The Other Side of the Door

looked comical, its round body like a child’s drawing of a guitar and its metallic brittle tone lacking the warmth and colour of a guitar. It wasn’t like that at all for me. I can’t put it into words, not really. Music has always been a refuge for me. Probably what made me turn to it in the first place was that when I was a child we had a piano in a spare room, an old one that was battered and out of tune. When my parents started shouting at each other, I would go to that back room and play for hours and hours, losing myself in the strange songbooks and piles of sheet music they’d inherited along with the piano from some old aunt. That was what music had always been to me. Somewhere I could escape to, where there weren’t words, where you didn’t have to be clever.
Maybe that was the problem with Amos and me. Amos definitely fell into the clever category. He didn’t respect my intelligence, that was for sure. And I suppose I didn’t respect his musicianship. Amos loved music. He certainly loved listening to it. He could play, after a fashion—he did his grades when he was at school and all that—but it was never natural to him. For him, playing music was always a frustration. He could never translate what he heard in his head. He had a characteristic tense expression when he played, which at first made me laugh and then didn’t. I tried to teach him, in our early days together, manipulating his arms and neck as he crouched over the keyboard, attempting unsuccessfully to get him to loosen up, to let himself go. But I stopped that. Amos had a very developed sense of his own dignity.
I wouldn’t dare say this to anyone, but to me every instrument spoke with its own tone of voice. The banjo may seem shallow and silly to other people but to me it talked of something old and melancholy and neglected. Gradually, in the weeks after I had bought it I took it out of its case and tried to get it to speak with some kind of fluency. But I had never played it in front of anybody, not once. When Danielle asked me, I felt it, deep down, as a challenge.
I couldn’t think where we should play. My own flat was too small and the walls were dangerously thin. I mentioned the problem to Sally and she said we could come round to her house. I protested feebly, mentioning her child, her neighbours, the trouble and noise, her husband, but she absolutely insisted. ‘You’ll be doing me a favour,’ she said. ‘I feel I’m becoming more and more cut off from the world. I’d love to have people around.’
I was a little concerned to hear someone actually pleading with me to have a band rehearsal in their home, but I was too relieved to push the point much further. We decided on Sunday afternoon and then I rang everybody about it. It seemed alarmingly easy.
I arrived at Sally’s home in Stoke Newington ten minutes early but I still wasn’t the first.
‘Hayden’s already here,’ she said, as she opened the door.
‘Oh, I’m sorry.’
‘No, it’s fine,’ she said. ‘He’s playing with Lola.’
That wasn’t completely accurate. He was lying back on the sofa in the living room and Lola was clambering up his rangy frame, as if he was a piece of apparatus in an adventure playground. Her foot, in a grubby green sock, was firmly on his neck and one hand was flat against his stomach. He looked as if he was asleep, but when she toppled sideways as if she was going to fall head first onto the stripped-pine floor, he extended an arm and rescued her. She shrieked with laughter.
‘Lola, leave the poor man alone,’ said Sally, happily. ‘Bonnie’s here, Hayden.’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘You’ll excuse me if I don’t get up right now.’ He gave a groan. ‘Careful where you put your knee, young lady.’
Lola glared at me briefly and went back to prodding Hayden.
‘Can I get you anything?’ said Sally. ‘Hayden’s had coffee and cake and some biscuits. I’m just making him some tea.’
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Lovely.’ I left the room and went in and out of the house, bringing my electric keyboard, my guitar and the banjo. Hayden didn’t offer to help or even say anything. He sat up, balancing Lola on one knee, and sipped the mug of tea Sally had brought him, his grey eyes watching me over the rim so that I felt suddenly self-conscious.
‘I brought a keyboard,’ I said. ‘But I’m not sure if we’re going to need one and I’m rather hoping we don’t. This is just a first get-together. It’ll all be very casual.’
He didn’t say anything, just looked at me with an enigmatic smile playing on his lips. I felt that he was, in some curious way, making up his mind about me, which of course made me talk more.
‘Really,’ I said. ‘You should treat this as an audition of us. You might well decide that it isn’t worth your trouble, and if you do then it will be absolutely fine to—’
At which point, thank the Lord, the bell finally rang. I gestured helplessly and went to answer it. It was Joakim and Guy, who was battling with his equipment. ‘I didn’t bring the full kit,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know what you wanted.’
He struggled through, followed by Joakim, who shrugged at me helplessly. I turned to close the door and almost shut it on Amos, who didn’t look amused. ‘I assumed I’m playing guitar,’ he said.
‘It’s all very casual,’ I said.
‘It doesn’t matter how casual it is. You still have to play an instrument.’
Neal arrived with his bass and amp, then Sonia, and suddenly it was like a party. Sally dashed around taking orders and bringing mugs of tea and coffee and trays of biscuits, cake and sandwiches.
‘Where’s Richard?’