Salt Slow by Julia Armfield

Author:Julia Armfield
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK

11.

Ava asks if Mona’d like to get a hotel again when they get to Cardiff, sitting idle on the bus with her finger holding down the page of a book. They are all a little weary, undercaffeinated. Two days ago, something had gone wrong with the coffee filter and they had barely realised in time that they’d all been filling up their mugs with blood. Mona drops down into the seat beside Ava, nodding vaguely and taking hold of her free hand. Catherine is walking up and down the aisle, stretching her legs in front of her and groaning as her knees and ankles crack. The lighting techs are playing canasta and drinking ginger beer at the table before the closed black curtain.

The bus rumbles around them, whirring on towards the next place as Ava reads and twists her fingers through the holes in Mona’s jeans. Mona listens only vaguely, thinking back to her mother’s phone call and wondering at the tone in her voice – tight, as if stretched thinly over something hidden. She tilts her head, trying to focus her mind on the decision she first made to follow the band, to really up and leave and join their crew. She remembers, of course, the first time hearing them, the opening sensation, the lurch. She closes her eyes, recalling the bloody little episode. Years ago, picnic blanket in her father’s garage; the dust and daddy-long-legs and pulling up her shirt as the boy from across the road fiddled with the radio. Something dour and masculine. Listen to this one, and biting her neck so hard her necklace broke and spilled down between them. She had let him roll her over, moaned and writhed the way she knew she should, and then the music had changed to something else, channel changing unbidden to something vampish and inciting – coaxing fingers creeping out from the radio – and something inside her had smarted. Ribs, wrenching open, the sensation of something tugging on her spine, the wrong way, pulling out from the depths of her chest. Pushing him over onto his back, she had moved her hands up over his arms, over his chest and shoulders, coming to rest on his throat where she had fanned her fingers, pressed down until she felt something give. The music had bristled on into a chorus and she had leant forward as though sinking her shoulders into water, feeling the shape of her own mouth – at once soft and vicious, the prelude to a bite.

She remembers too the lack of afterwards, the nothing space of in between that became each gap between one song and another, each wait between playing a CD and getting to play it again, each year between first hearing them and finally joining them on the road.

When they arrive, the fans are already there, despite the fact the show is not for seven hours. The venue is ringed with frosted windows and the girls are pressed to the glass in great gangs, choking up the street.

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