Relay Roof · June 24, 2230 · Before the Whole Take program
Bronx had remembered the wrong version of their song.
“There wasn't a bridge,” Tamsin said.
He held the guitar against his ribs. “There is now.”
“There wasn't then.”
She had asked him to pass a small screwdriver. He had passed it, then begun playing while she cleaned the contacts on a spare listening lead. The broadcast equipment was ready for its next check. Nothing essential had been disconnected to make room for nostalgia, which did not prevent nostalgia from getting in the way.
The song was old enough to have escaped being explained to their audience. They had played it in a room before the Roof became the place people expected them to occupy. There were two verses Bronx still liked and one Tamsin refused to recognize as a verse. Now he had added a bridge between them, a stretch of tender chords that made the young people in the song sound wiser than either of them had been.
“I improved it.”
“You acquitted us.”
He stopped playing. The little room had the uncomfortable quiet of an instrument expecting another note. Outside, someone carried a crate across the roof. A school bell sounded below, ordinary and punctual in a way neither of them should imitate publicly.
“It's a song,” Bronx said.
“I know. I remember liking it.”
He laughed without pleasure. “That's a review.”
She put down the lead. He knew exactly which part had troubled her, though he could have spent another ten minutes making her specify it. In the old song, two people left a room because neither could bear another hour inside it. In the new part, they looked back from a considerable distance and understood why leaving had been necessary.
He had supplied the understanding without consulting the other person who had been there.
“I didn't say I was airing it.”
“Good.”
“You might have asked.”
“You might have played it without explaining it to me.”
This was not how he had intended the morning's spare minutes to go. He had intended a recognizable melody, a smile, perhaps the brief companionable feeling of knowing something together that the rest of the city did not. He had altered the melody partly because he liked the new chords. He had not set out to rearrange a life.
Tamsin returned to the contacts. He watched the cloth pass over the metal and wanted to say that not everything needed a source strip. The phrase was so available, so exactly shaped to hurt her in a way he could later call a joke, that he kept it behind his teeth.
Instead he played the beginning again, as he remembered it.
She shook her head at the third chord.
“That's different too?”
“You used to play it wrong.”
“I may have learned.”
“Unfortunately. Put the wrong one back.”
He tried the chord twice before finding the old position. His fingers had become accustomed to a cleaner transition. Tamsin tapped the bench, not quite on the beat.
“That is why we never earned anything with it,” he said.
“We never tried.”
He remembered that too. A song once had been something they could leave unfinished when the food arrived. No one asked where the recording was. The memory pleased him until he tried to hold it still, and then it became another kind of work.
He played. The old, slightly awkward sound returned to the room. Tamsin's hand stopped moving. He watched her hear it and felt both vindicated and ashamed of wanting vindication from three notes.
“There,” she said.
He played through the first verse softly. His voice had changed since they first sang it. So had hers when she joined on the last line. Neither tried to disguise the difference. The words concerned a window that would not close, a neighbor who sang in the passage and the heroic effort required to remain angry while a kettle boiled.
“That neighbor never sang,” she said afterward.
“No. But the rhyme was excellent.”
“He coughed.”
“A difficult rhyme.”
They both laughed. It released something, not everything. Bronx rested his palm across the strings before the next part.
“I like the bridge,” he said.
“Keep it.”
“You just—”
“Put it in another song.”
He looked down at his fingers. They had learned the new stretch beautifully. He liked the way it gave his voice somewhere to climb. Another song would require another beginning, another reason for arriving there. He could not simply move the chords and claim the work was done.
Tamsin turned the cleaned lead over, checked it and set it with the other spares. She had a small strip of paper beside her on which she had written the contact fault. He did not ask her to turn it into music paper. He found his own scrap in the guitar case.
“Will you sing the old one again?”
She glanced toward the clock. “Once.”
“All the verses?”
“There are only two.”
“That is an editorial position.”
“Strongly held.”
He checked that the recording feed was closed before beginning. It was already off. He made the check visible anyway, without offering it as a favor she should admire.
They sang the two verses. In the second, he forgot a line. She remembered half of it and invented the other half so badly that he had to stop. Their younger selves had apparently owned a kettle with ambitions to become a boot. Tamsin insisted the rhyme justified it. He was obliged to concede the precedent.
From the stair door Kes called that the next equipment check was nearly due. Bronx answered. There was real work in the day, an amplifier with weight, other people's contributions waiting to be heard. He did not try to make their small private song the day's most important event.
Before getting up, he wrote the new chords on his scrap. Under them he put a few words about a bucket with a hole, considered those, and crossed them out. Tamsin watched without helping.
“You can use the kettle,” she said.
“I can't afford its footwear.”
She smiled and picked up the spare lead. He put the scrap in his case, separate from the public program. The old song had not repaired their history. He had not asked it to, once he understood what he had been making it do.
At the door she stopped.
“I did like that chord.”
“Which one?”
She named it badly. He knew which one she meant. They had not acquired a new vocabulary merely because a morning had gone a little better.
“I'll keep it,” he said.
“You should.”
Then she went to the checking table, and he followed with the guitar and both versions still in his hands.