Sophie's Encore (10 page)

Very carefully and deliberately, I pressed the ‘on’ button and waited for the display to light up. Talking myself through the task at hand, I connected the flash drive and waited for the song to load on to the system. Next, I saved it under “Working Title” and made sure I ejected the flash drive so there was no way I could corrupt my source file.

So far, so good. I put the flash drive to one side, feeling shaky and exhilarated all at once. I had actually put the console to work and managed the first vital task of my project. The song was loaded and ready. Now I could begin my job.

I allowed myself a couple of minutes to collect my thoughts. The whole situation reminded me of being alone in a car for the first time after I passed my driving test, suddenly being in charge of a potentially lethal machine all by myself. It had been an awe-inspiring and frightening moment, and this felt similar.

Yet all of a sudden, I knew how I wanted to proceed. I rooted around in a drawer for a notepad and a pen and installed myself to the left of the mixing console so I could write. Pen poised and pad ready, I pressed ‘play’ and waited for the music to fill the room.

Drums first, a gentle tapping of drum stick on cymbals followed by a couple of beats on the snare. The sound was slightly hollow, as though the drummer had been in a church. I wrote down on my pad,
Drums. Gentle. Hollow
.

Dan started singing, and his voice was loud, too loud for the drums. I wrote down,
vocals too loud; pull back, reverb
.

And so I continued, taking notes of my impressions through the song. I listened to it several times, adding notes to my music map and starting to write out the lyrics as well. Lyrics mattered greatly, to me and to Dan, and they would hold the key to how I would mix and master the song. I chuckled at myself and told myself to tread carefully. The danger, as Dan had warned me many a time, would lie in feeling over-confident, in settling too fast on a strategy or plan without truly listening with my ears
and
my heart.

In the end, I spent the entire morning listening to the song over and over again. It was a classic rock song, hard and fast, but melodious and lyrical. Or it would be, once I was done with it. I jotted down priorities. Mixing and balancing the tracks was first on my agenda. Dan had left me a really raw recording, and I would have to satisfy my inner sense of ‘right’ for the song before I could start thinking about effects.

Time flew faster still than it did with Dan beside me, and I noted, with only minutes to spare, that I would have to leave quickly to collect Emily on time. I closed down the DAW and switched off the light before racing upstairs and shouting a cheery ‘goodbye’ to Jenny, who was hoovering the lounge.

“Wait!” she shouted just as I made it to the front door. “Wait, you’re forgetting your keys!” She caught up with me and proffered a set of keys.

I looked at her quizzically. “Won’t you be here tomorrow?”

“Nah, I’ve got the rest of the week off, with Mr. Hunter gone and all that. I’ll be back on Friday evening to make sure the house is warm and to prepare some food for the weekend. You’ll be all right tidying up after yourself when you work here, won’t you?”

I nodded, unable to speak for a moment. The keys lay heavy in the palm of my hand. It was the same set that I had been given before, when I had lived with Dan for a few weeks after a fire had ended my thirtieth birthday party and rendered my flat uninhabitable. When I had first set eyes on but not yet met Steve, and when I had been hoping to engineer a meeting as soon as possible. In the days before grief and sorrow.

“You okay?” Jenny cut in. “Don’t worry about the alarm. It’s still as it always was.”

“I’m not worried about the alarm,” I responded. “It’s just…these keys…”

“They be bringing back memories of the good old days when you and Mr. Hunter still were considering them possibilities,” Jenny chuckled.

I blushed. She meant no harm, I was sure of that. She always said things as she saw them, and she had seen plenty in the relationship between me and Dan that wasn’t there, only we had never told her.

“The good old days,” I concurred with a smile and stuffed the keys into my handbag. “I’m sure I’ll work out the alarm system tomorrow. You have a good week off, now, Jenny.”

I waved at her before flying down the front path to my car. I was seriously running late, and I didn’t want to risk Emily’s tears. It was only when I had picked her up exactly on time, had taken her home and fed her, that I realized I still didn’t know the title of the song I was working on. The clue would most likely be in the chorus, although Dan had been known to be a creative titler. I ran the song through my mind yet again and suddenly was struck by inspiration.

“Turn Your Corner.”

Chapter Sixteen

“Turn Your Corner” consumed my life for the next four days whenever I wasn’t wearing my Mummy hat. I worked on it feverishly every morning, and at the end of every session I used my phone for a sneaky sound-capture so I could review the track at home in the evening. I was a woman possessed.

On Tuesday morning, I addressed the mix and balance, taking the first critical step in the process. It took me much longer than I had anticipated, and I shed a few tears of frustration when I couldn’t get the song to sound exactly as I wanted. On Wednesday morning, I returned refreshed and with a new plan of attack which had presented itself to me late on Tuesday evening. Instead of more mixing, I turned my attention to some of the fine tuning tools.

To begin with, I worked on the EQ, or equalization. I wanted the song to be warm and edgy, so I experimented with a slight upper bass boost and some of the high frequencies. Some of the things I tried I liked, while others gave me goosebumps of horror.

By Thursday morning, I had the instruments and vocals sounding nearly how I wanted them, so I had another stab at mixing and balancing, and it proved much easier this time. My self-taught lesson 101 was that mixing and mastering could be iterative; that sometimes, it was worthwhile going back and forth between the two stages.

By Friday lunchtime, I was proud of my little project, and I felt elated and deflated at the same time. I had to leave before noon, as always, and I had no way of knowing when Dan would be back to listen to my effort. I fretted about not being there when he did, because I really wanted to get a firsthand reaction. If he thought I had done badly, I wanted to know.

But there was nothing for it, I had to leave. Reluctantly, I gathered together my music map and notes and put them in my bag. I considered leaving them, but I wanted Dan to listen to the song without any clue as to what he could expect.

I loaded my engineered version on a fresh flash drive and balanced it on the console, exactly as I had found the original drive. I didn’t write a note to stick on the studio door, although I considered it. However, Dan deserved a moment of uncertainty—had I or had I not come and worked?—and I rued my rash action of Monday morning when I had torn the note off the studio door in the first place. How cool would it have been to have left it in place, greatly enhancing Dan’s confusion on his return?
Two can play your game
, I grinned to myself as I locked up Dan’s house.
Just please call me the minute you listen to it
.

Obviously, I didn’t expect Dan to be back on Friday afternoon, but I still felt on edge all day. The phone remained stubbornly silent until nearly ten p.m. Yet relief and excitement—my moment of truth was upon me!—were replaced with instant disappointment when caller ID announced Rachel. Not that it wasn’t nice to hear from her, but I
had
kind of been waiting for someone else. I summoned a cheery greeting which stuck in my throat as a tearful Rachel launched herself straight into the conversation.

“Henry has been sick,” she cried. “It was awful. He had vomit coming out of his nose and his eyes and I’m absolutely terrified.”

I made soothing noises and tried to get to the bottom of Henry’s sudden illness. “How’s he now?”

“He’s gone to sleep,” Rachel howled, clearly upset by her offspring’s ability to cause utter devastation and drift off peacefully the next second.

“How often was he sick?”

“Just the once.”

“Has he got a temperature?”

“No.”

“Any funny nappies?”

“No.”

I stroked the sofa cushion, as though this random action would calm down my distraught friend. My mind was still turning over possibilities for the cause of Henry’s misery.

“What happened before he was sick? Did you feed him? Jiggle him? Burp him?”

There was a small silence at the other end that seemed to radiate waves of guilt. “Um…”

“Yes?”

“Well, you know how he is always so hungry, right? So I made him a bigger bottle tonight.”

“How much bigger?”

“Um…double. He’s always so hungry and I thought…”

I tried hard not to laugh. “Did he take it?”

“In ten minutes flat.”

This time I couldn’t help a giggle. “Sweetie, he can’t take so much milk yet. He was like a primed volcano. But I don’t think you have anything to worry about unless he has a temperature or something.”

“No temperature,” Rachel reiterated. “So I don’t need to call the doctor?”

“I don’t think so. Look,” I offered to put her mind at rest. “Let him sleep, but take his temperature in half an hour, and again before you go to bed. And if you’re worried, call me back. Or better still, call the out-of-hours doctors.”

“Okay. Thank you,” came Rachel’s small voice. “Sorry to bother you with this.”

“No bother at all. G’night, sweetie.” We rang off, and I felt all wistful.
Ah, the joys of infanthood.
Steve and I had had our fair share of late-night upsets like this.

I tested my memories gingerly. On previous occasions, I usually felt unsettled and lonely. Tonight, I felt nostalgic and a little sad, but mostly calm and mellow. That was a good thing, right? A step in the right direction? Wasn’t that what everyone was telling me?

A small cough behind me frightened me nearly senseless. I whipped around to find a grinning Dan leaning in my doorway.

Chapter Seventeen

“What the heck are you doing here?” I shouted. “You gave me a big fright.”

“And it’s very nice to see you, too,” Dan offered. “I just got back and wanted to see how you were.”

I rose to my feet. “How did you get in?”

Stupid question; Dan had had keys to my house for as long as I could remember. “I meant, how did you get in so quietly?” I corrected myself.

“Ah, I’m a smooth operator if I have to be,” Dan chuckled, but swiftly turned serious. “You were so busy chatting with Rachel…well, I assume it was Rachel, anyway…I could have burgled you, and you wouldn’t have noticed. Is everything all right? With Rachel?”

“She’s fine, although Henry did a terrific vomiting act on her,” I responded. I was about to launch into a reminiscence of one of Josh’s spectacular explosions when I got distracted by Dan’s appearance. He looked terrible. Enormous bags shadowed his eyes with dark purple smudges, and his face looked sallow and pale. He wasn’t well, and I wasn’t sure whether it was
only
the tiredness from having flown across the entire continental US and the Atlantic, or something more. Mummy-me wanted to reach out and stroke his face, then tuck him up in bed with a hot water bottle and a mug of honeyed warm milk. I offered neither the hug nor the caress, but rather stood and stared and waited for him to speak.

After an almighty yawn, Dan sat himself down on the sofa and stretched out. “Oh God, I’m so tired,” he announced. I rushed to his side and knelt on the floor, bringing my face level with his.

“Are you okay?”

Surprise lit up his eyes, and he waited a moment before he replied, scrutinizing my face intently. “I’m fine,” he finally reassured me. “If a bit tired. I only got off the plane two hours ago, and I came straight here. Well…” He petered out while he fumbled in his trouser pocket. “…
almost
straight here. I picked up
this
from home first.” He waved the flash drive marked “Turn Your Corner” in my face. I blushed.

“Have you listened to it yet?”

“Did you want me to?” Dan’s eyes met mine, searching and teasing.

“Um…yes. Well, no. I don’t know.” I ran my hands through my hair and rubbed my nose. “Why didn’t you tell me you were going to Seattle?” I blurted out, changing the subject before I could stop myself. Dan had the grace to look sheepish.

“I don’t really know. It was arranged months ago and I forgot all about it. And then I tried to ignore the fact that I would have to be away. And…I don’t know.” He was lost for words. “It was stupid, really. I’m sorry.”

His honesty completely disarmed me. “It doesn’t matter,” I soothed. “You’re not accountable to me or anything. I was surprised, that was all.”

“But I am, though. Accountable to you, and the kids. I promised to be there for you, and I don’t even tell you when I’m going away. I don’t know why that happened, I feel really stupid. That’s why I had to come over and see you tonight. I’ve been feeling bad all week.”

“You might have rung me in the week, if you were feeling so bad,” I suggested mildly. “A phone call would have been nice. Or an email.”

Dan’s face fell even further, and my heart swelled up with worry. Something had happened to this man, and I couldn’t work out what it was.

“I know,” he mumbled, sounding contrite and apologetic. “But I couldn’t get myself to do it. I was worried I would make it worse.”

I smiled to myself. Men; they were all the same. Totally unable to think through their emotions rationally and make sane decisions. Dan looked at me as though he could read my mind, and he gently ran a finger down the side of my face.

“Something has changed between us,” he whispered. “And I don’t know what to make of it.” His eyes assumed an intense fervor that I hadn’t seen since he had proposed to me in Paris over eight years ago. This was dangerous territory.

“I don’t think so,” I said softly, deliberately misunderstanding him. “We’re still friends, right?”