Ben Corrigan
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The opening song had a languorous intro, like an elephant straining with the weight of a heavy cargo. Derek listened patiently. The song was simple and repetitive and there was no vocal line or melody to speak of. It didn’t go anywhere, or do anything, other than increase in volume. He wondered what he was supposed to focus on.
One of the guitarists was short and plump and had a shaven, oval-shaped head. Rising up, pushing forward, and then dropping and tilting back again, he rocked in time to the swelling sound, resembling a man throwing up over the bow of a storm-tossed boat. This was the only expressive movement among the band. Tall and muscular, with a simian face and large, stuck-out ears, the bassist stood still and straight, his feet shoulder-width apart. He looked down at the stage, deep in concentration, as though preparing to strike the first shot of a round of golf. A keyboard player with a bulky, bear-like shape took centre stage, sitting side on, like a concert pianist.
The group were unassuming and inscrutable. They might have grown up on council or country estates. They could have been Canadian or Icelandic, from East Sussex or the East Village. They may have been daring, innovative and brilliant, or bland and boring. Derek could not tell.
He scanned over the crowd as best he could in the dingy conditions. Couples as plain and oddly matched as the band they had come to see. Stout, bald men, alone and in pairs, still in the process of shedding their adolescent pupae. And ahead of him, illuminated by a stutter of silvery strobe lighting, her wisps of frizzy hair unmistakable – as clear as a familiar word appearing suddenly, and for no good reason, in the middle of a speech in a foreign tongue – Derek saw his ex-girlfriend, Gita.
His heart flitted with the feverish intensity of the strobes firing out at the audience. He dropped his head and closed his eyes, blocking out their engulfing coruscations. The music had built to a crescendo and was now a dark, deafening throb – or was that throb the sound of his own body, of his vital organs pressing their overdrive pedals?
Derek had met Gita five years earlier on a balmy August evening. He was in a new job, in a new city. For the first time since leaving university, Derek had been unable to keep pace with the changes in his life, as if he were being pulled along in his own slipstream. One minute he was arriving at a colleague’s thirtieth-birthday bash, wearing a shirt bought that afternoon and bearing a card with an impersonal greeting; the next, slow dancing on a smoky dance-floor with Gita’s head on his shoulder, gently finding his way to her scalp with his fingers; and then waking up in strange surroundings, and seeing bright sunlight thrown across an empty wall, and taking half a minute or more to work out that the room was his own, and that he had made it back to his new home safely, by himself, without remembering how, or when, or from where.
The music caught Derek’s attention. A fragile arrangement, slow and sad, twin guitar lines interlacing and winding around the bass’s rigid, one-note stem. A rise to a higher key, with an inversion of the guitars’ ascending and descending patterns, before the return to the opening passage. And so on, and so forth. There was no distortion. No sense of the band needing to take the song somewhere else. Just the intricate lattice-work of the structure, and the joy of the simple melody.
When they met a week later in a canal-side pub chosen by Gita, Derek had been surprised by her diffidence. She picked at the label on her bottle of beer. Smoked inexpertly. Twirled her hair. She was as softly, unassumingly pretty as he remembered – lightly freckled, with blue eyes that teased and questioned one moment, and looked downcast and melancholy the next. His feelings from the night they met, of longing restrained by logic and doubt, curdled into a lavaform