Chapter 6 The Third One Doesn’t Ask
The bus pulled at one, and by two they were somewhere south of Abington with the engine note settled into the long flat hum it makes when a driver has decided nothing else is going to happen tonight, and Shona was in the front lounge because the alternative was a hotel corridor and she had done enough of those.
That was the true version and it was also not quite all of it. What it left out was that she had stood in the aisle outside her bunk for some seconds with her boots in one hand, and had not been able to get into it, and had gone forward instead.
The lounge on this one was the usual Slate-tier arrangement: a table under a strip light somebody had put a folded day sheet over to kill the worst of it, a fridge with the sheet for Manchester magneted to the door at eye height, a kettle, a sink with a rack, and the vinyl benches that everybody complains about and everybody sleeps on.
The sodium came up the motorway and swept the length of the room every second and a half, on, off, on, off, the way it has done on every bus she has ever been on, in the same rhythm, since she was eighteen years old and thought it was the most glamorous thing in the world.
Solomon Rakoff was sitting at the table with a paperback and the one reading light on.
He had changed the shirt. That was the first thing she noticed, because she had spent four hours today learning that the shirt was the whole of what he volunteered, and this one was the same plain white as the other one and dry, and it had been folded at some point in its life, and there was a towel over the back of the bench behind him because there was always a towel.
His hair was damp at the crown where the grey was coming through.
He had a mug of something at his elbow that he had not drunk.
“Sorry,” she said. “I’ll go back.”
“You won’t,” said Solomon.
Which was not an invitation and was not an instruction either. It was just the thing that was true, said flatly, the way he said everything, and it left her standing in a fourteen-metre corridor at two in the morning with nowhere whatsoever to go.
She sat down opposite him. She put her boots under the bench. Outside, the orange came and went and came and went.
She got about ninety seconds into working out what he might want — tea, quiet, the light off, the window vent shut because the draught was coming in over the top of it and onto his shoulder — and then he put the book face-down on the table, spine up, with his hand spread over it, and she understood that she had been wrong again, twice in one night, and that this was going to be something else.
“I’ve known for three years,” Solomon said.
She waited. That is the whole of her professional training and it is also the only thing she has ever been able to do with a silence.
“Three years and about four months. It was a shed in Bristol, one of those seven-hundred rooms with the low grid and the beam down the middle, and I had a wedge on the riser and a spare pair of sticks and I could hear the whole of it from up there, because you can, from up there — the riser’s the only seat in the house where the band isn’t in the PA yet, it’s just the three of us in a room — and Emre stood eight feet in front of me for an hour and I couldn’t tell you one single thing about what he was playing.
Not one. Fifteen years of standing behind that man and I could not have told you the notes. ”
The strip light hummed. Somewhere behind them the bus went over a joint in the concrete and every hanging thing on the vehicle moved together and settled.
“I told myself it was the room. I actually said it to the front-of-house lad in the van afterwards — ‘that room’s a mess, isn’t it’ — and he agreed with me, because he was twenty-three and I was the drummer, and that was that, and we drove to Cardiff.
” He turned the mug a quarter turn on the table and did not pick it up.
“It wasn’t the room. It’s never once been the room.
There’s less of Yusuf in my ears than there was ten years ago, and there’s less of me in Emre’s, because I put myself there, and there is next to nothing of Emre in anybody’s, and what you end up with is three men standing in a very expensive hole being extremely considerate at each other. ”
He said hole the way you say a word you have had in your mouth for a long time without ever letting it out.
“That’s what it is. It’s the middle. There’s nothing in the middle of my band and there hasn’t been for a very long time, and I have known it for three years, and I have got into a bus every night of those three years and I have not said it.
Not to Yusuf. I told myself he’d have it fixed inside a week and fixed in the direction of everybody else, and that I therefore had no business handing him one more thing to carry.
That was an extremely convenient thing to tell myself.
” A pause. “So I didn’t say it, and I got to keep telling myself that the reason I didn’t say it was that it wouldn’t have helped. Which is not the reason.”
Shona opened her mouth.
She has a sentence for this. She has about nine of them.
It’s a common enough fault, I see it on two runs out of three, it’s a routing problem more than a people problem, give me a line check and forty minutes and it comes back.
Every one of them was loaded and ready and every one of them would have put the conversation into her hands, where she can carry anything, and she got as far as the first syllable of one and Solomon carried straight on over the top of it, not rudely — he just did not stop — and the sentence died in her throat with nowhere to be.
“Emre asked me once,” he said. “Nineteen ninety-eight, no. Two thousand and nine, sorry, he’d be — he’d have been fifteen, that’s wrong.
Two thousand and thirteen. He’d have been nineteen.
He asked me once, in a Little Chef outside Warrington, whether he was loud enough, and I said ‘you’re fine’, and he never asked me again, and I have thought about that roughly once a month for thirteen years and I have never once gone back to him and said the second sentence.
” He looked at the window, where there was nothing to look at but the orange coming.
“I had the whole answer at the time. I wasn’t guessing.
I knew, and I said ‘you’re fine’, because it was a Little Chef and he had a plate in front of him and I didn’t want to make it a conversation. ”
The bus took a long right-hander and the fridge door strained against its catch and did not open.
“Tonight,” Solomon said, “in the third song, the one with the stop in it, I heard where he was.”
He said it without any lift at all. No emphasis, no pleasure, the exact flat level of a man reading out a fuel receipt.
“He’s a semitone ahead of the kick on the push into the last eight and he has been for years, and it’s not a mistake, it’s a decision, it’s how he wants it, and it is genuinely better than the thing I have been playing against, and I did not know that.
I had no idea. I’ve been married to the sound of that man for fifteen years and tonight was the first time in any of them I have been able to locate him in a room.
” He stopped. Then, evenly: “I got the last four bars wrong. You’ll not have heard it, nobody heard it, I came off the ride a beat late because I was listening instead of playing, which I have not done since I was twenty-two, and I’d quite like to do it again tonight. ”
And that was it.
She sat there with her hands braced on a fold-down table and waited for the rest of it.
There is always a rest of it. The rest of it is the part where a man in a front lounge at two in the morning turns the thing round and hands it to her — so what you did tonight was, or I don’t know how you heard it in an hour, or whatever it is you’re doing, keep doing it, or even the bad version, the one she has had in four hundred rooms, so where did you learn that, then, which is always the first move of somebody working up to asking her something about herself.
He did not say one word about her.
Not her mix. Not her ears. Not the four decibels she had put in front of Yusuf’s feet at eleven thousand people, not the fact that she had done it on purpose, not what kind of person does that on the first night of a four-show contract.
Nothing about where she was from or who she was with or what she was doing on this bus.
He had opened his own chest on a table in front of her and shown her fifteen years of a thing he had not said, and had asked her for exactly nothing, and had left no gap anywhere in it that she could get a shoulder into.
There was no fader in it. That was the trouble. There was nothing in it to adjust.
“Solomon,” she said.
“Mm.”
And she had no idea, none, what the second half of that sentence was.
He waited about four seconds, which was generous.
Then he picked the paperback back up, and found his place with his thumb, and went on reading, and the reading light made a small warm circle on the page and left the rest of him in the orange coming and going, and that was the end of it.
He did not look up. He was not waiting for anything.
He had not been waiting for anything the whole time.
She got up. She got her boots. She said goodnight and he said “Night” without lifting his head, and she went down the corridor holding the rail and got into the bunk that had been Deakin’s until Newcastle — middle, driver’s side, somebody else’s smell faint in the mattress under the fresh sheet Mags had put on it — and pulled the curtain properly, because she always pulls it properly, and lay on her back in the dark with the motorway going past underneath her at eighty feet a second.
And then she did what she does, which is arithmetic.
Four shows. Glasgow gone, Manchester tonight, Birmingham Saturday, London Sunday.
Out of the Blackwall by two on the Monday morning, home by five, one day flat on her back, and then Tuesday, eight in the morning, the Sheffield load-in and five weeks of somebody else’s arena-and-theatre run with a tour manager who put her on her first arena in 2014 and had signed the paper in July.
Twenty-six hundred pounds of mobilisation money already invoiced, already banked, already spent against a boiler.
Fourteen days’ notice, and today was — today was Thursday, it had been Thursday since the dock — and the fourteen days had shut four days before Mags Lenane ever rang her.
There had never been a window. It had gone past her in Peckham with her feet up and the kettle on, and she had known that on the Saturday morning, standing in her own kitchen saying yes to four shows, and had not thought about it once since, which is not the same thing as not knowing.
She ran it again. She ran it the way she runs a patch list, twice, in order, looking for the one thing in the wrong place.
The numbers were fine. The numbers had been fine since July.
That was not what she was doing and she knew it by about the third pass, lying in a stranger’s bunk with her hair pinned and her face still on, because there was not one single figure anywhere in that calculation that belonged to anybody but her.
Nobody had asked her for it. Nobody had needed it. There was nothing useful in any of it, nowhere to put a hand, no one in the sum but her.
Up at the front of the bus, through three feet of partition and eleven other people asleep, somebody turned a page.