Four on the Floor

Three men were waiting for her in a barn on the Welsh border, and not one of them had asked for her.

The satnav gave up somewhere past Kington and the rain did not, so Coralie did the last four miles by memory of an email and the smell of wet sheep coming through the heater. A lane with grass up the middle. A cattle grid that rang under the tyres like a dropped cymbal. A sign on a gatepost, hand-painted, that said NANT-Y-GROES — STUDIO — NO DELIVERIES AFTER 6, and under it, in smaller and angrier paint, PLEASE SHUT THE GATE.

She shut the gate. She did it in four-inch heels on a surface that was mostly mud and partly something worse, holding the hood of her jacket over her fringe with one hand, and she did not fall over, which she decided to count as the first professional achievement of the residency.

It was twenty past four on the last Monday of October and it was already getting dark. The farmhouse was long and low and whitewashed, with a light on in one window and a thread of woodsmoke flattened across the roof by the weather. Behind it the barn was bigger than the house and newer inside than out: she could see the dull gleam of acoustic glass where a hayloft door had been, and a red lamp over a side entrance that was not lit yet.

She parked beside a Transit with a Cork sticker in the back window and an old Volvo estate, checked her face in the mirror — liner intact, lip intact, the bob still sitting where she had put it at six that morning in Walthamstow — and got out.

The woman who opened the farmhouse door was small and grey-haired and wearing a fleece the colour of a wet slate roof. Reading glasses hung on a cord against it.

"You're the writer," she said.

"Coralie. Ashe. Carys said you'd—"

"Delyth." A hand, dry and brisk, and then the hand pointed. "You're over the tack room. Outside stair, round the side of the barn, key's in the door. Kitchen's here, stove's lit, eat what you like but write it on the list if you finish it. They're in the control room." She looked down at the boots, once, and then back up at Coralie's face with no opinion at all. "Mind the yard."

"I've been minding it since the gate."

"Good," Delyth said, and went back inside.

Coralie stood in the rain for a moment longer than she needed to. Two hundred bands, Carys had said on the phone, in that bright, fast, speakerphone voice of someone doing seventy on the M4. Delyth's had two hundred bands through that barn and she's got a kind face for maybe two of them. Don't take it personally.

She did not take it personally. She hauled the bass out of the boot — the Precision, in the gig bag, because the good case was too heavy for a stair she had not seen — and the holdall after it, and went round the side of the barn.

The room over the tack room was small and clean and smelled faintly, pleasantly, of saddle soap that had outlived the saddles. A single bed with a white cover. A chest of drawers. A window that looked down the field in the direction of a river she could hear and not yet see. She put the bass on the bed like a person, hung the cream leather jacket on the back of the door so the rain could run off it, and looked at herself in the small square mirror over the sink.

A silk shirt the colour of old claret, one button further open than the weather wanted. High-waisted black trousers. The boots, which had cost more than her first car and which she did not regret. She reapplied the lip — deep berry, the one the girl at the counter had called assertive — and put the lipstick in her back pocket.

You dressed for the room you were walking into. Not the room you were in. That was not vanity, or not only vanity. It was the fact that a hired writer arrived as a stranger into a band that had been a band for years, and they would decide in the first ten minutes whether she was an asset or a guest, and a guest in a fleece was a guest who could be asked to make the tea. She had made enough tea.

She went down the stair, round the corner of the barn, and in under the red lamp.

The control room was warm and dim and full of the sound of nothing: a hum from the desk, a fan somewhere, the rain on a roof that had been built to keep the rain out of a microphone. Beyond the glass the live room was lit low. A drum kit sat on a riser in the middle of it, and there was a man behind the kit who was not playing it.

He looked up when the door opened. Black hair, short at the sides and curling on top as if he had been pushing his fingers through it for an hour. Dark stubble, trimmed. Blue eyes, very bright even through two panes of glass. A grey T-shirt that had lost a fight with his shoulders some time ago. He did not wave. He did not get up. He watched her come in, and then he put his sticks down across the snare, very precisely, and kept watching.

On the floor tom beside him lay a black notebook, closed, with an elastic band around it.

"Coralie," said the man at the desk, and stood.

He was very tall. That was the first thing, and the second was that he had arranged himself so that the height looked deliberate — black fitted T-shirt, dark hair pushed straight back off his forehead and staying there, a watch that did not need to be as good as it was. Clean-shaven. Grey-blue eyes. A face made mostly of cheekbones and a nose that had opinions. He held out his hand and she shook it and it was cool and dry and let go at exactly the right moment.

"Matthias," he said. "Thank you for coming out."

"Thank you for having me."

"We didn't," Matthias said. "The label did. But you're welcome." He said it without any unkindness at all, as a correction of fact, and turned his chair a few degrees towards the desk. "Can I ask you some things before we start?"

"Course."

"Have you heard the first record?"

"All of it. More than once."

"Which track is the single?"

"Lamplighter. Radio went for it. But the best thing on it is Hand Over Hand, and it's the best thing because it doesn't have a chorus, which is why the label will never let you do it again."

Behind the glass, very faintly, the drummer laughed. Matthias did not look round. Something in his face adjusted by about a millimetre.

"Who have you written for?"

She told him. Three of the names he knew; one of them he visibly did not like. She did not dress it up.

"Do you take a split?"

"On what I write. Not on what I fix."

"Where's the line?"

"Where we agree it is. Before I write it, not after."

"And the bass," Matthias said. "Carys said you play."

"I play."

"I've been doing it myself." He said it the way a man says he has been cutting his own hair, except that his hair was perfect. "On the record."

"I know. I can hear it."

That landed. He looked at her properly then, for the first time, a long level look that went nowhere near the shirt, and she found she liked him better for it.

"Meaning?"

"Meaning it's a guitarist's bass. It's lovely. It's on the root and it's on the beat and it doesn't argue with anything. It's the bass of a man who's got more important things to think about, which you have."

"Is that a criticism."

"It's a description. You asked."

The door behind her opened and let in cold air and rain noise and a man who was already talking.

"—and I said to her, love, I don't need the tour of the pantry, I have been in this kitchen since Saturday, I know where the Marmite lives, I'm on first-name terms with it — oh. Oh, you're here. You got through the gate."

"I shut it."

"She shut it. Matthias, she shut the gate. We've got a professional." He was broad and beautifully put together and unbothered by the weather: deep brown skin with the warmth of red under it, locs tied up in a knot at the crown, a short beard shaped to a sharp line, a gold hoop in one ear. A mug in each hand. He gave her one before she could say whether she wanted it. Tea, strong, with milk. Right, first time. "Kofi. Hi. Sorry. He's been doing the questions, hasn't he. He does the questions. The first time I met him he asked me which key I sang Try a Little Tenderness in and I didn't know, love, I'd never thought about it, I just opened my mouth — and he stood there with his arms folded until I went and found out, and that was twelve years ago, and he still does it, and I still don't know half the time, and here we are. Second record." He toasted the room with his own mug. "He's delighted you're here. He's just got a face that doesn't do delighted."

"I've got a face," Matthias said, "that does exactly what I tell it."

"See? He's thrilled."

Coralie drank her tea. Over the rim of it she watched the two of them not look at each other, and understood — not from anything either of them had said, but from the space they left, the way Kofi had come in and gone to Matthias's side of the desk without deciding to, the way Matthias had leaned half an inch off the arm of the chair to make room before Kofi reached it — that she was standing in a room with a couple.

Nobody had mentioned it. Not Carys, not the Low Orbit press sheet, not the long email thread she had read twice in a services car park off the M4. She filed it where she filed everything she was not supposed to know yet, and put the mug down.

"Play me what you've got," she said.

There were six tracks. Matthias played them loud, straight through, without introducing any of them, and she stood with her back against the side wall and her arms folded and listened with her eyes closed, because that was the only honest way to hear anything.

They were good. That was the first thing, and it was the thing people always forgot to tell you about records that had stalled. They were not bad songs gone wrong. The playing was tight and warm; the drums sat under everything like a floor you could have danced on; Kofi's voice came in on the first track low and close and a bit rough at the bottom, the voice of a man telling you something across a kitchen table at two in the morning, and her whole spine answered it.

The second track was better. By its second chorus she had heard the problem, and the problem was not in the playing at all.

The songs were finished. Every one of them. They had a beginning and a middle and an ending and they knew where they were going — and they were going somewhere she could not follow. The lyrics were half-lines. Images that stopped before they arrived. The blue cup on the left-hand side. You know which stair. Like Sunday, but the other one. Lines that meant something complete and particular and warm to exactly two people, and to everybody else meant a shrug. And under the voice, the guitar was answering the words — not accompanying them, answering — with a little turn of phrase on the which stair that was so private she felt she had walked into the wrong bedroom.

A love letter, in a language with two speakers. Six of them. Recorded at great expense, for a label that needed strangers to buy them.

The sixth track ended. She opened her eyes.

Matthias had stopped the playback and turned his chair to face her. Kofi was sitting on the arm of the sofa by the door with his tea held against his chest, not smiling now, watching Matthias rather than her. And beyond the glass the drummer had not moved at all. He had his forearms on his knees and he was looking straight at her through both panes, and there was something in his face she knew from other rooms — the look of someone who has been waiting a long time to find out whether the new person can hear what he hears.

"Well?" Matthias said.

She thought about how to say it. She thought about the version that would get her paid and the version that was true, and decided, as she usually did, that on the first day they had better be the same one.

"They're finished," she said.

"Thank you."

"That's not a compliment."

Kofi made a small sound into his tea. Matthias waited.

"They're finished for you," Coralie said. "Both of you. There's nothing wrong with them. There's nothing missing. That's the problem. They don't need anyone else in them. I'm standing here and I love the sound, I'd buy the sound, I'd buy his voice—" a nod at Kofi, who ducked his head, "—on a record of him reading out the shipping forecast. But I don't know what the blue cup is. And I'm not meant to. Nobody listening is meant to. You've written six songs with the door shut."

The silence went on long enough for the rain to fill it.

"Cormorant," Matthias said at last, with care, "would like a single."

"By the twenty-first. I know. Carys said. She said it three times, once in a tunnel."

"And your view is that there's no single here."

"My view is that there's no door here. The single's in there somewhere." She pushed off the wall. "I'm not here to rewrite your record, Matthias. I'm here to find the one place where somebody who isn't in the room can get in. That's all. One place."

"And the bass."

"And the bass. If you'll let me."

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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