Sliding Down the Sky (7 page)

I’d told him about the diner fiasco, for what it was worth. I think I was hoping for some insight, which, it turns out, I didn’t get.

“No.”

Not for lack of trying, though.

“I’m guessing they’ve been busy with the opening. I ran into Leo at the gas station yesterday, he looked pretty ragged.”

“I’m not surprised. They’ve taken on a hell of a lot of work. That place was a dump before it closed down. I can only imagine what eight years of neglect would’ve done to it.”

It had been Jack’s idea to go to the opening tonight. Ally wasn’t a fan of being in an enclosed space with hordes of people, and I couldn’t blame her. She’d have to use her crutches and braces, which meant that one wrong move could send her flying. But he’d sold it to her by saying it was a business proposition. If the bar did well, Leo and Gemma might want to extend their lease, which was good business for them as landlords. Ally, I guess, took it to heart. I also suspected – as I’m sure Jack did – that the other reason she was going was to prove to him that she could handle it. She was as stubborn as she was beautiful. If she wanted a baby, it would take the combined forces of the galaxy to stop her. I did feel for Jack. He better make up his mind that he was ready for it, and it better be soon.

I took another sip of beer, just as Ally and Maggie finally emerged from the bedroom.

“Hallelujah!” I cried, throwing my hands up in the air. “It’s a miracle!”

Maggie flipped her long blonde hair over her shoulder, and I noticed she was wearing Ally’s black Pearl Jam t-shirt with her jeans.

“Half an hour and you come out wearing that?” I asked, standing up. “What the hell took so long?”

“You think it’s easy, looking this good?” Maggie quipped, grabbing her handbag and standing at the door. “Are we going or what?”

I threw down the last half of my beer to quell my nerves – nerves that had been sitting at the bottom of my gut, twiddling their thumbs until now. What I needed was several beers, consumed in quick succession.

Maggie was the designated driver tonight, by rotation, and we piled into her car and headed for the other side of town.

“What’s with the name, anyway?” Maggie asked, as Ally searched for a decent radio station.

“I wondered about that myself,” I mumbled, taking in the suburban neighbourhood via the street lights. “What kind of name is Sass? Must be short for something. God knows what, though.”

The car fell silent and I looked over at Jack, who was sitting beside me, grinning.

“I meant the bar’s name,” Maggie chuckled. “Man, it’s pretty clear to see where your head’s at tonight!”

Jesus. I needed to get a grip, and fast.

“Anyway,” Ally said, coming to my aid. “It’s pretty cool that they’re having live music. It makes Harry’s jukebox look kind of crappy.”

“Ooh! Leave it there!” Maggie said, nodding approvingly at Ally as Counting Crows’
Einstein on the Beach
blared through the car speakers.

“Rock, apparently. And soul.”

I didn’t say anything about the country music Sass had mentioned because I knew Jack wasn’t a fan. Also, I didn’t trust myself to say anything else.

“Leo seems pretty cool,” Jack offered. “I went around a couple of days after they’d moved in, just to make sure everything was okay, and they have a piano in the living room. They must be a pretty musical family – he showed me his guitar collection. I say collection, because he’s got three.”

“So he plays piano and guitar?” Ally asked, turning around.

“Apparently, yeah. Wonder if they need a singer?”

He began to sing along with the radio, loudly and off key.

“Okay, enough!” Maggie yelled over the music. “Cease and desist! Please! I’ll buy the first round if you just shut up!”

He immediately quietened down.

“Cars are for amateurs – I sound way better in the shower.”

“Now there’s a stage show I wouldn’t mind seeing,” Ally said, giving Jack a playful wink.

Maggie laughed like a hyena, but I had trouble raising a smile. He was keeping a secret from her that could change everything. It made me nervous, like the ground was shifting beneath my feet. If Jack and Ally could fall apart, what hope did anyone else have?

“With the power of soul, anything is possible.”

– Jimi Hendrix

Sass

My heart felt like it was about to jump right out through my ribcage. Collecting coffee from the diner when it was practically empty was one thing, but serving drinks to a room full of people was something else entirely.

I tried to keep busy, working through the checklist that Leo had hastily scribbled on a piece of paper. It helped to keep my mind off things. I thought I was doing okay, too, until the band turned up.

Leo let them in, and I tried not to pay them too much attention as they unpacked and began to go through the motions of a soundcheck. This was all part of normal life, I told myself. Don’t pay any mind to them, just let them do their thing. It sounded like straight-forward, sensible advice, but it didn’t take into consideration the emptiness that hummed like a tuning fork inside me.

I hated them.

No, not hated them – was jealous of them. Jealous as hell. Green with envy. I could feel the jealousy burning a hole in my carefully-constructed mask. It felt like my face was on fire.

I couldn’t look at them. I tried to pretend everything was fine, all the while staying away from Leo, just in case he guessed. He had enough to worry about without me freaking out about a little live music. Why the hell didn’t I just tell him how hard this was for me?

Because it’s not fair. It’s not something he can fix.

It wasn’t all about me. This was his dream, his bar. Like I’d told Callum in the diner, I was just the hired help. I didn’t call the shots here, and live music was our point of difference. We needed it, he was right. Otherwise this was just another bar, destined to blend in when I knew he wanted it to stand out. He deserved to have exactly what he wanted.

I hid in the hallway as the soundcheck continued. It was torture. I took a deep breath, letting it out slowly as I sagged against the wall at my back. I closed my eyes, as if that would drown out the twang of the guitar, or the bass player messing around. Having nothing visual to hang on to just made it worse. The music became everything. Every note was accentuated.

I could hear it in the way they talked to each other over the music. The excitement in their voices was toned down, but it was there. That passion, that love of playing. It was all so clear, especially to me, because I’d had that too, once.

The memories began to crowd in on me, filling up the emptiness and pushing my body to the brink. I felt like a balloon in that crucial second between not being full enough, and about to burst. I was walking on a knife’s edge, and it was cutting into my flesh.

Breathe.

Standing on stage, in front of thousands. The first note played, reverberating through the air around us. The excitement as the crowd picked up on the song. The guitar in my hands, vibrating through my ribs as the music filled the space between my head and my heart, picking me up and taking me along for the ride.

Breathe!

I forced myself to breathe in through my nose, out through my mouth, over and over again until I realised I’d have to get back out there before Leo came looking for me.

It was one thing hearing Leo play his guitar in the house, it was another to be confronted by this. The memories were too much, the sense of loss was enormous.

I remember in the hospital, looking down at my bandaged arm and feeling my music ebbing and flowing through my veins. In my highly medicated state, my grief and my music were inextricably linked. I could feel the music inside me, as if it were searching for a release, some way to escape from my soul. With my hand gone, my arm a mess, and consumed with guilt, it dried up like autumn leaves, crumbling to dust.

I couldn’t play anymore, and I didn’t want to sing. In my twisted, tortured mind, if I couldn’t do one, I didn’t want to do the other. I didn’t know if Leo quite understood that. He still asked me to join him from time to time when he played, but I couldn’t bring myself to. It would’ve felt like recklessly tearing open a wound that may never heal again.

I didn’t have it in me anymore. It was gone, ripped away from my body, just like my hand.

The days after he found me in my apartment were a blur, but there was one moment I’d never forget. I was curled up on my bed, with my bedroom door permanently closed. I could hear him playing his guitar through the walls, and it unravelled my tortured mind. I couldn’t understand why he would do that to me, when he knew how broken I was. I burst out into the living room and begged him to stop. I wanted him to see how much he was hurting me.

He put his guitar down. Then he told me that music would save me, I just had to let it.

I had no idea what he was talking about. My music had left me – didn’t he get that? No more piano, no more guitar, no more words or chords or melodies or harmonies. No more bridges or choruses. Nothing. Gone. All of it.

Still, he didn’t give up. Eventually, when my head began to clear months later, it didn’t hurt so much. A new realisation crept up on me. He had already sacrificed so much for me, helped me in more ways than I thought were even possible. He shouldn’t have to give up playing, too. It made him happy when I listened to him. I could see it in his face. I think he thought I was being healed, somehow… God knows how. I didn’t have the heart to tell him it wasn’t the magic of music, it was the magic of him, my big brother, his huge heart and incredible capacity for loving me, even when I couldn’t love myself.

But watching others play, that was a level of pain I was not prepared for.

“Sass?”

Shit.

I pushed myself upright just as he rounded the corner into the hallway where I was hiding out.

“Just checking stock,” I said hastily. “Everything okay out there?”

He gave me a look, like he knew something was wrong but he didn’t know whether to ask me about it or not.

“It’s fine,” he said, making his choice. “I’m gonna open the front doors. You ready for this?”

No. Not really, not by a long shot. I had to fake it. It was the only way.

“There's no way around grief and loss: you can dodge all you want, but sooner or later you just have to go into it, through it, and, hopefully, come out the other side. The world you find there will never be the same as the world you left.”

– Johnny Cash

Sass

For a small bar, The Church was humming. It sat on the corner, a couple of steps leading up from the pavement to the double doors, now painted glossy black, set with the original old brass handles. The dark red carpet was original too, but freshly cleaned. The furniture had been mostly replaced by new stuff, but it was new stuff that had an old vibe. Leo had put in a new sound system, the best quality he could afford. The bar itself ran the length of the narrow room, with the stage at one end and a small dancefloor cleared in front of it. It was a galley bar – long and narrow. The atmosphere was carefully cultivated by Leo to be both comfortable and comforting. The dark red walls were adorned with gig posters from rock concerts he’d attended, ranging from the 1990s to more recently. Mounted in glossy black frames, they were his pride and joy and he’d been collecting them for years. Finally, they had a place to be. I was jealous.

I’d spent some time the day before going around the bar, looking at them. He didn’t have any of me, or of himself when he was playing. I was equal parts relieved and miserable. He should be proud of what he’d achieved, but he’d sacrificed that for me, too. Just in case people asked questions, or put the pieces together.

I’d gotten used to the bar being full of either workmen or just the two of us, and sometimes Gemma and Aria too, as we rearranged or cleaned things, getting everything ready for the opening. But now our humble little space had been invaded by noise and chaos and a room full of strangers. We were bursting at the seams, the live music thankfully blending into the background as I concentrated on listening to the orders coming over the bar.

“Four beers.”

“One whisky, neat; one Coke, no ice.”

“Three beers; one OJ.”

“Six beers and six tequila shots.”

They just kept coming. Leo took care of one end of the bar, I took care of the other. The cash register was in the middle, and every now and then we’d take a moment to swap a word or a look. The place was overflowing and he couldn’t have been any happier, or more relieved. He didn’t say as much, because that wasn’t his style, but I could see it, clear as day. I was happy for him.

As for me, I was getting better at dealing with the bartending thing, on the whole. It took some juggling and a lot of forethought, but I kept telling myself that I just needed practice, and I was getting a lot of that.

Gemma came in briefly with Aria. It wasn’t really the place for kids, but I knew they both wanted to show their support and I was grateful for the friendly faces. Gemma had worked just as hard on this place as Leo had, and she wanted it to work out just as much, if not more. Probably for the same reasons I did.

I served a customer, watching the three of them out of the corner of my eye. Leo gave Gemma a brief hug before he took Aria off her and introduced her to the patrons on the other side of the bar. Aria charmed them all, smiling coyly before burying her face in his shoulder. My heart swelled. He was so proud of her. He made it all look so effortless – having a family, providing for them, keeping them safe. And then there was me. He never once made me feel like a burden. He included me in this momentous dream of his as if it was always meant to be this way, when we all knew it wasn’t.

Gemma caught my eye and walked over to envelop me in a warm hug. I knew she understood how hard this was for me, perhaps even more than Leo did. She was easier to talk to than Leo, not because she loved me any differently but because she was a woman. Women thought about things differently. It helped that, as close as we were, we weren’t sisters. The foundation of our relationship was that we were friends first, family second. I loved her straightforward and sensible approach to everything, as well as her flair for knowing exactly what to say at precisely the right moment. It had helped me through a lot of bad days. I loved her sincerity, the fact that she didn’t do anything for show. Everything she did, she meant from the heart.