the cadence of part time poets

Chapter 33: Sheila

Eleanor Rigby,
Picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been,
Lives in a dream;
Waits at the window,
Wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door,
Who is it for?

All the lonely people,
Where do they all come from?
All the lonely people,
Where do they all belong?

- "Eleanor Rigby" The Beatles, 1966

Monday 20th September 1976

"So... what do you think?"

Remus lowered the notebook, eyebrows raised. "Mm? Oh, yeah. It's... good. This part, 'moon, star, acoustic guitar', yeah that bit's good..."

"It's shit."

"What? No. No... Well... Maybe... But not all of it."

Huffing, Sirius gave a grumpy strum on his guitar, legs tucked up beneath him on his bed. Remus sat across from him on the floor, back pressed against the edge of James' bed as he flipped through the notebook Sirius had kept with him over the summer. Like his letters promised, he'd been trying to write, but most of the songs ended up being a reflection of how being at home made him feel. Either horrendously gritty or intensely dark, with many that involved setting fire to the house or giving his mother a rather (gruesome) piece of his mind. Not all of it was terrible though—several of the lyrics had promise, and Remus quite liked the lines that went;

Loving you is how it feels to be done dirty,
Without you I was clear and now all I've got are all these worries;
I never asked for none of it,
But you were always generous,
'Cause love and kind and worry are just so fucking effortless.

It felt like real rock and roll, or in the very least, melodramatic, which was Sirius' favourite brand of rebellious sentiment anyway.

"Have you shown James?" He asked, turning the next page, which was mostly just a scribble of crossed out lines than anything else.

"No. I wanted you to be the first."

"O-oh?" Remus' licked his lips and forced a chuckle. "Why? 'Cause it doesn't matter what I think?"

Sirius looked up from his guitar very quickly. "No. 'Cause you're harder to impress. James is too nice. Even if it was all shit he'd never say so—but you would. Makes me want to work harder, I think."

"Oh..." Remus suddenly found the scribbled page very interesting, staring down at it to avoid Sirius' intense gaze.

"Besides, can't hardly ever get the dumb idiot to slow down nowadays. Did you know that before you got back to the room, he blasted out of here so fast he didn't even give himself time to dry his hair. Looked like he got hit by lightning."

"So not much different from usual then?"

Sirius tossed his head back and forth a bit in cheeky consideration. "No, not by much. Gotta love him, that Prongs."

"That's your worst nickname yet," Remus said, thinking back to the weekend before, when they'd nearly had to cut the stag head in half with a pair of kitchen scissors just to get James out of it. Now it hung on a peg inside their bathroom, looking distinctly worse for wear and now missing not only an antler as but one of its eyes as well. Despite that fact, Remus still felt like he was being watched every time he took a shower or did his business, but Sirius insisted on keeping the ugly thing as some sort of horrendous trophy.

"Does this mean you're coming around to 'Moony'?" Sirius asked.

"No—never. Not unless you want to be 'Starman'."