'Too many words... doesn't scan... been done... sure I've heard that before...' Her muttered comments, spoken— to be fair — as though I wasn't there anyway, were hardly more encouraging.
I wanted to leap up, snatch my songs away from her and run out of the house screaming. My backside got sore, and my legs got sore too, trying to take some of my appalling weight off the creaking, over-stressed legs of the antique chair.
She closed the piano, brought the guitar round and fingered some chords, strumming her right hand over the strings so softly I could hardly hear. She seemed to be playing through a couple of the songs, checking the chords, tutting every once in a while and going back, starting again. After about the fortieth 'tut' and the umpteenth shake of that blonde head, I was starting to wonder what the chances were of sticking in at swarf collection and working my way up through the factory floor towards Dinwoodie's management. Maybe managers lived in houses like this one.
The door opened and Dave Balfour looked in. 'You all right?'
'Yeah.' Christine looked at her watch. 'Ha!' She sat back and stretched. 'We'd better move if you're going to buy us that pint,' she told me. I tried to smile.
We crowded into Balfour senior's Peugeot estate; I half sat, half lay on the back-facing kiddies' bench, under the tailgate. We drove out to a hotel near the Gleniffer Braes. There were Jags and Rovers, Volvos and one Bentley parked outside. Just the place for a cheap drink, I thought.
We sat in the lounge, surrounded by muzak and golfers. The barman had given me a very long look. Technically I was still under age, though I'd been going into pubs for over a year and a half, but I think it was just my clothes and dirty fingernails he didn't like. I handed over a fiver and very nearly asked him if he was sure when he gave me the change back, but just sighed and took the tray to the table.
I fully expected to trip over somebody and send the whole lot flying, but I didn't. Not everything could go wrong this evening, I thought. Nobody had mentioned anything about my songs on the drive to the hotel, including Christine. I was so fed up I'd gone past being depressed; I just felt resigned, and tired. I distributed the drinks without spilling very much.
'... working on the songs, what'd you think?' She was saying to Dave Balfour.
'Aw aye,' he said, looking at me, then back at her. 'So?'
'Play you some later, if you like. Yeah?' She'd brought the sheaf of song scores along and had them on the table in front of her, studying them, blonde hair sweeping over the papers every so often, then being tucked back behind her ears. 'I'll give you a run through a couple of them... all right?' She looked up at the others. They looked unimpressed, but she smiled, Balfour shrugged, and that seemed to settle it.
'They any good, though?' Wes of the Hammond said, taking a handful of crisps and washing them down with Export. He munched, staring at me.
'Mmm ... yeah.' Christine said. I must have looked startled. She pursed her lips, her eyebrows lifted. 'Better than our stuff, anyway.' Dave Balfour and Steve, the bassist, were the ones who looked put out. 'Sorry, fellas,' she told them.
'Ah, well, we'll see,' Balfour said, in a reasonable tone. They spent the rest of the time talking about Monty Python, and which university they were going to go to; Dave Balfour hoped to study medicine at Glasgow, Christine had already started at Strathclyde (doing Physics, I was surprised to learn); Wes wanted to read English, anywhere, and Steve — another surprise — was a music scholar; from what he said he played the violin as well as the bass. Mickey the drummer was the only one who had no such plans; he was older than the rest, a clerk in the local planning office.
Listening to all these academic aspirations, I felt both inadequate and hopeless. They sounded so sure of themselves, they were all set to head off to do all sorts of professional things. The band was good fun, but it wasn't their great hope in life. They would split up, get together with other friends for a jam session now and again, but it would be a hobby, nothing more. They seemed to be embarrassed about discussing what might happen if they took the music seriously, tried to make a career out of it. It was mentioned once, as a joke. They all laughed.
What am I doing here? I thought once more. They don't need me, no matter how good the songs are. They'll always be heading in different directions, moving in different circles, higher spheres. Jesus, this was life or death to me, my one chance to make the great working class escape. I couldn't play football; what other hope was there to get into the supertax bracket? At this rate the most constructive thing I could do this evening would be to get chatting to Mickey from the planning office and see if he had any contacts in the housing department that could wangle my ma a new flat out of Ferguslie Park.
We had another couple of drinks (paid for by Dave and Christine), then it was back to the Peugeot. 'You go co-pilot,' Balfour said, holding open the passenger's door for me.
I was surprised, and secretly pleased, thinking this was some sort of recognition, a compliment. Wrong. We were doing fifty or sixty on the country road back to Paisley, when Balfour tapped me on the arm and pulled the zip down on his leather bomber jacket, then took both hands off the wheel and said, 'Steer for a second, will you, Danny?' He started taking off the jacket.
I stared at him, then at the head lit road in front, hedges and stone walls rushing past; the camber of the road was slowly angling us into the side. I grabbed the wheel, dry-mouthed, and tried to aim us back into the centre of the road, over-corrected and threw us over to one side. Balfour laughed, dragged the jacket off. 'Dave...' Christine said, sounding tired from the back seat. One of the others tutted loudly.
'Fuck's sake,' Wes muttered. I pulled the car back again, overcorrecting once more and heading us all towards the wall and the field beyond, our tyres yelping on the road surface.
'I can't drive!' I squeaked, half-closing my eyes.
'Don't worry " Balfour said, passing the leather jacket back to Christine, and casually taking the wheel from me, only just in time to prevent us and the car creating an al fresco mural along the wall. 'It doesn't show.' He corrected the estate's headlong charge towards the wall with one effortless flick of the wrist, and we accelerated down the road towards Paisley. I sat back, shaking, palms cold and wet.
'You'll die young, Balfour,' Christine said.
'Just try and die alone,' Mickey said. Balfour shook his head, smiling broadly at the lights of Paisley in the distance.
We got back without hitting anything, parked the estate in the drive, trooped into the garage, Christine looked at the songs for a while as we shared a joint (after checking the connecting door to the rest of the house was locked), then, with just the semi-acoustic, and the score propped up on a seat in front of her, she sang 'Another Rainy Day'.
Whereupon, my life changed.
She messed up two chord changes, couldn't quite get down to one note in the chorus each time, and the verses she left out to get it down to approximately single length were the wrong ones, but she sang it like an angel tearing a million miles of silk.
I hadn't imagined it would sound like that.
She attacked it. She slammed into the guitar, stamped her foot, and belted the words out through the chords 1ike ... I thought of machine guns firing through propellers; American marines at the Edinburgh Tattoo, marching past each other twirling flashing bayonettes inches from their noses; a perfect tennis rally; Jimmy Johnstone taking on four defenders and scoring... even her phrasing was a revelation. I'd written: