I’m in a van with seven members of the band I’m in, heading down the M1 the day after a gig in Saltaire. We are, I’m told, at least an hour from London, probably more. I make a face.
“What’s wrong?” says the bass player.
“I have to write my column,” I say. “But I don’t want to write it in the van, in front of you people.”
“What’s it about?” he says.
“I don’t know,” I say, recalling an incident from the previous evening, when our trumpet player became tangled in the backdrop on her way to the stage, with the first song already underway. It must have looked pretty funny to the audience, but I was stuck behind her on the dressing room stairs, listening to the drummer run out of ideas. Eventually she found the gap in the curtain, and a good story was averted.
“How hard can it be?” says the accordion player. “One day, blah blah blah, my wife says, blah blah.”
“You have no idea,” I say. But a few miles down the road I dig out my laptop and write ‘One day blah blah blah my wife says blah blah.’ I stare at the screen for a few minutes, and then look out the window for an hour.
I arrive home to a full house: all the children, and the oldest one’s girlfriend, are in the kitchen. Lunch is being cooked, and everyone is in a giddy mood. They are trying to relate events from the previous evening, but they’re really just re-telling the story to each other. Nobody is prepared to begin at the beginning.
“So he was being paid to be a doorman,” my wife says, pointing to the oldest one. “And then…”
“Wait,” I say. “Where is this party?”
“Next door,” she says. “A teen party. He was just there to make sure things didn’t get out of hand.”
“But things did get out of hand,” he says. “I had to kick everyone out.”
“But they didn’t leave,” my wife says. “They were just milling about on the pavement.” She shows me a video on her phone, in which she is surrounded by young people with glowing eyeballs. It looks like a zombie invasion of our street. They were like, ‘You can’t film me – it’s illegal,’” she says.
Details come tumbling out. Participation in the evening evidently spanned a wide range of roles: disgruntled neighbour, unhelpfully amused bystander, clandestine guest. It is a story full of sound and fury, sick and broken glass.
“He went to clear these kids out of a bedroom,” says the middle one. “And one of them was like, ‘Shit haircut, mate.’”
“Who?” I say.
“And there was Constance screaming, ‘In real life I’m pretty!’”
“Weirdly, the guy had the exact same haircut.”
“Why was Constance there?” I say.
“Keep up,” my wife says.
“I had to stop people shagging on the trampoline,” says the oldest one’s girlfriend.
“Not actual shagging,” my wife says.
“It always happens,” says the oldest one’s girlfriend. “Whenever there’s a trampoline.”
“It was the most exciting thing ever,” my wife says. “And you missed it.”
“How was your show, by the way?” says the oldest one’s girlfriend. I decide it’s not the time to tell a story about a trumpet player getting caught up in some curtains.
“It was fine,” I say.
My children subsequently become emboldened to confess things about parties past, about strange adolescents knocking themselves unconscious on our furniture. I retreat to another room, where I can’t hear anything but muffled high spirits.
“Blah blah blah,” my wife says. “Blah blah!”
