Cuttin' Heads

4

4“We all good?” Aldo asks into the mic, glancing at Ross and Luce in turn. Tuned up, levels set, they nod back.

“Alrighty. Mend the Black. When you're ready, Luce.”

Behind the kit, Luce counts them in on the hihats, setting the rhythm and tempo, one-two-three, one-two-three, then drops into the slow waltzing beat of the intro, accompanied by Ross dropping in with his grumbling fuzzed-out bassline. Aldo hangs back for a few bars while his rhythm section lays down the groove, smiling to himself, rocking back and forth slightly on his heels with his eyes closed. Almost unconsciously, the fingers of his left hand find the frets and strings of his new guitar, falling snugly into position on the neck as Luce goes into a rolling drum fill signalling the end of the intro bars.

One-two-three, one-and-a…

Aldo joins in, strumming out digital chorus washed chords. The new guitar sounds as good as it looks. Etheral and shimmering, hitting all the sweet frequencies. Singing.

Though he's been stressing about it all day, the large chunk of new debt the Les Paul represents doesn't even enter his mind right now. Neither does paying the rent, or even Dylan's child support money, because what's all that compared to this? The notes, chords, riffs, fills, solos and middle eighths? Soon lost in the song, Aldo's problems about money and debt and responsibilities are illusions. Glammers. Real truth, he knows, real grace, is found in moments like these. In verse and chorus.

They play, and the music feels like it washes Aldo clean. The day's worries and shame slide off him like a layer of greasy tattered skin. He doesn't care about being fired earlier. He doesn't care that he's flat broke, living in a cold, mouldy bedsit which he now can't even afford. None of it matters. It all goes away as the moody arrangement of Mend the Black - one of the first songs he'd ever written - flows around and through him, filling him up.

They play, and for the first time that day, for the first time since their last jam three days ago, Aldo is at peace.

An hour and five songs later, they down tools for a smoke break.

Leaving the stuffy college practice room, still redolent with the youthful BO of the day's students, they make their way through the empty corridors of the music wing toward the exit.

Outside, Ross sparks up a joint, fogging the evening air with an aromatically illicit cloud of home grown White Widow. He and Aldo had ordered the seeds from some Amsterdam based website months ago, wrecked one night in Aldo's bedsit and well into a two litre box of cheap white wine and a couple of lines of chico, courtesy of a guy in Ross's work. Until the seeds came through Ross's letterbox one day weeks later, they'd completely forgotten all about their lofty cocaine fuelled plans to get a high quality, Heisenberg from Breaking Bad level grow operation on the go.

Sober, they hadn't expected it to work, but with a bit of Googling and creative jury rigging of lamps, mirrors, tin foil, fans, and the commandeering of the outlet pipe from the back of an old tumble dryer, Ross had somehow constructed a half arsed, but functional enough grow space in his hallway cupboard, where there now lived a respectably bushy wee c******s plant Ross had named Earnest, who kept him and Aldo in free w**d.

Aldo's leaned back against the roughcast wall of the building, watching the cars go past on the main road, his ears ringing pleasantly, hands and fingers still buzzing with the feel of the Les Paul.

“Soundin no bad, eh?” Ross says, passing the reefer.

Aldo takes a drag, enjoying the flavour and blowing an appreciative smoke ring. “Not too shabby,” he replies. And it's not too shabby at all. They're sounding good. They're tight, and the songs are there. Over the past year they've started getting some decent gigs. The Garage and King Tuts in Glasgow. Fat Sam's in Dundee, and the Wickerman festival last year. That was some weekend, Aldo remembers with a smile. The three of them wandering about in a field in Dundrennan, full of acid, music everywhere, watching the fire jugglers as the sun went down. Amazing. They'd shared the bill with Stiff Little Fingers. Not on the same stage of course. Public Alibi played in a small tent off to the side, the one for unsigned bands, but still. They were on the same poster, and that was pretty fuckin cool. There'd been a good crowd packed into that tent watching them, and they'd been getting into it, even forming a modest mosh pit of five or six guys good naturedly knocking the shite out each other.

“The gig at the 13th Note's up on the f*******: page, by the way,” Luce says.

“Cool, cool,” Ross says, nodding. “Should be a good one. Friday night. Ladies night.” He waggles his eyebrows and does a little hip swaying dance move. “Oh yeah.”

“I've said to the students in my class if they don't come to the gig, they're not passing the course,” Luce adds. Aldo guesses she's joking, but with Luce, you're never quite sure, and he's known her for nearly twenty years. She took her music seriously, that was for damn sure.

“Get em telt, Luce,” Ross says, still gyrating his hips, now playing a little air-bass. “Any foxy wee student rock chicks in your class coming?”

“Away you go, ya sleazy bastard. You're nearly thirty.”

“Few years off that yet,” Ross objects. “A couple of boys from work are coming up to the gig as well. I told them it's two for one on voddies.”

“Is it?” Aldo asks.

“No idea.”

“So what you going to do for work, Al?” Luce asks. He'd told them about how his day had gone when they were setting up. He thought Loose Cannon was a decent song title.

“f**k knows,” Aldo says, passing her the joint. “I seriously can't face another call centre.”

“I'll see if there's any jobs going in here.”

“Nice one.”

“I'll have a wee ask about in the hospital as well, dude,” Ross chips in.

“Cheers,” Aldo says. “This s**t needs sorted. I need funds, pronto.” Earlier, in Squinty Ginty's, he'd sat down with his pint, a notepad and pen, and wrote down all his income and expenses. It made grim reading.

The banking app on his phone informed him that he had precisely forty-eight pounds and twelve pence available, which was all that was left of the three grand overdraft currently owed on the account. He'd already had a letter from the bank the week before, giving him notice that they would in fact be reducing his overdraft limit to a hundred pounds in four weeks' time. At the time, he'd called the bank and let them know everything was cool, he'd been in a new job for a few weeks and would start depositing his wages into the account within the month. The Indian lassie on the other end of the phone, who had the unlikely name of Morag, had agreed to Aldo paying off the overdraft by a hundred pounds a month. No worries, he told her. He could afford that. After all, he was a responsible adult with a full time, permanent job.

Then he got fired a week later for not asking an octogenarian if he wanted a credit card.

So, sitting in that dim lit pub, sipping sparingly at a pint he couldn't afford, the income column of Aldo's scribbled balance sheet had read forty-eight pounds and twelve pence (which was really the bank's forty-eight pounds and twelve pence) and the sad little collection of change in his pocket. Without any real hope, he'd opened the iTunes app on his phone and checked the band's account. The seven song EP they'd recorded in a cheap studio and put online a year ago had sold zero copies in the past three months, and less than a hundred since its release. No unexpected windfall from royalties, not that he'd really expected any.

Then he looked at the list of expenses in the other column of his accounting sheet, and knew he had a serious problem.

He already knew he had a lot more outgoing than incoming funds, but seeing those outgoings written down in hard black ink was a kick in the stones. The numbers, bound in inarguable mathematical laws, sneered at him from the page. Rent, food, council tax, child support, internet connection, gas and electric, mobile, payments on the eight hundred pound bank loan he'd taken out last year, the three grand overdraft, and the grand now owed at Coasters Music for his new Les Paul.

He tried to wrestle with the expenses, beat them down into smaller, more manageable digits, seeing what could be cut.

Tesco Value everything when food shopping. Lots of pasta. Other food in tins. In bulk if possible. See about getting a card meter in for the gas and leccy. Find a cheaper tariff for the mobile, or maybe even do without?

He'd have to call the bank, and then the benefits office. He'd been on the dole before, but never quite in such dire circumstances.

Dylan's child support. Christ. He still didn't even want to imagine that conversation with Ashley, but knew he'd have to do it eventually. As it was, he only got Dylan every other weekend.

Aye, and what did you do? Got fired from a job a retarded badger could've got a promotion in. Good luck seeing more of your son now, ya fuckin clown.

Sitting in the bar, his ill-afforded pint soured with guilt in his mouth and a bad case of debt dread crawling on the skin of his forearms, Aldo had decided to take the Les Paul back to the shop. It represented a thousand pounds on the expenses column. Ninety-five quid a month in payments. A debt he could really do without, and which was, after all, a luxury. Not necessary for survival. He'd only had it a couple of hours. Hadn't even taken it out the case. Surely the shop would take it back.

By the time he finished his pint, he'd talked himself into bringing it to jam, just to see what it sounded like. Just to have a shot. Just to say he'd had a Les Paul for a little while. It was the guitar he'd always wanted, ever since the day he'd seen the video for Guns n' Roses' Garden of Eden on MTV, sitting on the floor in the living room in the house he grew up in. He'd only been five or so at the time, but can still remember it clearly. How he'd been awestruck by the sight of the band in that wall-eyed video, all flying long hair, cigarettes, sunglasses and leather. The song. Fast and dangerous, like a machine that could mangle you if you got too close. And s***h, crazy afro flying and shredding the s**t out of that bad a*s riff on his black Les Paul…

That had been it for Aldo Evans. From that moment, he'd never wanted to be anything else other than a rock star, and by the end of the first hour of jam tonight, he'd known he was keeping the guitar. At least until the debt collectors came and took it.

Fuck you, expenses column.

“Who we playing with again on Friday, Al?” Ross asks him now.

“Shattered Twilight. Kinda gothy, heavy Cure type thing going on?”

“Oh f**k. Them? We played with them last year, mind? They're pish.”

“Aye. Strawberry fields. Were you no winching the facepaint off their bass player that night, Luce?” Aldo asks.

“Ya durty mare,” Ross says, nudging Luce with his elbow.

Luce blushes and punches him in the arm.