Chapter Thirteen
The venue smell was all spilled beer and sweat and teenage excitement. Iona loved it immediately.
"The Banner Club" proclaimed the sign outside, though half the letters had given up and gone dark.
Inside, the floor stuck to her shoes with every step, the lighting was the color of old mustard, and the stage was approximately the size of a dining table.
Someone had taped a string of fairy lights across the back wall. They flickered ominously.
"Perfect," Cam said, bouncing on her heels. "This is perfect. This is exactly the kind of dive we used to play."
"We never played dives this small," Ellie said, checking her bass for the third time.
Due to lack of official dressing rooms, they were in the least-dark corner of the club. Iona had insisted that their handbags be put behind the bar. She got the feeling that most bands didn’t have handbags.
"We played that place in Leeds where the ceiling was so low I had to duck," Cam said.
"That was a basement. This is…" Ellie looked around. "This is a basement that someone put a bar in."
Iona surveyed the room. Twenty chairs, maybe thirty if you pushed them close.
A bar that ran along one wall, manned by a woman who looked like she'd seen everything and was deeply unimpressed by all of it.
Through the grimy window, she could see Manchester drizzling quietly onto the pavement outside.
They were really doing this. She couldn’t believe they were really doing this. Her heart leaped up into her throat, and she forced herself to swallow it back down again. "Where's Maeve?" she asked.
"Terrorizing the sound guy," Cam said. "She didn't like where he'd positioned her monitor."
"Did she use words, or just a look?"
"Bit of both. I think he might cry."
Iona found her in the tiny backstage area, which was actually just a storage cupboard with ideas above its station. Maeve was adjusting a cable with the intense focus of someone defusing a bomb.
"The acoustics in here are appalling," Maeve said without looking up.
"It's an open mic night in Manchester. Were you expecting the Royal Albert Hall?"
"I was expecting functioning equipment."
Iona leaned against the doorframe. Maeve's hair was escaping from its braid, red curls springing free around her face. She was wearing her usual uniform of gray and black, but she'd rolled her sleeves up to her elbows, and there was a tension in her shoulders that Iona recognized.
"You're nervous," Iona said.
"I'm not nervous. I'm irritated."
"You can be both."
Maeve finally looked up. Her green eyes were sharp, defensive. "I haven't performed in front of people in fifteen years."
"I know."
"Real people. Strangers. Not just you lot insulting me in a rehearsal room."
"I know."
"What… what if I can't do it anymore?" The words came out fast, almost angry. "What if I get up there and my voice doesn't work and I freeze and everyone realizes I'm not…"
"Maeve."
Maeve stopped. Iona stepped into the cupboard, which put them approximately six inches apart because there wasn't room for anything else.
"You've spent years writing songs that made other people famous," she said.
"You wrote a song that won three Grammy nominations for someone who couldn't carry a tune in a bucket.
Your voice works. You're going to be fine. "
Maeve stared at her. Then something shifted in her face, a crack in the wall she kept so carefully maintained. "How are you not terrified?"
"Oh, I'm absolutely terrified," Iona said cheerfully. "I've just had fourteen years of pretending to be calm for Mo. You learn to fake it."
"That's not remotely comforting."
"Wasn't meant to be. Come on. We're on in ten."
???
Maeve stood at the side of the tiny stage and watched the sparse crowd settle into their seats. Twelve people. Maybe fifteen. A man at the bar who might have been asleep. The woman behind the taps, still radiating professional boredom.
This was nothing. This was pathetic. She'd played arenas once, for God's sake. She'd stood in front of thousands of people and opened her mouth and sung like it was the easiest thing in the world.
That was years ago. That was a different person. A drunker one, certainly.
Cam was setting up her kit, which involved banging things and making far too much noise.
Ellie was running through a silent fingering pattern on her bass, face calm, though Maeve noticed she was pressing her left hand against her thigh between runs, stretching her fingers out like they ached.
Iona was tuning her guitar, humming under her breath, apparently as relaxed as if she were sitting in her own living room.
Irritating. Completely irritating.
The host, a bearded man with a clipboard and an air of someone who'd rather be anywhere else, shuffled to the microphone. "Right, next up we've got… The Stage Girls?" He squinted at his list. "Is that right? Sounds familiar. Anyway, give them a hand."
Scattered applause. Someone knocked over a glass. The sleeping man at the bar jerked awake and looked around in confusion.
Maeve's feet wouldn't move.
"Come on." Iona was beside her, hand warm on her elbow. "We're supposed to be up there."
"I know that."
"Then why aren't you moving?"
"Because my legs have decided to go on strike."
Iona didn't push. She just stood there, hand still on Maeve's arm, waiting. Patient. Sunshine and calmness when Maeve felt like she might vibrate apart.
"Three songs," Iona said quietly. "That's all. Three songs, and then we're done, and we can go back to insulting each other at rehearsal."
"I liked that part."
"I know you did. Come on."
They walked onto the stage together. The lights were too bright, making Maeve squint. Cam counted them in. Four clicks of her sticks, sharp and decisive.
And then they were playing.
The first verse was rough. Maeve's voice came out tight, strangled with nerves, and she could feel herself overthinking every note.
But somewhere in the chorus, something clicked.
Her body remembered what her brain had forgotten.
The muscle memory came flooding back: how to breathe, how to hold the mic, how to let the music carry her instead of fighting against it.
Cam was solid behind her. Ellie's bass thrummed through the floor, anchoring everything. And Iona's guitar wove through it all, bright and clear, harmonies landing exactly where they should.
They finished the first song. Scattered applause, but genuine this time. Someone whooped. The bartender had stopped looking bored.
The second song was better. The third was something else entirely.
It was messy. Cam came in half a beat late on the bridge.
Maeve's voice cracked on a high note. Ellie made a face when she fumbled a transition.
None of it mattered. The energy in the room had shifted, become something electric and alive.
Even the handful of people in the audience felt like a crowd, felt like validation, felt like coming home.
And when they hit the final chord, Maeve was breathing hard, sweat on her forehead, heart pounding. And she felt something she hadn't felt in fifteen years.
She felt like herself.
Iona was grinning, guitar still vibrating with the last notes. Their eyes met across the tiny stage. Before Maeve could think, before she could overthink, she crossed the distance between them and pulled Iona into a hug.
It was meant to be brief. A celebration. The kind of thing bandmates did after a good show.
But Iona's arms came around her and held on, and Maeve's face was pressed into Iona's hair, which smelled of coconut and something that was just Iona, and she could feel Iona's heart beating against her chest, fast and alive.
The applause from the crowd faded to nothing.
The sticky floor, the bad lighting, the rust and the noise, all of it disappeared until there was only this: warmth, and breath, and Iona's body solid against hers.
She didn't want to let go. She wanted to stay here forever, wrapped up in this moment, in this person, in this feeling of rightness that she'd spent years trying to forget.
Then her nose twitched.
Whiskey. Sharp and amber and achingly familiar. Her body remembered that too: the burn of it going down, the warmth spreading through her chest, the way it made everything softer and easier until eventually everything fell apart.
She pulled back.
Iona's phone buzzed in her back pocket. She fumbled for it, glanced at the screen, and her face changed. "Shit. Mo. I was supposed to call her an hour ago."
"Go," Maeve said. Her voice came out strangely. "Go call her."
Iona was already backing away, phone to her ear, mouthing "sorry" as she ducked offstage. Cam was saying something about drinks to celebrate. Ellie was packing up her bass. The bartender was calling last orders.
And Maeve stood alone in the middle of the tiny stage, heart still pounding, arms still warm where Iona had been, the ghost of whiskey in her nostrils reminding her of everything she used to be.
It wasn't the old days. She wasn't nineteen anymore, reckless and thirsty and certain that nothing could touch her. She was thirty-four and sober and terrified. Iona had a daughter. Maeve had fifteen years of wreckage behind her.
Things had changed.
She stepped off the stage and headed for the exit, letting the cold air clear her head.
The show had been good. Better than good. For three songs, she'd remembered who she was. For one moment, holding Iona, she'd felt something crack open in her chest, something she'd kept carefully sealed.
And then reality had come crashing back in, as it always did.
She was still sitting there when Iona found her ten minutes later.
"Mo's fine," Iona said, dropping onto the bench beside her. "Just wanted to complain about being stuck at her dad's. Apparently Shepherd's idea of dinner was reheated curry and she wanted pizza."
"Sounds rough."
Iona sighed. "The show was incredible. You were incredible."
Maeve didn't answer. The whiskey smell was gone now, replaced by rain and car exhaust and Iona's coconut shampoo. But she could still feel it, a memory lodged in her sinuses, a warning.
"Maeve?"
"I'm fine."
"You don't look fine."
"Then don't look at me."
It came out sharper than she meant. Iona didn't flinch, just sat there, patient and steady, that infuriating sunshine warmth radiating off her even in the Manchester drizzle.
"We were good up there," Iona said finally. "All of us. Together."
"I know."
"We could do this. The album. The come back. Whatever. All of it. We could actually do this."
"One thing at a time," Maeve said. She stood up, brushing raindrops off her sleeves. "We did one show. That's all. Let's not get ahead of ourselves."
Iona looked up at her. In the dim light from the pub windows, her eyes were very blue.
"Okay," she said. "One thing at a time."
But her smile said she knew something Maeve was trying very hard not to admit.
And Maeve turned away before Iona could see that she knew it too.