Fran told me she was leaving the band while I was underneath her father's workbench looking for a plectrum.
“After Friday,” she said.
“After Friday what?”
“I'm stopping.”
I could see a dead beetle, two screws and a blue thing that might have been the plectrum if I wanted it enough. I reached for it. It was a piece of wire casing.
“We've got the showcase.”
“That's why I said after Friday.”
I slid backwards and hit my head on the underside of the bench. Fran made a noise like she was trying not to laugh. A month earlier she would have laughed properly, and I would have called her something, and we would have lost ten minutes being stupid. Now I stood up holding the back of my head and she looked at her shoes.
“You could have said.”
“I'm saying.”
We were sixteen. This was my first band, my second bass and the only thing I had ever persuaded other people to do for longer than a week. There were three of us: me, Fran on drums and Aidan on guitar and vocals. Aidan had joined because he thought being in a band would help him get a girlfriend. He now had a girlfriend who did not like our music, which seemed to me a poor return on six months of rehearsals.
Fran had been playing drums before the band existed. Her dad bought the kit from a man who was emigrating, and for a year she practised with headphones on, hitting the pads we laid over the drums to stop the neighbours complaining. I used to sit on the garage freezer and watch. She could do different things with all four limbs. I could barely write while someone talked to me.
“Is it your dad?” I asked.
“What?”
“Exams. Or the noise.”
“No.”
“Because we can move rehearsals.”
“I don't want to move them.”
She took the pads off the snare and the toms, stacked them on the freezer and sat down. Aidan was late. His girlfriend had a netball match and he had promised to watch the last ten minutes. He had been watching the last ten minutes for forty minutes.
“I just don't want to do it any more,” Fran said.
“You don't want to play?”
“I don't want to be in the band.”
I plugged in my bass. The amplifier made its usual enormous cough. Fran flinched, though she knew it was coming.
“Fine,” I said.
We played the opening of our first song until Aidan arrived. It had a complicated stop halfway through the verse. Fran always came back in exactly right, even when I didn't. That afternoon I missed it four times.
On the way home I messaged her a recording of a drummer I had found online, with the words, Imagine us doing something like this.
She sent a thumbs-up.
I stared at it through supper. My mother told me to put the phone away. I said I was arranging transport, which was true in the broad sense that I would eventually need some.
At school the next morning, Fran was sitting with the art people outside the library. She had blue paint on the side of her hand. When I came over, she shifted her bag so I could sit down. I stayed standing.
“When did you start hanging out here?”
“We have art together.”
I knew this. She had taken art at the beginning of the year. I had taken accounting because my mother said it would keep options open. So far it had kept open the option of failing accounting.
A girl called Ruth was telling a story about a ceramic bowl that had exploded in the kiln. Fran laughed. It was the proper laugh, the one with the ugly snort at the end.
“We need to talk about Friday,” I said.
“At break?”
“This is break.”
“Second break.”
I left before she could say anything else. By second break I had made a list of every person at school who might play drums. There were four. One was in matric and had already said he was not doing extracurricular anything. One played in a church band and was busy on Fridays. One was a Grade Eight who had brought two sticks to school and hit things with them, which I had to admit was not proof.
The fourth was Dean.
Dean sat behind me in accounting. He had a drum kit, according to a video he posted in the holidays. I watched the video again under the desk. He was good. At least, he was fast, which looked the same on my small screen.
“Do you want to be in a band?” I whispered.
He leaned forward. “Yours?”
“Yes.”
“What about Fran?”
“She's leaving.”
“Oh.” He looked pleased, then tried to stop looking pleased. “When?”
“After the showcase. You could come to rehearsal tomorrow. See how we work.”
He said yes. I felt so much better that I almost messaged Fran to tell her the good news.
At second break she found me by the tuck shop. I was buying a cheese roll I didn't want because I needed something to do with my hands.
“I can't stay late tomorrow,” she said. “My gran's coming.”
“That's fine. Dean's coming.”
“Dean?”
“He plays.”
Her face changed very slightly, like the screen brightness going down on a phone.
“To my house?”
I had not thought of it as her house. I had thought of it as where the drums were.
“Just to watch. For after Friday.”
She looked at the roll in my hand. I had squeezed it flat.
“You could have asked.”
“You said you were leaving.”
“It's still my house.”
Then she walked away. I took a bite of the roll and found I couldn't swallow it. For the rest of the day I kept making better versions of the conversation, ones in which I sounded reasonable and she admitted that I couldn't be expected to stop having a band just because she had found other people.
At home I messaged Dean. I told him rehearsal was cancelled. It wasn't. He replied, No stress, and asked whether I could send him the songs anyway. I sent them. Then I felt disloyal, which annoyed me, because I was the one being left.
The next rehearsal was worse than I had imagined. Fran's gran was in the kitchen making something with onions. Every time we stopped, we could hear her and Fran's dad talking. Their conversation sounded easy and continuous, a different kind of music that we couldn't join.
Aidan wanted to change the order of the songs. He had watched a video about keeping your strongest song for last. Our strongest song was also our shortest, and I thought putting it last meant we would be bad for longer at the beginning.
“Can we just play?” Fran said.
We did. In the second song, the one I had written, there was a section where the guitar dropped out and the bass and drums went on by themselves. Fran and I had made it up one Saturday while Aidan was at the dentist. It was the best thing we did. She used the rim of the snare and I played high up the neck, where my bass sounded almost like a guitar with a cold.
That day she played it straight. No little push before the beat. No scrape along the cymbal at the end.
I stopped.
“What's wrong?” she asked.
“You're not doing it.”
“Doing what?”
“The bit.”
“I'm playing the bit.”
Aidan sat on his amplifier and looked at his phone.
“You're playing it like you don't care.”
Fran put her sticks down across the snare. They rolled apart, one towards each rim.
“Maybe I don't want every rehearsal to be an exam.”
“I just want it to sound right.”
“I know.”
She said it without shouting. I would have preferred shouting. Shouting would have given me something to answer.
Her gran called us in for food. Aidan went immediately. Fran followed him. I stayed in the garage and unplugged my bass, then plugged it back in because I didn't know whether we were finished.
After a minute Fran came back with a plate.
“You should eat.”
“I'm not hungry.”
“Okay.”
She put the plate on the workbench. There were three little fried things on it. I ate one as soon as she turned away.
“Do you hate playing with me?” I asked.
She stood beside the freezer, picking a loose piece of tape off its handle.
“Sometimes.”
I wanted to put the food back on the plate as if I hadn't taken it.
“Not all the time,” she said. “But sometimes you decide how the whole afternoon is going to feel before we even start.”
“Because nobody else decides anything.”
“Aidan decided to change the order.”
“That was a stupid decision.”
“See?”
I looked at my bass. One of the strings had left a dark line across my finger. I rubbed it, which made it wider.
“I thought we were doing something,” I said.
“We did do something.”
“We're not finished.”
“You aren't.”
She went back inside. I ate the other two things and carried the plate to the kitchen. Her gran asked whether I wanted more. I said yes, please, and sat down between Fran and Aidan, who was explaining his girlfriend's netball position with complete confidence and no apparent knowledge.
On Friday, the school hall smelled of floor polish and hot extension leads. We were fourth on the programme, after a dance group and before a boy who could make a noise like a trumpet with his mouth. I had spent weeks imagining that someone would film us and the film would look like the beginning of something. From the stage, the hall looked exactly like the place where we wrote exams.
Fran was adjusting the borrowed drum kit. Her own kit had stayed at home; the music teacher said there was no time to swap between bands. The bass drum kept sliding forward. Fran put an old rubber mat under it and pushed with her foot.
“Better?” I asked.
“We'll see.”
I wanted to tell her something important. Unfortunately, everything important in my head sounded like a caption under a photograph of a sunset.
“Dean isn't coming to your house,” I said.
“Good.”
“I should have asked.”
“Yes.”
The dance group began their music. We had to move into the side passage, where the trophy cabinet reflected pieces of us. I could see Fran's shoulder and my own mouth.
“I don't know where we're going to rehearse,” I said.
“You could ask the music teacher.”
“She hates us.”
“She hates Aidan eating near the equipment.”
This was fair. Aidan had once put a yoghurt on a keyboard.
The teacher appeared at the end of the passage and told us we had six minutes. The programme was running late. We had planned three songs, nearly eleven minutes, and I started explaining that our second song had a section that couldn't be cut.
Fran touched my arm.
“Two songs,” she said. “The short one and yours.”
“Then we have to cut the middle.”
“We can make it work.”
I looked at her. She was holding her sticks loosely in one hand. There was still blue paint near her thumbnail, a small crescent she had missed when washing.
“How?”
She counted quietly, tapping one stick against her leg. Aidan leaned in. We worked out where the guitar would come back and how she would signal it. It took less than a minute. Nobody had to lose.
When we walked onto the stage, someone shouted Aidan's name. His girlfriend was in the second row with three friends. My mother was further back, holding her phone vertically despite everything I had told her.
We played the short song too fast. I missed a note and made a face, then remembered the camera and tried to make the face look deliberate. Fran was grinning at me from behind the cymbal.
In my song, when the guitar dropped out, I turned towards her. She gave the first beat a little shove, the way she used to. I followed. For four bars we had the whole hall to ourselves, or it felt like that, though I could see the trumpet boy waiting with his cheeks puffed out in the wings.
Then she lifted her stick. Aidan came back in. We finished together.
It was not the best we had ever played. On the recording, someone coughed through the quiet part and my mother said, “That's her song,” loudly enough to cover two whole bars. I watched it once that night and put my phone down.
On Saturday I went to Fran's house without my bass. She was in the garden painting a wooden chair. Her dad had spread newspaper under it, which kept blowing away.
“I thought you might want your cable,” she said.
“I do. Also, are you busy?”
She looked at the chair.
“After this.”
I sat on the step and held a corner of newspaper with my shoe. She painted for a while. Without the drums, I could hear the washing machine turning inside the house.
“Do you want to go to the shops?” I asked.
“What for?”
I had no answer. We always used to have an answer: strings, batteries, a lead, something for the band. Fran dipped her brush, wiped it carefully on the edge of the tin and looked at me.
“I need a new black pen,” she said.
“Okay.”
“Not from the supermarket. The art shop.”
“Okay.”
She pointed with the brush. “You've got paint on your shoe.”
I lifted my foot. The newspaper escaped and blew against the wet chair. Fran swore, and I grabbed it, and for the next few minutes we were both too occupied with picking paper out of paint to say anything else.
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