Page 34 of His Sound
“Va t’en, cave.” She shoos him with her hands until he jumps down.
He glances my way and winks when he catches me staring. “Roxanne loves me. Don’t you Roxanne?”
“I don’t love your ass on my counter,” the woman grumbles.
She must be Cole’s Roxanne. That’s how I know her.
There isn’t a lot of public knowledge about Cole Byrne, even in the Sherbrooke Station fandom. He takes the ‘strong and silent type’ thing to a whole new level, but dedicated fans knows he’s always had an on-again-off-again relationship with a girl named Roxanne. She shows up in event photos every now and then.
I look her over with a new interest before I realize how creepy I’m being.
JP comes over with a mug of his own a moment later. “I made Roxanne give me triple the whipped cream on this.”
He looks unabashedly proud of himself as he sets his drink down on the table, whip cream piled high above the rim and doused in an almost disgusting amount of chocolate syrup and cocoa powder.
“What...is that?” I ask.
“It’s hot chocolate,” he replies, “à laJP. Roxy won’t put it on the menu, though. You want to try some?”
He holds the mug up, and whipped cream sloshes down the sides.
“I’m good,” I assure him, before he can spill the whole thing. “Is your friend on his way?”
JP pokes his finger into the whip cream pile and then licks it. “Right. My friend. He, um, couldn’t make it, so he asked me to explain what he’s looking for.”
“Is he sure? We can meet another day,” I offer.
JP shakes his head. “Nah, he said this is fine. I think he might be bailing on purpose.” He gives me a lopsided grin. “He’s kind of shy about his music.”
“I’m the last person he has to worry about being shy around.”
JP takes a sip of his drink and pulls it away to reveal a white, frothy moustache. I can’t help laughing.
“What?” he demands. “Do I have something on my face?”
We spend the next twenty minutes discussing cover art, and JP leaves his moustache in place the whole time. It’s hard to take anything he says seriously when it’s coming from a mouth lined with whipped cream and chocolate, but I can almost ignore the distraction when he starts talking about his friend’s music. I ask a few questions about what style the guy plays, and JP’s face gets even more animated than usual.
“So it’s sort of like this...concept piece, you know? It’s about thispoisson rouge. In English, you call it a goldfish. The EP is the story of this goldfish growing up in a pond full of all these other fish that are bigger and faster than he is. They make fun of him because he’s always getting distracted by things, never paying attention to what he’s supposed to be paying attention to. He swims in the wrong direction, and he’s always late for stuff. He feels stupid a lot of the time, but he just doesn’t know how to be like the other fish.”
JP stares out the window for a moment, his fingers drumming against his now-empty mug, before he turns back to me, eyes bright and hands waving as he continues the story.
“Then one day, the goldfish realizes he can hear things the other fish don’t. They laugh at him because he’s always going, ‘What’s that? What’s that?’ and swimming off after some imaginary sound. They tell him he’s crazy. For a long time, he believes them, but then one day he follows the sound he hears—the sound is music, but fish don’t have music, so he doesn’t know what it is—and he finds a way out of the pond. He ends up swimming up theFleuveSaint-Laurentto Montreal, and...Well, it keeps going from there, but you get the idea.”
I realize we’ve both been leaning in closer to each other, and I quickly straighten back up in my chair.
“It sounds amazing,” I tell him. “I’d love to hear it.”
He tugs on his man-bun. “It’s not done yet, but when it is, I’ll show it to you.”
“Your friend will let you?”
He looks confused for a moment before he nods. “Yeah. Yeah, he’ll want you to hear it.”
“So for the artwork...” I prompt. “Any ideas on what he’s looking for? It’s a bit hard to come up with a concept when I don’t actually know what the sound is like.”
“He likes your graffiti stuff,” JP tells me. “Eventually, the goldfish becomes this kind of...cool city fish, exploring all the sewers and stuff. I think if you made some kind of graffiti fish or something, that would be cool.”
I nod, a few colours and textures already starting to shift around in my head. “There are a lot of street art styles, though. I want to make sure I’m going with the right one.”
