Chapter Fifteen

It was only a few weeks later that Mouse found himself trying to disappear into a rather impractical leather sofa in Chiswick, wishing that his general sense of foreboding would leave him alone. It wasn’t a feeling that he was used to, and the three bottles of wine he had tried to chase it away with the night before had done nothing to get rid of it – although they had done a great job of turning his stomach into a cement mixer. Catie had sat, nervously watching him and barely saying a word.

He wasn’t a shirker, or a light-weight, or a prima donna, but he’d needed a longer break. He’d needed more time wandering around with Petey squirming and shrieking under his arm; more time trying to teach him to kick a ball straight; more time just sitting on the sofa and watching him play and trying to get him to eat spaghetti with a fork. Catie had pointed out a week or two earlier that he seemed to have become almost physically attached to his son: they’d laughed it off at the time, but now he felt oddly lopsided without him. Once the stadiums had been added in, someone should have noticed that the studio time needed to be pushed much further back into the autumn. It should have been bloody obvious. Perhaps he should have noticed it himself, but he hadn’t. Everyone always expected him to be the happy, easy-going one, but he felt more like picking a fight.

All the police nonsense about Jake meant that they had been told not to use the studio in Notting Hill which had originally been booked, so there had been the added hassle of sorting out somewhere else. Jeff had dealt with it all, thank God, but there was something about this place which just didn’t feel right. It had all of the right gear, but Mouse wanted to be able to wander through the Portobello market for an hour or so if he wanted a change of scene, not be faced with a choice of Waterstones or the M&S Food Hall on the Chiswick High Road. All you could see out of the window was a squat, red-brick office block across a car park: it was possible that if he had moved to the other end of the sofa he might have been able to see at least a part of a tree, but it wasn’t even a particularly nice tree.

Meanwhile Jake was sitting over the other side of the room, with his guitar positioned like a shield in front of him, exuding about as much positive life force as a middling-sized black hole. He’d dropped off the radar screen a couple of days after the last Manchester gig, and seemed to have forgotten how to use a telephone. All they really knew was that he had given Ed the slip: three days of sunbathing with a bodyguard had been enough for Jake to decide to go walkabout again, leaving a note to say that he would see the others in the studio and some cash for a furious Ed, who wasn’t on holiday in the first place, to have a holiday without him. Mouse had only just persuaded Jeff not to report him missing, and then only with the help of Jake’s brother, Simon, who swore blind that he knew where he was. Mouse was pretty sure that Simon had been lying, but at least it had worked.

Jeff and Duncan had been having a long and complicated conversation about mobile phones almost since they had got there. Mouse had half-listened to the beginning of it, but had found it oddly like listening to a conversation in French made up of English words. His attention had wandered, first back to Petey, and then on to a sense of simmering resentment of the car park outside the window. He’d expected them to shut up and get on with it as soon as Jake had arrived, but Jake had been so efficient at deflecting any attempt at conversation that Mouse wasn’t absolutely sure that the others had noticed that he’d come in.

Eventually Jeff sat down at the piano, and asked Mouse and Jake if they were intending to join them.

“We were waiting for you two to stop talking gobbledegook!” Mouse wasn’t letting Jeff have it all his own way, although he was reluctant to stir from the sofa.

“That was all about the future, that was. I reckon it could come in very handy over the next couple of months.” He played the opening chords of Sky Blues, but at about half speed, as if he was having to feel for them in the piano keys. “Have you still got a phone, Jake? I tried calling you last week and didn’t even hit voicemail.”

“Me?” Jake peered round the guitar neck, looking slightly surprised. “Nah. Decided it was more hassle than it was worth. Been practicing telepathy instead.”

Mouse was relieved that Jake had managed a sentence with more than two words in it: it meant there was hope.

“Isn’t a phone easier to carry around with you than a crystal ball?”

Jake wasn’t sure if Mouse was sending him up.

“You don’t do telepathy with a crystal ball.” “What then? I thought you had to stare at it and then stuff appeared – isn’t that the whole point?”

“No, that’s something else. Telepathy’s where you use your mind.”

“No wonder it didn’t fucking work then!”

Duncan got the laugh that he had wanted, which Jeff took as the cue for business.

“What do you guys think of this?” He played a short sequence of chords, vaguely la-ing a melody over the top.

“What’s it meant to be?” Jake looked mildly curious, but had opened up his guitar case so that he now had a barricade as well as a shield. Duncan was less guarded:

“Fucking funeral for a fucking opera singer if you ask me. You’re not writing for Katherine Jenkins now. Try it lower and about twice as fast, and then we can work with it.”

Jeff felt his way down the keyboard, eventually transposing it down a fifth before playing it through again, trying not to feel too resentful as he did so. He knew that they needed to write as a band for this to work, but hated the fact that the others seemed to need him to pretend that he hadn’t won six Ivor Novellos all on his own in order for that to happen. They ought to have all got over that by now, but he knew damned well that they hadn’t.

“Yeah, but faster too. That was even slower than the first time.” Duncan seemed intent on making a point, although Jeff wasn’t wholly sure what it was.

“But it’s not meant to be fast. I kind of hear it as the start of a beautiful ballad…. but perhaps with something a bit punchier for a chorus or middle eight.” He started playing it again, softly and slowly as he spoke, before adding a faster passage onto the end: he carried on playing as Duncan spoke.

“We don’t need ballads. It was the faster stuff that sold the last one, and worked best on the tour. We need to come up with some more happy, poppy stuff.”

“That’s not true. We’ve always done both, and the fans have always loved both.”

“That’s bollocks.” Duncan was louder than he meant to be, “ The single sales of “Heaven Knows” were so crap that the label are trying to pretend that it was never released. And the fans had that petition to get it out of the shows.”

Duncan and Jeff were squaring up to one another over the piano, which was now silent. The group of fans who had wanted it off the set list had also wanted it replaced with “Home at Last” which was not only up-tempo, but was also one of Duncan’s lead vocals. “Heaven Knows” was a Jeff vocal, with Jeff on the piano, and Jeff had even written most of the lyrics. Mouse could feel the last few feeble dregs of optimism draining for him, as he tried to figure out how best to defuse this one without making it clear just how much he agreed with Duncan, as Jeff seemed in no mood to let it drop.

“The fans who got up the petition are only a tiny proportion of those who buy our stuff, and you know it. They..”

Jeff was slightly staccato, and in danger of getting properly angry. It hadn’t been quite what he had planned for the day. However, it wasn’t Duncan who cut across him, but Jake. While the others had been staring at the piano and figuring out their next move, he had packed his guitar back up, grabbed his hoodie, and was heading towards the door.

“Sorry guys. I just can’t do this.”

Mouse wanted to either groan or join him, but managed somehow to do neither.

“Come back Jake, it’s OK. We’ll all calm down a bit soon – it’s just first day nerves.”

“No, I’m sorry guys, but I’m really just not in the mood.”

“You daft prick, what use is stomping off going to do? You need to stay here and sort this out with the rest of us.”

Duncan was genuinely nonplussed: as far as he was concerned it seemed like a pretty normal day, and it was good to be back with the others after a month of playing cat and mouse with Ella.

“Not today. I’m just not in the mood.”

Jeff’s anger had transferred wholesale from Duncan to Jake, and was about to vent like a pressure cooker.

“What the fuck…”

He hadn’t expected quiet, measured, rational Jake to yell back at the top of his voice “I’m just fucking not in the fucking mood, alright!”, before slamming the door hard behind him. Jeff was left standing with his mouth open, like a surprised goldfish.

Mouse slumped back onto the sofa, wishing that it would properly swallow him up this time: Jeff sat down heavily next to him, huffing and puffing slightly as he seemed to deflate. Duncan was standing looking at the door, unsure what was meant to happen next.

“D’you reckon he’s actually gone?” he asked.

Although he could see that he was on a short fuse, Mouse persuaded Jeff to head out and try to catch up with Jake, to try to get him to come back. Jake and Jeff hadn’t always seen eye to eye, but when things flared up they were best left to hammer it out between the two of them. But he wasn’t even sure that it was really about Jeff this time around; and couldn’t see how they were ever going to come up with anything useful even if Jake could be persuaded to return. It wasn’t just Jeff’s thing for ballads: there was no spark between them in the room, and Duncan was the only one who had really seemed happy to be there.

Duncan, on the other hand, was humming to himself and occasionally drumming on the edge of the mixing desk as he powered up a load of the equipment. He looked surprisingly cheerful.

“Right. Do you reckon you could play that about twice as fast, so we have something to start to fiddle around with?”

Mouse hesitated. Not only was he not in the mood either, he hadn’t really paid any attention to what Jeff was playing, beyond the fact that it was likely to send him to sleep. And starting with half the band missing and in a strop didn’t feel quite right either.

“Not sure I can remember it, mate, I’m sorry.”

“Well play something else then. Doesn’t matter what we start with so long as we start with something.”

When Mouse stayed glued to the sofa, Duncan went over to the keyboards and started to pick out chords himself. His humming was out of tune with his hands, and Mouse was wondering whether he ought not go over and start messing around himself just to get him to shut up, when Duncan hit upon something that for some reason made Mouse smile. He got up to join him, keen to catch it before it fled along with everyone else.

By the time a rather subdued Jeff made it back, they had a vague attempt at a chord sequence and melody, with a driving dance-floor beat. Mouse had tried to tone it down, but Duncan had resisted on the basis that Jeff made everything sound like Val Doonican if you gave him half a chance. If they started with something which would give your Granny a headache, there was at least a chance that you would still be able to hear it in the final mix. Mouse was messing around with a guitar, but couldn’t find anything that really worked with the rest of what they had. Jeff caught the end of the attempt.

“Jesus. I’m away for an hour, tops, and you come up with something that sounds like the Wurzels, remixed by Dangermouse. That’ll certainly scare the fans silly – every last one of the poor buggers.”

He looked as if he would like to find it funny. He wanted to just dive straight in and unpick what they had done, to try to put it back together into a song. Once Mouse stopped his rather frantic strumming, he heard the melody line playing back more clearly. They often started with a nonsense lyric, and then went back later to see if they could come up with something else which at least vaguely made sense. This time, Duncs had chosen to sing “not in the mood”, over and over again, with the occasional “you’re not in the mood” where it needed the extra syllable. Jeff would have liked to have found that funny as well, but it was a bit too close to the bone.

“You shouldn’t have done that with the lyric, Duncs. We’re going to have to treat Jake with kid gloves over the next few weeks if we still all want all this to happen.”

“Where is he?”

“Gone home. I managed to catch up with him, and we had a bit of a chat, but he wasn’t for coming back today. He’ll come back tomorrow.”

The chat had taken place in the Starbucks round the corner, which was where Jeff had eventually spied Jake brooding over a large and very watery peppermint tea. He’d had no idea that Starbucks even sold the stuff, but Jake clearly knew where to find his poison. Jeff had tried to suggest that private might be better, but Jake had dug his heels in and refused to have the conversation anywhere else. The place had been full of yummy mummies, who were exactly the right age to know exactly who they were, and take plenty of photos on their camera phones while pretending to call their nannies. The chances of their secret location not being all over the internet before teatime was negligible, which did at least mean that there was half a chance that everyone would agree that they could go back to Notting Hill and not be stuck with the view of what was really a very annoying car park. Jeff just hoped that none of them had heard that much of what had been said.

Neither of the others seemed inclined to ask for details, but Mouse needed to know just how rocky the ride was likely to be.

“What was it that got to him? I know we were all being a bit odd, but I still can’t figure out why it had got to him in particular. Don’t think I’ve heard him yell like that since – well I don’t think I’ve heard him yell at all before, not since that very first day in Cam’s office.”

“He says it’s because of his leg, and because he’s never done so much of the music. He’s back to saying that we don’t need him and he’ll just be getting in the way.” Jeff wasn’t sure how much more to say, “I reckon Stevo stuff is still getting to him, though: I wish he hadn’t refused security. Even I get nightmares about that, and it isn’t even about me.”

Mouse shared Jeff’s suspicion that life in general was probably wearing Jake down, but was still worried that the question of his role in the band was up for grabs again.

“We talked through all the stuff about his leg, and agreed that it was four of us or none of us. Has he decided we didn’t mean it?”

The discussion had taken place in the aftermath of the attack by Stevo: the others had been vaguely aware that Jake had been struggling a bit, but had no idea just how bad things were. Mouse had immediately ruled out any suggestion that Jake should be allowed to leave, or be replaced, and at the time any other conclusion had seemed unthinkable. Now Jeff wished that it had been raised and discussed in another context, although he sensed that he would have been voted down anyway. It was a bit like being the Queen; paying the price for having once had a share in absolute power.

“You know what he’s like. He knows what we all said, and what we all decided, but the silly bugger’s been thinking again. I tried telling him that it’s not healthy to think that much, but I rather got the impression he was going to think about that too.”

Jeff said it with a hint of exasperation, although it made Duncan laugh out loud. Mouse wasn’t finding it particularly funny.

“I guess we can only really wait and see how he is tomorrow.” He paused, and looked slightly guilty, “I kind of like the idea of something called “Not in the Mood”, though, even if the rest of this is shit.”