by Debra Oswald
By the time Ash got to the end of the disc, night had truly fallen and the house had sunk into darkness.
Ash’s mobile rang. Charlie.
‘Howdy,’ said Charlie. ‘There’s something we need to check out tonight. Can you go out?’
‘Yeah. No problem,’ Ash replied. ‘Want me to meet you somewhere?’
‘Negative. I’m already on my way to your place. Be there in two minutes.’
‘Oh well, hang on –’
‘See you in a sec,’ said Charlie and hung up.
Generally, Ash avoided having friends around to his house. If friends did show up, he always tried to scoot out the door quickly.
By the time Charlie knocked on the door, Ash was dressed and ready to go. He’d left a Post-it note for his mum: ‘Gone out with Charlie. Call me on mobile if problem.’
‘Let’s go,’ said Ash.
‘You should get yourself a jacket, my man,’ suggested Charlie. ‘We’re going to be outside in the cold.’
‘Okay. Give me one sec.’
Ash left Charlie at the front door and went to his room to find a jacket. He was only gone two minutes but by the time he came back, he saw Charlie and his mum chatting in the hallway.
She had emerged from the bathroom wearing a white cotton robe, still with damp hair and that lobstery-pink skin you get from a long hot bath. She had pulled the headphones off her ears so she could hear. Ash could see that Charlie was asking her about the white-noise headphones and she was explaining how they worked.
Ash hurried to the front door, saying, ‘Oh, Mum. Hi. I left you a note.’
‘Yes, that’s fine, Ash. Charlie explained you’re going out,’ she said. ‘Will you boys be right to get home?’
‘No problem,’ Charlie assured her. ‘My dad’s picking us up later.’
‘Oh good. That’s kind of him. Have a fun night,’ she said.
Ash smiled goodbye to his mum as he headed out the door. He wanted to wish her a ‘fun night’ too. But that might come out sounding sarcastic, jokey-nasty, and that wasn’t what he meant. So he didn’t say anything. Charlie was already halfway up the street, scampering towards the bus stop. Ash had to gallop down the front steps to catch up with his hyperactive mate.
Charlie had heard about a pub that put on a live blues band every Saturday night. The place was only ten minutes away on the bus. There was one problem: kids under eighteen weren’t allowed in and the security guys were dead strict about it.
‘We’re both sixteen,’ Ash pointed out. ‘Even if we had fake IDs, no one would believe you’re eighteen. The dumbest security guy in the universe wouldn’t be fooled. No offence,’ he added.
‘None taken.’ Charlie was fully aware that he looked more like a very strange elf than a regular eighteen-year-old person.
‘So, if we aren’t allowed in, what’s the point of going?’ Ash asked.
‘Don’t fret, poppet,’ said Charlie. He always had an answer for everything. ‘My informants tell me there is a sweet spot outside.’
‘Eh?’
‘That’s the place!’ shouted Charlie, hitting the stop button on the bus. ‘The Carlisle Hotel.’
The front section of the Carlisle – the part you could see from the main road – was like an ordinary pub, with guys drinking and watching football matches and horseraces on a bank of TV sets. But from deep inside the building you could hear the muffled sound of live music.
‘So, what now?’ asked Ash.
‘Have faith,’ said Charlie. ‘There’s supposed to be – yes! This way!’
Charlie dived round the corner into the narrow street that ran along one side of the pub. There were two recycling skips and beyond those, three steps leading up to a small concrete landing. This was the back entrance to the music venue, with double doors wide enough to heave sound gear through. A person could sit there and hear the music from inside so clearly and loudly it was like being in the room with the band. It must have been some lucky accident of acoustics.
Charlie and Ash sat either side of the double doors with their backs pressed against the wall. Ash could feel the beat of the music thumping through the bricks and into his spine.
Neither of them wanted to say it, but the band inside wasn’t fantastic. They were plodding musicians playing third-rate versions of famous blues songs. The singer did a better job than Charlie’s strangled-cat vocals but not heaps better. Even so, it was worth being there. It was good to hear a live band, instead of always listening to recorded music.
For Ash, there was a special kind of energy when music was pumping live out of the amplifiers. Maybe it was knowing that people’s hands were on those guitar strings, pounding down those drumsticks, creating the music at just that moment, for just that audience, filling the air with thousands of tiny living sound particles.
The two of them listened for forty minutes, until the band took a break. By then, Charlie and Ash were freezing from sitting outside on cold concrete for so long.
‘We need hot, greasy food and we need it now,’ Charlie decided.
So they ran down the street, running to get warm and to loosen up their stiff legs. They eventually found a takeaway place on the main road. They bought drinks and a big parcel of hot chips and made it back for the start of the band’s second set. They opened the parcel of chips on the ground between them and hoed in.
Ash recognised one of the songs. ‘Hey, that’s a Jimmy Nicholls number.’
‘It certainly is,’ said Charlie. ‘I’m proud of you, my son.’
Jimmy Nicholls had become one of Ash’s favourites. Nicholls was a top American slide guitarist, a solid songwriter and a cool, growly singer. He’d been around a long time and was still making great records, even though he had to be sixty-something by now. The band inside the pub pretty much ruined the Jimmy Nicholls song but Ash got a buzz out of hearing it live anyway.
When the music was over, Charlie texted his dad to pick them up. They waited for the car on the corner of the main road, hopping from foot to foot to warm themselves up.
‘Hey,’ said Charlie. ‘You know those headphones your mum uses?’
Ash’s chest tightened. He didn’t want Charlie wondering about those tragic people Ash was related to.
But Charlie wasn’t actually thinking about that stuff. His brain was focused somewhere else. ‘The headphones generate white noise, right?’
‘Yeah, low-level white noise. It filters out annoying sounds,’ Ash explained.
‘Right. Yeah. Saucy,’ said Charlie, his brain whirring round. ‘Are there other colours of noise?’
‘I think so but I don’t know much about –’
‘And there’s such a thing as blue noise?’
Ash shrugged and nodded.
‘So maybe we should call the band Blue Noise.’
Ash said the name out loud a couple of times and kind of rolled it around in his head. ‘It’s not bad.’
‘Exactly,’ said Charlie. ‘It’s not the most fabulous name in the history of band names. But it is classy, it’s not goony and it doesn’t give any wrong impressions.’
At the next band practice, the name was up for discussion. Everyone either liked it or at least didn’t hate it. And they were all sick of arguing about names, sick of saying ‘The band doesn’t have a name yet’ when people asked.
So the decision was made. The band had been born and now it was christened: Blue Noise.
Chapter Eight
Whitewater rafting – that’s what was going through Erin’s mind. Back in first term, their PE teacher decided that whitewater rafting would be a character-building experience. All the kids in Year 10 could ‘challenge themselves’ and ‘face their fears’.
The day of the trip, they sat for two hours on buses heading out of the city to a river that supposedly had the right kind of dangerous rapids for facing fears. The teacher herded them all off the buses and then handed out bright-orange life jackets. ‘Everybody smiling? This is going to be a top day!’
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nbsp; The squealing was so loud and shrill it hurt Erin’s ears. Packs of girls were shrieking with fright before they’d even climbed into the rafts. They were still standing on solid ground on the bank, being organised into groups of six for each raft.
Most of the boys were joking around, teasing each other, making macho grunting noises. Putting plenty of effort into not looking as if they were nervous.
Erin tried to keep calm by reminding herself that the people in charge would never set up an activity for kids that was seriously dangerous, even if it looked it. No PE teacher would risk arriving back at a school with a busload of dead Year 10 students. Teachers couldn’t risk even one drowned kid. So it must be totally safe. Then again, Erin recalled hearing about two boys from a posh school who’d been killed on a caving expedition. So teachers did get it wrong sometimes and kids could die. Maybe she should be shrieking with terror like those other girls.
‘Good on you, Erin,’ said the PE teacher. ‘You’re looking very calm and focused there.’
Erin smiled back at the teacher’s tanned, shiny face. The guy had no idea what was going on in her head.
The squealing girls switched to full-on screaming once they were shooting down the rapids, swerving between rocks, swinging and tipping, being sploshed with icy water. You could tell from the metallic, armour-piercing tone of the screaming that some of the girls were truly very scared.
Erin was pretty scared. It was impossible not to think about the fact that she might get thrown out and smash her skull open on sharp rocks. But the rafting was also exhilarating. Whooshing along, feeling the power of the water underneath the raft, knowing she was almost out of control but not quite – it was terrifying but incredibly exciting.
When it ended and she clambered onto the bank, Erin’s skin tingled from the thrill, and her legs were wobbly from fear. She’d come out the other end of it, and she felt great. Even if she had wet clothes sticking to her like soggy cardboard.
In the middle of one Friday-afternoon Blue Noise rehearsal, Erin was thinking about whitewater rafting. It came into her mind because of the improvised solos.
Right from the first practice, Charlie had insisted that everyone have a go at improvising. Erin was terrified of the prospect. She’d started piano lessons when she was seven. The notes she needed to play were always written down in black and white. Of course, there were different ways to play those notes, your own interpretation and whatever. But Erin had never had to make the notes up herself before.
During the previous rehearsals, she had a go at improvising but always lost her nerve and gave up part way through. Charlie and the others never made her feel bad about it but she still believed she was letting them down. Feeling guilty was one of Erin Landers’ areas of giftedness. She’d been practising solos at home, in secret, to build up her confidence.
This particular Friday, the band was rehearsing ‘The Sky is Crying’. When Lily finished singing the second chorus, Charlie nodded to Erin. It was her turn to let rip with a solo on the keyboard.
That moment felt like jumping off a waterfall in a flimsy inflatable boat into churning rapids. Well, she decided, she could make use of the whitewater rafting idea. She deliberately imagined the hearty PE teacher pushing her into the water, saying, ‘Good on you, Erin. Go for it,’ in his gung-ho voice.
Diving into her solo, Erin was nervous but she could also feel the skin on her arms tingling. There was that same scary-exciting feeling that she was barely in control of this powerful force that was whooshing her along. And just as with whitewater rafting, it felt great when she came out the other end.
Charlie said, ‘Excellent. That was a tasty solo, Erin.’
Erin was already making a mental list of twenty negative things: how she’d messed it up and the crappy bits she’d played.
But then Joel smiled to indicate he thought it was okay.
And Lester gushed, ‘Erin! That was great!’ and did a flourish on the drums to express his approval. ‘Ashman, don’t you reckon Erin did great?’
Ash nodded, then threw his head back and howled like a wolf. Triumphant howling. Lester and Charlie joined in and the three of them made Erin laugh so much she never got around to telling them all the reasons her solo was actually very bad.
Blue Noise had been going for two months. Erin wasn’t sure how her parents would react to the idea. She had just muttered something to them about doing stuff with a new blues band at school. She made it sound like no big deal. A very small deal in fact. Hardly worth them thinking about, let alone worrying about.
Of course, her mum and dad noticed that Erin was playing different CDs around the house now. It wasn’t a problem, because they quite liked a lot of Charlie’s music. Erin’s mum would bob her head to the blues numbers while she chopped vegetables for dinner. ‘What’s this called, Erin? I like this one,’ she would say.
Erin sometimes hauled the electric keyboard home so she could practise in her room. She could play around with the effects and stuff you could do on a keyboard that you couldn’t on a normal piano.
Her parents must have heard her in there playing Memphis Slim licks instead of Bach. They didn’t say anything. Maybe they assumed it was a phase she was going through before she got back to serious classical piano. Maybe they were right about that. Maybe playing in a blues band was a novelty activity that Erin would get sick of eventually. She wasn’t sure.
But Erin had realised she looked forward to band rehearsals more than anything else in her week. Not that rehearsals were always a perfect fun-fest. There were times when they sounded like the worst band ever to plug into an electrical socket. There were times when they disagreed about how to finish off a number or what song to work on. Then everyone got tetchy, as if there was a grumpy poisonous gas spreading through the room. And there were times when it all came together and sounded good. Good like a proper band.
When Blue Noise first started, Charlie had chosen all the songs and done the arrangements. But since the rest of them had begun their education in the Charlie Novak Academy of Blues, they were bringing their own ideas to the rehearsal room.
The Friday Erin nailed her solo on ‘The Sky is Crying’, they started work on a new number that Ash wanted to try. ‘Don’t Ever Let Nobody Drag Your Spirit Down’. Charlie didn’t mind, didn’t feel miffed about giving up his position as boss of the band. He loved it when the others suggested stuff.
‘I was thinking that we could do the bridge like this,’ said Ash. He picked up his guitar and played the bridge he had in mind.
Erin thought it sounded great. He was a good guitarist. You didn’t have to be a guitar genius to realise that.
But as soon as he finished playing, Ash said, ‘I don’t know. It sounds a bit lame.’ He was never confident about his playing or his ideas.
Erin sneaked a sideways look at him. He had his head down, hair flopped across his eyes, picking at a frayed corner on his shirt.
‘So, look, maybe we should forget that idea,’ said Ash. ‘It’s no good.’
‘That’s crazy talk!’ Charlie protested. ‘That bridge is good. It’s delish.’
‘Yeah, I like it a lot,’ added Joel.
Ash shrugged and half smiled, relieved.
‘I could try this,’ said Joel, and played a saxophone riff. He always had heaps of ideas for other parts of musical arrangements too.
Lily never had any suggestions to make. While this discussion was going on, Lily sent a few texts, picked at her fingernails or stared into space as if there was somewhere more important she was supposed to be. In the end, Lily would just sing whatever and however she was told to sing. And the thing was, she sang so brilliantly, what did it matter if Lily Opara didn’t give a flying fruit bat about the music?
Lester thwacked his drumsticks against his legs. ‘Let’s just try it. Let’s just play.’ Lester never wanted to yap about the finer details of the arrangement. He was always itching to play.
They played the number through. They were getting some
where. With ideas from Ash, Joel and Charlie added together, ‘Don’t Ever Let Nobody Drag Your Spirit Down’ started to build up layers and interesting little chunks.
‘That is sounding tasty,’ said Charlie. ‘But there’s still something missing.’
‘Maybe we’re playing it too fast,’ suggested Ash.
‘No, I think the tempo is right but … ah! Ladies and gentlemen, I see the light,’ said Charlie. ‘We need backing vocals on this one.’
Ash jumped in quickly: ‘Not me. I can’t sing to save myself.’
‘Same goes for me,’ said Joel.
They all knew how bad Charlie sounded. Strangled-cat vocals never sound good, even just doing the odd ‘ooh ooh’ in the background.
After a bit of experimentation, it turned out Lester could do a barking noise – but on the right note. Lester’s voice was strange but it sounded kind of punchy as a backing vocal.
That left Erin. She could feel Charlie staring at her.
‘Look, I can’t really sing,’ said Erin. ‘I mean, I have reasonable pitch but I can’t –’
‘Good pitch is all we need,’ said Charlie. ‘If you can get the notes, that will work for harmonising.’
‘No, no, but I’ve got no power in my voice. It comes out sort of whispering and tragic, like someone dying from pneumonia.’
‘Microphone will solve that,’ insisted Charlie.
Erin was going to argue but Charlie was giving her his wounded-baby-wallaby face. How could she say no to him when he looked at her with that face? Maybe this was the face he used to squeeze favours out of Mrs Vallentine and the other music teachers.
From then on, Lester and Erin did the backing vocals when a song required it.
Most Fridays after rehearsal, they all went to the Portuguese chicken place up the road from school. All of them, that is, except Lily. In Lily’s universe, there were plenty more fabulous things to do than go to a fast-food place with a pack of sixteen-year-olds. But in Erin’s universe, hanging out with the band was just fine. Better than fine.