by Debra Oswald
‘No, but it might be good to think about – I don’t know –’
‘About what?’ said her dad.
‘You don’t want to give up piano though,’ said her mum. It was half a question, half an order.
‘No, I guess not. But it might be good to have a break from the exam stuff. I don’t know –’ Erin seized up, couldn’t get the words out.
‘Erin – the milk!’ her dad called out.
She’d taken her eye off the saucepan at the worst moment. In the second it took Erin to turn back, the hot milk had already frothed up and boiled over.
‘Oh no,’ she gasped and frantically mopped up the milk as it cooked into tidemarks on the stovetop. She scalded her hand and hissed from the pain of it.
‘It’s just you’ve never said anything about not enjoying piano,’ said her mother. ‘We’re just trying to think through the options.’
‘Yeah, I know,’ muttered Erin, squeezing milk from the sponge into the sink.
‘All we want is for you to use the opportunities that are out there,’ added her father.
‘God, we don’t want to be pushy with you about this, Erin,’ said her mother. ‘But, I mean, it doesn’t sound like you know what you want.’
Her dad smiled, puzzled, head on one side, as if his daughter was a strange little bird. ‘The thing is, sweetheart, you’ve worked so hard and done so well, you wouldn’t want to throw all that away now, would you?’
‘Guess not. I just …’ Erin began and then gave up.
‘Well, we’ll all just keep thinking and talking this over, okay?’ her mother said finally.
Erin shrugged, nodded and escaped to her bedroom.
She flopped onto the bed, her heart pounding. She pictured herself as one of those plastic models of the human body they have in museums. Models with the skin taken off so you can see the organs and guts inside. She could see her red heart thumping against her ribs. She could see the shiny pink ropes of her intestines twisting up with stress.
Why was she so hopeless? She couldn’t talk to her parents even though she really needed to. She couldn’t talk to Ash Corrigan even though she really liked him. She was tongue-tied.
A line came into her head and she reached across to scribble it down on the bottom of a maths worksheet on her desk. She looked at the line and realised it was a song lyric.
She added a couple of more lines and then started to hear scraps of melody in her head. She scooted around to the keyboard and fooled around with the melody, until a basic chorus began to grow.
Some chunks of music and lyrics came easily, as if they’d just been floating in the air around Erin’s head, waiting for her to write them down. Other bits were tricky and took lots of bashing and squashing until they fitted the way she wanted.
Erin worked half the night, long after everyone else in the house had gone to sleep. By 3 am, ‘Tongue-tied’ was finished, or at least a decent first go at it.
The shape of the song – the way the verse, chorus and bridge worked – followed the patterns she knew from famous numbers. She was definitely writing in the bluesy-soul tradition. But the thoughts and the emotions of the song came straight from her own mind; she had written about what it felt like to be sixteen-year-old Australian girl Erin Landers.
Charlie would be stoked that someone had written a song for the band. She imagined the great soul man Ray Charles sitting right next to her at the computer, saying, ‘Go on, Erin. Send that song to Charlie Novak.’
She attached a rough notation of ‘Tongue-tied’ to an email addressed to Charlie. Her brain was still fizzing from the rush of finishing the song so she hit the ‘send’ button without really thinking.
It only took a few seconds for Erin to decide she had made a terrible mistake. Why had she sent that song to Charlie? It was three in the morning, so she was too frazzled to know what she was doing. That explained why she had thought – for one mad moment – that she’d written a decent song. But what if it was a bad song, embarrassingly bad? Now there was no way to stop Charlie seeing it. He would realise that Erin was a talentless try-hard lunatic. What if Charlie felt sorry for her and didn’t know how to tell her how bad the song was? What if he showed her embarrassingly awful song to other people and they sniggered when she was out of the room? It was too hideous to think about.
Erin was suddenly gripped by that hollow sickly feeling in her stomach, partly from anxiety, partly from lack of sleep. For a moment, she thought she might chuck up.
She sat on her bed, imagining the digital fragments of her song flying through the night air and into Charlie’s computer. She wanted to climb inside the broadband cable, slide along the optic fibres, locate the right microchip and rip out the file before it went through. She wanted to run around to Charlie’s house and destroy his computer before he ever saw her crappy song. But she knew neither of those methods would work.
It was too late. The mistake was made. That was the last time she’d ever listen to Ray Charles’s advice.
Chapter Thirteen
The next Monday afternoon, Ash could feel the difference in the rehearsal room. Now that the six of them had played together at the school performance, Blue Noise felt stronger, more intense. This wasn’t just mucking around. They really were a band now.
Rehearsal got started with the band tidying up a few ragged bits in their existing songs. Then there was a discussion about which new songs to work on. Joel suggested a couple of songs but Charlie thought they were too close to jazz and didn’t suit the Blue Noise sound.
‘Okay. Sure,’ said Joel, shrugging, but you could tell he was annoyed that his song choices never got picked.
It worried Ash that Charlie’s passionate beliefs about the music meant he steamrolled over other people’s ideas without meaning to. Ash tried to figure out compromises so everyone could feel okay.
‘We could do “Lonely Avenue”,’ he said. He’d heard Joel talk about having a go at a saxophone riff on that song.
‘Oh. Yeah. I’d like to work on that.’ Joel smiled and his fingers were already tripping over the saxophone keys.
‘Delish. Perfect. Everyone happy with trying “Lonely Avenue”?’ said Charlie.
Everyone was happy.
‘Oh, oh, oh, I should say that we’ve got one other new song,’ said Charlie. ‘An original. I’ve got copies for everyone.’
Charlie rifled through his bag looking for the copies. Ash noticed that Erin was glaring at Charlie, frantically doing hand signals to him and shaking her head. Obviously she wasn’t too happy about something. Charlie pointedly ignored Erin and passed around the printed copies.
‘Did you write this one, C-Man?’ asked Lester. ‘You finally pulled your finger out and wrote a song!’
Charlie slapped Lester around the head with the sheet music. ‘No, I didn’t in fact write this. Erin did.’
Ash sneaked a look at Erin. That was why she was giving Charlie the hairy eyeball. She was panicking about him showing everyone the song.
Erin winced. ‘Look, guys, it’s not really – I mean, it’s not like I’m a proper songwriter or anything.’
‘Let’s run through it and see how we go,’ said Charlie.
For the next thirty minutes they worked on ‘Tongue-tied’, getting the basics of the song then working it up, getting the timing right, experimenting with backing vocals. Erin didn’t make many comments or suggestions as they went along. She still looked too nervous about the whole business. After a bit of trial and error, they did one last run-through.
After the final chord, Lester was the first to jump in. ‘Erin! You’re a legend! That’s like a proper song from a shop!’ And he did a drum roll in Erin’s honour.
Erin laughed. She was starting to relax, finally. Ash liked that about Lester: he could be positive and up-front with people in a really great way.
‘Lester’s right,’ said Charlie. ‘Fine work. Succulent and sizzling.’
Joel and Ash added their compliments about the song.
The band members weren’t just flattering Erin because they felt sorry for her. They didn’t have to. It was a genuinely good song.
‘Thanks a lot, guys,’ said Erin. ‘And thanks for all the bits you’ve put in there. It really makes it sound better.’ Erin was grinning like a little kid on Christmas morning.
After rehearsal, everyone disappeared quickly. Ash suddenly found himself alone with Erin in the music room as they packed up their gear. Erin avoided meeting his eye and he didn’t know what the hell to do.
The Friday before, Erin had been chatting to him on MSN. It was fun; they were getting on great. Then suddenly she switched off and she hadn’t replied to any of Ash’s messages all weekend. Maybe he’d said something to offend her. Possibly it freaked her out that he said she looked good in the photos. She might think he was coming on all romantic with her and she might hate that idea. Maybe she was letting him know she wasn’t interested in him in that way. It was hard to work out what was going on in girls’ minds a lot of the time. It was especially hard to work out Erin Landers’ mind.
Finally, after several minutes of strange, sticky silence, Ash decided to say something.
‘Hey, umm, Erin, that really is a great song.’
‘Oh. Thanks.’
‘I mean it,’ he added earnestly, so it wouldn’t sound like a phoney compliment.
‘Double thanks. It means a lot to me that you like it,’ she said.
‘I hope you like the way Lily’s singing it,’ said Ash. ‘Is it weird to hear someone else singing the words you wrote?’
‘Well, she sings it way better than I ever could.’
Ash shrugged. ‘She’s got a good voice.’
‘She does.’
It was pretty obvious to Ash that Erin didn’t much like Lily Opara, but she didn’t take the opportunity to bitch about her. That was something else Ash liked about Erin Landers. She wasn’t one of those girls who bitched about other girls. And she could write a good song.
Ash smiled and he turned to say something else to Erin but she was gone, hurrying out of the room as if Ash smelled rank. She didn’t want to talk to him, especially not when the two of them were alone. Fair enough; he got the message. She wasn’t interested, so Ash decided he should back off.
Most Saturday nights, Charlie and Ash caught the bus down to the Carlisle Hotel so they could sit on the concrete landing outside, listening to live bands through the back doors. It could get mighty cold sitting outside at night, so one Saturday morning they went trawling through the local op shops. They bought themselves cheap but warm padded jackets, two each. One jacket was for wearing and the other jacket was for sitting on, so the coldness from the concrete didn’t freeze their bums off.
As they sat on their puffy nylon jackets outside the pub, Charlie would rave on about his plans to set up an all-ages music venue.
‘I mean, really, this is crap, isn’t it? Two dedicated blues fans and because we’re under eighteen, this is what we’re forced to do to enjoy some music. It’s not right,’ he fumed.
‘They do put on all-ages gigs at that place near the station,’ Ash pointed out.
‘Occasionally. Not very often,’ said Charlie. ‘And anyway, those gigs are always metal or pop music. What about the blues fans?’
Ash didn’t want to point out to Charlie that there wasn’t a huge crowd of sixteen-year-old blues fans floating around Sydney. But Charlie read his mind anyway.
‘There might not be many of us now,’ he argued, ‘but I reckon if you gave kids decent venues where they could go and hear top musicians, they’d get into it big-time. But the way it is now, it’s a wicked travesty, a disgrace, a scandal.’
‘Under-eighteens can go to music festivals,’ said Ash.
‘Affirmative. Yeah. True,’ conceded Charlie. ‘But most festivals are way out of town and you need a car to get there. How are guys our age supposed to do that? Nah, the whole system sucks and we have to change it.’
In the Charlie Novak Perfect World, there would be fabulous, cheap all-ages music venues across the city every night of the week. One of his goals in life was to make that happen. And Ash reckoned there was a decent chance that Charlie would manage to.
Chapter Fourteen
The day Charlie heard the line-up of bands playing at the Mandawarra Blues Festival, he went totally feral. He was screeching so loudly down the phone, Ash had to hold the handset away from his ear.
Charlie reeled off the list of acts playing at the two-day festival. Ash recognised some of the names, but the one that stood out for him was Jimmy Nicholls. One of Ash’s big favourites was actually coming to Australia to play a gig that Ash could go to!
‘We have to go!’ gasped Charlie, breathless from his phone screeching.
‘For sure. Any ideas how we get there?’ Ash asked. Mandawarra was about four and a half hours down the coast, beyond the last stop on the train line.
‘Heaps of us are going – all the Novaks, a few other folks, plus everyone from the band we can get to come. We’ll organise some vehicles. You can come, right?’
‘Yeah,’ said Ash. ‘I mean, I’ll check with Mum but it should be sweet.’
‘Oh, and ask your brother – the guitarist one – if he can come. There’ll be room if he wants to come too.’
As soon as he got off the phone, Ash went to the computer and looked up the Mandawarra Blues Festival site. He couldn’t wait to show Ben. Ash loved the idea of Ben coming down to Mandawarra with him and the Novak tribe.
Since his brother had come home from this last trip, Ash had hardly seen him, even though they were living in the same house. Half the time, Ben came in the front door around 7.30 am after a big night, just as Ash was heading out the door to school.
‘Hey, little brother,’ said Ben one morning as the two of them passed on the steps. He bunged on one of his sparkling killer smiles but anyone could see his eyes were dull with tiredness and bad luck.
‘You around tonight?’ asked Ash. ‘You said you’d have a listen to the tracks we recorded.’ He’d been pestering Ben to look at the Blue Noise website. He wanted to show off to his big brother.
‘I’m gonna check out the website for sure,’ said Ben. ‘I can’t wait – oh, but tonight, I might have something on.’
‘Well, is there a night this week –’ Ash began.
‘Yep, soon.’ Ben flashed that smile again. ‘We’ve gotta make some time to catch up, eh mate?’
But there never seemed to be time to catch up. Ash was desperate to talk to Ben about the band, the music, the Novaks, but there was never an overlap when both brothers were at home and awake. That was why Ash thought it would be so great if Ben came down to the Mandawarra festival. It would be a brilliant chance for them to hang out together like they used to.
The next night, Ash stayed up past one o’clock, planning to be awake when Ben got home so he could persuade his big brother to come to the festival. He kept himself awake by practising guitar and watching series five of Scrubs on DVD.
If Ash was honest with himself, he had this fantasy running in his head, a fantasy about Ben getting fired up about music and playing the guitar again. Charlie believed that music, especially blues music, could rescue people from all sorts of messes. Sometimes Charlie sounded like one of those crazy-eyed, barracking preachers on the Christian TV channel when he raved on about the blues saving people’s souls.
Ash didn’t share Charlie’s faith in the power of music but he secretly hoped there was a little chunk of truth in it. Ash remembered the terrific, funny, solid guy Ben used to be back when he played guitar and was into music. It would be fantastic if he could go back to being that guy. Maybe going to the Mandawarra festival could be the trigger.
Ash ended up falling asleep on the couch in front of the TV, waking up at half-past six when the sun came slanting through the side windows l
ike a slap in the face. He could feel his whole body ache from sleeping all night in a weird position on the couch with no blanket.
He looked around the lounge room and saw that Ben hadn’t come home anyway. Maybe he should send his brother a text about the festival – but then he remembered that wasn’t possible. Ben reckoned he’d lost his mobile a few days back. Ash suspected that Ben had really taken his phone to Cash Converters to get some money. That’s what he’d done with his guitar and amplifier the year before.
Finally, Ash decided the only way to get the message to Ben was to leave him a note. He printed off a flyer from the festival site which showed the great line-up of bands playing. He put a fat stripe of green highlighter across Jimmy Nicholls’s name. On the bottom of the flyer, he wrote, ‘Charlie’s parents can give us a lift down to Mandawarra and a place to stay there. You won’t need heaps of cash – just festival entry and food money.’
He folded the flyer in half and on the outside he wrote, ‘Ben. Read this. Urgent. Leave me a note if you want to come. Ash.’ He left the note on Ben’s foam mattress in the lounge room. There was no way he could miss it there.
The next morning, when Ash left for school, Ben was sleeping, snoring like a rhinoceros with a bad cold. When Ash got home that afternoon, the bed on the lounge-room floor was a tangle of sheets and blankets surrounded by piles of his brother’s dirty clothes. Ben had obviously gone out for the night. He must have seen Ash’s note but there was no sign of a message in reply.
Then in the corner of the room, Ash noticed a little mound of paper where Ben had emptied the junk out of his jeans pockets onto the floor: chewing gum wrappers, crumpled TAB betting slips and Ash’s note about the festival, screwed up into a grubby ball.
Ash felt a small sting through his chest. Ben had thrown away his note like a piece of rubbish. That hurt him.
For the past three weeks, Ash had been asking Ben to spend five lousy minutes to check out the Blue Noise website. It was such a small thing to ask and Ben couldn’t be bothered. That showed how much he cared about something that was important to Ash. For all his ‘Hey, little brother’ mouthing off, Ben wasn’t interested in anything about Ash’s life.