by Hazel Jacobs
“Ah… no. Hang on.”
The phone is muffled as Tommy talks to whoever else is with him. She chews on her lip and ignores the tiny pang of jealousy that twitches through her at the thought that she’s woken the bass player up from a one-night stand. Maybe not even a one-night stand. Maybe he’s in a long-term relationship? He flirts like a single guy, but he’s also so damn good-looking that the thought of him being single is a bit hard for her to swallow.
It’s not as though she thinks that she’s the most important person in Tommy’s life. They had one afternoon exchanging some tame flirtatious comments and a couple of meetings where he had been openly hostile to her. She supposes that the annoyance and jealousy she’s feeling right now is less to do with their previous interactions. It’s similar to the way she used to feel in High School whenever she’d learned that a boy she liked had a girlfriend.
“Sorry… what’s up?” he asks, coming back on to the phone.
“I was hoping to have a work conversation,” she says. She cringes at the almost formal tone of her voice. “You know, because I’m not sure what to write these songs about.”
“You’re… yeah, I’m not sure,” he says. “I don’t even know when we need this done by.”
“Me neither,” she replies. She hears more shuffling on the other end. “You sure I’m not interrupting?”
“It’s fine,” Tommy replies. “Look, I’m not even sure why we need to do this. I really feel like the band should be focused on launching this album before we start working on the next one.”
“You mentioned that last week,” Sersha says, her voice calm though with a slight hitch of annoyance when she realizes where this is going. “And Mikayla says that Bass Note wants it done.”
“Yeah, I know—”
“So shouldn’t we just get it done?” she asks. “The sooner this next album is finished, the sooner you’ll be rid of me.”
Though she’d thought that the flirting and his tacit approval of her demos meant that he was okay with her help. That he would at least try to work with her on these lyrics. But perhaps the reason that she hadn’t been given any guidance is because Tommy is still stubbornly trying to get Mikayla and the rest of the band to sack her.
There’s silence on the end of the line. Not even a shifting of the bed clothes. Then Tommy sighs.
“I’ll talk to Mikayla… see if we can get a concrete deadline.”
“Thank you for committing to that,” she says. “The young lady in your bed will back me up when I ask Mikayla if you’ve talked to her.”
Silence. Then Tommy hangs up.
Sersha sighs and tosses her phone onto the bed. That conversation had drained her happy bubbles something awful.
Her mam used to say that Sersha was chock-a-block, full of happy bubbles. That every day she would wake up and fizzle about, spreading smiles and laughs with everyone she sees. But since she’d moved to America—since she’d walked in on that lunch meeting where Tommy, the bass player slash lyricist she admired so much, was trying to convince the rest of the band not to hire her—her bubbles had slowly gone flat. That conversation, with Tommy not-so-subtly trying to pawn her off with a half-assed excuse about the band’s album launch that hadn’t even worked the first time he’d tried it, had taken the last of her bubbles.
She glances over at the mirror hung up on the wall. Even her wild, nonsensical blonde hair has gone flat in the wake of that conversation.
“Time to change that,” she says to herself.
She straightens her posture and smiles her winning smile. It doesn’t make her bubble.
So she takes her laptop and a sun hat even though it’s February in Manhattan and heads out of her apartment. She walks up four flights of stairs to the roof, which is kept open so that all of the tenants of the building can use the garden plot up there. Naturally, all of the plants are wilted or dead, though there’s a tiny basil bush feebly growing in the center of one of the boxes near the edge of the roof. Sersha wraps her coat more tightly around her shoulders as a gust of freezing wind hits her right in the chest. It gets colder in Galway, but this is still pretty cold.
The Manhattan skyline is white with snow and covered in gray sky. It’s not the place that she would have liked to build up her bubbles again, but she’s learned over the years that trying to do it inside just never works. She needs the open air—even the gross, cold Manhattan air. At least the snow seems clean. The snow on the rooftops and the snow on the street looks like polar bear vomit.
She shoves the hat onto her head because hats on heads make everything happier.
She sets up her laptop and opens MixVibes. She pulls up her dubstep version of ‘Flaming Red Hair.’ She thinks it’s pretty much ready for YouTube, but there’s one test she hasn’t passed. The dance test.
The brief pause before the music starts is always her favorite. The strings enter, the cheerful flutes come in, and then the beat drops.
Sersha grins. The pause at the start is her favorite, but this part is pretty good too.
She lets the beat flow through her, taking over her muscles and bones, making her smile like a fool and feel like she’s floating along on the air. And then she starts to dance.
It’s not the sexy kind of dancing in music videos. Or even the well-groomed dancing of Broadway and ballet. It’s the kind of dancing that people do naked and alone in their houses—all waving arms and shaking booty, and Sersha knows that anyone looking out of their windows will probably see her and think that she’s an escaped mental patient. But then what is the point of humiliating yourself if no one can see it? What is the point of dancing around like a fool if you don’t do it in public?
So she dances like a fool. Pouring out all of her frustration over Tommy’s undermining nonsense and her own lack of direction, or the fact that she doesn’t know what she’s doing in this job or what is expected of her, and that this is her first job in this industry. People would be judging her on this and use that to decide whether to hire her in the future. She puts all of that aside and shakes her butt in time with the dubstep track, before turning into an Irish jig during the fun flutey bits of the song. ‘Flaming Red Hair’ is a wonderful song to Irish jig to.
Her father taught her the jig. Sersha’s father left when she was a kid. She can remember the way he always smelled like cigarettes and the way that he jiggled her on his knee. She can also remember the arguments. Her mam’s studio never made the kind of money that it should have. Her father thought that her mam should have been more invested in running the house, leaving the breadwinning to him. Her mam thought that was a bunch of bullshit. Sersha agreed with that.
The day he left, he packed his suitcase and kissed Sersha on the head.
“I’ll be back in a few weeks, sweetheart,” he’d told her.
A few weeks turned into months, then years. Her mam signed the divorce papers and copped some incredible flak from her deeply Catholic parents, but she’d been free to work and raise her daughter without bowing to the pressure of a man who thought she should be a cleaner instead of a breadwinner. And while she sometimes missed her dad like nothing else, she could never fault her mam for wanting the freedom to work for herself. To create something wonderful instead of supporting other people while they made something wonderful.
That’s why Sersha loves writing songs so much. Because it combines both. She creates something with every song, but the songs are developed and extended by the musicians that she gives them to. They feel like a gift from her to them and then a gift from the both of them to the people who hear it.
‘Flaming Red Hair’ goes for five minutes, then changes into an upbeat, chipmunkified version of Omi’s ‘Cheerleader.’ She’s particularly proud of that one.
She pretends to hold her arms on the shoulders of a man, foxtrotting around the roof as snow begins to fall from the sky. She doesn’t notice until a flake lands on her nose and melts instantly, making her nose twitch. It makes her laugh out loud as she spins herself int
o a semi-graceful, semi-flailing pirouette.
She keeps dancing around her imaginary man. After a while, her imaginary man begins to look an awful lot like Tommy in her head. She imagines his shy, head dipped down grin—the grin she remembers from interviews of the band, but not one that she’s ever seen in the flesh. She imagines his brown hair flopping into his eyes the way that it does when he’s playing bass in one of Black Lilith’s music videos. In her head, she can see the slight curves of his arm muscles and the rumpled purple flannel that he inexplicably likes to wear.
But he’s not dancing with her. He’s at home, with another woman in his bed, trying to come up with ways to convince his band, and his manager, that he doesn’t need to work with her.
But she isn’t going to dwell on that. She’s not going to lose any more bubbles today. She’s going to build up such a reserve of bubbles that the next time she hears from Tommy, she’ll make him sick with how sweet she is. She’s going to fizz until he can’t help but smile at her enthusiasm.
She tells herself that as she swings around, kicking her legs out and going into a jig again. Snow keeps falling all around her, making her feel as though she’s in a fantasy movie. It feels like magic. The music plays through, singing through her blood, and even though she thinks the lyrics could have used work the music itself is gorgeous. It was gorgeous before she got her hands on it.
She keeps dancing until her hands turn numb.
Sersha lets herself into the studio, trying to flatten her hair with one hand and take a drink from her travel mug with the other.
“Morning,” Slate says from next to the mixing board.
He’s got his feet up on the desk, showing off his heavy boots and ridiculously long legs. Slate is handsome in a way that makes Sersha wonder if there is, in fact, a God because that face could only have been hand-crafted by a higher being. It’s almost intimidating. She prefers Tommy’s unassuming, gentle good looks.
“Morning,” she says, still flustered from the trip to the studio.
First, she slept through her alarm. Then her hot water stopped working, and she’d had to shower with freezing water. The bus had been late, she’d slipped on the footpath and landed hard on her ass, and when she got to the studio the security guards had given her a hard time for far longer than necessary.
All that to get to the studio on time, but she looks around the room she realizes that Slate is the only one there.
“Don’t tell me—”
“They’re not late,” Slate says. “They went to get bagels.”
“Oh, well that’s all right then,” says Sersha.
She pulls her laptop out of her backpack and sets it down next to Slate’s boots. He doesn’t move them. His yellow T-shirt is so skin-tight that she wonders if he painted it on, and his hair is messy and oily in a way that should have made him look like a heroin addict, but actually makes him look like an underwear model.
Sersha’s email inbox contains a note from Mikayla. Apparently, Bass Note would like some new demos for the next album by the start of April. Considering it’s February 27, she’s got some time. But she stands by what she’d told Tommy that the sooner they get the job done, the sooner he will be rid of her. She hasn’t spoken to him since the phone call where she apparently pulled him away from a young lady in his bed. She’s still not sure how she feels about that.
“Tommy is still sulking,” Slate tells Sersha. When she looks over at him, she sees his eyebrow raised knowingly. “He’ll get over it.”
“You think so?” she asks, unsure.
“What you’ve got to remember is that our songs are always really personal for him,” Slate says. “They’re personal for all of us, but him especially. They’re all about his life and how he feels… deep shit, and he doesn’t want to work on songs that don’t belong to him.”
Sersha sighs and runs her hand through her messy hair, trying to smooth it down and then giving it up as a lost cause.
“Songs are always personal,” she says.
“It’s different for Tommy,” Slate replies.
Sersha thinks that it was a bit rich for him to assume that the lyricist that Bass Note paired him up with would wind up a tortured artist. When he himself is a tortured artist, so concerned with the purity of his lyrics that he won’t work with anyone on them. But she doesn’t say it. She’s trying to keep the bubbles that she built up while she danced on the rooftop yesterday, and she isn’t going to throw them away on snarking at a man who isn’t even in the room.
Slate is still watching her with a knowing look like he can read her mind.
She opens her laptop and pulls up some ideas for songs that she’d put together the night before.
“What do you think of these song ideas?” she asks.
“I don’t do song lyrics,” Slate says. “I’m mostly here as eye candy.”
“Congratulations on a job well done,” she replies. He huffs out a laugh. “But these aren’t the lyrics, they’re just ideas for songs that I think you guys might like to play.”
Slate leans over so he can read the screen. She turns it so he can see the list better. His eyes dart across the screen, moving much faster than she would have expected him to be able to read. When he’s done, there’s a small smile on his lips.
“Yeah, those are cool,” he says. He leans back in his seat again. “You haven’t tried to write the lyrics yet?”
“Then how will Tommy feel like they belong to him?” she asks.
Slate nods as though he understands completely. “He says that you’re also into mixing and dubstep?” he asks.
“Did he say that in a way that makes me seem like an awful human being?”
He snorts. “A little bit, yeah. But I think that dubstep is awesome.”
Sersha grins at him then pulls up her YouTube channel. Slate pulls her laptop onto his legs and scans the playlist, before grinning and clicking on a mashup of The Beatles and Ke$ha that she’s pretty proud of. He sets the laptop on the table and closes his eyes, bopping his head in time to the music.
“Not bad,” he says. “Why these two songs?”
One thing that Sersha’s mam learned early is to never ask Sersha about her music. Because that’s a great way to not get a word in edgeways for at least an hour. She always tries to contain herself, but when she gets excited all desire to appear like a normal human being goes out the window and she starts gesturing wildly and talking a mile a minute.
Sure enough, within a few minutes, Sersha is talking with her hands and letting her Irish accent take over in her enthusiasm. Slate doesn’t seem to be too rattled, on the contrary, his smile grows wider and wider as she talks, apparently enjoying her decent into madness as much as she is.
The song ends, but her rant does not.
“…Plus it’s such an exciting thing that we can do. Taking the old and the new and mashing them together, isn’t it? You look at the chord progressions and bass lines, and these songs have so much in common, but people react to them so differently. And then the mashup makes something completely new out of two things that already existed. It’s not got ads on it, so it’s not like I’m breaking copyright or anything.”
Her arms are waving so much that she thinks she looks like a manic windmill, but she’s still grinning and Slate’s smirk just eggs her on. That is until her waving hand hits something soft and a gasp of pain sounds behind her.
Sersha swivels around.
Behind her, Mikayla and Logan are in the doorway. Tommy is just inside the room. She didn’t even realize that they were there. She’d been too busy talking and gesticulating to realize that Slate wasn’t her only audience. She feels her cheeks go pink when she begins to wonder how long they’ve been standing there.
Dash is on the carpet next to Sersha’s chair, clutching his crotch.
“Oh, shit…” she says.
At some point, when she was talking animatedly and gesturing wildly with her hands, she’d punched the lead guitarist of Black Lilith in the crotch
.
Her exclamation of horror is drowned out by the sudden burst of noise as everyone else in the room starts laughing. Mikayla and Logan go red and fall over each other. Logan actually clutches his stomach and bends over, his face screwed up with how hard he’s laughing, and Mikayla leans on his shoulder with a hand over her mouth and tears in her eyes. Slate throws his head back and laughs so hard that he snorts, which makes him and the rest of the room laugh harder. He leans back on his chair and points at Dash’s red face as he laughs.
But it’s Tommy who draws Sersha’s eyes. His face is lit up from behind and his eyes are bright as he laughs, less unbridled and wild than the others, but full of mirth. His usually down-turned lips are open and bent into a beautiful smile, and he leans against the wall with his knees bent as though he can’t hold himself up under the weight of his own amusement.
Their eyes meet. His laughter doesn’t slide off of his face like it did the first time she saw him laugh. He just keeps laughing, looking at her the whole time, and she wonders if a person can get high off of a laugh, because if it is then that’s probably what’s happening to her.
At her feet, Dash is still groaning and clutching his testicles.
“Oh… I’m so sorry, Dash!”
Sersha rubs him on the arm because she doesn’t know what else to do. She’s knocked forks out of waiter’s hands with her wild arm movements, but she’s never done physical damage to a person.
Slate’s chair leans back so far that he falls off, landing hard on his back but apparently not hard enough to make him stop laughing.
“It’s okay. I’m okay!” he says through his breathless laughter.
“I’m not!” Dash groans.
Sersha pats him on the arm some more, sheepishly closing her laptop so that she won’t be tempted to play more music and become even more excited.
Finally, everyone calms down. Logan helps Dash up. The lead guitarist waves off her apologies with a chagrined smile. His cheeks are pink and he limps a bit, but she didn’t punch him hard. When Logan is done helping Dash up, he helps Slate up as well. Slate is still laughing when the band heads into the soundproof room full of instruments where they will be recording a demo track for a charity.
