Page 17 of Musical Games
Zoe pissed herself laughing. ‘”The Heart of Scotland”? You’re priceless!’
A new realisation burned through her and she looked up in horror. ‘Shit, you’ve got to remove all those magazines you stashed about the place. He’s got to think I’m a musician, not a bloody soap star.’
‘That’s the least of your problems. What are you going to tell Jamie? That he’s got to come up with a load of new songs dedicated to Brad Bauer overnight?’
Sam groaned and sunk her head again.Jamie. ‘Ugh. He doesn’t even like me.’
Zoe rubbed her shoulder. ‘That’s not true. He’s just never met anyone like you before. You’re pretty intimidating.’
She looked at her friend.Please make this better for me. ‘Promise you’ll come with me when I talk to him? There’s less chance of him saying no if you’re there.’
Zoe rolled her eyes. ‘Of course, but then you’re on your own.’
She let out a sigh. ‘Thanks, sweetheart, you’re the best.’ She sat up straighter. ‘I need a piece of paper.’ There was a pile of call sheets on one of the tables and a pen. She turned the papers over to the blank side and scribbled a title.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Writing the lyrics for “The Heart ofbloodyScotland”. Now bugger off and leave me in peace, but keep your phone on. As soon as I’m done, you’re coming with me to Morag’s.’
Zoe smiled at her and left the room, quietly shutting the door behind her.
6
Sam stared at the piece of paper with the words ‘The Heart of Scotland’ at the top.What now?She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, resisting the temptation to bang her head against the table, then crawl underneath it and hide. What had she been thinking? She’d spent her life acting out other people’s words. She’d never written her own before. She looked out the window. It was at the side of the castle and slightly elevated from the ground. Across the tightly parked trailers and the castle wall the mountains rose up to meet the clouds. What did Scotland mean to the people who lived within its borders? Could millions of people’s experiences be bottled and distilled down to a universal truth? What did Scotland mean toher? Images of Jamie flashed through her mind like a slide show from the seventies. Jamie smiling, Jamie playing his guitar, Jamie in his boxers. Jamie half naked in a kilt, Jamie carrying her in his arms whilst half naked in a kilt. Jamie—
‘Fuck’s sake!’ she yelled, shaking her head as if she could cast off the fantasies.
Her heart rate was rising, panicked pressure building. She stared out the window, focusing on the mountains.Breathe in, two, three, four, and hold, two, three, four…When she felt more in control, she wrote the word ‘Scotland’ in the middle of the piece of paper and drew a heart around it. Then she created a mind map, lines coming out of the heart with words she associated with Scotland and the Scottish people she knew. She thought about Morag and Fiona. The way they’d opened their hearts and home to her. And Jamie and Duncan, who might have been considered taciturn had you not seen how they were with their families.
Loyalty, warmth, openness, fairness, power, pride, freedom, untamed, raw, wild, resolute. Words tumbled onto the paper. Suddenly she wasn’t Sam any more, she was a conduit. Ideas, phrases, feelings rushed through her and onto the paper. It was an outpouring she didn’t stop to question. Part of her knew that to stop for even a minute would cause the flood to slow to a trickle, then dry up. So she kept writing page after page of lyrics, for one song, then another, then another, mixing her memories, her dreams, her soul’s deepest wishes into the stream of consciousness flowing through her. At the end of writing the fifth song, she paused and looked at the table. It was strewn with paper, her handwriting a dynamic and almost unintelligible scrawl as if a spider had snorted speed, then gone to a breakbeat rave.
Whilst every part of her was still buzzing, she went back over each song, editing, tidying, then wrote them out again onto blank pieces of paper. She glanced out the window at the lowering sun. How long had she been writing? Checking the time, her excitement tripped and fell into a pit of anxiety.Shitsticks.Jamie would be home from work soon. How could she tell him what she’d done? And how the fuck could she convince him to say yes?
An hour and a half later,her mood had been rescued by Zoe, Fiona and Morag and given a fuel injection of nitrous oxide. The three women hadn’t even needed Prosecco to hype themselves up. They’d decided Sam and Jamie were going to be the greatest song writing duo of all time and Morag was already planning which pictures in the living room she was going to take down so she could put up all the Grammys they were going to win. Sam’s excitement had been genuine when she’d got back with Zoe, but now it was forced as she counted down the minutes till Jamie returned. There was too much chatter for her to practice her breathing technique, so she pinched her thumbs and fingertips in turn under the table, counting up to four, over and over again, whilst her heart rate outran the second hand on the kitchen clock.
She was the first to notice Jamie’s shadow behind the glass of the back door and wished she’d drunk something stronger than tea to prepare herself. As he stepped through, all conversation around the table stopped. His body was still but his eyes flicked from his mother, to his sister, to Zoe. He avoided looking at her altogether.
‘What’s going on?’ he asked.
All heads around the table, except for Liam’s, swivelled to look at her. Jamie’s eyes were cold. She dug her nails into her palms and opened her mouth.
‘No,’ he said abruptly. ‘Whatever it is, it’s a no.’ He turned his back, shucking his tool bag to the floor and his boots off as the room erupted.
‘But you haven’t heard what she’s going to say, son!’
‘Why don’t you take your head out of your arse and listen!’
‘Jamie, just give her one minute!’
Sam sat back. This was a disaster. He’d said no before he even knew what he was saying no to.
Liam began to cry and Fiona bounced him up and down. ‘Now look what you’ve done, you big lump.’
‘It’s not me that’s done that, it’s you lot!’
Morag grabbed him by the arm, steering him into a chair. He sat down with a thump. ‘Just open your ears and keep your mouth shut for five minutes. This is your big chance with Brad Bauer! He wants you to play for him again like you did a few months ago!’
Jamie shook his head vigorously. ‘No way. Once was enough. Sitting up there on my own? Playing for him? Never again.’
