Grin.

We were dotted randomly around the studio, each of us splayed out across whichever furniture we’d chosen to land on.

Trewin was at the computer, drilling through music. The centre of his forehead was blotchy with large bruises and one section of the wooden desktop was particularly dented. His fingers tapped the keyboard on one side of the desk while across the other side completely his other hand lifted and dragged and slapped against the desk a little wireless mouse which manipulated everything on the forty-inch screen that blocked out the bay window. His back and arms spanned the full width of the desk and at times he appeared to be sleeping, but still moving.

A bear with a streak of thick blood in its fur skulked between us all.

New James was a starfish on an antique chair. His right knee was draped over the armrest and his right arm spiked up in the air, perhaps indicating North. The rest of him poured over the rest of the chair, one third of him compact and secure, the other two low in mid air or piled against the floor.

He opened his mouth and sound came out. Perhaps at one time they were words, but all I heard was a low, amorphous and consonantless moan. It wasn’t pain. I don’t know what it was. It was the sound of floorboards resettling in an empty house.

The bear stopped, stood on its hind legs, roared a roar so loud and long that it became a mutually accepted background—a wholesale replacement of the reality to which we had previously consented—and bounded with heavy thuds over to where New James sat.

Ed was face down on top of the piano, his face mushed into the wood so his lips hung loosely from one side. One arm and one leg were like ivy grown over the naked front of the piano, and every now and then one index finger would tap a key with mechanical precision.

The bear ripped New James’ leg off and started to chew on it. Blood sprayed across the white carpet and cream coloured walls. Some even got me in the face. It was warm.

I was slumped into the sofa so that it was my shoulder blades that hooked into the seat. Otherwise I just lay there like processed stringed-cheese that had all been ripped apart.

Seryn had draped himself across one chandelier, among the cobwebs.

The bear ripped off both of New James’ arms and ate them too. His single-legged torso stayed in the one place, but now it leaked blood. His face was blank.

Then the bear, taking a great gouge from Trewin’s back on its way across the room, headed for the piano. It picked Ed up and threw him in the air before catching him with its teeth. The crunch of Ed’s ribcage was drowned out only by a quick blast of music from the speakers. The middle of the second verse of the eighth track of the new album, I think. New James leaked noise. Trewin grunted. Ed, his body moving like a rag-doll caught in the gears of a Victorian factory floor as the bear chewed on his body, summoned a squeak himself.

Trewin and New James both muttered something simultaneously.

Seryn fell from the chandelier.

I breathed out from my heavy lungs and managed a dead whistle. Eyes swivelled on me.

The bear threw Ed across the room from his mouth. Ed’s body hit the wall with a low thud, leaving blood and a few scraps of skin. This time on its way across the room the bear ripped hard with all his weight at Trewin’s shoulders so both arms came off, though the disembodied fingers continued tapping and working and clicking.

The bear picked up Trewin’s body and threw it out the window. After it had broken the glass, invisible behind the giant screen, I heard it murmur something before hitting the ground outside.

I struggled to swallow a little saliva before the bear turned on me; hunched on its shoulders, sharp, long, and bloody teeth bared, revving like a motorcycle before launching at me with its open mouth.

Like climbing up a deflated balloon.

We were taking it in turns to look out of the broad bay window, into the street, where our eyes searched for the delivery driver.

“Another coffee, everybody?” said New James.

Nobody responded, but he picked up all the mugs and went to the kitchen and started shuffling things around anyway.

The day was bright and the curtains and the paintwork on the windows shimmered in cool light. Ed sat casually on the windowsill, one leg up and bent with his foot perched on the sill’s edge, one leg dangling, toe on the floor but heel in the air. He had trainers on. I sat cross-legged on the floor, shoeless and odd-socked. Seryn and New James were sharing the sofa while Trewin span around on an office chair. I had a throbbing pain in the upper-left quadrant of my back.

“Wee!” said Trewin.

“When do you think he’s coming?” asked Seryn.

“Could be a woman,” Trewin said.

“Oh yeah,” said Seryn.

New James returned carrying five mugs in one hand like a bunch of bananas and a big cafetiere of steaming coffee in the other.

“Not long now, lads,” he said.

“I don’t know,” said Ed. “I’m not happy about it.”

“Me either,” I said.

“Nor me,” said Seryn.

Trewin and New James agreed.

My phone rang. It was management.

“Anything?” she said.

“No,” I said.

“Well, we are where we are.”

“Yep.”

“Just keep on going.”

“OK.”

And I pressed the button to disconnect and looked at everybody.

“That was management. Are we just carrying on like this?”

And everybody responded with great enthusiasm.

The end of work.

Trewin had a giant whiteboard on the floor in the middle of the room. He navigated it like a game of Twister. I was slouching on half a chair, drinking my fifth deep mug of coffee and shoving tobacco up my nostrils until it burst out of my ears. The sun shone outside and while a musical project was up and visible on the computer screen beside the window, the speakers sat undisturbed.

We were plotting, literally, for another project.

The technical term is avoidant. This is avoidant behaviour. I am very guilty of this sort of thing, and that’s why I know it when I see it, and, after years of battering my head against the tendency, wilfully indulge in it. It is the only way to find peace, and you cannot complete a work until you find peace within it—be it the peace of carelessness abandon or the peace of some kind of holistic achievement. A spell of avoidant behaviour is the ageing of the steak. It is the non-watching of the watched pot. It is the abandonment of all heretofore accepted responsibility justifiable only by arrogance and solipsism. No, wait...

Anyway we threw our arms up and down and touched our chins and held our fingers over our mouths and talked about character arcs and thematic development and held our heads. I span around a lot in the old wheelie chair, throwing up ideas about chase scenes and desolate locations while Trewin drew arrows in that whiteboard turquoise colour from person to trait to scene and gave up little chunks of propellant. And then this. And then that. All deeply interpersonal and with a possibility of gaining compulsory attention. Every idea brought forth ten new ones until we had to reign it back in again to keep the whole thing manageable. Never too much. Which trapdoors should we leap over, and which should we sidestep?

But we never lost enthusiasm, which was good. Tiredness came but it came after we'd worn good routes on the island in the middle of the floor. We smiled as we gave up but I looked out the window and said how I didn’t like the day. I’d left the house without a jacket for the first time in months.

Ed arrived and my brain was a broken cog, whirling to no effect, so I left. On the way home I was so cold I sang to myself to distract from it.

The next few weeks will bring a lot of work that we are in no way prepared for. Such is the method.

Buy and sell.

We had cancelled another meeting, and with the freshly neutered day I walked into Brighton to meet Woman from her dungeon of work.

The two of us were ten jovial minutes from home, and just walking into the gigantic Hove Tesco, when management called me on the phone.

“Pick up a basket now,” I told Woman.

Management laughed through the speaker.

We sauntered through the vegetable aisle as management talked about the release of the new album. Woman picked up a cauliflower and looked at me with her eyebrows raised. I nodded.

I jabbed an excited finger at the courgettes. Woman scrunched up her face. 
 

On the way here we had passed a man talking loudly on his phone.

“Yeah. Yeah, that’s a difficult one to challenge,” he said into his hand.

Woman and I walked a few steps in the night, then talked without looking at each other.

“It is,” she said.

“It’s a very difficult one to challenge,” I said.

“It’s true. It can’t be denied.”

“I know.”

And then there I was, not ten minutes later, hanging out beside the vine-ripened tomatoes and loudly talking lead times and effective project management and revenue streams into the ears of shelf-stackers and mothers wearing slip-on shoes.

I walked casually and mulled the Philadelphia while management chatted about things that would happen, and what my part to play would be and why they would be good. Since these things were first mentioned, maybe a week or two before, I’d discovered a little burst of enthusiasm in myself which was helping things fall out of me here and there that might be of use. I had, in fact, been working.

But now management talked of opportunities and of plans and of reality. And of history. And of potential. These are things that I have faced up to before and found no benefit in. Maybe they excite some people—but not me. The last time I started to touch on those things and what they might mean, I developed a chronic pain condition.

So the floodlights shone on the minced meat and I picked some up, as Woman and I had decided to have bun-less burgers for tea. I make very good burgers. It’s something I make well without really thinking about it. I felt good about making dinner.

I told management that I’d been working hard on creative stuff and that I would send her what I’d done.

I felt empty when I hung up. I figured that from here on in I would be forced to open up a little more than I’m comfortable with. Sometimes I get caught in strange little loops of solitary habit that only get shown as the waste-of-time/road-to-absolute-misery they are when somebody asks me about what I’ve been up to, and I have to turn up my palms and show them. Suddenly I’m going to have to open the box of mystery and show off what I’ve been hiding in there. And now that that’s about to happen, I don’t understand how I got here. I don’t understand why there’s a box. I don’t understand why I’m in this room. Stop looking at me like that. I don’t know why you’re treating me this way. It’s just a box. It’s just a few pieces of paper. I don’t know what they mean. Please don’t make me scream. Not here in the middle of Tesco. I just wanted the burgers. I just wanted to walk Woman home. She’s buying mayonnaise and rainbow peppercorns. How did things end up like this?

The reason the meeting was cancelled was sickness. That’s a good one. I'll have to use that.

Rosy.

Our manager was due to drive up from the South West, but she had to cancel due to the snow on the roads.

Things were running fairly smoothly, she told us, but sometimes she likes to come up and check we’re all OK and tell us what plans she’s made, what people she’s been talking to, what our aims need to be for the next few months—things like that. These meetings have a reputation as ending up a bit boozy, but that’s slowed down a little, of late.

One thing that has perhaps contributed to this has been a change of location. It’s been about a year now since we moved operations out of the shared house and into our palatial studio. The thing is, though… I liked that lampshade. Well, it wasn’t a lampshade as such. It was a shirt. It was a perpetually damp shirt, draped around a lightbulb.

Our manager is happy we’ve moved on. She would often stay over in the house, and I have no doubt that her drive home the next day would necessarily include a stop at a pharmacy for some kind of cream or other.

“You’re manager of Phoria, right?” The pharmacist would ask.

“Yes.”

“That place on the hill?” 

“Yes.”

A pitiful shake of the head.

“...this one’s on me.”

And our manager would limp to her car with a crooked back, smothering herself in ointment with both hands.

But I liked the place. We could kick the floor, there. Things peeled and fell apart. The house stank with the effort of slight improvement, but we were never able to lift ourselves out of the swamp. The doors all sat uneasy on their hinges—especially the ones removed from their frames and stacked against the wall, blocking the hallway. Vacuum cleaners ran, but they rumbled like 4x4s over the black encrusted lumps of chewing gum that enhanced the carpet. Tables looked like bits of trees that had rotted into shape after being thrown into the room. Cushions burst unevenly with makeshift stuffing and dusty display cases creaked every now and then, holding unread books and unused old toys found and brought in from the street for no other reason than that they needed a home.

The front garden had boat engines and a moss covered sofa with springs sticking out of it, and you had to walk through overflowing rubbish to get to the front door, which you had to break in to, because nobody had a key.

When it rained, and you were in the house, you had to put a jacket on.

We used to sit in the lounge and treat it like a railway waiting room. Any ghosts in the house no doubt looked on and grew fearful of us all. We were often disturbing and rarely sober, passing sheets with figures on showing how we were doing, discussing release strategies and whatnot before folding the pages into ashtrays and later on mopping up beer with them. Everybody smiling, sitting on the floor, laying across each other and listening to music and talking about where we were heading.

Now we do things in a chandelier strewn cathedral. The walls are pure white. There’s a picture rail. The windows are large and look out onto trees. The place is filled with antique furniture that’s comfortable. The carpet is actually fitted.

I can’t pretend it’s not nice. And I also can’t pretend there aren’t little islands of squalor that speak of who we are—but they’re islands on a calm sea. The old place was one single tempestuous bog. I loved watching the bubbles rise out of the swamp and burst. That doesn’t happen any more.

(I also love the chandeliers and the ability to breathe and the relative fearlessness with which I now enter the studio, but that’s beside the point.)

So instead of driving up, our manager booked us in for a conference call, and I joined in from home—a damp, bug infested hole in the ground near Hove seafront. Home. I drank coffee brewed in a stained espresso maker on a crooked oven that snaps the electric if you turn it up too high, and sat in unwashed clothes on a paint-stained chair while we talked about everything we were going to achieve. I cooked bacon and sniffed richly at abandoned glassware while she talked. My eyes were dry. It was cold, because of the drafts, but I wore layers and spoke calmly.

Tim

Slow-forward.

The cold bit me hard on my way to the studio.

There was plenty of work to do, but what needed doing was known, so it was very easy to put it off. It needed to be put off, in fact. We’d been slapping our foreheads against a government authorised plastic wall for months. The coffee was already brewing as I entered. The kitchen was thick with steam and bandmates.

We moved into the recording room and Ed and Trewin drank their coffee and chatted about bikes, I think. Maybe engines or something. I don’t entirely remember. I don’t altogether care about engines. I’m not one of the engine people. I can’t stand over an engine and enjoy it. I mean, not really enjoy it, like engine people do. Sometimes I think I’d like to, but then I remember that I don’t care at all. Is that clear? I don’t like engines. Am I getting through? Hello?

Seryn and I sat in silence until I put forward the idea, for no reason other than fun, of watching something I’d found the night before. I could feel the conversation winding down (like an engine), and felt very much that this slow (like an engine (which I don’t like)) start (like an engine) to the day should be maintained (like a loving relationship). 

"Do you want to see something awesome?" I said.

"Sure," they said

So, with the chilling wind howling outside, we sipped on steaming coffee in our grey, unlit recording room, and watched this video together in a singular, comfortable silence: 

That’s the voice of HAL, there. And a clear influence on many of our favourite things. It’s a cool little nugget, no? Very few engines—that’s what I like best about it.

So then we were ready to drop back into work. Sit, listen. Suggest. Maybe this here, maybe this there. Entire songs needed reworking, but nobody was rushing. There was rushing that had been done, and rushing that were yet do, but for some reason on this particular day nothing was urgent, nothing needed to be done in a panic, and the time in which to get everything worked out was plenty. Our transport was casual—unmotorised. This suited me, you could guess. Oh yes. Everything was soft. We rode the waves between projects. One beat didn’t work. We took a note. Some harmonies were too complex; too much for a person to do. Retract. Redact. Unwind the twisted thing. Slow it all down. No need to grind uphill, dear friends. No need for horsepower. Surf gravity. Make your mode of transport a stolen ASDA trolley.

This splendid day inspired a small offering, which I hope tells a story:

Nothing there was crisis,

and nothing there was war.

A deadline is a noble aim,

but ever nothing more.

Tim

No.

He still didn’t look right.

When I got in, Ed and Trewin were bickering over the implementation of our new inter-band messaging system. The system came along with a whole bunch of news email addresses, apps, and all the elements of integration that make the modern world such a great place to hang out.

To recount that actual conversation would be nothing more than the kind of tennis match you’ve heard a thousand times. Was it a tennis match, or was it an endless relay race? More like getting drunk and lost at a party. There we have it—the goings on in this band either scale the heights of an ornate skill set or devolve into the most granite-brained stupidity. And it is never possible to know which one it is at any given point in time. All we know is we breath, and we’re ugly, and there’s always something to do for somebody, somewhere. Our crunched-up and stepped-on shells have pierced our soft insides.

So Trewin was crumbling under the pressure of a new app. He was lost in the wilderness of words on a screen. I couldn’t blame him—he had been staring at the same computer screen, sat in the same chair, sleepless, dreamless, and with only a limited depth of tenderness for about seven weeks straight. What I thought was dust on the piano keyboard was actually dirt from unwashed fingers.

Ed, Seryn, and I showed him how you can share music instantly on the new system; how quick, easy, and beneficial it was once you looked at the screen and took in the words rather than tried to make them bend to your will. I wouldn’t put it past the man to call up the particular multi-national company that makes this system and—after much talking, holding, and department hopping—convince them what to change and what to scrap. I’m sure I once caught him on the phone to Heinz whining about the inevitable regression of society when the logo of a basic foodstuff impresses a childish nostalgia on an entire public. Or maybe it was him catching me.

I want to forget what I know and learn to hate what I love.

Beans.

So we settled the issue of the system. He would...basically do what he always did, and not talk to anybody anyway. Meanwhile, the file sharing system was good. He could work it. We rearranged things better to his liking while he showed us why it was pointless, terrible, and an interruption to his day.

He rolled and lit a cigarette, grimacing and hissing as he inhaled, but brightening immediately.

His eyes were bulbous, his skin grey, and his voice was that of a sad dog.

We listened to a track that needed work. We thought it was finished months ago, but on this listen something seemed a little off. Could it be that as the other tracks have been polished and buffed and improved, this one had fallen a little behind the curve? But we thought we’d finished it! This was the one about which there were no doubts! We all loved it before! What’s it doing now, tormenting us like this!?

All of our phones beeped with a new incoming message. New James had sent a message concerning Trewin’s problems with the system.

Stop being an idiot. It’s easy freaky lemon squeaky.

The track continued to play, and the meandering structure caused a loss of interest.

Trewin folded his arms on the table, smacked his head on them, and moaned.

“Oh God,” he said, “kill me now.”

“Don’t worry,” I said, “just work on it and send it over.”

Tim

Yes.

When I walked in the door, he span around and eyed me gleefully.

‘I’ve had no sleep,’ he said.

‘I bought biscuits.’

‘Nice.’

I laid them on the desk among the cigarette butts stuffed straight into the table and coffee cups with whole gardens growing out of them. I sat on the piano stool, removing from it a pair of suspicious underwear.

Ed pointed at the chandeliers. He’d replaced a couple of the two-hundred light bulbs that had nearly all blown.

‘Nice one,’ I said. ‘The place looks better.’

Ed smiled as he reclined on the antique sofa. He’d hired the Rug Doctor a week before and was riding the crest of a foaming wave.

‘I’ve had no sleep. I need a cup of tea,’ said Trewin as he span around in his terrifically engineered chair. It was the kind of chair that an Italian technology-fantastist might baulk at for being too gaudy. Visibly, it was a locomotive.

Seryn walked in, handing Ed and Trewin two dirty pint glasses in which puddles of creamish liquid sloshed about.

Trewin took a glug.

‘Cold,’ he said, looking blankly at Seryn.

‘Yeah, I know,’ he said, ‘That's because I left them on the side for about fifteen minutes.’

‘The biscuits are nice,’ said Ed.

Seryn and Ed went to Seryn’s room to set up a new synthesiser while Trewin and I sat and chatted about very little of note. When is the album coming out? How are we? That sort of thing. Predictable. Unimaginative. Of little or no note. Trewin played the same fourteen seconds of music over and over again for the longest time, tinkering with a graphic equaliser which sat in a little box inside a little window inside a project in another window which filled a screen packed with squares and other oblongs and infinite simulated knobs drawn on to all colours of pixelated pretend equipment. The bass elements of a distant whining sound phased in and out, ever-so slightly.

The music stopped.

‘I don’t know what I’m doing any more,’ he said.

He leaped out of the chair and went to microwave his tea as an atonal trumpet sound blasted at concert volume from Seryn’s open door.

Tim