“What needs doing
then, lads?”
That room isn't
quite an icon to me, yet. My
own room, many Bridgestone
spins away and which I share with the most messy and clumsy “wife”
in the world, has seen so many deep cleans and give ups and accidents
and covered spills and religious notes pinned to the walls and scuffs
and weird collections started on unbalanced surfaces that it cannot
now be changed from having had us live here. It is no longer a cave
with our stuff in, but a little home carved out as a direct result of
our activities. A tiny home, the size of a key cutting shop, that
houses two people, two businesses, five guitars, a million feet of
fabric, a mannequin, an industrial sewing machine, about five-hundred
books, about two-hundred DVDs and games, my hair, and several years
worth of crusted, narcotic-infused sweat.
It's
also got a garden. Full of
weeds.
I
look around
in the morning and see this
place as “my house how I
have it” – a symbol of two lives in the twenty-first century –
rather than as a
problem that needs to be fixed because the gold on the door handle
has corroded, or because that
un-binned empty
box of luxury chocolates is
hindering the passage of
my hand as it reaches over faded-brown
bed sheet stains
for a similarly tinged
shin-kicker.
Trewin's
room, however, where all
still has a touch of clinical
purpose about it (moreso than my cave, anyway),
likely for his sanity, manages
to infuse any given memory I
have with that feeling of “other place” – not
a sense of homeliness or even familiar
workliness.
All this despite the number of meetings, drinkings, listenings, and
other debaucherous rebellions against sensibleness that have gone on
up there that should
make it feel like an old friend.
Sofa
bed piled with cushions, some of us perched on fold-out chairs with
rusting hinges, paint peeling, and padding long since disintegrated
by the sweat of a thousand arses. The twinned smells of stale white butts
and yesterdays M&S yellow-sticker-reduced
Platchula Bean Salad with Cuban Roasted Pecan Tudenza Leaf
Puree and Fresh Chombo-Style Kale and Distilled-Water-Fed
Quinoa Passata fill the
room. The food looks like a half-arsed rockery and sits half on the
floor and half in its plastic bowl. Trewin will occasionally turn
from his computer to pick up the bowl, lick the congealed
butter-death off the fork, and tuck in again. It must be good.
“We
need to get the pre-mix of the album off.”
“Yeah,
and we need to buy some gear.”
“I
don't have any of the stuff I need.” says Seryn.
“When's
the next gig?”
“We
need to book a practice.”
“Are
we having a tech-rehearsal, later?”
Jeb's
in the next room, his clicking mouse sounding like the desperate
pleas of a soldier who, upon
finding himself stranded in a gutted comms room,
wishes
he'd paid attention when his
unit was learning morse code rather than copying off Neville and
sneaking a peek at a cigarette card of Rita Hayworth.
“How
are those videos coming along?”
“Oh...yeah...I'm
just...it's just rendering.”
“Oh,
and we need to get some publicity photos done.”
“Oh
God, yeah.”
“Who
wants a tea?”
And
everybody oooooooohs and says oh,
yes please
– and
relaxes as someone goes and boils the kettle before drying it off and putting water in it. It was stormy
outside while all this was going on, so it was just right. It
was dark grey at midday, the windows were streaming with rain, and
I'd just had some soup and a cigarette. We all felt like cats in
front of fireplaces. Droopy eyed and comfortable.
“So
[yawn] that's
a list of what we need to do, right?”
“Right.”
“Great,
that's that done. So, have I shown you this video yet of a
neon-painted deer riding a powerboat engine attached to a human
skeleton?”
“No!”
Chomp.
TBC
