Home > One Day Like This (Excess All Areas #1)

One Day Like This (Excess All Areas #1)
Author: Scarlett Cole


1

 

 

“Last two walls,” Matt Palmer said, shoving his floppy black hair from his face. “Whoever decided wallpaper was back in fashion was a wanker of the finest order.”

Luke Bryson, fellow Sad Fridays bandmate, drummer by night and employee of Matt’s Uncle Allan’s decorating firm by day, shrugged. “I get paid whether I’m hanging wallpaper or painting walls. I hate matching up seams as much as I hate cutting in.”

They’d met the first year of high school on opposing sides of a brawl. A week of school detention boredom turned them into inseparable best mates with a passion for making music, Manchester City Football Club, and flirting with girls in the year above them.

“Did you hear back from that guy in London?” Luke asked.

“Nah. If it sounds too good to be true, it usually is. He did some research on us. Found out that Jase bailed halfway through the show in Brighton and said he couldn’t risk a repeat. I mean, how hard would it have been to ignore the fucking pint glass tossed at him and keep playing? The crowd were with us, everyone having a good time. And he let a single idiot get to him.” Matt slapped more decorator’s paste onto the wallpaper on the pasting table, brushing it angrily as he tried to tamp down the frustration that always rose when he thought about his pain-in-the-arse younger brother, their band’s lead singer. “I know it’s only the start of August, but it would have been good to have a few more gigs pencilled in for January. Anyway, we should nail down the setlist for the show in Wigan next weekend.” Matt gathered the paper and stepped onto the ladder, lining the pattern up before letting the rest of the paper drop to the floor.

“What are the chances we could test out the new song you were working on?”

Matt briskly brushed the air bubbles from behind the paper. “Not finished yet. But it’s time to give writing and recording another full album a shot. The summer gigs boosted the bank account enough that we can afford some studio time and production. It’s not a ton of cash, so we’d have to do a bunch of sound engineering ourselves.”

“Can you two save your band yapper and get on with getting that paper on the walls?” Uncle Allan, his nan’s younger brother, stood with his hands on his hips. His paint-splattered polo shirt with his decorating firm’s logo on it swamped his scrawny yet fit-as-a-fiddle, seventy-year-old frame.

Matt looked down at his matching polo shirt. It fit him better, pulled tight across a chest he worked out frequently, but it was fucking depressing to pull it on every morning. It was like a costume that didn’t quite fit. “It’s getting done faster than you could pull it off, old man. Keep your hair on.”

As he rolled the seam and trimmed the excess wallpaper at the top and bottom with a razor blade, he shook his head. This couldn’t be all there was to his life. A bucket of wallpaper paste and Uncle Allan giving him shit, while for a few blessed hours every weekend he escaped onstage at pubs and clubs all over Great Britain. The successful journey he’d imagined when they’d dropped out of school to play music hadn’t materialised. But music . . . he couldn’t imagine his life without it. It was oxygen when life suffocated him. It filled his soul when the drudgery of the day to day depleted it. Music was everything he couldn’t say in real life.

Because at twenty-nine, the thought of spending a lifetime of making other people’s houses look amazing when he could barely afford the rent on his own made him shiver. Some of their clients were so far up their own arses they refused to let them take a piss in the toilets or give them so much as a glass of water during an often ten-hour day.

Jase, a cracking lead singer and a totally shite human being, worked at a pub. Their cousins, Ben and Alex, were both great with their hands. Alex, catchall percussionist and sound engineer, worked as a landscaper by day, while mechanic Ben was one torque wrench away from trashing fingers that played electric guitar to Matt’s bass.

All of them were fatigued. Weekends on the road meant grabbing extra shifts here and there in careers flexible enough to grant them time off to play and record.

But some days, in quiet moments when Matt sat alone late at night writing new songs, it felt as though he was the only one utterly committed to the dream.

There were days when he regretted his decision to allow Nan to talk him into letting Jase be in the band. The fact she’d bribed his skint arse with a new guitar had been sneaky. But seeing she’d raised them after their mum bailed, taking them into her tiny two-up two-down Manchester terraced home and paying for everything they’d needed from her pension, he’d been unable to say no.

“You don’t get to police what we talk about while we’re working, Uncle Allan. Especially not on a Saturday when we’re doing you a favour because your other crew fell behind.”

Allan dipped his paintbrush into the pot of white gloss paint and carried on cutting in around the skirting boards. “I’m paying you double overtime, you mercenary bastards,” he muttered.

“You know, we’re great live,” Matt continued. “We have venues repeatedly ask us back. And we have a decent following. I just don’t know how we break through. Like, fuck me, I don’t want to be doing this for the rest of my life. No offence, Uncle Allan.”

“None taken, lad.”

Luke looked down at his watch. “Time for lunch break. Ready, Matt?”

Matt dropped the roll of paper he was about to take to the wall. “Let’s go.”

They walked to Luke’s van; a beat-up white Vauxhall Vivaro Luke had picked up at an auction. Ben had helped him get it serviceable to haul their gear around for gigs. He pulled the rear doors open and reached for his guitar case.

The world righted itself as he put his hands on the neck.

“We’re doing the work,” Luke said thoughtfully. “Putting in the hours and miles.”

“Yeah. Pubs, small concert venues. A few hundred punters. Five hundred tickets, maybe. A thousand at a push for a great gig. Enough cash to stay alive as a band to fight another day. I guess I’m fed up with hand-to-mouth. We need to try something else.”

“While you’re wracking your brain, should we work on the bones of that new song? I think the chorus isn’t working. I feel like the verses are catchier. It’s almost like if you could rewrite it, like start with the score of the chorus and make it the verse, then flip the verse as the chorus. I know the words don’t exactly fit, but given the verse is eight lines and the chorus four, you just repeat it twice. If you know what I mean?”

“Do you really want to talk about the song? Or do you want to talk about what day it is?”

“I know what day it is,” Luke replied curtly.

Eleven years since Luke’s firefighter father’s death in a warehouse blaze. Matt had been over at Luke’s house when his mum had found out. They’d been playing Grand Theft Auto while Luke’s younger sister, Izabel, had been trying to figure out what had happened at the Battle of Fulford for her GCSE History. They never played Grand Theft Auto again, and he’d never forgotten that Harald Hardrada had won the battle, because it was the last sentence Iz had spoken before her mum’s sobs.

“Definitely don’t want to talk about it. So, yeah. Let’s get back to flipping the verse and the chorus.”

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