The Musician

Okay, okay. Let me settle down, will you? For Christ’s sake, what am I sitting on now? Okay. Okay.

This one’s called…The Mill Inn Massacre.

You’ll find out.

There was a man named Julius. He was a musician. He was a quiet young man - in his late twenties - who kept himself to himself. He spent all his free time - he worked in a hospital. As a porter. He spent all his free time making music. And all his money went on music. He made his music on an expensive computer, which he had bought with his money from the hospital job. That doesn’t matter too much, the point is - the point is, he was quiet. A little quiet. A little strange, but essentially normal, you know, just another guy, working nine-to-five, spending all his money on what he really wanted to be doing. He had yellow hair, too. Yellow hair that came down below his ears, and it looked like it had been drawn, like his hair was a drawing but the rest of him was real.

He loved making his music, and sometimes he used to play it in front of people, you know, like a gig? They didn’t pay to watch him, but sometimes he got paid. He didn’t really do it for the money though, he did it so other people could hear his music, and through that, they would know something about him, something about what he was really like, and what was inside his head. Yes, the music that was inside his head. So, he did these gigs in front of strangers, all around the city where he lived, even though it made him really, really nervous. Can you imagine? It made him so nervous, so so nervous that his throat got dry and his eyes itched and he wanted to cry (and he did cry, sometimes), and he was sick too, sometimes, really violently sick, vomiting up everything he’d eaten and drank that day. But he went through all of this, regularly, just to give something of himself away to these people, to share himself around. He did have talent. His music was breathtakingly beautiful and made you feel so happy to be alive, and it was a shame that he only did these small gigs, in places where some people didn’t care and wouldn’t even listen.

So on the night in question, the night this story happened, he was playing a gig at a pub called the Mill Inn. Yes, like the title of the story. It was a medium-sized pub, with a crowd of regulars - the people who drank there every night, most of them didn’t really care what music was playing, they just played pool and smoked cigars and drank cider and got so drunk every night that they pissed on their feet instead of in the urinals. Yes, of course that’s important.

So there were the regulars, and there were the people who’d come for the music, some for Julius’ music (he went by the name Under Ventricle - it’s a piece of the heart. Good name, huh?), and some for the music of the other bands playing after him - he was on first. The pub was dimly lit, with a smoke machine on stage and bright disco lights on a big light rig - pricey stuff, all that gear. The pub was a pub committed to being a good music venue for local bands. The tables were dark wood and old-fashioned. The people sitting at them rested their feet on the struts beneath at awkward angles, and felt uncomfortable. Now we’re getting to the good stuff.

Try and picture it, okay? Think about what I’ve told you, his yellow hair - he’s tall too, very tall, and thin - the dim pub with disco lights, green and yellow, green and yellow. The smoke machine. The dark wood tables, the people sitting uncomfortably around them, the low drone of pub chatter, the hazy stench of cigarettes with the odd honk of cigars in places. A girl drums her fingers against the table, she’s stoned - drugs, yes they’re bad - and enjoying the rhythm. A boy - nineteen - flips his fringe out of his eyes at every other word he says. The couple in the corner, both short and stout, made for each other, are kissing while they hold hands.

And Julius, he’s nervous, so nervous he stumbles, his feet unsteady and not wanting to carry his weight. He’s drinking a bottle of beer for good luck, beer to take the edge off the evening, to take the edge off having to stand up on a stage under yellow and green lights and give his music to these strangers in this room.

I’ve just remembered, I forgot to mention, when he plays his music at gigs he does it all on his computer, with the basic song set up, and then he presses buttons to add the sounds. He adds layers of sounds, lots, so he’s pressing buttons most of the time, he doesn’t just press play on his laptop and then stand there like a lemon on stage. It’s not that important to the story, but it’s what he does. Sorry.

So, he’s getting ready to go on, ordering another beer which he’ll sip slowly, all the while he’s playing, because he doesn’t want to get drunk, he might slip up and make a mistake. He just needs to wet his whistle from time to time. He orders his beer and he’s nervous, so nervous he wonders why he ever does it, cos right now he just feels like packing up and going home, ordering a Chinese and watching telly. So nervous he tastes the vomit in the back of his throat, ugly and bitter, waiting there. Then the sound man signals by holding his hand up and flashing his fingers, and Julius takes his change and walks up to the stage.

Now be prepared for a little disappointment, because he spends a while playing his music, okay? He swallows his nervousness right back and he readies the first track, he wets his whistle a couple of times with tiny sips of beer - Corona, if you’re interested - and then he starts playing. He gets a round of applause when he starts, which is good, that means some of the strangers are looking forward to what they will hear tonight, but then he just starts, he gets over himself and he starts. So he’s playing his music.

And that’s all that happens for a while, really. Some other people in the room do some other stuff but it’s all insignificant. And the trouble with this part of the story is that you can only describe music so far in a story. That’s why it’s music - if it was possible to say the things you can say with music in words, then music wouldn’t exist as music, it’d all be words. But you can’t, and music lives on. Let’s just say, Julius’ music was exquisitely good - not to everyone’s taste mind, that’s a separate issue all together - but really amazing, honest and sweeping, with beats made up of real emotion that just got inside your head. It made the people in the room that listened feel a bit like they had made the music themselves, and that they were deserving of feeling good about making it too. It connected them, with hundreds of tiny invisible lines, right up to Julius, on stage, who was inside the music, his eyes never leaving the straight lines of his computer. The way he got through performing was to pretend he was at home, facing the window that looked out on green, playing to an audience chosen entirely out of his imagination. He communicated with the music through the drawn lines of the yellow hair that hung over his eyes, and the people in the room weren’t there. They were green, and all of his choosing, invited. He didn’t see them, he didn’t think of them. The music.

Then - after he’d been playing his music for a fair while - a girl - she had on a brown cardigan, and blue nail varnish. She liked the music - she was sitting - uncomfortably - at one of the dark wood tables, and she had a feeling. She had a sudden feeling - a certain feeling - that something was going to happen here tonight, something major. Something awful. She gasped as she had the feeling, because it was more than a feeling, it was knowing, knowing that something was going to happen. And as she gasped, her hand flew to her wide open mouth, and her eyes went crazy, flicking and fluttering, because in that moment she could see, she could just see what was going to happen here tonight, and it was so awful…

She turned her head, wheezing for words, trying to take it all in, she turned her head towards the friend nearest to her to say something, to warn someone-

And she was looking at the end of a gun. Big and shiny, right in her face, aimed at her eyes. And she died right then, knowing.

The lights flashed green and yellow, the cigar and cigarette smoke mingled with the smoke from the machine and the smoke from the gun and the dust from the dark wood tables, under which dead people sat uncomfortably, as others died around them. The floor ran with blood and piss and beer and other drinks, the barmaid slumped across the pumps at the bar. The man behind the gun kept on shooting and the musician kept on playing. Julius kept on playing. He didn’t see, and he didn’t hear. His eyes through the drawn lines of his yellow hair, pea-greenish under the bright disco lights, and the smoke. And the music.
That’s the end.

So what happened to the musician?

He was fine. He survived.

No he didn’t. He died too!

No, he was fine - he didn’t get shot.

He wasn’t fine. He went - inside the music.

But-

And even if he did survive, he would have been put in a padded cell, and listen to music all day, and not be able to do anything else or see any people. Because of what happened.

And what do you know about padded cells?