The Dying Fall

Chapter 12: Soundclub

Song for this chapter:

Chapter 12: Soundclub

The streets were slick and dark with rain as Carrie and Nano hurried through them to the theatre. There were few people around, scuttling through the spot-lights of the streetlamps with their shoulders hunched and heads bowed against the heavy drizzle. Lights blinked out in the shops as they were locked down for the evening, and then reappeared in flats and houses as workers returned home from work.

Dodging the puddles of the cobbled square, Carrie and Nano hurried to the alley down the side of the theatre and to the yard at the back. Diving into the alcove of the rear entrance, Nano rapped sharply on door and waited for a response. After a minute, he knocked again and a muffled voice from inside asked: “What’s the password?”

“Open the bloody door, Woodsy,” Nano growled. “It’s pissing it down out here.”

The door opened a crack. “That’s not very polite.”

“Let me in or I’m doubling the price on your next hit.”

Woodsy chuckled and opened the door a little further. Nano immediately pushed his way in and Carrie followed, aware that her presence wasn’t expected at this private gathering. Woodsy, who was about Nano’s age, short and stocky, with a permanently joyous face, didn’t seem bothered nor surprised to see Carrie.

“Hey-hey!” he said as he closed the door behind them.

“This is Carrie,” Nano said quickly. “Bloody Earth it’s cold in here! Anyone else turned up yet?”

“What do you mean ‘yet’?” Woodsy replied, leading them up a corridor where they passed a number of storage and maintenance cupboards. “You’re late, as usual.”

They went through a door at the end of the corridor and turned right into a narrower but carpeted hallway. About halfway along it, they followed Woodsy through another door and found themselves stepping into the front of the main screening room. Carrie glanced up at the faded blue curtains that hid the giant screen and then let her gaze wander slowly over the tiered seating and up towards the dark balcony. She had sat in this place on several occasions, mostly as a student and sometimes with friends on a Saturday afternoon in the winter, when it had become too cold to loiter on the streets but none of them wanted to go home to parents, chores and a long empty evening. Tucked away on the balcony, they never really paid attention to the show—usually a state-commissioned drama or documentary, or a film by one of the Global Care organisations. Carrie always had one ear on the conversation of her peers and one on the score of the programme, hoping to catch something that would satisfy her growing taste for a siren melody. But there was often little to glean from the soundtracks, just the same plodding tunes already tainted by their association with state advertising. In some ways, sitting in the dark, with images from the screen flickering over her, had given Carrie’s mind time to wander into forbidden territory, making it all that harder, when they were finally turfed out onto the street, to return to her dull and quiet life.

Nano and Woodsy began walking up the central aisle towards the middle of the tiered seating, where five other young adults were gathered—some slumped in the seats with their feet on the back of the chairs in the row in front and some leaning over from the row behind. One of them was Rox, who gave Carrie a nod of recognition as she joined them. Nano briefly introduced Carrie to the group. Apart from Woodsy there were three others Carrie hadn’t met before: Penna, Lake and Morris. From snippets of conversation, Carrie gathered Penna and Lake were cousins and Morris worked for a repurposing workshop.

“All right,” Woodsy said, holding out a popcorn box to Carrie and Nano, “Hand over your buds and we’ll get started.”

Carrie dropped the bud Nano had given her into the box and Woodsy gave her a reassuring wink.

“Don’t worry, you’ll get it back.” He turned to Nano. “Did you bring that new DANCE COMP you’ve been banging on about?”

“As well as this one?” Nano said, dropping a HIPHOP bud into the box. He opened his hand, palm upwards, to reveal the DANCE-coded button.

“Nice one!” Woodsy exclaimed, plucking the bud from Nano’s hand. “We’ll start with this.”

As Woodsy sauntered off to the projection booth, Nano led Carrie into the row behind the rest of the group. Rox climbed over Penna and Morris and leant over the back of a chair as Carrie slipped off her coat, folded it around Savannah’s journal and placed it on the floor under her seat.

“So, has Nano made you take the oath yet?” Rox asked.

“What’s that?” Carrie asked, straightening and brushing her hair from her face.

“The one where we swear to never tell anyone about this soundclub on pain of having our eardrums burst, legs pulled off and heart ripped out.” Her eyes fixed on Nano with a playful look. “You know, the oath Nano keeps breaking.”

“That’s bullshit,” Nano said matter-of-factly as he unzipped his jacket and handed Carrie one of the bottles he’d tucked inside it. He slung his jacket on the seat behind him and cracked open his own bottle. “The only other person I’ve brought along is Morris. Besides,” he added, “There wouldn’t be a soundclub if it wasn’t for me.”

Rox chuckled. “Don’t let Woodsy hear you say that.” She turned to Carrie. “Nano likes to make out he’s so magnanimous but we still have to pay for the buds we bring.”

“If I gave out buds for free, Dryce would personally pull my legs off himself,” Nano replied.

“Poor baby,” Rox said, squeezing Nano’s shoulder. She smiled at Carrie and pulled a crumpled paper bag from her back pocket. “Chocolate?” she offered.

Carrie stared at her as if she’d just been offered a four-legged fish.

“It’s the real stuff,” Rox added. “Perfectly legal.”

“Where did you get it?” Nano asked, diving straight in.

“Dryce gave it to me.”

Carrie took a small square of chocolate from the bag and looked at it for a second, wondering if she dared. Once she had this piece, she’d want another and she wasn’t going to get it.

“Dryce is soft on you,” Nano said, popping his piece in his mouth.

“That’s fine, coming from you,” Rox replied.

Nano gave her a puzzled look. Carrie placed the chocolate on her tongue and then rolled it into her cheek so she could suck slowly on it.

“Nano!” Penna called. “Do you know where the next undersound is yet?”

Nano put his drink in the cupholder of his seat, squeezed past Carrie and shuffled along the row to where Penna and Morris were sitting. Rox watched him go and then leant in towards Carrie.

“If Dryce has a soft spot for anyone, it’s Nano,” she said in a low voice.

“Is that why he lets him live in his basement?”

“You know about that?” Rox put a piece of chocolate in her mouth. “It’s because he’s a good dealer,” she continued. “There can be something disarmingly charming about him.”

“You mean the way he annoys you into buying hits?”

“Because it’s the only way to get him to shut the hell up?” Rox laughed huskily and low. “You’ve clearly been a customer for too long. Still, you must be more than just a good customer for Nano to bring you here.”

Carrie glanced across at where Nano was in conversation with the rest of the group, hands in his pockets as he leant back against a chair. She wondered if Savannah had ever been invited to the soundclub and whether she was just repeating history being here. What would be next? A bloodstained cobble pavement?

The surround sound suddenly crackled on and a DANCE track thumped into the theatre space, filling up the air with its high-octane beat.

Rox put her hand to her chest and bopped gently up and down where she was kneeling on the seat. “This music kills me.”

There came a “Whoop!” from the back of the theatre and Woodsy came striding down the aisle, jerking his body awkwardly, but without inhibition, to the music.

“C’mon Rox!” he shouted. “It’s not called a DANCE COMP for nothing!”

“Fancy it?” Rox asked Carrie.

“In a bit,” Carrie said.

The crowded floor of the undersound was one thing, but with just her and six relative strangers in the empty theatre, dancing was too exposing an act for her self-consciousness. Instead, she slumped into her seat and stretched her legs under the chair in front to let the harmonies and rhythms of the track wash over her. Her eyes fixed vacantly on the screen curtains until they became a waterfall backdrop to the musical high that soon rushed through her veins. It didn’t take long for the melody to transport her to a private world of sound where she was no longer aware of her damp jeans and hair, or the cold, stale air of the theatre. Anxiety over her mother’s coming ire at her staying out all day, weariness at the prospect of tomorrow’s early morning shift and all the complicated emotions of pass loss faded too, as if the music had put them on mute.

The sensation was a bit like drifting to sleep with her eyes open and she was mildly startled out of her cosy stupor when she felt a touch on her leg. She refocused her gaze to find Nano stepping over her legs and plopping himself in the seat next to her. He braced his feet on the chair in front of him and took a swig from his bottle as he raised his eyebrows at her. Carrie half-smiled back but neither of them spoke as the DANCE COMP played on.

About halfway through the DANCE bud, Woodsy disappeared into the booth again and soon a POP track took over. Rox came back to join them, bringing Lake with her, and they chatted, drank, recited lyrics, tapped their hands on their knees, twitched to the changing beats of each track, and forgot, for a blissful few hours, that this thing—this itch—that had brought them together was forbidden, and the moment they walked out of the theatre doors, they’d return to an aphonic and insensible world. Eventually, under the influence of a sweetly sad folk song, a lull fell on the group, each of them slumped in their seat whilst the strain of a violin cut the air around them.

“That quote,” Nano said suddenly, in a low, soft voice at Carrie’s shoulder, so that only she could hear. “The one in Savannah’s journal: ‘That strain again, it had a dying fall’—that’s what this is, isn’t it?” He gestured at the theatre, as if to indicate the echoes that filled it.

Carrie shifted slightly to look at him, surprised by his uncharacteristically reflective mood.

“It’s all for that fall,” Nano continued. “The moment in a melody that pierces you—that bitter-sweet pain that tells you you’re still alive.”

He turned his head to meet Carrie’s gaze, and, for the first time since Savannah’s death, Carrie didn’t feel entirely alone. She realised Nano wasn’t just talking about her; all of them in this theatre were looking for the same thing. The trouble was it was a transient experience they had to keep chasing. And now they’d started, they couldn’t stop.

As the track ended, Woodsy swivelled around to look at them from his seat. “Right, he said, checking his watch, “I’ve got to kick you lot out of here if we’re going to make it home before curfew.”

“Rox hasn’t done her thing yet,” Nano said.

“Yeah!” Penna agreed quickly. “We can’t leave until Rox has done her finale.”

Rox snorted from her seat but still swung her legs off the neighbouring chair and got to her feet. “All right, losers,” she said, stretching her arms wide and arching her back as she faced them. “What’s it to be?”

“That JAZZ one,” Morris suggested. “You know, the one that goes ‘It’s a long way down, a long way down, a lo-o-o-ong way down.’”

Penna scoffed at his tuneless rendition. “She did that last time.”

“Did not.”

“You weren’t here, idiot.”

“I like that one from that really old MIX,” Lake jumped in. “It’s got that synthy vibe on the chorus—it was played at the last undersound, near the end of Gubbs’s set.”

“Let’s have that one,” Penna agreed.

“I’ll give you a beat,” Morris offered, beginning to drum on his chair.

He got a slap on the shoulder from Penna. “You’ve got no rhythm, mate,” she said bluntly.

“Hey!”

“It’s true,” Nano confirmed.

Rox smirked as she placed her hands on her hips and rocked gently on the balls of her feet. No one said anything further as they watched her. For a moment Rox’s gaze travelled over them, as if something on the balcony had caught her attention, and then her lips parted and her voice, clear and rich like honey, slipped between them as easy and natural as if she were merely sighing the sound out of her body. Carrie was instantly transfixed and her skin tingled as if a cool hand had brushed against it. She had never heard a sound like it. She had heard people sing before, of course, thousands of times on the buds she’d consumed, but she had never heard a melody sung raw and free, straight from mouth to ear with nothing in between. 

There was something extremely personal about digesting a voice without any mediation, to the point that Carrie felt embarrassed that she couldn’t look away from Rox, who stood with one hand tapping her thigh and her body swaying, not just to the rhythm of the song as it belted out of her, but to the feeling of it—the power of the words and the melody combined. Carrie knew that Rox was feeling what she felt herself when her unvoiced songs visited her in the quiet of the night. Rox wasn’t just singing a song, she was emoting it; and it made the song more alive than Carrie had ever heard it before.

As Rox finished and the last echo of her voice died on the walls of the theatre, Carrie caught Nano’s eye and saw he was giving her one of his usual sly smiles. Carrie knew exactly why he was smiling, but she didn’t say anything and neither did Nano—not until they’d been cleared out of the theatre’s back exit by Woodsy and were walking into the square.

“So, what do you reckon?” Nano asked as they passed under the cobnut tree.

“About what?” Carrie responded innocently.

Nano was typically direct. “About Rox singing for the track.”

“Would she do it?”

“Did you not just see her in there?”

Carrie hugged Savannah’s journal close under her coat and looked up at Nano as they halted by the bus stop. Suddenly, she felt jittery about the whole thing. Her need to bring to life the song her mind had conceived was tussling with a fear that releasing it into the world would awaken a lot of things she’d rather let lie. This song had begun as a secret, and sharing it with Nano had been hard enough. To put the lyrics and music into someone else’s mouth felt like putting her heart between the jaws of a lion. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to take that risk.

And yet…

“Okay,” she said with a shrug. “Might as well ask.”

Nano cocked his head to one side as if he could sense her reluctance and just gave her a single nod. “Usual time, Wednesday?”

“Yes,” Carrie agreed, remembering the list of Nano’s requested scraps in her pocket. Anxiety spiked in her at the risk of stealing from the line again, but was superseded rather quickly by the fear that there would be nothing to take this week. Creating this track depended on getting hold of the components Nano required, but she also needed the money she could get from selling other scraps to Dryce. It was becoming clear to her that giving up the extra cash would not be easy when the time came. It wasn’t just music that was addictive.

As she parted from Nano and hurried home in the drizzle, Carrie chastised herself for evidently becoming the fool she’d sworn she wouldn’t become. As much as she would have liked to blame the miserable quality of her life on someone else, she was actually the problem. Skulking into the dark hallway of her house and upstairs to her room, Carrie caught sight of the faint glow of a candle shining out from under her mother’s bedroom door. He mother wasn’t susceptible to the weaknesses Carrie fell to on a daily basis. Had Carrie inherited them solely from her father? Or was there something fundamentally different between her mother and her that gave her mother the power to resist temptation whilst Carrie helplessly caved? Or was it that her mother wasn’t even tempted in the first place?

As she crawled into bed, Carrie consoled herself that no one who loved music could possibly ignore it. Her mother had never experienced what Nano had described—the dying fall in a melody that pierced your soul so you could be sure you had one. Carrie couldn’t imagine living a life where her inner being was never touched by something as vital as music. Perhaps that was a worse existence than being an addict.

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Next weekend: Chapter 13—Family

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Author’s Notes:

Rox being The Star of Bethnal Green in this chapter. I don’t know about you, but sometimes I find listening to live music an almost religious experience.

Chapter 13: Family, coming next weekend.

PJ