them.
Suddenly he was two bars behind and they were all so out of synch that the only sensible thing to do was stop.
‘What the hell was that?’ Rock Giant came straight at him and slammed a fist down on top of the snare. ‘You’re supposed to keep it steady, but you were all over the place, revving it up and then tootling along for the next bar.’
‘I was following Ash.’
‘You’re not supposed to follow Ash.’
He didn’t mean that literally, but a decent drummer knew how to keep a steady beat going and how to keep time for the band, while at the same time taking cues from the guitars and the vocalist.
‘Let’s do it again,’ Spook suggested. The guy was a natural mediator, always so soft-spoken and willing to hear all sides.
Xane counted them in, but they had the same problem over again, this time before they’d even reached the chorus. And it wasn’t down to Luthor. He’d done as he’d been told and hadn’t followed Ash, but Ash wasn’t with the rest of them, so it got discordant pretty quickly.
‘It’s like fucking Willows all over again.’ Rock Giant deposited his bass on the sofa. ‘What are you playing at?’
‘Paul, leave him be.’ Xane shoved the microphone stand away with such force that it toppled. ‘This is nothing like what we went through with Willows. That wanker was out to sabotage us from the get-go. Luthor’s just getting to grips with our style.’
‘He’s incompetent.’
Luthor shook his head. He knew how to play drums, and no one was about to tell him otherwise. In any case, Rock Giant being a dick about it didn’t account for the rest of the band’s behaviour. They were experienced musicians, for fuck’s sake. There was no way they could fail to realise what was going on. They had ears.
OK, so Xane realised, hence his stand-off with Rock Giant, and the pained expression on Spook’s normally composed face suggested he knew too, which only left Ash himself. Black Halo’s lead guitarist had his head bent forward so that his hair masked his face. Only his lips were clearly visible, and they were set in an irritable moue. The definitive piece of evidence, though, was the arthritic claw-like curl of his right hand. It would seem that Ash wasn’t as healed as he’d like them all to believe.
He caught Luthor looking, and two angry black eyes glared back through the curtain of hair.
‘Maybe we should try this again tomorrow,’ Luthor suggested.
Xane muttered an affirmative, Spook too, but Rock Giant stomped his foot.
‘We do it again now. And again. Until it’s right.’
‘Paul,’ Spook warned him.
‘Let’s do this.’
Ash removed the strap from his shoulders and dropped the guitar. ‘I can’t.’
‘What? Come on. Don’t let this idiot get to you.’
‘It’s not him.’
‘Sure it is.’
‘It’s me.’ He held up his clawed hand and strained but couldn’t straighten out his fingers. ‘My hand’s fucked. I can’t play. You guys are going to have to find yourself another guitarist.’
‘The hell we are, Ash.’ Spook smacked him across the back of the head. ‘We’re here for you now, and we’ll still be here for you no matter how long it takes for you to get well. The tour’s dates have already been moved forward six months, and it’s only been three weeks since you took your little dive. Give yourself a chance to heal. I expect you just need some physio.’
Hurt flashed within Ash’s eyes. ‘Yeah, right,’ he drawled. ‘’Cause time and stupid exercises solve everything. Well, what if they don’t? Have any of you thought about that? What if I’m fucked up for good? We’re not going to be all buddies in a band together then, are we?’
‘We’ll always stick by you, Ash,’ Xane claimed cautiously.
‘Had-to-think-about-it-there-didn’t-you.’ Ash seemed to realise thirty seconds after they all did that he was slurring his words. He kicked the nearest chair hard enough to make them wince. ‘Bastard-fucking-wanking-hell.’ The stream of expletives rolled off his tongue as one giant, mashed-together ‘Fuck you!’ to the world. He aimed for the chair again, but Spook sideswiped his arm and Ash turned his rage upon the nearby sofa instead, throwing the cushions from it, pummelling the heck out of its back and tearing at anything else he could lay his hands on.
‘Ash, it’ll be all right,’ Spook tried to reassure him as he darted alongside him, clearly seeking a means of restraining his friend.
‘The-hell-it-will. Iain’s-permanently-fucked-the-shit-out-of-me. I-should-have-put-him-in-the-ground-when-I-had-the-chance-instead-of-just-busting-his-nose. Now-I’m-just-screwed … completely-fucking-screwed.’ He darted for the stairs with Spook still on his tail. Xane caught the back of Spook’s shirt, dragging him to a sudden halt.
‘Let him go. It’ll do him good to yell at the universe.’
‘You can do a lap of this island in less than five minutes. What happens when he’s done two and he still can’t deal with shit? Last thing any of us need is him taking a dip in the lake. I’m not going to interfere, if he needs to let rip. I’m just going to make sure he doesn’t do himself any additional damage.’
Xane let him go. Rock Giant followed Spook down the stairs, leaving Luthor and Xane alone.
‘Sorry,’ Luthor apologised. ‘I should have just kept my mouth shut.’
‘Maybe,’ Xane responded, still facing the stairs. He turned as Luthor emerged from behind the drumkit. ‘We ought to have realised it was too early to have him in the studio. I just … He seemed OK when I was talking to him on the way over here. Sure, he’s still a bit ashen, but the slur was gone and he seemed glad to be back in the land of the living.’
As he hadn’t heard Ash speak more than a couple of simple phrases before he’d started ranting, Luthor didn’t feel qualified to comment, but Xane clearly needed some kind of reassurance that his friend was going to be fine. ‘He only started slurring once he got upset. Maybe it’s the stress that made him relapse?’
Xane chewed the notion over, while agitating the ring piercing in his lower lip. ‘No,’ he eventually concluded. ‘He was just working really hard to make sure he pronounced everything carefully before. I should have realised. Fucking Willows! Prison’s too good for him. He deserves a battering with a baseball bat, preferably one with six-inch rusty nails hammered through it.’
‘Pounding him into snot won’t make Ash better.’
‘It’d make me feel fucking good though, like I was doing something, instead of having to just sit and watch Ash suffer.’
‘He’ll get better, Xane.’ Luthor gently laid his hand upon the other man’s shoulder.
‘Will he? He’s right, you know. We’ve no contingencies in place if he doesn’t.’
‘It’ll
