Page 9 of Our Song

In an ideal world I’d have given Tadhg some time to forget about my weirdness at the céilí before seeing him again. Like a week. Or maybe a month. But I had to go to the music room the next day. I couldn’t miss the opportunity to possibly start a band. That didn’t mean I wasn’t nervous, though.

‘I just have to go to the loo,’ I said to Katie, as we made our way through the coláiste corridors. I needed a moment to compose myself.

‘Stop dithering!’ said Katie. ‘We’re already late.’

‘I’ll follow you on!’ I said.

As I pushed open the door of the band room a few minutes later, it struck me that maybe Tadhg wouldn’t be there and I’d been making a fuss over nothing, but he was there all right, already holding an electric guitar.

There was no sign of his Evil Twin bandmate.

Katie’s new BFF, Brían, was sitting behind the drum kit, and Katie was standing by an impressive electric keyboard.

Standing next to Tadhg was the shiny-haired girl who had glowered at me for speaking English on the bus the day before.

Well, she needn’t worry, it would be Irish-only in this room (apart from words like ‘yeah’ and ‘okay’, which even the sticklers couldn’t object to).

‘Laura!’ cried Katie. ‘You remember Tadhg and Brían from the céilí? And this is Caoimhe.’

‘Hi,’ I said.

‘I’m just after telling Tadhg I think maybe we’ve seen his band on Grafton Street,’ said Katie.

‘Oh yeah,’ I said. This was my chance to be a normal person. I turned to Tadhg and said, as casually as I could, ‘I thought I recognised you.’

Tadhg said, ‘I thought I recognised you too.’

Before I could say anything preposterous back to him, Caoimhe saved me from myself and said, ‘We were just going to try working out a song. Do you play an instrument?’

‘Um, guitar,’ I said.

‘Really?’ said Tadhg. ‘Cool.’ He didn’t say it in the disbelieving tone some boys used when they found out I played the guitar. He actually seemed impressed. ‘We can both play guitar. There are two electrics. Do you want to play rhythm or lead, Laura?’

‘I think I’ll play rhythm,’ I said, though I didn’t really have to do too much thinking about it.

If I was going to play the guitar in front of the boy of my dreams, I wanted to play in a way that gave me a chance to impress him.

In my nervous state, I’d make a show of myself if I tried picking out any lead guitar lines.

‘I’ll play bass on the keyboard,’ said Katie. Although Katie’s main instrument was the not-so-rock-and-roll clarinet, she had done piano up to Grade One, so she was definitely up to the task of playing a simple bassline.

‘What will you do?’ I asked Caoimhe.

‘I’ll be singing,’ she said. She looked uncertain, and I realised that, despite her head-girl vibe, she wasn’t cocky. ‘If no one minds.’

It was settled. I took down the other electric guitar from the wall and pulled the strap over my head.

It was a battered Squier Stratocaster. I felt a little thrill of excitement as I grabbed a lead from a box and connected to it an amp.

An electric guitar! I’d only ever had a go of one in a shop before.

‘So … What song are we doing?’ I said, after I’d tuned the guitar.

It turned out that while I was dithering in the loo, they had decided to figure out ‘All Day and All of the Night’ by the Kinks, a classic tight, loud pop song.

‘We all know it,’ said Tadhg, ‘and the chords are easy.’

‘Yeah, I can play it,’ I said. I’d played it on my own in my room on my dad’s old guitar plenty of times. And now I was going to play it with a band!

‘I’ve already written new words for it in Irish,’ said Caoimhe, holding up a piece of paper. ‘They’re not a translation. But the idea is the same.’

So the rehearsal began.

And we were awful .

I had to start the whole song off and I was so nervous I kept getting the rhythm wrong.

But it wasn’t just me. The drums were too loud.

Then the keyboards were too quiet. Caoimhe’s Irish lyrics might have looked good on paper, but they didn’t always match the rhythm of the tune when she was actually singing them.

Katie and Tadhg’s backing vocals clashed.

Tadhg tried to do the elaborate guitar solo from the original and it totally fell apart.

It was an absolute mess. By the time we had staggered to the end of the song, I wanted to give up.

I’d wanted to play with a band for so long, and now it turned out I was terrible at it. We were all terrible at it.

Except maybe we weren’t. Because to my amazement, Tadhg said, ‘Not too bad for a first try! Let’s go again.’

So we did. And then we did it again. And again.

And again. We played it for two hours. We only took breaks for the loo and to get water because it was hot and stuffy in that soundproofed practice room.

And gradually, so gradually that for a while we weren’t aware of it, we started to get better.

Caoimhe tweaked her lyrics so they scanned better with the tune.

Katie started hammering out a bassline and a top note on the piano that added an extra layer of percussion.

I stopped overthinking and just let myself channel that gorgeous choppy garage riff.

After a while, we stopped looking at our hands and the lyric sheet and started looking at each other instead, nodding our heads in time to the steady beat.

It didn’t matter that Tadhg was the boy I’d had a crush on for months because right now we were equals.

We were part of a team. The five of us were in time now, we were in perfect sync, and when Tadhg finally played the solo perfectly, we all whooped and cheered.

My right arm was aching, but I kept playing, slamming down each crunchy chord in perfect time with Brían’s drums and Katie’s bassline, and we were all joyfully singing our version of the final chorus and I didn’t care that I couldn’t sing, because now we weren’t just a bunch of people who happened to play music.

We were a band, playing as one, shouting together in pure joy and exhilaration.

‘ An t-am, an t-am ar fad! ’

I smashed the last chord that finished the song and we all broke out into cheers and applause. Tadhg forgot we were meant to be speaking Irish and shouted, ‘That was brilliant !’ And Caoimhe was so flushed with happy excitement she forgot to give out to him.

It was my first time hanging out with Tadhg Hennessy.

It was my first time playing in a band.

And I knew, as if I’d been hit by a thunderbolt, that I wanted to keep doing both of these things for the rest of my life.