Thirty-Five
Ashley’s T-shirt was stuck to the small of her back. Her left hand was stiff from holding down bar chords. She was exhausted. She could stop now if she wanted to. She’d given the heaving throng a decent show, if not her best.
But Ashley Malone always gave an encore, and she didn’t want to let her fans down.
She turned back toward the shadows behind the drum riser, where Jax, Toby, and Elena were catching their breath and wiping sweat from their faces.
‘You lot mind if I do this one on my own?’ Ashley asked, her voice quiet under the dull roar of the crowd chanting her name.
Jax wiped their forehead with a towel, exchanged a glance with Toby and Elena, and gave Ashley an easy nod. ‘Go on, Ash. All yours.’
Usually, this was where she’d play the big radio single from her first album, ‘Broken Eyes’, with the full band driving the chorus. But tonight was different.
She handed her electric off to a waiting tech, took her acoustic, and walked back out into the spotlight. The band stayed back in the shadows, their instruments quiet, leaving her alone with three thousand glowing phone screens and a silence waiting to be filled.
‘I’m not doing the usual encore tonight,’ Ashley said into the mic. Her voice sounded gravelly through the monitors, stripped of its stage polish. ‘I wrote something this afternoon on the bus. It’s not really finished, so give me a little grace if it sucks.’
She didn’t wait for them to quiet down. She struck that flat, heavy D-minor chord she’d found three hours ago and let it rumble through the subwoofers.
The lyrics came out exactly as they had on the bus, blunt and slightly awkward, devoid of the metaphors she usually used to hide her life from the press. It wasn’t catchy, and there wasn’t really a chorus. But it was her best work in a long time.
The screen went dark, the suit was gone
He sold me Japan before the dawn
Said, ‘Four more months, we’ve drawn the line’
And I nodded along and surrendered my time
I was sitting in a room with the AC cold
Counting up the time that I’d just sold
Didn’t even know what town I was in
Just a hollow girl in a rented skin
So I dialled your face through a burning light
Hoping you’d tell me I was doing right.
The room had gone strangely quiet. Not the respectful quiet of a theatre, but the heavy stillness of a crowd realising they were watching something unrehearsed and dangerous happen on stage. Ashley kept her eyes fixed on the back exit sign, refusing to look at the crowd.
And then you broke down, you laid it on the line
You gave me the truth, and I ran out of time
You said ‘I love you’ through the pixelated screen
The most terrifying thing that I’d ever seen
My chest swelled up, my throat closed tight
I wanted to scream it with all my might
I wanted to tell you
I wanted to love you
But I choked on the words and the screen went black
But I was a coward, and the screen went black.
Ashley played on. She didn’t care if they liked it.
She felt light. For the first time in years, she wasn’t trying to sell anything.
She was just telling the truth to three thousand strangers because she’d been too chicken to tell it to the one person who mattered.
She hoped that meant something. She hoped she was doing something to make herself brave. She didn’t want to be a coward anymore.
She came down hard on the final notes, her voice cracking slightly on the high note, letting the acoustic guitar ring out into the massive room. She closed her eyes, ready to let the last chord die so she could thank them and get off the stage before the crowd turned on her.
Then, a strange shift happened in the crowd, starting from the middle. It wasn’t the usual bouncing or swaying. It was more of a… surge.
Ashley squinted into the blinding blue glare of the follow-spots, her brow furrowing as the security guards at the front barrier suddenly uncrossed their arms and reached for their earpieces.