Blue Noise

by Debra Oswald

  Then Joel’s mobile beeped and he read the text.

  ‘Lily’s not coming,’ said Joel flatly.

  Ash instantly flicked his head to look at Erin. She was going to have to sing and she knew it.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  For Erin, it was a question of aim. If she actually threw up, she didn’t want her vomit to hit the tent ropes. She needed to aim for the patches of grass between the ropes. Her stomach was heaving, she was sweating and the skin all over her body was prickling with cold; she felt the way you feel just before you chuck up. The wave of nausea passed after a minute but the reality of the situation was still there in front of her.

  She was going to have to muddle through the lead vocals in this gig. There was no one else to do it. If she chickened out and refused, she would be letting down the rest of the band, especially Darren, who’d done them a favour and worked hard to take Charlie’s place.

  Blue Noise was a strong band musically. They should at least show off what they could do on their instruments, even if that meant Erin would have to embarrass herself in front of hundreds of people. Maybe they could cut a couple of the songs out of their set. Maybe they could lose some of the verses, keep the singing to a minimum and do really, really long instrumental solos. But then again, this wasn’t the best moment to change all the arrangements.

  Various mortifying scenes of public humiliation were running through Erin’s mind. Scenes of people out there in the crowd laughing at her. Worse still, people stifling their laughter, smiling with fixed fake smiles and whispering out of the sides of their mouths. ‘Far out, this is a train wreck,’ they’d say.

  She wrote a little script in her head of what the two radio station DJs would say onstage.

  Cool Guy DJ: This band is terrible.

  Pretty Girl DJ: So incredibly terrible.

  Cool Guy DJ: Who chose this band for the concert? Who even put them on a shortlist? It must be a mistake. There must be a mix-up with the name of one of the good bands.

  Pretty Girl DJ: Well, they used to have a really good lead singer. But she left.

  Cool Guy DJ: Oh, I see. And now they’ve just got that girl who can’t really sing. What a disaster.

  In reality, Cool Guy DJ stepped up to the microphone and introduced Blue Noise, listing the names of the musicians. He gave the band a bit of a rave, using words that Charlie must have sent in with their competition entry. ‘Blue Noise is keeping blues music alive for a new generation but with their own original sound.’

  Beside her, Erin could hear Joel and Lester offering up jokes to each other.

  ‘How many drummers does it take to change a light bulb?’ asked Joel.

  ‘Tell me,’ said Lester.

  ‘One, but the guitarist has to show him how to do it.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Lester. ‘Why did the chicken cross the road?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To get away from the painful saxophone solo.’

  The jokes never got any better. Erin wished she had a pre-performance ritual of her own to overcome her gut-churning nerves.

  Ash whispered to Erin, ‘You’ll be fine. It’ll be okay.’ But he didn’t sound very convinced.

  Ash’s voice, the DJ yabbering onstage, the burble of the crowd – all the noises sounded far away to Erin, as if she was deep underwater in a pool, with people shouting down at her from the surface. Whatever Ash said, there was a good chance it would not be okay. There was a real chance she would make an idiot of herself, her performance worthy of one of those YouTube clips people send each other for a laugh.

  Walking out onto the stage, Erin saw a gap in the centre where a lead singer should be standing. Joel and Ash quickly moved the saxophone mike and the keyboards closer to the middle to fill the space.

  Erin sat down at the keyboard. Luckily, she had forbidden her parents from coming to the gig, so they wouldn’t be there to witness this humiliation.

  The first number was ‘Trouble in Mind’. Erin’s hands fell onto the piano keys as if she was grabbing a lifeline to stop herself drowning. She played the intro – played it pretty well – and then she jammed her eyes shut. There was no way she could sing a word with her eyes open. Joss Stone always used to sing with her eyes shut, so Erin Landers could do the same.

  She sang softly, hoping that no one would actually hear her voice. Erin realised this defeated the purpose of singing but her throat was constricted into a solid lump, so very little sound could get out. A couple of times, she half-opened her eyes to see Ash signalling her to ‘punch it up’. She sang so feebly that the poor sound-mixing guy must have thought there was some problem with the microphone.

  ‘Trouble in Mind’ is a song that needs a big smoky voice. A voice that Erin Landers did not possess. After the second chorus, Erin knew she was doing a terrible job. She seriously considered jumping up and running off the stage mid-song. But then Joel went into his sax solo and it was just too good. Erin would have to stay on that stage. She had to stumble her way through the vocals so people could hear Joel play saxophone and Ash play guitar. And then – what the hell – she pounded out a keyboard solo as if her life depended on it.

  The number ended and there was a smattering of confused applause plus a few loyal friends doing their best to whoop and cheer.

  ‘Thanks, everyone,’ said Ash to the audience. ‘This next song is an original. Erin Landers, on keyboards, wrote this and I helped out. It’s about the amazing time we had at the Mandawarra Blues Festival.’

  Ash went straight into the opening chords of ‘Mandawarra’ and Erin clamped her eyes shut again. Luckily, this song suited her voice better and she managed a bit more volume. And then, as she got into the second verse, her mind wandered away from the image of her making a fool of herself on that stage in front of six hundred people. She started to think about the night she and Ash wrote that song, sitting on the jetty. She thought about meeting Christine De Sousa and the festival and the Novaks and why they wrote the song in the first place. On one lyric, Erin laughed, remembering something. Then she threw her head back a bit and really belted out the chorus.

  Maybe it was like when a person with a stutter sings or acts and their stutter goes away. When Erin wrote a song, she could send her thoughts out more clearly. And when she sang her own lyrics, she could send her voice out.

  For that single moment, the song was everything. She had to shove her frantic, self-conscious, reality-mangling ego out of the way and sing the song.

  On the final chorus of ‘Mandawarra’, Erin felt her lungs expand with the air she needed. She felt her throat open and her voice come out, direct and strong. She felt like a different person. No, not different. There was just more of her self there.

  Chapter Thirty

  Ash had to be honest with himself. In the middle of ‘Trouble in Mind’, he was seriously worried. Erin was making a mess of it, singing feebly, her voice cracking and wobbling. She had her eyes shut tight, flinching with a pained expression on her face as if a dentist was coming towards her armed with a huge syringe. She was obviously, screamingly, excruciatingly embarrassed, so it was uncomfortable for people to watch her.

  Maybe it had been a mistake to ask Erin to do the lead vocals. They should have accepted defeat and pulled out of the concert. Sure, the band was playing well and it was great for people to hear that. But Ash didn’t want to put Erin through torture like this.

  Then during ‘Mandawarra’ something shifted. Erin started getting into it, singing louder and with more guts, until eventually she threw her head back and let it rip.

  Erin didn’t have a huge voice like Christine De Sousa. She didn’t have a pure voice like Lily Opara. But the emotion was there inside each word she sang. She could feel the song more than a hundred people with better voices. She could deliver it to an audience like no other person in the world ever could.

  Erin’s parents had secretly come to the concert, despite her insistence that they stay away. Ash spotted them out there, hiding behind a food stal
l that made those tiny Dutch pancakes. The Landers were gawping at the stage with their mouths hanging slightly open. They couldn’t believe this was their daughter. It was as if they suspected it wasn’t their daughter but some alien being who had landed in a spaceship in the middle of a Glebe park.

  By the time the band got into ‘Don’t Let Nobody Drag Your Spirit Down’, Erin had really found her voice, even though this wasn’t one of her own songs. Ash could hear her trying some of the husky growling vocal stuff that Jimmy Nicholls did. He could hear a new power in her voice that he’d never heard in rehearsal.

  Ash didn’t have to worry about Erin anymore and he could focus properly on the music. For that gig, he was playing an Epiphone guitar he’d borrowed from a guy in Year 12 who’d broken his arm.

  Ash flew into his solo on ‘Don’t Let Nobody Drag Your Spirit Down’ and, for a second, he found himself wishing Ben was there in the audience to see him play. But then he decided that his brother could be there, not be there or burst into flames for all he cared. Ben hadn’t been at home since the day he stole Ash’s Fender. Well, he must have slipped in briefly to pack up his stuff but that was it. He was gone.

  Blue Noise moved on to play ‘Tongue-tied’ and Ash felt brave enough to look out properly at the crowd. People seemed to be getting into it. He could see Darren Yang’s parents hovering at the edge of the stage, filming the gig. The sound-mixing guy smiled and gave Ash a thumbs-up gesture: they were sounding good. At the end of the song, the applause from the crowd swelled up and onto the stage, carrying the same charge of electricity Ash had felt when he’d played with Jimmy Nicholls.

  ‘Thanks. Thanks a lot,’ Ash said, leaning in to use Darren’s vocal mike. ‘This next song is another original by Erin. It’s called “Best Friend Blues”.’

  Ash was a little nervous about this number; they hadn’t had much time to work on it and had never played it in front of an audience. But they all liked the music and the arrangement so they wanted to give it a go.

  Ash couldn’t take his eyes off Erin as she played the lush keyboard riff and sang ‘Best Friend Blues’. Erin Landers must be the most amazing girl in the world. Or at least one of the most amazing.

  In the rush to work up the song for performance, Ash had never really paid much attention to the lyrics. It was one of those songs where you could interpret the words in different ways. He’d always assumed it was about the weird tensions and miscommunications between girlfriends. But now, listening to Erin sing the words onstage, singing with every fibre of her soul, Ash realised he’d been an idiot.

  ‘Best Friend Blues’ was about having a crush on a good friend, about misreading the signals, about being scared you’ll make a fool of yourself or ruin the friendship. The lyrics had the lines ‘How can I risk it? If I get this wrong, I could wreck everything with you. I don’t know, I don’t know what to do.’

  Ash sneaked a sideways look at Erin as she sang, ‘Oh, I wish I could see inside your head right now. Don’t know what you’re thinking. Don’t know how.’

  For the first time, Ash properly heard the lyric ‘It’s late and I’m sitting on the jetty with you.’ The song was about that night in Mandawarra. The song was about him.

  Erin was brave enough to be singing with her eyes open now. She glanced up from the keyboard and, for one moment, made eye contact with Ash. Ash Corrigan decided he was going to kiss that girl very, very soon.

  ‘Thanks, everyone,’ Ash said to the crowd. ‘Please give it up for Darren Yang on bass, Lester Preece on drums, Joel Schneider on saxophone and the wonderful Erin Landers on keyboards and vocals. Oh and um, I’m Ash Corrigan. We’re Blue Noise.’

  A wave of applause and hollering and whistles came flooding over the stage. All that noise – it couldn’t just be friends of the band. Strangers out there in the crowd must be enjoying the music too.

  Ash grinned. ‘Thanks for showing us such great support. We’ve got time for one more song, “Help Me”.’

  Ash turned away from the crowd for a moment and whispered to the others, ‘Let’s kick it up a notch, yeah?’

  And on ‘Help Me’, they did kick it up a notch, everyone playing in top form, the energy surging, so the chemistry on that stage took the music to a higher level than they’d ever reached before. The crowd response went to another level too; they were whooping, dancing, grinning up at them. It was like a huge cycle: the energy of the band feeding off the energy of the audience, so they could send it back out again. It wasn’t magical but it felt close to that.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  The video of the Glebe concert, filmed by Darren’s parents, turned out pretty well. The Yangs sent Ash a copy of that footage, plus the YES-FM people made a sound recording of the whole concert for broadcast the following Sunday. So a week after Ignition, Ash was able to upload two decent records of the concert and email the links to Charlie in Guatemala.

  The next morning, Ash scooted to the computer in the lounge room as soon as he got up. He wanted to check that Charlie had received the links and seen the concert footage. Not surprisingly, there were several new messages from Charlie.

  ‘Watched video twenty times already. Estupendo! Jugoso! (That’s: Wonderful! Juicy! amigo.) Excuse me, what about that Erin – how good is she!?! BTW, just realised how BRILLIANT your guitar solo is on “Tongue-tied”. You are El Hombre (The Man).’

  Charlie never let on that he felt bad about missing out on playing in the Glebe concert. His brain didn’t work that way – or at least he pretended he didn’t mind. He raved on about the fantastic blues scene in Guatemala. Ash couldn’t be sure if this was true or just a fantasy that Charlie wished was true. But either way, it didn’t matter. If there wasn’t a buzzing blues scene in Guatemala already, there would be one after Charlie Novak had lived in the country for a few months.

  Ash and Charlie planned to set themselves up with Skype so they could talk for as long as they wanted. Once they hooked up web cameras, Ash would be able to see Charlie’s weird marsupial face and enjoy the latest monstrous hairstyle inflicted on him by the twins.

  Still, talking over the net with Charlie was good but it wasn’t the same as having Charlie in his face at school, at band practice, at gigs. It wasn’t the same as being able to go round to the Novaks’ house for dinner. Ash missed Charlie most when the band was working out the arrangement for a song or mucking around in rehearsal, jamming. But Charlie said – and Ash believed – that they would jam together somewhere soon enough.

  While Ash was sitting there at the computer, Marion appeared in the doorway in her bathrobe.

  ‘I’m making a cup of tea. Do you want one?’ she asked.

  ‘Thanks. That’d be good,’ Ash replied.

  ‘By the way,’ added Marion, ‘another envelope arrived yesterday.’

  Just after Ben disappeared, an envelope had arrived at the Corrigan house addressed to Ash, posted from somewhere in Queensland. Inside, there was a grubby piece of paper torn out of a spiral notepad.

  ‘Sorry, little brother. I’m up north. I’ll pay you back. Promise. Ben xx’

  There was a twenty-dollar note in the envelope.

  A few days after that, another note came with twenty bucks enclosed. But since then, no more instalments had arrived. Ash wasn’t exactly holding his breath waiting for Ben to keep his promise.

  ‘Ben sent some more money for your guitar,’ said Marion, handing Ash a fifty-dollar note.

  ‘Yeah?’ said Ash. ‘Are you sure this is from him?’ He suspected it was really her money and she was faking that it came from his brother.

  ‘Yes. He sent me a note and asked me to give you the money,’ she said.

  ‘Oh Mum, I don’t want you to – I mean –’

  Ash was about to argue with her but then stopped himself. He understood why she was doing this. If one of your kids saved up for something important to him and then another one of your kids stole it, how would you feel? You’d feel bad and you’d want to make things right. So Ash and his Mum
would play the game: she’d pretend Ben was sending cash instalments to replace the guitar and Ash would pretend he believed her.

  As for where Ben really was and what he was up to, Ash had no clue. He tried not to think about it. He tried not to worry about his eldest brother.

  Ash and his mum both looked up when they heard socked feet shuffling along the hallway. It was Luke, heading from his room to the shower.

  ‘Morning, Luke,’ Marion called out with a slightly hopeful lilt in her voice.

  There was an incomprehensible mumble in reply from Luke. Weirdly, one good thing had come out of Ben stealing the guitar: it had given Luke a fright. He realised how low a person could go and he wanted to avoid that happening to him. Now Luke emerged from his room more often. He downloaded information about TAFE courses he could do in computer graphics. If Luke Corrigan ever managed to stay awake for sufficient daylight hours, he might even enrol.

  Marion brought back a cup of tea for Ash and looked over his shoulder at the computer screen. ‘Is that film of the concert? Am I allowed to see it?’

  ‘Oh. Sure,’ said Ash. ‘The sound mix isn’t great. But you’ll get the idea.’

  Ash hopped out of the chair so Marion could sit right in front of the screen and then clicked ‘play’ on the video of the Ignition concert.

  ‘The girl singing and playing the piano – that’s Erin?’ asked Marion.

  ‘Yeah. Erin,’ Ash replied, hoping his voice would not betray his feelings too loudly.

  On the night of the Ignition concert, all the Blue Noise band members and a mob of their friends had held a celebration in Lester’s shed. At the end of the party, Ash had walked Erin home to her place.

  It was on the Landers’ front porch that Ash finally made his move. He lunged towards Erin before the two of them could chicken out or get the timing wrong. They kissed for a long time, until their lips were quite numb and Ash thought his legs would collapse. Both of them were desperate to make up for all the chances they’d missed before. That first pash was even better than Ash had imagined it would be and he knew – because Erin told him later – that she felt the same way. Even now, a week afterwards, Ash could remember how amazing it felt to kiss Erin. In fact, it made him blush and he hoped his mother hadn’t noticed.