Free Sea Change by Jeremy Page Page B

So lovely to be coming to him from before , before anything bad happened to them. He hears innocence in it. She’s bringing the band into one spirit, and then he listens to himself playing the piano, kicking off the jaunty intro to Tidal Joe . Within three bars Fergus has joined in on the fiddle, helping the piano with a messy rhythm before Cindy starts playing a muffled beat on the snare and Phil does a looping bass line on the guitar. It sounds really fresh to Guy, now, as he listens to it, waiting for Judy’s voice to come in once again. He hears an oyster-catcher, caught on the CD, calling from one of the creeks with an off-tempo pic-pic-pic , just before Judy sings The boat smells of diesel and pots full of crab , a cheeky male inflection in her voice, evoking a sea-shanty, then she softens into the song proper, slowing the whole band down with a lilting rhythm that occasionally catches them out.
    It’s so evocative. They made that CD on a sunny autumn day. Fergus had set a huge jug of coffee on the trestle table at the back of the garage next to a fruit bowl filled with greengages, picked from his own tree. Fergus had been in a great mood. Picking fruit did that to him. He liked to provide.
    Fergus and Cindy had only just moved into the house - a former warden’s cottage on an island in the Blackwater estuary. To get to it you had to wait for low tide, before driving across a length of stone and seaweed causeway which was simply known as the Hard. It was an enchanting place. As you crossed the causeway, with the slick flat mud on either side, you saw the island from the seabed’s perspective - rising from the estuary, girdled with a dirty high tide mark, and capped with a green mass of trees and hedges.
    It was a great sight to see Fergus wrapping himself round the fiddle, as if he might accidentally snap it in two, with strings fraying as the bow sawed the notes, a far-away grin on his face and a gimlet tooth glimpsed between his lips. Cindy would stare at him, amused, both of them wearing similar clothes as if they were brother and sister dressed by the same mother.
    Fergus and Cindy, Guy and Judy, the two couples of the band - Phil must have felt isolated having just agreed to join them, Guy considers, remembering how nervous Phil always seemed, stringing and restringing his guitar, smoking too much, reluctant to take his jacket off, ever. The key makes a shift in the song and the sound of Phil’s guitar lifts to the front. That was good, Guy thinks, how Phil naturally brought the plucking forward, creating his own space in the melody. Yeah, Phil was a good guitarist, Guy thinks reluctantly, shame he was such a fool in so many other ways.
    ‘That’s nice,’ Fergus says on the recording at the end of the track, not out of ego, but because the music always affected him. ‘Yeah,’ Phil adds, in his East Anglian whine.
    Guy lets it play, thinking something might reveal itself across the years. There’s a lot of silence and some things are said he can’t make out. The sound of a band between tracks is a peculiarly expectant space - isolated notes, the twists and squeaks of tuning pegs - it’s music unmade, unmachined. Cindy tries a few beats of the rhythm again, and Phil does an abrupt and fast riff on the E string, then starts to tune it even though it’s already in tune, turning it down a quarter of a tone, turning it up again, settling where it was. He wants to drop tune it already, the clown. Guy remembers how Phil loved to pluck the string then pull back the headstock to bend the note. Do that too often and you can snap a guitar. A show-off. Guy can hear someone pouring out coffee and he thinks it might be himself, now standing at the back of the garage, and he remembers distinctly how he’d eaten one of those greengages and watched how Judy was sitting, on a Lloyd Loom chair by the microphone, in a dark bomber jacket, with her legs crossed once at the knee and then at the ankle too.
    ‘You OK,