Hoofcross felt he was on fire,
the jagged clanging of his bass guitar discharging into the overheated
atmosphere of the room like some manic electrified carillon. He must look like
he was on fire, too, the handmade cigarette hanging out his mouth like a
sputtering fuse, smoke blowing into his nose as he focused his callused fingers
in their grip on the frets. Behind him, Mapplethwaite was busting a gut on the
drums, the sweat standing out on his pasty forehead, clinging to his greasy
hair as he hammered the kit in fervid concentration. At the bar before their
set, Mapplethwaite’d been boasting loudly about the blackness of his shit that
morning, fallout from a night out on the Guinness. Now he seemed to have lost
all his bravado, and was hanging on for dear life, working away with a deathly
determination as his face became steadily more pale and his suffering stood out
more blatantly by the second. At the front of the band, Prig was having a whale
of a time, howling like a monkey down the wonkily-adjusted mike-stand, his
hands moving in only the most impressionistic approximation of the chords he
should be playing. Off to his right, Pilkington completed the lineup, frowning
over his guitar in dastardly absorption as he tried to remember a song they’d
taught him at practice barely more than three hours before.
The gig
was a stormer. Drunken whoops greeted the chaotic disintegration at the end of
every song, and at the termination of their set a trio of their mates set up a
ragged chanting of the band's name as the members set about unplugging their
various pedals and instruments, with Mapplethwaite removing his cymbals from
the drum kit.
‘Muf-ti! Muf-ti! Muf-ti!’
Hoofcross was stoked. They’d
played tonight perhaps the best out of any gig they’d ever done together, and
he was on a high as he walked outside, sweat cooling on his glowing face, to
smoke his post-gig cigarette…
