Blue Noise

by Debra Oswald

  Charlie was in one of his excited, wild-eyed moods. ‘Now, my poppets, now, now,’ he said breathlessly. ‘How is the songwriting going? Anyone got a song to show us yet?’

  Everyone at the table mumbled ‘no’. So far, the band had built up a small repertoire of classic blues numbers they could play reasonably well. But Charlie was desperate for people to write original material too.

  ‘I’m working on a couple of new song ideas,’ said Charlie.

  ‘Uh, more songs about your feelings for a certain girl?’ asked Ash.

  ‘Affirmative. Of course. Always,’ admitted Charlie. ‘Lily will probably never love me back. I am fully aware that she’s out of my league. But that only makes it more intense, you know? I have this love that comes deep from my soul but she is always out of reach – all that heartbreaking stuff.’

  It made Erin squirm with embarrassment to hear Charlie tell everyone about his unrequited love for The Goddess of Mulvaney High. It was like someone running around the streets showing their insides to strangers. Charlie didn’t seem to care. In fact, he believed his misery about Lily could work in his favour.

  ‘That’s the handy thing about being a blues musician,’ he argued. ‘When something crappy happens in your life, you can put the heartache to good use. You can write a song about it.’

  But for all his blathering on, Charlie hadn’t ever brought in a song he’d written. In fact, at that point in the history of Blue Noise, there was only one member of the band who was having a crack at writing songs: Erin. She had been tinkering with songwriting at home in her room. Most of the stuff she attempted to write ended up sounding like second-rate copies of famous songs. There was no way she would ever dare show her pathetic efforts to anyone. Sitting there in the chicken place, she reached for an extra-salty chip and didn’t utter a word to the others about her secret songwriting.

  ‘Erin, do you want another drink?’ asked Ash.

  ‘Uh, mmm, yeah,’ muttered Erin, pawing through her wallet for coins as a way to avoid meeting Ash’s gaze.

  ‘Pineapple?’ he guessed.

  Erin realised she was thrilled that Ash Corrigan knew what juice she liked. How pathetic was that?

  Chapter Nine

  Ash slid a stack of coins across the counter to pay for more drinks and carried them back to the table. When they hung out at the Portuguese chicken place, they were always careful to buy plenty of food and drinks so the owner didn’t mind them taking up one of the booths for ages, talking.

  Ash passed the pineapple juice to Erin and got a murmured ‘Thanks’ in return.

  Lester and Joel were joking around, bagging each other out as usual.

  ‘I got one. I got one. What do you call a thousand saxophones at the bottom of the ocean?’ asked Lester.

  ‘A good start,’ guessed Joel. ‘That joke’s just a lame cover version of the lawyer joke.’

  ‘Damn you, Joel Schneider,’ said Lester.

  ‘What do you get if you cross a gorilla with a drummer?’ asked Joel.

  Lester bunged on his I’m-a-stupid-drummer voice. ‘Awww, dunno.’

  ‘A really dumb gorilla.’

  Lester snorted. ‘And you thought my joke was lame!’

  ‘Oh, by the way, Erin, you might need to help Lester to read the long words on the menu,’ said Joel helpfully.

  ‘I can manage, thanks,’ Lester replied. ‘But Erin, maybe you should take the lid off Joel’s drink. We can’t have the sax god damaging those delicate fingers he uses to play his instrument.’

  ‘Settle down, children,’ said Erin in a schoolteacher voice. She seemed to enjoy being recruited to their mock-insult battle. Every week, Ash could see she was becoming more relaxed with the guys in the band. More relaxed with everyone except him.

  That afternoon at the chicken place, Charlie was especially fired up about his long-term vision for the band.

  ‘Okay, so we have to finish decent-quality recordings of three saucy numbers and get them up on a website.’ He sliced his hand across the tabletop, as if he was laying out the plan for Blue Noise on the orange plastic surface.

  Over the last two weeks, Charlie had been taking chunks of time out of rehearsal sessions for ‘capturing the Blue Noise sound’. With a laptop borrowed from his dad and software he’d downloaded, Charlie had been recording bits and pieces of the ‘three saucy numbers’. He raved on to Ash about how he was working on mixing the tracks but no one had heard the results yet. The recording process gave Charlie an excuse to be alone with Lily Opara in the small music room at school that had a proper vocal mike. Charlie could shut Lily in there for an hour at a time getting the vocal just right.

  ‘When will we get to hear the stuff you’ve been recording?’ asked Joel.

  ‘Soon, my friend, soon,’ said Charlie, shoving hot chips in his mouth. ‘We must remember: recording the music and getting it out there online is great but playing live is the thing. This band is now ready, I believe, to play in front of a live audience.’

  ‘Really?’ Erin looked a bit anxious.

  ‘I’m not talking about a paying audience. We’d just play at school to start off,’ explained Charlie. ‘I’ve spoken to Mrs Vallentine about the band playing at assembly.’

  ‘Never happen,’ said Lester. ‘She doesn’t like rock bands playing at assembly.’

  ‘Well, you know Charlie can squeeze all kinds of amazing favours out of Mrs Vallentine,’ Ash pointed out.

  ‘It’s some mysterious Novak mind manipulation,’ agreed Erin.

  Charlie narrowed his eyes like a stage hypnotist. ‘I have certain – shall we say – powers of persuasion.’

  ‘Hang on, have you got incriminating nude photos of Mrs V?’ asked Joel.

  Lester groaned. ‘Oh please, we’re eating.’

  ‘Blue Noise will play at assembly,’ said Charlie, very calm.

  Erin was not so calm. ‘What? We’re not ready. We need to practise heaps more and then maybe we could think about it but –’

  ‘We play at the assembly next Friday,’ announced Charlie. ‘It’s all set.’

  Ash heard a gasp of terror from Erin and then the clunk of glass as she dropped her drink bottle, sending pineapple juice spraying across the orange tabletop.

  Chapter Ten

  Erin had still not forgiven Charlie for arranging this, the band’s performance at Friday assembly. It was way too soon. Blue Noise wasn’t ready to play in front of four cockroaches and a deaf labrador, let alone in front of the whole school.

  Erin was only just getting the hang of playing blues and she wasn’t convinced it was her thing anyway. If today turned out to be a disaster, she might lose her nerve and give up on the whole experiment.

  At lunchtime, all the band members set up the gear on the squeaky wooden stage in the hall. All of them, that is, except Lily. She didn’t show up to help. As usual, Charlie was full of excuses for her, and was happy to set up the vocal microphone on behalf of The Goddess.

  ‘It’s not exactly a hip blues joint, is it?’ said Joel, looking around their school hall.

  The hall doubled as the gymnasium so there were volleyball nets, giant stacks of blue gym mats and the lingering stink of boy sweat through the room.

  As they hooked up the gear, Lester and Joel were swapping jokes, their own special ritual to keep themselves calm.

  ‘What do you call a drummer with half a brain?’ asked Joel.

  ‘Dunno,’ said Lester.

  ‘Overqualified.’

  Lester nodded. ‘Fair enough. What’s the difference between a vacuum cleaner and a saxophone?’

  ‘I’m sure you’re going to tell me,’ said Joel.

  ‘You have to plug in a vacuum cleaner before it sucks,’ answered Lester.

  It amazed Erin the way some guys could use mutual abuse and bagging each other as their way of being friends. And she envied the fact that they could joke around at a time like this. That is, when they were about to go on stage.

  At 2.30, assembly time, Erin sto
od in the wings, her throat tight with anxiety. In thirty seconds she would have to go out onto that stage in front of the students of Mulvaney High. She’d played the piano at school several times before but that was always classical stuff. That was different.

  This time, she would have to play blues, sing backing vocals and improvise a solo. Everyone would be staring at her: packs of hoony Year 7 boys, catty Year 9 girls, deeply cool Year 11s, not to mention her own friends. There were some people out there – she could list the names – who would be determined to sneer at the band and think they were rubbish, no matter what. She couldn’t worry about them. But there were other people out there whose opinion she did care about. What if they thought the band was tragic? And let’s not forget her sister, Phoebe, who could report every juicy detail of the humiliating scene to their parents. There were so many potential ways Erin could make a huge steaming fool of herself, it crushed the air out of her lungs.

  ‘Everybody ready?’ said Charlie. ‘Let’s introduce Mulvaney High to the power of the blues.’

  Erin took a deep breath and conjured up the image of the whitewater rafting. She tried to picture the PE teacher slapping her heartily on the back, encouraging her to face her fears. But maybe she needed a more appropriate imaginary coach than that goony PE teacher. She imagined legends like Ray Charles and Memphis Slim slapping her on the back. ‘You can do it, Erin.’ That made her laugh: the idea that Ray Charles or Memphis Slim would be hiding behind the dusty black curtains of the Mulvaney High School hall. She laughed and then the next thing she knew she was on the stage, sitting at the keyboards, ready to play.

  ‘Hello, Mulvaney High,’ Charlie said into the microphone. ‘This band is called Blue Noise and we’re going to play some blues for you this afternoon.’

  Charlie counted in the band and they launched into ‘Help Me’. That was the number they knew best, so it would be the easiest one to start with.

  Erin’s hands were on the keyboard, playing all the right notes in the right order. But there was no way she could look out at the audience. To get through this without her nerves cracking up, she would have to focus on the keys and on Charlie. As they played, Charlie nodded or flicked his head to signal the shifts in the music and when to take a solo.

  They got through ‘Help Me’ without any major stuff-ups. Erin heard some applause bouncing off the panelled walls of the hall. She sneaked a peek out at the audience but kept her eyes out of focus so she could only make out a blur of pale faces and grey uniforms. Erin’s heart was pounding. With two more songs to go, there were still plenty of opportunities for humiliation and disaster.

  ‘Thank you most kindly,’ said Charlie over the sound of the applause. ‘This next number is called “The Sky is Crying”.’

  ‘The Sky is Crying’ always gave Lily the chance to show off her voice. The smooth, maple-syrup sound of Lily Opara singing was amazing and Erin found herself staring at The Goddess. It wasn’t just her voice. Or even how absurdly beautiful she was. Lily was so incredibly confident, so comfortable onstage, standing there radiating some special power as if she owned that hall and the souls of everyone in it, without any speck of self-doubt. Erin couldn’t imagine ever feeling confidence like that.

  Erin was so distracted by Lily’s performance that when Charlie nodded for her to do a solo on ‘The Sky is Crying’, she launched into it without agonising about it. She just carried on the sweep of the song through the keyboard solo and it felt good.

  From where Erin was sitting, she could only catch odd glimpses of Ash on the far side of the stage. He was playing really well.

  Chapter Eleven

  For Ash Corrigan, it was a physical thing. Playing live that very first time in front of an audience, it felt as if all his blood was flowing in the right direction for the very first time. He was aware of every cell of his body buzzing, doing whatever job each cell does so that he was able to stand on that stage and perform.

  He didn’t feel anxious or self-conscious about his playing. The six of them onstage were connected, in sync with each other, like one organism creating the music.

  It was no big surprise to see Lily Opara soak up the attention of an audience; being onstage with hundreds of people watching was her idea of nirvana. But it wasn’t just Lily who was buzzing with the adrenaline rush of performing live. The whole band had cranked it up three notches. Joel on saxophone – he was incredible. For her solo in ‘The Sky is Crying’, Erin let fly on the keyboards as if she’d only been playing with one hand before this. And the applause from the crowd – well, that applause felt fantastic to all of them.

  ‘Thank you, good people of Mulvaney High. Thank you,’ said Charlie, grinning out at the rows of kids and teachers. If Charlie had been nervous beforehand, he hadn’t let it show. He certainly looked happy now.

  ‘For our last number, we’re going to do “Got My Mojo Working”. Thanks for giving us a listen today.’

  Charlie nodded to Erin, the signal for her to play the crisp opening keyboard riff she did on ‘Got My Mojo Working’. Then Ash started to play and the irresistible rhythm of that number got his feet moving on the stage floor. He looked out across the sea of heads in the hall, lined up in rows on the blue plastic chairs. The rhythm had other people moving too, heads bobbing in time to the music. The band was only performing in their daggy school gym, but for a few minutes on that afternoon it felt like a hot blues venue.

  Ash spotted two of the music teachers sitting on the end of a row with their heads tipped to one side. Judging by the looks on their faces, they were thinking, ‘Oh, I see, this band is actually pretty good.’

  Charlie’s dad, Vic, had arranged special permission to take photos. He prowled below the stage and around the sides, getting shots of the band. He had a smooth way of moving around – quick but almost invisible – so that he didn’t distract from the performers onstage. It was a trick he’d learned when he worked as a big-time music photographer.

  When Blue Noise finished playing, there was even more applause from the kids of Mulvaney High. A big chunk of applause, really. Enough to make anyone up there on that stage feel mighty good.

  Charlie turned away from the audience to face the band and did a little formal bow. ‘Beautiful work, ladies and gents.’

  With assembly over, Ash and the others packed up the gear while kids streamed out of the hall to go home. A few people swung over to the edge of the stage on their way out to say ‘That was great’ and similar positive stuff. Ash’s science teacher, Mr Axelsen, who was a big music fan, said, ‘You guys are seriously good.’

  Everyone in the band was buzzing, a little bit breathless, their eyes shining, big dumb smiles on their gobs. Joel’s curly hair was frizzed out around his head like he was a cartoon character who had just been electrocuted.

  Lester’s school shirt was soaked through with sweat. He was so blown away he couldn’t manage to speak a whole sentence. ‘Man, how was – that felt – I mean, it was – what about the bit when – far out, I just – oh.’

  Ash nodded, laughing. He knew exactly what he meant, even if Lester couldn’t get the words out.

  The next afternoon, Ash did his delivery round for the pharmacy. He was still on a high from playing at assembly and his bike seemed to be flying around the streets as he rode from house to house.

  He dropped off some packages at Mr Galea’s place and the old guy was keen to hear all the details about the band’s first performance.

  Mr Galea applauded. ‘It was an exciting day, yes? One time soon I’m going to hear your music on my radio.’ He had the radio blaring in his kitchen all day long. ‘So, playing this music, do you feel a million dollars? Ha, I don’t need to ask this. I can see in your face that you are feeling very good.’

  Ash laughed. ‘Yeah, I reckon you’re right, Mr Galea.’

  ‘Make sure you take three dollars’ tip for yourself today,’ he said, waving his hand towards the jar of cash. ‘You’re going to need that fancy new guitar some day very soon.’<
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  ‘Oh no,’ protested Ash. ‘I think that’s too much.’

  ‘Three dollars. Don’t argue with me,’ Mr Galea replied. ‘Promise you’ll bring me a copy of the first record of your band.’

  ‘I promise,’ said Ash. ‘Thanks.’

  Ash walked into his house with his pay envelope plus tips in the back pocket of his jeans. He couldn’t wait to add it to the tally in his special notebook. The Butterscotch Blonde guitar might still be a fair way off, but every dollar he earned took him a tiny bit closer.

  Scooting down the hall, Ash spotted the kitchen benchtop. It was covered in packets of biscuits, a block of cheese, buttery knives, dirty plates, several soggy tea bags, little hills of crumbs, hunks of orange peel and other mess. That meant one thing: Ben was home. Ash felt his good mood lift to an even better one.

  Through the back windows, Ash saw Ben pacing around the yard, yabbering into the cordless phone. He was thinner than when he left the last time but he was still what most girls would consider a good-looking guy, especially when he flashed his killer smile at them.

  The second he spotted Ash at the back door, Ben waved wildly, doing an exaggerated performance about how happy he was to see his little brother. He pointed to the phone and pulled a face about the person he was talking to. He made a hurry-up gesture at the voice on the phone as if he was desperate to get whoever it was off the line so he could talk to Ash.

  Ben had a way of making you feel you were the only person on earth who mattered to him at that moment. Ash half knew it was a trick to make people feel special, to make people like him.

  Ben walked inside, still talking into the cordless. ‘Listen mate, I gotta go. My little brother’s home. Main person in all the world I wanna see,’ he said. ‘My brother? He’s sixteen. But you should see him, he’s so damn cool. I mean, genuinely cool, not try-hard. He must be a major hit with the ladies, that’s all I can say. Anyway, mate, see you round.’