Free Dead Girl Walking by Christopher Brookmyre Page B

amazed what you can learn about people when you’re around them every waking hour for the best part of a fortnight.
    Such as, bugger all.
    Don’t get me wrong, I found out a lot about their habits, moods, what they ate, sleeping patterns, grooming regimes and even OS preferences, but very little of any real substance. This was, of course, because they were mostly men. I try not to generalise, so I’ll acknowledge that statistically speaking, this was a very limited sample, but my data suggested that men can talk all day about music, movies, books, TV, sport, science, politics, religion and even clothes, but almost never about themselves: their families, their upbringing, their relationships, their ambitions.
    Heike put it more bluntly when she said that men talk about their feelings like they talk about their periods.
    As for who these people really were, I found out more in ten minutes on my laptop than from several days sharing a coach, a dressing room and several hotels. It felt a bit creepy, to be honest, looking up websites to investigate the people I was travelling with, as suggested by the fact that I only did it in my own room. Was that daft? I wouldn’t have felt at all conflicted about doing it if I had just been a fan of Savage Earth Heart, but now I knew these people, it seemed a bit stalkery. However, the whole issue was that I
didn’t
know these people.
    It was a jolt to see my name listed on the band’s Wikipedia page. Worse, the words hyperlinked to some Royal Scottish National Orchestra and National Youth Orchestra pages, where there lurked some truly embarrassing photos from my earlier years, just waiting to be discovered by the curious. Seriously, I’d have felt less squirmy knowing nude selfies had been hacked and posted (not, I should stress, that I have ever taken any nude selfies).
    Scott had been in the band from the start, and it turned out he was Heike’s cousin. She had taught him to play guitar when he came to stay with her on Islay one summer, according to one of the few articles that made much mention of anyone other than Ms Gunn. I was envious of the instant advantage this gave him: even of the fact that her big-cousin status meant she was constantly on his case.
    I found out that Damien was thirty-nine, which was at least twelve years older than I thought. I could still see why I had assumed that, though. He was naturally young, always positive and energetic, by far the least cynical person with regard to his outlook on music, which was even more surprising when I read that he had been around the block a few times. I knew Heike looked up to him due to his greater experience, and I wished I could be calm and impressive around her like he was.
    I learned that Rory was divorced, which was some going for a guy not long turned twenty-five. I was unsure how this made me feel, especially after all the remarks I had heard about being already engaged at twenty-two (even if we hadn’t set a date yet). ‘That’s awful young, is it not?’ people would ask, implying I was making a mistake, or at least hadn’t given myself time to consider all my options.
    Rory had worked as a secondary-school physics teacher until the sudden success of the second album meant he could concentrate full-time on the band. A bit embarrassingly, I also sussed that he had nothing specifically against fiddle players. It was at our Cardiff soundcheck, when the engineer asked me what I wanted in my monitor mix, that it dawned on me that this was what Rory had been talking about when he said he ‘didn’t want to hear any fucking fiddle’. It would have been nice to be able to say that I told him about this and we shared a laugh over my hilarious misunderstanding, but despite learning that he didn’t hate my guts, I felt even more awkward around him after whatever weird mojo had passed between us up on that drum riser.
    I still wasn’t particularly comfortable around any of my bandmates, to be honest. Heike was the one