They wear glitter in Manchester – a queue like a Chinese dragon winding up past the traffic lights. Mona watches them hop from foot to foot, sharing chewing gum, straggle of autumn in their summer haircuts. Slips of chorus start and echo backwards, girls passing lyrics down the line. Fingernails the colour of honeybees, bottom lips daubed with gold. Barrier girls, one of the roadies tells her, they queue for hours just to get to the front.
She takes her camera out to film short segments for the band’s website. Three girls caught a bus at six this morning and have been hanging around the civic centre since nine. It sounds extreme but we wouldn’t do this for just any group, you know? Further back, a gang of girls barely older than thirteen bare their teeth like knuckles and claw their fingers at the lens. We’re the original fanclub. The OG. Other people say they started first but it was actually us. We liked them before it was cool.
It starts to rain at six thirty – lurch of hoods and umbrellas. Those without are scooped sideways by companions, tucked under sleeves and into coat panels. The queue mutates into a travelling sideshow; two-headed girls in plastic macs, chimera-blooms of arms and hands as groups protect bareheaded members from the rain.
Doors at seven, mushroom of bodies. In the mirror-panelled foyer of the civic centre, they take photos of themselves in groups, sticking their tongues out. Hands are stamped and hip flasks confiscated – No Alcohol Purchased Off The Premises tacked at the foot of the stairs. Teenaged girls, tangle-handed, shoving through the inner doors. Melting nylon smell and anticipation sweaty at the upper lip, dark-ringed armpits – a keening, keeling, racing forward towards the band the band the band.
Later, back on the tour bus, Mona edits her footage together, intercutting her shots of the queue with sequences of the show and backstage. A tour diary, the management had requested, when they first took her on as video producer: intimate access, behind-the-scenes, the fucking thrill of it all.
On her laptop screen, Mona watches a clip of the evening’s encore. The band – their long hair, their flaring nostrils – reappearing to the kind of clamour Mona has only ever seen reserved for the Beatles; weeping female fans in strips of documentary footage, fingers reaching up into eye sockets, digging down with a violence made slippery by tears. It is not a reaction she is used to seeing for a girl band. The scrabble, the sweat behind the knees. On the screen, she watches as the lead guitarist raises her hand for silence; a wide, extinguishing gesture which is swallowed up into the end of the clip. Skipping back, she watches again, focusing her attention on the audience before the shot cuts back to the stage. Pausing the video, she squints down towards the bottom left hand of the screen, noting two girls holding up a third who has fainted and now hangs between them, glitter-cheeked and livid to the lips.
Liverpool – sticky-floored. There is some problem with the power distribution and Mona, the only member of the crew at a loose end, is dispatched to the venue manager’s office to request a quick solution. Nothing I can do, sweetheart, the building is what it is. The office is papered with tour posters dating back to ’72: The Who and Foreigner and ZZ Top. A clogged smell, sour towels and paper, a smell like overflow. The manager points to one poster and then another, See these – see this one. Had them here in eighty-three. Power was enough for them it’s enough for your lot, babydoll.
The sound is bad that night, unbalanced; the bassist’s amp keeps cutting out. Halfway through the set, the lead guitarist unplugs and walks offstage. The crowd heaves, a thrum like something under skin. Grief-stricken silence where a crowd might usually start to clamour, the audience clutching at each other, until the lead guitarist returns with an acoustic and an expression filled with teeth.
After the show, Mona revisits the venue manager’s office to return the dressing-room key but finds the door bolted and the lock stuffed with orange thread. Scrabbling it out with a fingernail, she recognises it as the tangerine cotton from the band’s T-shirts being sold in the foyer. She puts her eye to the keyhole and although she spies the shape of a figure in the office beyond, her calls elicit no response. Eventually she slips the key under the door.
That night, she goes for burgers with the road crew and sits in a vinyl booth stuck with chewing gum, Coke glasses sweating in the steam-heat coming off the industrial radiators. They are a close-knit company, a collection of women on the road, and their conversation is a pliant, textured thing, sympathetic to interruptions. They trade stories of when they first heard the band: when I first got the call, as someone says without irony. Catherine, the tour manager, spreads her hands across the table and affects a voice that holds a metaphorical torch beneath her chin: I fell asleep on my sofa one night and when I woke up, their music was playing. Turns out, one of the music channels had started playing songs from their second album. Funny thing is, I could have sworn I’d turned the TV off ...
So you rolled over the remote in your sleep, the others laugh, though their raised eyebrows cover a rollcall of similar oddities: the wrong CDs in CD cases, the broken mirrors and messages written on steamed-up shower glass, the never-ending swooning, crooning sounds at night. In each case, they had been only miniature hauntings – whispered lyrics, songs playing on unplugged radios – but still enough to force them out onto the road. They press Mona for her story – join the party, new girl – but she demurs, picks at sweet-potato fries and folds her napkin lengthways. Later on, walking back to the bus, they make a game of reciting favourite lyrics, knitting words across words like a net beneath the tightrope night.
Road to York, two in the morning. Pulling over at Hartshead services, they wake to find the driver has opened the luggage hold and is ejecting stowaways. A twist of teenaged girls in orange T-shirts, chicken-skinned with cold. Catherine, hair stuck in the back of her sweater, gives them cab money and tells the girls to think of their mothers, how they must be worried sick. Are the band on the bus? one of the girls begs, staring up at the blacked-out windows. The band are in the back, as they always are, curtained off from the crew with a length of thick black serge – an unspoken Do Not Disturb. Catherine, of course, does not communicate this. Don’t do it, says another of the girls, you’ll kill us if you send us away.
Futile to go back to sleep. Mona sits at the front of the bus with the road crew and drinks coffee cut with rum. Someone is reading aloud from a day-old newspaper – venue manager from a previous city found asphyxiated in his office, clot of orange found halfway down his throat. They have all been sleeping badly, waking up sweating at strange hours of the night. Not so unusual on a tour, although perhaps odder that so many of them have been dreaming the same dreams; fractured thoughts of beating wings, of threads and electric weather, blasted motorways, pliant female skin and the sense of some unbearably beautiful song.
Ava, the black-haired roadie with the blue eyes, offers Mona a cigarette and they stand outside, kicking the tyres on the bus and comparing tour scars. Ava has a knot of displaced muscle in her left wrist from bending her hand back lifting an amp. Mona pulls up a crisp of hair from the place at her temple where she hit her head falling against the stage barriers whilst filming. War wounds, Ava grins, bumping knuckles in a gentle feint against Mona’s chin. Her hand lingers, falls after a curious moment. She is taller than most of the women on the bus, swim-skinny, always overtired. When she exhales smoke, it is in an all at once sort of manner, a gust that briefly wreathes her head.
Back on the bus, Mona’s sister rings and rings and she turns her phone over and ignores it until it finally vibrates itself off the table, at which point she turns it off.
Silty air in Scarborough, a smell of burning when the bus pulls up short to avoid a motorbike.
The toilet on the tour bus clogs and they draw straws to see who has to fix it. The soundboard operator dredges up several yards of matted hair and a sticky black handful of feathers, which she wraps in tissue paper and throws out of the window.
Mona and Ava go for breakfast and sit in the café window, bleary with morning and three days of broken sleep. It has rained for the best part of a week – long squall, spongy asphalt – and the traffic is moving stickily at the intersection that borders the shopping precinct. They order eggs and buttered spinach and sit sipping at gritty coffee and attempting to recall the set list from the haze of last night in York. Ava ticks off songs on coffee stirrers, lays them down like dominoes, end to end. ‘Black Chaos’, ‘Morgana’, ‘Apogee’ – then something else. Mona picks up the first coffee stirrer, moves it down the line. They didn’t play ‘Black Chaos’ first.
She has noticed this before now, a tendency for the previous evening’s show to fade from the memory, the smeared place where recollection should have been. It is a curious thing, a sensation not unlike surfacing from sleep and grasping vainly for a fast-receding thought. It is as if she’ll watch the show and then her mind will close around it, knuckle-clench the way a magician palms a coin, opens up with an empty hand. And yet every night, the feeling is clear: a rushing, wild euphoria. You’ll kill us if you send us away.
At the intersection, a two-storey car-carrier pulls in between a Range Rover and an Audi with plush dice draped across the rear-view mirror. Tapping her fingers idly against the window, Mona watches the aquatic sway of the carrier as it rolls towards the lights, three cars strapped to its first platform and a further three strapped to its second. The rain has picked up again, gentle groan of coastal weather. At night, these past few days, the wind has been low, dragging its chin along the windows of the bus. Across the shopping precinct, she watches the grimy tumble of crisp packets, a blown-away umbrella. Ava is still lining up coffee stirrers, muttering song titles under her breath, and one of them sets Mona off humming – Ava grinning at her, joining in. They are almost at the chorus – an early song about breaking and mending, about hunger and revenge – when the car carrier, stalled at the lights, sways perceptibly in a fresh burst of wind. It is momentary, this queasy listing, but it is as the breeze dies that the backmost car on the carrier’s second storey breaks its bonds and rolls gently off the platform, directly onto the Audi behind.
The cries are immediate, the clatter and spill. The waitress drops a tray of muffins as staff and customers stand and dash out of the café into the car park. Those who don’t leave crush up against the windows, stand on chairs to get a better look. A swarming ghoulishness that couples with the horror of palms pressed to steaming glass.
Ava shakes her head, looks away from the sight of the crushed red Audi. Across the table, Mona taps her finger lightly on a hairline crack in the window, gaze towards the car but not quite on it, focus tightened on the glass beneath her hand. They rise to leave shortly afterwards, eggs and spinach both abandoned, turning away from the wreck as they exit the café. Knuckle-clench, the palming of a coin.
Carlisle. Disorder. Mona films the queue outside the venue, watches as two girls in leather skirts go interminably over the moves of a secret handshake. They are stiff with hairspray, bare and tender at the arms. Tattoos of birds at their clavicles and up the backs of their legs. A group of seven or eight lead the line in a singalong, a tall girl in purple tights waving her arms in a gesture which mimics a conductor but more closely resembles the wielding of something blunt.
The night is wide, uncurving, like the earth might be flat and walkable from end to distant end. Mona watches girls nuzzle into the shoulders of their companions and tries to recall any instance of filming a boy in the queue. The band’s audience, she knows, is broadly feminine – the kind of music that aches and claws its feet in bedclothes – but it occurs to her that there also isn’t a single man in their crew. She powers down her camera, making for the back entrance. From somewhere inside, she hears the slight reverb of soundcheck, a swell of warmth within her like a welcome forcing open of her chest; the band’s very particular wailing lushness, their wide and craving snarl.
Hungover in Glasgow – braving the weather for bacon rolls. Sticky-faced and smeared at the lips with ketchup, the sound technicians trade stories about the fans. Making their eyes wide, flutter-fingered, fondly miming mania. I remember once a girl snuck backstage by hiding in the band’s laundry. I remember once a girl spent three days on the road with us by climbing into the belly of the drum.
Exhausted, Mona feels brassy and nauseous, mustard on her shirt. Walking back to the bus, she has to sit down sharply on a low wall running parallel to the pavement. Ava pauses with her. Up ahead, she can still hear the sound technicians, now talking in carrying voices about the girls from Edinburgh and Derby, the girls in Hull who had been ejected from the venue and had scaled the walls to climb back in through a transom on the second floor. A story has been spinning about for several days about a group of girls in Keele who left the gig and holed up in a pub round the corner, drinking rum and Cokes and pints of shandied lager. Three hours later, they chased a boy out of the pub – chased him out into the road, so goes the story, straight into the path of a passing truck. Knocked flat, one of the sound technicians is saying, with a sound like blood on her tongue. Exit pursued by barrier girls off their heads on lager and lime.
The Glasgow venue is large and the get-in takes most of the morning. Mona tries to read on the tour bus but ends up falling asleep in her bunk and wakes to disorientating darkness, winter weather falling down in early afternoon. Smearing her face with clammy hands, she slides aside the cover on her bunk window and squints out over the car park. The back of the venue is just visible from this position and a queue of girls already snakes along the crowd barrier, hair dyed a number of frantic colours, like hybrid flowers bred into unusual shades. Your core audience seems to be exclusively teenaged girls, a recent magazine profile had noted, asking the band how they accounted for this bias. Well why would there be anyone else, the lead guitarist had replied, you don’t come to a party you weren’t invited to.
She sighs – so runs the rest of the article – and looks away from me. I am immediately made aware of my insignificance, as though the removal of her gaze from my person is tantamount to the removal of all gazes. Her bandmates follow suit and I am left like that, holding my Dictaphone up to the side view of three tilted (though still lovely) heads. A member of their management team appears from somewhere and I am informed in congenial doublespeak that the interview is over.
The road crew had read sections of the article aloud to each other. Congregating at the front of the bus, they had passed the magazine hand to hand and dripped disdain over its needling prose. Hatchet job, Catherine had fumed, while Allessandra from the lighting crew had kissed her own fingers at what she saw as a writer’s punctured ego. Their music is light, perhaps even frothy, she had read aloud, they are girl-pop’s confessional figureheads, if not their leading lights. Given only scant attention were the testimonials from fans, girls interviewed at shows and record signings: They make music about yearning, about hunger. It’s more than pop music, it’s music that needs to ravage, to eat. Male bands are over. ‘Boybands’, I should say.
Fucking rock journalists, Catherine had said later, ought to have their fingers torn off. From behind the black curtain at the back of the bus, there had come a sound rather like a laugh. Some weeks later, it was fleetingly reported in the same publication that the journalist would be taking an extended leave of absence due to illness and another writer was drafted to cover his regular slot.
Mona spends the ferry to Belfast white to the eyeballs, vomiting over the side of the viewing deck. Ava brings her a flannel and a can of Diet Coke she bought from a vending machine that only takes euros. Mona wipes and sips and holds on to the lapels of Ava’s jacket and ten minutes later they are pressed together on the galley steps, kissing with the acid zip of fizzy pop. Ava has hard hips, an easy manner, and afterwards says that the first time she heard the band was also the first time anyone kissed her. I was seventeen, I think. Drove my brother to a house party I wasn’t invited to. I let him out at the kerb and was going to drive right off but this song came on the radio and I ended up idling it out, having a cigarette. It was the second chorus when I realised a girl was climbing out of the upstairs window. One of his friends from the party. Shinning down the drainpipe. To get to me.
They wander up to the ferry café and order tuna sandwiches and milky tea, sitting in a booth with their backs to the water and talking circles around the thing that just happened. The café deck is half-deserted, a smell of liniment and freeze-dried coffee. Along the far window, four of the sound technicians are curled up and sleeping uncomfortably on a long bank of metal seats. The band are not here. Mona had thought she saw the lead guitarist smoking a cigarette on the viewing deck when she first came out for air, although by the time she had finished throwing up there was no one to be seen.
Tell me how it happened, Ava asks at one point, pressing gently into her palm with three long fingers. How you heard them first. Mona shrugs as she replies. Tell you about when I first ‘got the call’, you mean? Ava rolls her eyes and Mona smiles at her, imagines sliding down a drainpipe to get into the passenger seat of her car – tug at her hair, irresistible. Yes, the call, Ava says, the drag, the ache, the yearn, the need, whatever you want to call it. Mona glances away, thinking of the road crew and the sound techs and the lighting riggers and all the girls who come to the shows every night with silver on the lids of their eyes. Beyond the windows, the water is pale and wintry, white surf like a kicking-up of snow. She shrugs again and gulps her tea and doesn’t answer, thinking as she does so of the image it always conjures – the opened ribs, hands reaching into the pulp of her, a rhythmic movement of fingers, tapping out a song against her heart.
An announcement over the tannoy at twenty to one signals that passengers have ten minutes to return to their vehicles before docking in Belfast. Back on the bus, in the semi-dark of the car hold, Catherine confides what a member of ferry staff has told her: they are running a little behind schedule because a man had to be coaxed off the viewing deck, from which he had apparently been threatening to jump.
Soundcheck in Galway – the band are bad-tempered, sing their songs as though being chased through them and ask repeatedly for alterations to be made to the sound balance, for the amps to be turned thirty degrees clockwise and the instruments to be moved to the left. Mona films the rehearsal, wondering idly as she does so whether half the footage will ever be used and what the point of it will be. At the edge of her shot, she watches Ava moving equipment, leaning up to adjust a spotlight, pale strip of twisting waist.
Catherine reports that the band seem better after soundcheck, sitting in their dressing room eating grapefruit halves and fudge wrapped in strawberry cellophane. The general relief is palpable, as though the road crew’s mood is hopelessly tied to that of the band. On the bus, the crew eat heavy noodles, fragrant with garlic, and Allessandra from the lighting crew reads tarot with grease-spotted cards. Curled up by the window, Mona picks the hanged man, the chariot and the nine of cups, although Catherine spills her noodles over the table before anyone can offer to interpret.
Later on, Ava and Mona wander down to watch the show. The music is liquid, drip-down – a sensation of something tarring their lungs, something fibrous caught between their lips. Afterwards, pushing out into the quiet evening, they tangle hands and Ava brackets her with pale arms, kisses her, a thrill like a fingertip to strings. They ditch the gig and get a hotel room, roll together through sheets chewed up with bleach. The room is arctic from the air-conditioning and Mona charts the quake of gooseflesh along Ava’s arms and shoulders, follows freckles with an index finger and thumb. With her black hair and her bright white skin, she is soft, planetary, suddenly all illuminated. Burying her face in Ava’s neck, she notes that there is an odd smell to her, a nervous-dog scent that thrills her. Their clothes lie puddled together on the carpet, two sets of skinny black jeans slithered out of like a tandem shedding. In the half light, they are both uncertain figures, luminous with bruises. They slot together quietly, a painful crook of fingers. Ava arches her back, eyes wide as a strangulation. Afterwards, they switch on the TV – a news piece about girls rioting in the streets near the venue. The sound is low, but the images lack nothing in clarity. A brief glint of video shows a crowd of girls flooding down the high street, bright with glitter and orange cotton T-shirts, breaking windows and throwing wide their arms. On screen, the moon is overlarge, stark and phosphorescent. It looms over the trampled high street, wall-eyed and gaping down upon the mess.
Mona’s phone rings and rings – she doesn’t answer it, only turning her head as Ava flicks the television onto mute. I heard someone talking yesterday about a fan in Newcastle, Ava says, who brought some knitting to do in the queue before the show. Then later, when she left, she went two streets down to a bar she wasn’t old enough to get into and drove a knitting needle through the bouncer’s eye. Mona shakes her head, mentally replaying her Newcastle footage – the long line of girls in neon trainers, perhaps some overlooked flash of needle points.
The stories are stranger here, or perhaps they are now simply far enough away from where they started to accept more outlandish versions of things they have heard before. A group of girls are said to have left the show in Hull and chased a forty-year-old man up a pylon. A girl in Nottingham is rumoured to have left the gig after the encore and returned to her mother’s house five hours later, holding something resembling a heart in her sticky fist.
Ava turns over onto her elbow and moves a hand down Mona’s side, apparently done with talking. Mona allows herself to be pulled down and wrapped around with blankets, though she keeps her eye on the television and the long dark sweep of girls until the news piece is over.
Early morning, at a rest stop outside Dublin. The company have disembarked to stretch their legs when Mona, doubling back to grab her wallet, comes just far enough along the aisle to see into the back, for once uncurtained. She can make out little, only Catherine stooped in rubber gloves, gathering up a matted nest of wide black feathers trampled down into the floor.
Swansea, rain-glistered. Distracted, Mona picks up her phone without thinking and realises it is her mother too late to disconnect. The voice is flinted with distance, resentfully surprised. I’d got so used to your voicemail. The conversation lasts less than five minutes and holds the unpleasant timbre of a telling-off, though her mother quavers towards the end of certain sentences, as though her conviction is coming loose at one hinge. It was unkind of you just to disappear like that, I don’t care what the job is. I know it’s work but to just up and leave everything – your whole life, with no warning – I’m sorry, I don’t know. It just seemed unfair.
Afterwards, she walks down to the venue where the road crew are setting up. The queue is already tangled along the side of the building, more unruly than she has ever known it to be. The girls have overspilled the barriers and are pushing forward with unharnessed energy, jagger of voices like a hive held over a flame. The doorman presses a boot against the bottom of the door as it shuts behind her, testing the weight with the hobnailed edge of his heel.
The band have a live slot booked at a local radio station and the road crew play it over the PA system during set-up. The DJ is a middle-aged man with a drooping accent and a tendency to turn sentences down at the corners. So tell us about your current tour, he asks with an inflection like sending back soup at a restaurant, I hear there’s been some talk about your fans running a little wild – some bad behaviour, stunts out of hand and so on. Don’t you feel that, as public figures – artists – you have some duty to your fans – many of them vulnerable girls – to set an example? There is a crackle – thirteen solid seconds of dead air – before the lead guitarist replies: Setting an example’s all well and good but I personally wouldn’t want the kind of fans who’d follow it. We just want fans who follow us. The DJ seems to encounter some problem with his microphone shortly after that and the band obligingly step in to play an uninterrupted acoustic set that carries them into the four o’clock news.
Ava asks if Mona’d like to get a hotel again when they get to Cardiff, sitting idle on the bus with her finger holding down the page of a book. They are all a little weary, undercaffeinated. Two days ago, something had gone wrong with the coffee filter and they had barely realised in time that they’d all been filling up their mugs with blood. Mona drops down into the seat beside Ava, nodding vaguely and taking hold of her free hand. Catherine is walking up and down the aisle, stretching her legs in front of her and groaning as her knees and ankles crack. The lighting techs are playing canasta and drinking ginger beer at the table before the closed black curtain.
The bus rumbles around them, whirring on towards the next place as Ava reads and twists her fingers through the holes in Mona’s jeans. Mona listens only vaguely, thinking back to her mother’s phone call and wondering at the tone in her voice – tight, as if stretched thinly over something hidden. She tilts her head, trying to focus her mind on the decision she first made to follow the band, to really up and leave and join their crew. She remembers, of course, the first time hearing them, the opening sensation, the lurch. She closes her eyes, recalling the bloody little episode. Years ago, picnic blanket in her father’s garage; the dust and daddy-long-legs and pulling up her shirt as the boy from across the road fiddled with the radio. Something dour and masculine. Listen to this one, and biting her neck so hard her necklace broke and spilled down between them. She had let him roll her over, moaned and writhed the way she knew she should, and then the music had changed to something else, channel changing unbidden to something vampish and inciting – coaxing fingers creeping out from the radio – and something inside her had smarted. Ribs, wrenching open, the sensation of something tugging on her spine, the wrong way, pulling out from the depths of her chest. Pushing him over onto his back, she had moved her hands up over his arms, over his chest and shoulders, coming to rest on his throat where she had fanned her fingers, pressed down until she felt something give. The music had bristled on into a chorus and she had leant forward as though sinking her shoulders into water, feeling the shape of her own mouth – at once soft and vicious, the prelude to a bite.
She remembers too the lack of afterwards, the nothing space of in between that became each gap between one song and another, each wait between playing a CD and getting to play it again, each year between first hearing them and finally joining them on the road.
When they arrive, the fans are already there, despite the fact the show is not for seven hours. The venue is ringed with frosted windows and the girls are pressed to the glass in great gangs, choking up the street. A local newspaper, it is soon discovered, has reprinted an old interview with the band as press for their arrival. What are you? the journalist asks at one point, going on to clarify that he just means to enquire what kind of genre they see themselves in: rock, pop, indie, all of the above.
Much later, Mona is dispatched to the dressing room to fetch the band for soundcheck and briefly catches the lead guitarist without her face on. She has forgotten to knock but thankfully no one sees her pressing the door open; tall sweep of wet black feathers. The face – the brief glimpse that she has of it – is a curious thing, familiar yet misplaced with its upturned nose and silvered eyelids, hanging over the back of a swivel chair.
London at last. The driver angles the bus through a road gagged with girls who beat on its sides with the flats of their hands.
The venue is a large white oval building, a pitted eye lidded with tall gates which the girls try to climb. The crew hide the bus in the back lot out of sight of the road and slump down in their seats, considering. They are all hungry, white-gummed and bloodless. All of the freshly bought food on the bus rotted overnight and Catherine had to scoop it up into a plastic bucket, tipping it over the crash barrier on a layby.
They do the get-in quietly, a smell like pennies on the backs of their hands. The venue is a five-thousand-seater and the soundboard operator is worried about levels. It won’t reach the back row, people won’t hear them. Catherine shakes her head, still grimy at the fingertips. Never been a problem being heard before. Mona films the setup; the lighting technicians levering themselves up into the rafters like ragged birds with women’s heads. On the stage, the road crew are arguing – a gentle sound, merely drifting. She focuses her lens on Ava, oddly veinless, the thin white lines at her temples.
There is a chip shop across the road and they send her out at five o’clock to fetch something resembling supper, passing unnoticed amongst the girls who throng the road. The boy behind the counter can’t be more than eighteen, skin like fork-clawed cottage cheese. He eyes her curiously – the peek of her pass on a chain, tide of travel scum at her jawline – asks if she’s working the venue tonight. Who’s the band, he queries without inflection, and she tells him with a note of pride which crests and breaks against the dam of his indifference. Oh, right, I think my sister likes them. She sets her mouth in a line, pays him without thanks.
Doors at seven thirty. Mona is sent to film the band walking from their dressing room to the stage. The dressing room – what little she sees of it before the door swings shut – is a dark disaster, blackened stains on unforgiving surfaces. The smell is strong, a rotting like the peeling-off of flesh. In the dark of the wings, she watches the band through her camera display, registering as she does so a sensation quite like love, white-hot, devoid of logic. The lead guitarist grasps the bassist’s hand, the rhythm guitarist pushes her fingers into her temples, holding the corners of something in place. From backstage, Mona films the roar of the crowd as the band passes out onto the stage. A sea of orange shirts and upturned faces, girls crying, already mouthing the words. Behind her in the wings, Ava rests her chin on her shoulder, watches the crowd through the camera display. I love this song, she says, anticipating. They stand there together as the lead guitarist strikes her first chord, both registering the same internal twinge, the vibrant, violent pulling.
On the news later, a brief video package, girls bursting from the venue and howling across the street. The velvet rage of their small mouths, hair torn from temples. A swollen werewolf moon. Orange T-shirts fraying at the hems, unwound and ragged. In a blurry clip, one can just make out the boy in the chip-shop window, the way he moves his hands up at the breaking of the frontage glass. In a thick swathe, the girls reach out for him, grabbing at his legs and neck and elbows, pulling him out through the window. The clip ends shortly after that, before the screaming and the rending, the camera swinging away to capture the mass of a thousand girls all racing forward down the street, the crooked note of music in the air.