Free A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby Page A

remember; some bands just go out and play their songs a little louder and faster, but we found a way of doing something else; we used to speed ’em up and slow ’em down, and we used to play covers of things we loved, and that we knew the people who came to hear us would love too, and our shows came to
mean
something to people, in a way that shows don’t any more. When Big Yellow played live, it was like some kind of Pentecostal service; instead of applause and whistles and hoots, there’d be tears and teeth-grinding and speaking in tongues. We saved souls. If you love rock’n’roll, all of it, from, I don’t know, Elvis right through James Brown and up to the White Stripes, then you’d have wanted to quit your job and come and live inside our amps until your ears fell off. Those shows were my reason for living, and I now know that this is not a figure of speech.
    I wish I was deluding myself. Really. It would help. But we used to have these message boards up on our website, and I’d read them every now and again, and I could tell that people felt the same way we did; and I looked at other people’s boards, too, and they didn’thave the same kind of fans. I mean, everyone has fans who love what they do, otherwise they wouldn’t be fans, right? But I could tell from reading the other boards that our guys walked out of our shows feeling something special. We could feel it, and they could feel it. It’s just that there weren’t enough of them, I guess. Anyway.
    Maureen felt faint after Jess cut loose on her, and who could blame her? Jesus. I would have needed to sit down too if Jess ever cut loose on me, and I’ve been around the block a few times. I took her outside on to a little roof terrace that looked like it never got the sun at any time of the day or year, but there was a picnic table and a grill out there anyway. Those little grills are everywhere in England, right? To me they’ve come to represent the triumph of hope over circumstance, seeing as all you can do is peer at them out the window through the pissing rain. There were a couple of people sitting at the picnic table, but when they saw that Maureen wasn’t feeling too good they got up and went back inside, and we sat down. I offered to get her a glass of water, but she didn’t want anything, so we just sat there for a while. And then we both heard like this hissing noise, coming from the shadows next to the grill in the far corner, and eventually we figured out that there was a guy back there. He was young, with long hair and a sorry-ass moustache, hunkered down in the dark, trying to attract our attention.
    ‘Excuse me,’ he whispered as loudly as he dared.
    ‘You wanna talk to us, you come here.’
    ‘I can’t come into the light.’
    ‘What would happen to you if you did?’
    ‘A nutter might try to kill me.’
    ‘There’s only Maureen and me out here.’
    ‘This nutter’s everywhere.’
    ‘Like God,’ I said.
    I walked over to the other side of the terrace and crouched down next to him.
    ‘How can I help you?’
    ‘You American?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Oh. Howdy, pardner.’ If I tell you that this amused him, you’ll know all you need to know about this guy. ‘Listen, can you check the party and see if the nutter’s gone?’
    ‘What does he look like?’
    ‘She. I know, I know, but she’s really scary. A mate saw her first and told me to hide out here until she’d gone. I went out with her once. Not like “once upon a time”. Just once. But I stopped because she’s off her head, and…’
    This was perfect.
    ‘You’re Chas, aren’t you?’
    ‘How did you know that?’
    ‘I’m a friend of Jess’s.’
    Oh, man, I wish you could have seen the look on his face. He scrambled to his feet and started looking for ways to escape over the back wall. At one point I thought he was going to try running up it, like a squirrel.
    ‘Shit,’ he said. ‘Fuck. I’m sorry. Shit. Will you help me climb over?’
    ‘No. I want you to