Written Into the Rider

The Carrow Hall had a slow room and a fast crew. Wrong way round. Tegan had known it from the pavement.

She stood at the back of the truck at nine in the morning with the roller door up and the smell of Manchester rain coming off the tarmac, and she counted flight cases out loud, which she did not need to do and did anyway, because the counting was how she stayed on the correct side of a day. Eight cases. Two risers. The drum hardware trunk with the wheel that had been going since Sheffield last spring and would keep going, out of spite, until it killed somebody. She put her hand flat on it as it went past. The house lads had a good rhythm on the ramp and no idea where anything went, and that was fine. Knowing where it went was her job.

"Tegan." Garrity from the house, clipboard, high-vis, apologetic before he'd started. "Curfew's eleven, hard. Council's been at us."

"Eleven's fine. We're on at nine-fifteen and off at ten-twenty-five."

"Support wants forty minutes."

"Support gets thirty and a soundcheck at half four, and if they push it I'll come and stand next to you while you tell them, so it isn't you." She was already walking. "Any water in the dressing room, or is it the machine again?"

"Machine again."

"Then I'll get water."

Three years of this. Three years since the October she'd got on a bus in a car park in Salford with a band she'd been warned about and a per-leg fee written on the back of an email, and here she was, in the same city, in a hall with a slow room, getting water because a machine was broken. She did not find that sad. She found it accurate, and she preferred accurate.

The sheet was in her back pocket, folded twice, printed on Sunday because she did not trust her phone in a load-in. Twenty-six dates on it, and seven of them crossed off in biro with a line through the city and a time written next to it, which was a habit she had never explained to anyone. Manchester was tonight. Under Manchester there were eighteen more, and then a room in Kentish Town with the label in it.

Nineteen, counting tonight. She had done the sum in the dark at four that morning in her bunk, lying in the middle of a bus with three men asleep in it, and had got nineteen, and had done it again to be sure, and got nineteen again.

Soundcheck was where it showed.

She was at the back of the room with a box of the good bottled water on her hip and her ears doing the thing they did without being asked. Cassius was on the mic saying one, one, one the way he always did, three flat syllables in that Bristol-under-Manchester voice, and Salter at the house desk was pushing him up, and there it was. A thin mean edge on the top of the vocal, maybe three kilohertz, maybe a bit under, the kind of thing you did not hear as a sound so much as feel as a small pressure behind the eyes. It was not in the room. It was in Cassius's wedge, and it would sit on his throat all night, and by the third song he would start pushing underneath it to get over it, and by Sheffield tomorrow he would be hoarse and unpleasant about being hoarse.

She put the water down on a flight case and went up the side of the room and was standing at the monitor desk with her hand on the fader before anybody had said her name.

"Three K," she said to the monitor lad, whose name was Nadim and who was doing his best. "On the wedge, not the house. Take two out and give him a bit at eight hundred to put back the weight."

Nadim did it. Cassius said one again into the mic, then stopped, and rolled his shoulders, which was as close as he came to a thank-you before six in the evening. Three years of service-station food had gone on him at the edges and made him broad rather than heavy; mid-brown skin under the work lights, close-cut hair with the early grey coming in at one temple. She had watched him do that shoulder roll in something like ninety rooms and could have drawn it in the dark.

"Better?" she said.

"You're a witch," Cassius said into the microphone, so that it went into the empty room, all nine hundred capacity of it, and the empty room took it and gave it back thin. "Everyone note that the tour manager is a witch."

"Everyone note that the tour manager brought water."

"I love you," Cassius said, still into the microphone, and Nadim the monitor lad had the sense to look at his hands, and Tegan took her hand off the fader and went and got her box of water and put it in the dressing room, one bottle each on the table, because saying a thing into a microphone in an empty room is the cheapest kind of saying and everyone in the building knew it.

That was the arithmetic. He said it that way because it was cheap. Nothing said into a house PA at four in the afternoon has ever cost anybody anything.

They ran four songs. She watched Kier push his hair back off his face with the flat of his wrist between every one of them — black and long enough to get in his way, and not once noticed — narrow through the shoulders, warm brown skin gone amber under the work lights; and Joss behind the kit, tall and rangy and fair, sandy hair he cut himself badly, forearms on the rims that told you what he did for a living. Then they ran Hold, and the room opened up and swallowed itself, and the whole afternoon went quiet in the way a corridor goes quiet outside a room where two people are having a conversation.

It went like this. Kier had it in a low tuning, and the intro figure was the best eight bars any of them had written, a slow descending thing on the guitar that made the hair on your arms move even in an empty hall with the lights up and a lad hoovering by the bar. Joss came in underneath on the rim with a heartbeat you could have set a watch to. Cassius sang the first verse, which existed, and the chorus, which existed, and then arrived at the place where the second verse should have been.

There was no second verse. There had been no second verse for eighteen months.

So they vamped it. Four bars, eight bars, twelve, Cassius holding the mic and looking at a spot two feet above the barrier with the patient blankness of a man waiting for a train that has been cancelled, Kier playing the intro figure again, then playing it again with a note changed, then a third time with the note changed back. Joss kept the rim ticking and then, because there was nowhere to go, rolled onto the toms and made it sound like a decision, which it was not, and the whole thing sagged sideways into the top of the next song, and the next song had to start with all of that still in the room.

Nobody stopped playing. That was the thing. They played it accurately. Three men doing precise work at each other rather than together, and a hole in the middle of it that everyone had agreed to walk around for seven months.

Cassius took the mic off the stand.

"Cut it," he said.

Kier didn't look up from the pedalboard. "No."

"I'm not asking you to bin the song, I'm asking you to bin it tonight, in this room, on a Tuesday. Nine hundred people and half of them here off the second record and none of them know it — what is it doing? What's it for? What's it doing in slot five?" He turned. "Joss. What's it doing?"

"It's doing what it's been doing," Joss said, unhurried, from behind the kit, in that flat Yorkshire way that landed like a hand put on a table. "It's the best thing we've got and it isn't finished, Cass. That's not a new problem, and you don't fix it at four in the afternoon."

"It's a hole."

"It's a hole," Joss agreed. "That's why I'd like it finished."

Kier crouched and moved a cable that did not need moving. He was quiet long enough that Cassius drew breath to fill it, and then Kier said, to the floor, "You want me to hand you a verse so you've got something to sing over the gap."

"I want a song."

"That's not the same want."

"Kier—"

"You want the gap covered," Kier said. He straightened up. He pushed his hair back off his face with the flat of his wrist, the way he did when he was about to say something sideways. "I want the thing to be true first. If I write you eight lines tonight you'll sing them for the rest of the leg and I'll never get to take them out again. It'll be the song. That's how it works. So no."

"So it stays broken."

"So it stays unfinished," Kier said. "That's a different word."

And then the three of them looked at Tegan, all at once, the way they did — not because anyone had asked her anything, but because she was standing in the middle of a room with a clipboard and a set list and a curfew, and she was the one who decided things.

She decided a great many things. She decided what time the bus rolled and who sat in the front lounge with a hangover and whether an interview happened. She had once decided, in a service station outside Carlisle, that Cassius was not going to be allowed to phone his brother, and had been right. What she did not decide, and had never decided, and had no earthly standing to decide, was what went in slot five.

"That's a band conversation," she said.

"You're in the band," Cassius said.

"I'm on the crew list."

"Tegan—"

"You're on at nine-fifteen and you're off at ten-twenty-five, and if you cut a song out of the middle you're off at ten-twenty-one, which is a short set in a room that's already slow, and I'd have to find you four minutes from somewhere. That's my part of it. That's genuinely all of my part of it." She looked at her sheet, which she did not need to look at. "Doors at seven. Support at eight. I'll be at the desk for the first three songs and then I'll be in the box office counting, because we're on a door split and I don't trust the clicker."

Nobody said anything. Nadim the monitor lad was pretending very hard to be somewhere else.

"Salter's got three K out of your wedge," she added, to Cassius. "Don't push. You've got Sheffield tomorrow and Nottingham after."

"Yeah," Cassius said. He'd gone quiet, which was the only interesting thing he ever did. "Yeah. All right."

She went out through the fire door into the loading bay to get away from all three of them at once.

It was still raining, the fine sideways Manchester sort that does not appear to be falling and gets you wet anyway. She stood under the lip of the roller door with her hands in her jacket pockets and looked at a skip and a stack of crushed pallets and the wet back wall of a building whose front she had never seen.

Inside, through the door, somebody started playing the intro figure of Hold again, slowly, once, and then stopped.

She took the sheet out and unfolded it and did the sum for the third time, standing in a loading bay, because it was a thing she could count.

Nineteen including tonight, and the last of them a Thursday in Kentish Town with a woman from Cormorant Records in the room, deciding whether there was an album three and a six-week support run in America, or whether there was nothing.

Three of them had contracts. Cassius had a contract, and Joss had a contract, and Kier had a contract, and there were also publishing splits she had seen the top sheet of and pointedly not read. She had a per-leg fee, agreed by email, and an agreement that ran out on the thirty-first of January, and nothing after it. Not a bad deal. It was the deal she had asked for, three years ago, because it was clean, and clean had seemed like the most important thing to be.

She folded the sheet along its two folds and put it back in her pocket.

Then she went in and told Garrity the support was getting thirty minutes, and stood next to him while he told them, so it wasn't him.

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

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