Side of Stage

Lowenna Kitto had carried her own fiddle into every room the Brisons had ever played, because nobody had once asked to carry it for her.

The Brisons' van went into the dock at ten past two, behind two articulated trucks and a nightliner with its generator running, and the man with the clipboard waved it into the gap by the bins without looking up.

"Bins," Merryn said from the passenger seat. "Lovely. Put us next to the bins, why don't you, so we know where we stand."

"It's the nearest bay to the door," Lowenna said. "We'll be in and out quicker than they will."

"That's not why he did it."

It was not why he had done it, and they both knew it, and Lowenna got out anyway and went round to the back doors with her keys. Kenver was already there, bass case on his shoulder, saying something soothing to nobody in particular, the way he did, like a man patting a horse he had not been introduced to. Cador lifted the kick drum down without a word and set it on the tarmac as gently as a cake.

Her own case was black, hard-shelled, lined in green plush, and it held a fiddle her grandmother had bought in Penzance in 1962 for eleven pounds and that Lowenna had insured, the year before, for more than the van was worth.

Inside, the hall smelled of floor polish and cold steel and somebody's pot noodle. A thin, cheerful man with a radio clipped to his belt and a lanyard that said TUCKETT met them at the top of the ramp and handed Lowenna a day sheet still warm from a printer.

"You're the Brisons. Lovely. You're in four, which you share with lighting, there's a curtain. Your line check's at half five if we're not running late, which we will be. Doors seven, you're on at seven-forty for thirty-five, and I've got you twelve minutes for the changeover." He said it in the same pleasant voice as the rest, which was how she knew he had said it to a great many bands. "Any problems, I'm on channel two."

"Twelve," Merryn said, when he had gone. "Twelve minutes. Cador can't get his snare off the stand in twelve minutes."

"Cador can get his snare off the stand in four," Lowenna said, and Cador, who was carrying the snare, nodded once.

Dressing room four was a low rectangle with a mirror along one wall, a strip of bulbs over it with three of them gone, and a black drape on a rail dividing it down the middle. On the far side of the drape somebody was asleep, or at least breathing like it, among a nest of cable and a laptop showing a lighting plot in blue and orange. On the Brisons' side there was a rider of four bottles of water, a bag of crisps and a fruit bowl containing one apple.

Merryn looked at the apple for a long moment.

"Don't," Lowenna said.

"I never said a word."

"You were going to say a word about the apple."

"There's one, Wen. One apple. Between four of us. It's not even a nice one, look, it's gone soft round the top. They've given us a bruised apple and a curtain." Merryn dropped onto the end of the bench and crossed her boots at the ankle. She was small and quick and freckled, with her sandy hair cropped short as a boy's, and she had the face she had had at sixteen, in the church hall at St Just, when the vicar had told them they could have the room on Tuesdays if they kept the noise down. They had not kept the noise down. That had been eleven years ago, and Merryn was still looking at every room they were given as though someone was about to take it off them.

"It's the first night," Lowenna said. "It's a two-thousand-capacity hall and a nine-week tour on a label we've never been near. We'd have played for the curtain."

"I know we would. That's what gets me." But Merryn took the apple, and bit it, and some of the shoulders came down.

Lowenna hung her clothes on the rail. She did it in the order she would need them: the black velvet trousers, high in the waist and wide in the leg; the corset-seamed top in black satin that laced at the back and that she would need Kenver to do up, because the one time she had asked Merryn, Merryn had done it so tight she had not been able to breathe through the second chorus; the heeled ankle boots, polished that morning on the hard shoulder outside Exeter while Cador changed a tyre. Gold for her ears in a little velvet pouch. She set her make-up bag on the counter under the one working stretch of bulbs, and unzipped it, and laid it out.

Then she did her hands.

It took a quarter of an hour and she did not hurry it. The left first: a glass file across each nail, short and square, so nothing caught on the fingerboard or bit into the string. She ran her thumb over the tips afterwards to check them. The right was different. The right was for being looked at — long almond nails lacquered deep plum, because the bow hand was the one an audience watched, and she had decided at nineteen that if they were going to watch it they were going to see something worth it. She checked each one for chips under the bulbs. There was a nick on the ring finger she touched up with the brush. Then the cuticle oil, a drop to each nail, worked in with the pad of her thumb, and the faint smell of almond went up into the room and sat against the polish and the pot noodle.

"You and your hands," Kenver said, fondly, from the bench.

"My hands pay your rent."

"They do," he agreed. "I'm not complaining. I'm just saying, you and your hands."

The line check ran late, as promised. At twenty to six they were still standing in the wing with their cases while Nightjar finished soundchecking, and that was how she saw them properly for the first time, rather than as three faces on a tour poster with their name in red across the bottom.

The stage was enormous after the rooms she was used to — a black deck the size of a tennis court, a riser at the back, a wall of lights hung above it that were all dark except for a wash of plain white work light that made everyone look as if they were in an operating theatre. In the middle of it, the singer was talking to a stagehand who was trying to tape down a cable.

"No, you're all right, you're all right, mate, leave it, because if you tape it there I'm going to stand on it, and if I stand on it I'm going to go over, and if I go over it'll be on somebody's phone by Tuesday with a song under it, and it won't be one of ours, will it, it'll be something with a kazoo." He had a guitar slung low on his back, and he pushed his hair off his forehead with the back of his wrist as he talked; it fell straight back down. "Move it six inches left. Six. That's — no, that's my six, that's lovely. You're a legend. What's your name? Dev. Dev's a legend."

Kasim Chowdhury, the poster said. He was not tall, but he was built as though he had decided to be noticed anyway — a white shirt open at the neck and pushed up to the elbow over forearms that had been worked on deliberately, a narrow waist in black jeans, a close beard edged so sharply it could have been drawn on. A thin gold chain caught the work light. He moved like a man who had never stood still on a stage in his life and did not intend to start.

Behind him, from up on the riser, a laugh came over the kit — a loud, open, delighted laugh, the kind that went off before its owner had decided to let it.

"Kazoo," the drummer said. "He's right, though. It would be."

He was the biggest of the three, broad in the shoulder and thick through the chest, in a grey vest that left his arms bare to the shoulder, and they were the arms of somebody who hit things for a living and enjoyed it. His hair was cut in a sharp high-top, his beard short and boxed, and when he leaned over the floor tom to adjust it a small gold stud flashed in one ear. Lucan Brightwell. He tapped the tom twice, listened to it, frowned at it, tapped it again, and said, to the monitor desk, "That's ringing. Can you hear that ringing? Take some of that out," and the engineer did, and he said, "Yeah. That," and grinned as if he had been given a present.

The third one was at the edge of the stage on the far side, where the work light ran out. He was very tall — taller than the singer by the best part of a head — and he was tuning a guitar by ear with his back half-turned to the room, his head bent over it. Black T-shirt that fitted him as though it had been measured. Silver rings on four fingers of the fretting hand. Black hair cut short, parted hard to one side, not a strand out of place. Dashiell Abellera. He finished tuning, played four bars of something quiet and clean that nobody else seemed to be listening to, and stopped, satisfied.

Then he looked up, across the whole width of the stage, and saw the Brisons standing in the wing with their cases.

He nodded. Just once — a small, courteous nod, to all four of them, the kind you gave people you were keeping waiting. It did not ask for anything. It did not expect a nod back. He turned and said something low to the singer, and the singer said, "Yeah, yeah, two minutes, we're done, we're done," and they were off the stage inside three.

"Well," Merryn said, under her breath. "They're pretty."

"They're on time," Lowenna said. "Which is more use to us."

The vocal mic hummed. She heard it on the first word of Merryn's line check: a low, grubby fifty-cycle buzz under the voice, the sound of a cable that had been dragged across too many floors. Merryn heard it too, and Lowenna watched her draw breath to say something about it to the monitor desk that would be true and that would make the next nine weeks a little bit worse.

Lowenna got there first. She crossed to the desk, smiled at the monitor engineer, who was young and harried and plainly being shouted at down his headset by somebody else, and said, "Sorry — I think it's the cable on the vocal, not the mic. I've got a spare in my case if it saves you going to the truck."

He looked at her, and at the cable in her hand, and something in his face unclenched. "You're a lifesaver."

"It's no bother."

The hum went. Merryn sang the line again into clean air, and gave Lowenna a look across the stage that said you didn't need to do that and also, underneath it, thank you, and that was the whole of the conversation they would have about it. It usually was. Lowenna had been smoothing rooms in front of Merryn since the church hall. It was easier than letting Merryn break them.

Back in dressing room four, she did her face. The cat-eye first, a sharp black line drawn in one stroke on each lid and flicked out towards her temple. Her skin did not need much; it was pale and cool and even, and stayed that way under stage light — she had never in her life gone pink under a lamp, which was one of the few useful things her mother's side had given her. The lip last, deep plum, blotted and done again so it would last a set. Then her hair: very long, near black, heavy with waves, and she wore it over her left shoulder all day the way it wanted to go, but for the stage she swept it back off her right side and twisted it low at the nape and pinned it there, tight and sleek, eight pins, so that nothing could cross the bow arm. She had once watched a fiddle player in Truro play an entire set with her hair caught in her own bow and had decided, at fourteen, that it would never be her.

Kenver laced her into the top. She stood and looked at herself in the long half of the mirror: the satin pulled in hard at the waist and full above it, the velvet sitting low and snug over her hips, gold at her ears, plum at her mouth. She looked expensive. That was the point. The Brisons were a van and a bruised apple; she could at least be something worth looking at on the way past.

They played well. The hall was a third full when they started and half full when they finished, and the half that had come in early cheered properly at the end of the last song instead of politely, which was more than they had had any right to expect. Cador got the snare off in three minutes and forty seconds. They cleared in eleven.

Then she went back to the wing to watch.

She told Merryn she wanted to hear the room with people in it, which was true. She did not say that she wanted to see what three men who soundchecked like that did with two thousand people in front of them, which was also true.

What they did was very good. The sound was big and clean and tight; Lucan drove it from the back like someone pushing a car he expected to start, Dashiell's guitar wove in and out of the singer's in long bright lines, and Kasim worked the front of the stage as if the whole hall were a friend he had not seen in years. By the fourth song she had stopped listening as a support act and started listening as a fan, which she had not done in some time.

Then they played "Saltlines".

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

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