Dan and Katelin, Duncan and Rose-Ann: on Thursday nights, they were Show of Strength, top of the league at Gordon Fuller’s weekly pub quiz. It was Duncan who’d got them all into it. Duncan Lomax with his collector’s habits and magpie mind, filing away facts just as he filed LPs in his record shop; there was nothing he liked better than the opportunity to showcase his quizzing prowess. He absolutely needed the other three, though; he could be wrong when he was certain he was right, and Rose-Ann never let him hold the pencil, because he wouldn’t consult. He wasn’t collaborative, she said; he was a quiz autocrat.
The two couples arrived at the same time from their different directions, rushing to get through the door to beat the incipient rain. Katelin and Rose-Ann hugged as if they hadn’t just seen each other yesterday for lunch at a Victoria Street café. They’d met, originally, through the men, but had a friendship now that had a life of its own. Sisters under the skin, Rose-Ann said, but she hailed from Santa Monica so was always coming out with stuff like that. The women took their usual seats – back of the room, tucked into an alcove, a small wooden settle, just room for the two of them – and chatted while they waited for their drinks to arrive. At the bar, Dan and Duncan ordered two pints of bitter and two glasses of red. Astral Weeks was playing through the sound system, and this was one of the reasons they came to Gordon’s place; the guy had impeccable taste. Gordon didn’t care about upbeat, unless upbeat was what he wanted. He’d play only what he wished to hear, and if it was Van Morrison’s anguish, then so be it. If anyone complained at his choice, he only turned it up louder.
‘This album should be compulsory,’ Duncan said as they waited.
‘Yeah, too right, they should hand it out with the polio jab.’
‘Great idea! The government taking responsibility for every child’s musical judgement.’
Dan laughed. ‘I think we’re on to something. Astral Weeks and Abbey Road, just to be on the safe side.’
‘Look,’ Duncan said, glancing over his shoulder at the women, as if he thought Rose-Ann might overhear and shut him up, ‘I got an idea,’ and, like a man with only one shot at the big time, he rapidly pitched a scheme to start a record label, an indie-folk/rock outfit, under which he could gather his rapidly growing collection of brilliant misfit introverts. He wanted Dan on board.
‘An investment opportunity,’ he said. ‘Ten grand should do it.’
‘Do what?’ Dan asked.
‘Get us up and running.’
‘So, five grand apiece, you mean?’
Duncan winced. ‘Och, man, you know how skint I am, and I can’t spend Rose-Ann’s dosh on something like this.’
‘Right. So, ten grand from me, nothing from you.’
‘Nothing but my bottomless talent and energy and remarkable ear,’ Duncan said. ‘And that’s gold bullion, my friend.’
Dan laughed. ‘My ten grand would be wasted,’ he said. ‘Money down the drain. What you could do is cherry-pick from your East Neuk artists, then get them gigs, create a buzz. That’s what you could do.’
‘And you, too.’
‘You don’t need me to do that.’
‘Ahh, but Dan, to start a label …’
‘… would be a one-way ticket to being screwed over by somebody bigger and richer than we are.’
‘OK,’ Duncan said. ‘OK. Let’s do the other thing then.’
Gordon’s daughter Meredith plonked two pints on the bar in front of them, sloshing beer on to the polished wood, then swivelled away to find the red.
‘That’s fifty-pence-worth she just spilled,’ Duncan said.
‘She’s got a face on,’ Dan said. ‘She wants to be somewhere else.’
‘So, shall we do it?’ Duncan said.
Dan shrugged, deeply sceptical, but Duncan said, ‘Good man, good man,’ anyway, as if a deal had been struck. When Meredith approached with two glasses of wine he picked up the pints and said, ‘Get those off of her before she chucks half of it away,’ and he made his way through the packed tables to Katelin and Rose-Ann. Dan followed, and handed over the wine, and the two women took their glasses, clinked them, and Katelin said, ‘To the road trip.’
‘The road trip,’ said Rose-Ann.
‘Eh?’ Duncan said.
‘We’re going on a road trip?’ Dan asked.
‘You’re not,’ Katelin said.
‘But we are,’ said Rose-Ann.
They did this sometimes: an irritating little double-act, finishing each other’s sentences, grinning at private jokes.
‘Very nice,’ Dan said, nodding approval, provokingly and deliberately relaxed.
Duncan, less gifted in the feigning arts, said, ‘What? Where to? Cambridge, you mean? To see Alex?’
‘Men,’ said Rose-Ann to Katelin. ‘They just can’t see the bigger picture.’
‘But hang on,’ Duncan said, ‘whose car will you take?’
‘We’ll hire a car, Duncan,’ said Katelin patiently, and then to Dan she said, ‘Have a guess where we’re going.’
He smiled at her, picked up his pint, took a mouthful, then put it down.
‘Go on,’ she said. ‘You’ll never guess.’
‘Santa Monica,’ he said. ‘You’re going to fly in to JFK, then drive all the way across the States to the West Coast.’
The women gawped at him.
‘God, Dan Lawrence, you’re an annoying bastard sometimes,’ Katelin said, but she was laughing.
‘You’re never doing that?’ said Duncan.
‘We are, we just decided, while you boys were at the bar,’ Rose-Ann said. ‘It’s been a long time coming, but we’re breaking the chains.’
‘What chains?’ Duncan said.
‘Ah, dearest Duncan,’ Katelin said. ‘There are no chains, it’s a playful metaphor.’
‘But it’s going to take weeks!’
‘Five or six,’ Rose-Ann said.
‘You’re kidding me!’ He looked at Dan to share his outrage, but Dan was seeing only the upside: a potential six weeks of unscrutinised, unjudged, unmonitored living. And Katelin would benefit from cutting loose for a while, because he knew how good it felt, he’d done it himself in the past, jetting off after bands and staying away – sometimes, perhaps, longer than was strictly necessary.
So, privately, Dan applauded Katelin’s impulse, but when she said, ‘It’s going to be great!’ he only said, ‘Yeah, three thousand miles at sixty miles an hour in a hire car, what’s not to love about that?’
‘You’re jealous,’ Katelin said. ‘Patently jealous.’
‘Not at all. Well, OK, maybe a bit. I’ll make you a few mixes, help pass the time.’
‘Thanks,’ Katelin said, ‘but that’d be like having you on the back seat. We’re going to talk to each other, and sometimes listen to the country stations, aren’t we, Rose-Ann?’
‘WJLS, the Big Dawg,’ Rose-Ann said in a southern drawl, and they both fell about laughing.
At the bar, Gordon cleared his throat into the microphone. He was looking as inscrutable as ever: unsmiling, commanding, scanning the crowded pub with his eyes of steel, looking for lightweights and lawbreakers.
‘OK, people,’ he said. ‘So-called smartphones off and out of reach; anyone found googling will be ejected immediately and banned on a Tuesday night for ever after. Write your team name on the answer sheets, legibly please, and same goes for your answers. Any answer I cannae read will be marked as erroneous, no arguments, quizmaster’s word is final. Pencils at the ready for quiz number two hundred and eleven. Meredith’ – he paused here to indicate his surly daughter, who stood behind the bar inspecting her fingernails – ‘will bring the table questions to you all in due course, for you to complete during the interval. First round, happening just now, is literature.’
‘Over to you then, Rose-Ann,’ Dan said, and he pulled his iPhone from his jacket pocket to switch it off. On the screen, it said: @AliConnorWriter followed you. He paused, raised his eyebrows, smiled. Took your time, girl, he thought. Three weeks since he’d followed her.
‘Switch it off,’ Katelin said. ‘Or Gordon’ll have your guts for garters.’
‘Which winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature,’ said Gordon, ‘was also a first-class cricketer?’
‘That’s sport, not literature,’ Katelin said loudly, hoping Gordon would hear. Rose-Ann pushed the sheet, and the pencil, across the table to Dan.
‘I think Golding was a cricketer,’ Duncan said in his quiz whisper.
Dan was thinking only about Alison Connor, whose sixteen-year-old ghost had turned his head towards her own. Dark brown hair and the smell of fresh air and her impenetrable, infuriating secrecy.
‘Dan?’ Rose-Ann said.
‘What?’ he said, remembering where he was. His phone was still in his hand.
‘Turn your goddamn phone off,’ she hissed.
‘And answer the bloody question,’ Katelin said, tapping the answer sheet in front of him with an index finger.
‘It’s William Golding.’ This was Duncan, leaning in and whispering urgently again. ‘I’m almost certain.’
‘What question?’ Dan said. He pushed the off button on his phone and slid it away, back into the dark warmth of his pocket. There you go, Alison Connor, he thought, you’ll be safe in there for a while.
Katelin heaved a sigh. ‘Nobel Prize for Literature, first-class cricketer, who is he?’
‘Oh, right,’ Dan said. He picked up the pencil and wrote Samuel Beckett. Duncan peered at the answer.
‘You sure?’ he said. ‘I’d swear it was Golding.’
When Dan was still Daniel, he’d shared a bedroom with his older brother Joe, who had a job in the sports centre by day, but by night was a snake-hipped, Oxford-bagged Northern Soul disciple who hitched to Wigan Casino whenever he could, carrying talc to keep the slide on the soles of his shoes. Their sister Claire – four years older than Dan, two years younger than Joe – loved the Osmonds, and only the Osmonds, as if extending her listening habits would have been a betrayal of her Mormon vows. There was just one record player in the Lawrence household, and it was Joe’s, so whenever he was home Dan listened in on the Vel-Vets, the Pearls and the Dells, and watched his brother spin and drop on the plywood square he’d taped on to their bedroom carpet, then when Joe was at work or on a Wigan odyssey, Claire would claim the turntable, and it was wall-to-wall schmaltz and groove with Donny and the boys. Up to the age of thirteen, Daniel tolerated this state of affairs, but then he heard Genesis at a friend’s house, and he was up, up and away on his own musical journey: the one that had brought him to where he was now; the one he was still on.
At first, Genesis gave him everything he needed, but then he found Pink Floyd, King Crimson, Cream. For an ardent few months he made himself publisher, editor and staff writer of his own handwritten prog-rock fanzine called Us and Them. He got his mother to make photocopies in the offices of Hadfield’s steelworks, where she was PA to the managing director, and he sold them at school, two pence an issue. The magazine business went under when he started a different company, making party mix tapes for people to rent and return. The tapes had titles such as Air Guitar, Guilty Pleasures, Heat Wave, and – thinking himself canny – he organised them so that, if you wanted to please everyone at a party, you had to rent more than one tape. Nobody coughed up the money, so he jacked that in, but by then he had the mix-tape habit and he carried it on, making real mixes, properly mixed up, just for himself, or for friends, or for girls he fancied, speaking to people through music. He believed himself a cipher, for a while, through which the right music reached the consciousness of the uninitiated, the misguided or the uneducated, and he felt, at sixteen, seventeen, even eighteen, that there was no one he cared about whose life couldn’t be immeasurably improved by a Daniel Lawrence mix tape.
Then Alison Connor had come along and he’d thought he was born to make mix tapes for this girl, but she’d told him thanks, but in fact she preferred to listen to music differently to this; she liked only to play albums, beginning to end, because that’s what the artist intended. Dan was thinking about this now as he hurried home with Katelin from the pub, on this foul, wet night: thinking about how, all those years ago, he’d felt simultaneously crushed, impressed, aggravated, flabbergasted. ‘I know that’s what the artist intended,’ he’d said. ‘Obviously, I know that. But mix tapes are something else, aren’t they?’
‘It’s just, if I heard, say, “Alison”, I’d want to hear “Sneaky Feelings” straight afterwards. It’s the way I am. It throws me when Fleetwood Mac comes on, or Thin Lizzy.’ She’d nudged him, trying to gauge how he’d taken her rejection. ‘Sorry,’ she’d said, although he’d known she wasn’t, not really.
Dan’s hand, in his pocket, was wrapped around the phone on which @AliConnorWriter followed you was still showing on the screen. She’d been the first girl he’d met who knew as much about music as he did, and had the ammunition to shoot him down when she took issue with his hard and fast truths. First girl? Only girl, to be honest, apart from the ones at NME of course, where music was akin to religious faith. But of the regular, real-life, ordinary-world females Dan had known, Alison Connor was still the one to beat.
‘You were off form back there,’ Katelin said, and her voice startled him back into the present: Stockbridge, St Stephen Street, rain like glancing arrows coming at them from the night sky.
‘Well, it was tough,’ Dan said, slipping easily back to where he should be. ‘And there were no football questions.’
‘That’s not what I mean.’
‘What then? Christ, this rain!’
‘Not sure, you just seemed to need reminding where we were, now and again.’
‘Oh, I knew where I was all right,’ Dan said. ‘Carrying the reputation of Show of Strength on my shoulders while you and Rose-Ann got pissed. That’s a great idea, a trip to Santa Monica.’
‘I know. I’m going to ask for a short sabbatical in the next semester,’ Katelin said. She hooked her arm through his for warmth. ‘I don’t want to just use up my summer break. We were thinking end of January, through February, back first week of March.’
‘Pretty soon, then. They won’t like that, will they?’
‘They might have to lump it. Teaching staff are always off on sabbaticals.’
‘Right.’
‘Well, you went often enough, and when Alex was still only little, running me ragged.’
‘Hey! Do you hear me objecting?’
‘No, because I’m pre-empting your objections.’
He laughed. ‘No need, I have none. Do it.’
‘Yeah, well, obviously Alex doesn’t need me at all now, and you’ll manage fine without me, and McCulloch only loves you anyway, he won’t notice I’m gone.’
Dan laughed. ‘They’ll notice at work though.’
‘I bloody well hope they do.’
She worked at the university, in student support, fielding first-year crises of every possible shape and size. All she knew about freshers were their difficulties, and when Alex first went off to Cambridge two years ago, she’d told him he might experience depression, loneliness, sexual anxiety or panic attacks. ‘All perfectly normal,’ she’d said. Alex and Dan had roared, and Katelin, only ever half able to laugh at herself, had said, ‘Yeah, yeah, I forgot you two know it all.’
‘Six weeks in the States,’ Dan said now. They were inside the house, shedding their wet jackets, shaking out the rain. Katelin stared at herself in the hall mirror and said, ‘Can you see any grey in my hair? I think I can see grey.’
‘No,’ Dan said, glancing at her reflection. ‘I can’t see any grey. You could do a gig tour, y’know, east to west. I can check that out for you if you like?’
She looked at him, and sighed. ‘Why would I suddenly want to do a gig tour?’
‘I dunno, I suppose because you suddenly want to do an American road trip and you could listen to bluegrass in the Bluegrass State, which would be my idea of heaven on earth.’
‘Dan, if I said butt out, would you be offended?’
‘Nope,’ Dan said.
‘Good, so butt out.’ She yawned, suddenly and violently, Katelin-style; this was way past her ideal bedtime. ‘God, I’m knackered,’ she said. ‘I’m for my bed.’ She started up the stairs and said, without looking back, ‘Keep it down, won’t you?’
‘I’ll use headphones,’ Dan said. ‘You’ll not hear a peep.’
‘Oh, and let the dog out for a pee.’
‘On my way.’
‘And don’t leave the lights on.’
‘Oi,’ Dan said, ‘this is me, not Alex,’ but she didn’t hear, she was away upstairs, closing the bedroom door, so he just jogged down to the kitchen and let McCulloch out of the back door to sniff the wet night air. He switched on the radio, retuned it from Katelin’s Radio 4 to his own 6 Music, and there was Richard Hawley, crying a tear for the man on the moon, but too far away, in this basement, for Katelin to hear. Then Dan turned on his phone to find Alison, and saw she was almost lost among a fever of notifications, none of which held any interest for him tonight. @AliConnorWriter followed you; that’s all he was after, and there she was, awaiting his attention. He pushed aside a pile of magazines on the sofa and sat down, and he wondered, was this juvenile? This avid interest in a woman he’d only ever known as a girl? But then: Fuck it, he thought, life is a weird and wonderful thing, and this isn’t any old girl, it’s Alison Connor. He tapped on her profile to have a look at what she’d said since he last checked: not much, just something he didn’t understand, intended for a woman called Cass Delaney, whom Dan now knew – after a spot of judicious stalking – was a journalist in Sydney, on the Australian Financial Review. He considered the fact that Alison Connor was fully aware Daniel Lawrence still existed and that, having discovered this, she’d decided to be nice and let him know she knew. He checked the time in Adelaide. He looked at her profile picture again. He thought he really should read her book, although he hadn’t read anything other than music biographies for about ten years and he hated the distinct possibility that he wouldn’t like it. He heard McCulloch scratch at the door so he let him back into the kitchen and, for a while, the two of them sat side by side on the sofa, the dog watching Dan as he tried to compose a message to Alison. He’d decided, over the past few weeks, that if she ever followed him back, a short, friendly, direct message – privately sent, obviously, not there for all the world to see – would be the thing. But Jesus, everything he tried sounded inane. Hey, Alison, fancy meeting you here! Or Hi, Alison, how’s life? Or Good to hear from you, Alison. Jaunty, inquisitive, sober; every approach sounded like somebody other than Dan: somebody dull, somebody desiccated, someone to whom @AliConnorWriter might very well never reply. He sat there in the cold kitchen until even McCulloch gave up on him and went to sleep, and it wasn’t until Dan was calling it a day himself and heading upstairs, mission unaccomplished, that he had an idea of such simple brilliance that he wished he was still downstairs with the dog, because at least then he could’ve shared it. He carried on past the bedroom door and went up to his office. There, on his laptop, he did a quick search for Elvis Costello and the Attractions, 1978, ‘Pump It Up’, and there they were. A pure white studio set, Pete Thomas’s perfect drums, Steve Nieve spinning magic with organ riffs, chic geek Elvis, sneering through the vocals, dipping and staggering on rubber ankles. Dan watched it through a few times. Total bloody genius. And this is what this video would say to Alison Connor: ‘Remember this? Because to me, it’s totally unforgettable.’
He copied the link, and sent it to Adelaide.
No words, no message. Only the song, speaking for itself.