The Band in the Cellar

The cellar was under a bakery on Rowan Street, and it had two rules. Nothing before six, because of the ovens, and nothing after ten, because of the flat above. Between those hours, for eleven years, four people had made a great deal of noise there every Wednesday.

Priya was the drummer and the only one who had ever had a lesson. Marek played bass, badly at first and then adequately. Ellis had a guitar and a hundred opinions. Joanne sang, and had joined last, in a year the others could no longer agree on.

They had never played a proper concert. There had been two weddings, one street party which was rained off after four songs, and a birthday in a pub function room where nobody had listened. This didn't bother them as much as people assumed it should.

The letter came in February. The building had been sold, the landlord wrote, and the cellar was needed for storage from the first of April. He was sorry. He had been the one who let them have it for forty pounds a month in the first place, so nobody shouted at him.

Ellis said they should look for something else at once. Marek said that if they found a room in the same part of town, it would cost three hundred a month, which was true. Priya said nothing, because she had already rung two places on her lunch break and both were full.

That left four Wednesdays. Nobody called it that out loud until the second one, when Joanne arrived, put her coat on the amplifier as always, and said, "Right, three left," and everyone pretended she hadn't.

The cellar had never been a good room. It was damp along the north wall, the ceiling was low enough that Marek had learned to stand slightly to the left, and there was a smell of warm bread from six until about half past seven which had ruined several serious songs.

On the third Wednesday Priya brought a microphone and a small recorder she had borrowed from her brother. She said that if they didn't record something now, they would spend the next ten years telling people about a band that nobody could hear.

They argued for half an hour about which six songs. Ellis wanted the newest ones. Joanne wanted the ones she could actually sing at the end of a working day. In the end they chose five that everybody knew and one that Marek had written and had never quite finished.

The recording took four hours and went past ten, and at twenty past the woman from the flat above came down the stairs in her dressing gown. She listened to the last chorus from the doorway, said the singing was better than she'd expected, and went back up.

On the last Wednesday they didn't play at all. A van was hired, the drum kit was taken apart and carried up in six trips, and the damp wall turned out to have a poster behind it from a band none of them remembered putting up.

Priya handed the key back at the bakery counter on the Friday. The woman there put it in a drawer with a lot of other keys and gave her a loaf that hadn't sold, and the new lock went on the cellar door the week after.

They still meet, in Marek's garage, without drums, which is not the same thing and everyone knows it. But the recording exists. It is thirty-one minutes long, there is a bakery van reversing in the background of track four, and if you ask any of them, they'll tell you that was the point.