Page 36 of Our Song

‘Good point,’ I said.‘Okay, brilliant!I’ll tell the others.’

Ruairí was absolutely delighted with himself.

‘See, Laura?’he said, raising his pint in a toast.‘I told you Tim would be perfect for you!’

Chapter Fifteen

2019

‘Tell me everything!’

Katie is waiting for me in the hall when I get home from Tadhg’s place, bouncing up and down with excitement.

‘Have you been standing here since you got in from work?’I say.

‘Of course not, I’m not that unhinged,’ she says.‘I was correcting essays in the front room and I saw you come up the path.So how was it?I was expecting lots of messages from you and I got nothing!’

‘Let me put my guitar down first,’ I say.

In the kitchen, Katie puts the kettle on.‘Don’t worry, I’ll let you make your own,’ she says.‘So why didn’t I get minute-by-minute updates all day?’

I laugh.‘I was with Tadhg pretty much the entire time!I couldn’t keep taking out my phone.’

‘You could have taken it to the loo,’ says Katie.‘Anyway, come on!Tell me everything!Was it really weird?What’s the house like?How was the whole day?’

‘It was …’ Awkward?Fun?Painful?Kind of magical?‘It was grand.Mostly.He hasn’t changed as much as you might think.’

‘Well, that’s good to hear,’ says Katie.

‘I think he finds being famous kind of embarrassing,’ I say.

‘As well he might,’ says Katie.‘Remember thatVanity Fairthing in that ruined castle?’

‘I won’t forget that in a hurry.’It had been a cover story full of cringeworthy Irish clichés.TheVanity Fairteam had him posing on a bit of rampart, gazing off into the distance.He wasn’t wearing a cloak fastened with a Celtic brooch, but he might as well have been.

‘I hope you didn’t mention that,’ says Katie.

‘No, I didn’t!’

‘And you didn’t react to his music the way you usually do, did you?’

‘Jesus, of course not!’I cry.‘I do have some manners!’

Because here’s the thing about Tadhg’s music: it drives me mad.

Not, by the way, because I’m still madly in love with its creator and find it too painful to hear his voice.But because every single time I hear one of his solo songs, ever since the first time I saw the ‘Winter Without You’ video, I want to change it.It’s not that the songs are bad or anything.They’re actually great.It’s that I know exactly what I’d have added to them if we’d written them together.I want to adjust the melodies, I want to change the intros just a tiny bit, I want to tweak the middle eights.It’s like a terrible, terrible itch I can’t scratch.

‘So,’ says Katie, ‘what did you do all day?’

I tell her almost everything.I don’t tell her about my shameful pangs of lust.But I tell her everything else.Including the fact that towards the end of the day we ended up playing some of Tadhg’s solo songs.It was me who suggested doing the latter, to Tadhg’s mortification and Katie’s amazement.

‘Seriously?’she says.‘The songs you always say could be better?’

‘Yeah,’ I say.‘I think it was because I felt guilty about the ‘End of My Garden’ thing.’

‘And how was it?’

‘Good,’ I say.‘I think.No, definitely good.’

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