17. The Big Sleep
seventeen
The Big Sleep
Even though it’s daylight outside, the auditorium is dark, the lights are off. A fine layer of dust covers the wooden floorboards, and it’s eerily, deathly quiet. Our footsteps don’t make a noise, nor do they stir the motes into life, and when someone speaks, the lack of echo is jarring.
Pixie stands beside a control panel at the side of the stage. Her eyes are shut and her fists open and close at her sides. She looks, for want of a better word because I now know that’s not how this works, possessed.
“What’s she doing?” I ask, sidling up between Trystan and Camille.
Camille answers. “Gathering her emotions.”
“She’s making herself annoyed enough to flick the light switches on,” Trystan says.
“Fuck them ALL!” Pixie suddenly yells, smashing her hand out in front of her and tripping the switch.
One by one, lights burst into action overhead.
Pleased with herself, Pixie strides over to the group. “They’re not all pointing in the right direction,” she says, looking up. “But it’ll do. So, Gary, as the band newbie, what instrument would you like to play?”
“Uh . . .” I glance around. Am I being pranked? I see no instruments, and even if I did, as ghosts we’d have no way to pick them up and play them.
“Unless you want to do vocals?” Pixie says.
I scrub my fingers through my moustache. “I don’t know if anyone else has noticed this, but we’re all dead. Pretty sure if we had the ability to play music, we lost that with our lives. Regardless, I can’t play any instruments, and I definitely, definitely can’t sing.”
“We don’t actually play real music,” Trystan says. “But I dunno, I think this is more fun.”
“Maybe we should show him rather than trying to explain it,” Jeanie says. She claps her hands together. “Right, places, everybody!”
Peter ushers me to the side of the stage. “Have you heard any of Pixie’s songs?”
“What was the name of her band?” I ask.
In the centre of the stage, the rest of the ghosts fan out.
“Sex Pigs from Hell. Stupidest name ever for a band, but—”
“Oh my god!” I know that band. Fifteen-year-old me loved that band.
Their music was the perfect backdrop for my adolescent outrage.
The exact blend of feminist, anti?establishment, anti-individualism commentary mixed with all the whiny “no one understands me” lamentation of an emo teen struggling in an adult world. “I loved Sex Pigs from Hell.”
“God, not you too,” Peter says, taking a wide sidestep away from me.
Pixie smiles. “Song request?”
Embarrassingly, I can only remember the name of their most famous tune. “‘Incarnadine.’”
“Obviously,” Stove says gatekeeperishly.
But Pixie doesn’t seem to mind. “Yes, dude!”
I make a mental note to borrow Josh’s phone one day.
If it connects to the internet as he said it does, I can probably google the rest of Pixie’s back catalogue to remind myself of the songs and lyrics.
A thought occurs to me. I scribble it down on my paper, which is blank again, and shove it into my pocket . . .
Can I solve these murders with online searches???
I turn my attention to the ghosts.
Stove hands Pixie his mic.
She brings the wind muff up to her mouth and speaks. Though she’s shouting, so her voice is louder, it’s not amplified by technology. “Thank you all for coming!” she says to presumably just Peter and me.
Peter walks down the steps and takes a seat in the front row of the stalls. It’s impressive, largely because he’s sitting and I’m not sure I’ll ever learn how to do that again, but also because the fold-down seat isn’t even folded down. Essentially Peter’s sitting on air.
I follow him but stand in the central aisle.
“Give it up for your band,” Pixie says. She turns around. “Tonight we have Stove MacLeod on drums.”
Stove holds pretend drumsticks above his head and I clap.
“Josh Little on bass.”
Josh stares over the top of imaginary sunglasses and nods at me. Okay, I’ll admit it, this is fun.
“Trystan Retallack on keyboards and synth and a bunch of other stuff.”
Trystan waves.
“Camille Ciel on lead guitar,” Pixie says, to which Camille holds up the devil horns gesture and bares their teeth.
“On backup vocals is Jeanie Johnson, and sometimes when she feels like it, saxophone.”
Jeanie curtsies.
“I’ll be your lead vocalist, and tonight we are . . . The Youngscares!”
“I fucking knew it would make an excellent band name,” I say to Peter, who side?eyes me through his slow applause.
“One, two. One, two, three, four,” Pixie mutters.
Then Josh starts strumming a non-existent bass guitar. “Bum, bum-bum. Bum, bum?bum.”
As Stove says, “Tut-tut, tss-tss,” then clicks his tongue and says, “Da-dada, tss-tss.” Enviably, he’s also sitting on thin air whilst miming striking a set of drums and tapping his foot.
Jeanie sways from side to side, snapping her fingers, and singing surprisingly melodically, “Ooooohh. Oooohh.”
“Do-do, do-do-do. Do do do,” Trystan sings as he plays invisible keys seemingly at random. He’s grinning his head off, making it almost impossible for me to even notice the other people on stage with him.
Then Camille plays an electric air guitar, adding loads of distortion and pained expressions.
“Remember when you thought I would lie down for you,” Pixie shout-sings into Stove’s mic. “Remember when you thought I would buy what you’re selling.”
“What you’re selling . . .” Jeanie echoes tunefully.
I’m instantly transported to twenty years ago. To nineteen-year-old Gary listening to his MP3 player on the Manchester bound National Express in order to watch random, unknown bands play dive bars with hairy, sweaty strangers. That was way back when I had an ounce of a social life.
Pixie continues. “Remember all the times you thought you could change me. Remember all the times you thought I would bend for you. For the system.”
Jeanie sways on the spot. “The fucking system.”
Muscle memory kicks in, and my fingers idly tap out the beat on my legs. My head bobs.
“You thought you could break me. You thought you could mould me. Well, guess what, my friend? I was already broken. I won’t change. I won’t bend. I will fight you till the fucking EEEEENNNNDD! INCARNADINE! INCARNADINE!”
Everyone hums along with their various mouth instruments, and it’s not perfect. Not even close. But somehow it works, and more importantly, they’re all having an incredible time. Well, except for Peter, who’s sitting arms crossed, looking about as bored as a judge during a paint drying contest.
“The number of times I’ve heard this bloody song,” he mutters to me. Luckily, his words are dimmed by Pixie’s singing. “You know it’s about menstruation?”
I can’t help but bite. “No it isn’t. It’s about fighting the patriarchy.” I think about some of the lyrics. “Okay, it’s not only about that.”
“I swear kids these days wouldn’t know music if it spat in their cornflakes. It’s just noise. Gives me a bloody headache.”
Without thinking too much, I take a few incremental steps towards the stage, away from the magical misery man.
Pixie finishes her song. The others follow at random times, but always end with laughter. I cheer until Camille takes a bow.
“And that, Gary Runcorn of Swindon Sounds radio station, is what ghost-jamming is all about. Wanna join us?” Pixie says, still into Stove’s mic.
“Join us. Joiiinnn uuuss,” Trystan says, igniting a whole chorus of “Join us,” like some eerie death cult chant.
“I can’t.” I step backwards, waving my hands to create a barrier between us.
“Sure you can,” Pixie says. “What instruments do you know?”
Fuck. “Uh, just the triangle.” Though I doubt my skills have improved that drastically since my year five Christmas performance.
“Pfft.” Jeanie floats off the stage, grabs my arm, and pulls me with surprising strength into the beam of the super trooper. “You should play the pan flute.”
“What?!”
But she’s already running back into position.
“I can’t do pan flute.”
“Believe in yourself, Gary.” This comes from Josh. Josh, of all people, and I feel like I now understand the phrase “rock bottom.”
“Do you know the song ‘Everyone Hates Your Stupid Shoes?’” Pixie says. It’s another Sex Pigs from Hell tune. I don’t remember how it goes, only that it wasn’t actually about shoes, but some kind of metaphor for celebrity culture and dogmatism.
“A little. Not really, though. I’ll . . . butcher it if I try,” I plead.
Pixie shrugs. “So what? Nobody cares if you fuck up. Have you even heard Jeanie’s backup vocals?”
“They weren’t bad,” I say.
“Exactly, but there aren’t any backup singers in ‘Incarnadine.’ J was freestyling. It’s impossible to fuck this up,” she says.
“Okay, okay, fine. I’ll do it.”
Jeanie cheers and waves her hands about.
“Pan flutists stand right here on the stage.” She seizes both of my arms around my triceps and manoeuvres me closer to Trystan.
So close, in fact, that if we had actual instruments, I’d be standing right inside his keyboard.
I don’t protest, and when she walks away from me, she indiscreetly winks. Pretty sure Trystan’s clocked it.
And now I need to find a hole to crawl into and die all over again.
“Ready?” Pixie says, either oblivious or deliberately ignoring my discomfort. “One, two. One, two, three, four . . . I know it’s all the rage . . .” she croons but stops mid?sentence and turns to me. “Gary, you’re up, my dude.”
“Right. Yep. Okay.” I clear my throat, then hold my hands out below my mouth as though I’m grappling with a pan flute. Here goes fucking nothing. “Wheeew, whuuuuh, wheeew,” I sing.
Pixie’s face cracks into a wide grin, and she resumes singing. “They tell you who to love. They tell you who to hate. But what if you listened to yourself for once?”
The rest of the ghosts join in. Camille makes electric guitar sounds. Josh “bum-bums” on his bass. Jeanie “ahhh-ahhhs.” Stove beats his imaginary drums, and Trystan hums and pretends to tickle keys.
So I keep up my breathy whistling. I only vaguely remember the tune, but as Pixie sings on, I realise she’s the only one who does. Everyone else is making it up as they go along.