Gravity

Chapter Nine

“Shall we play it again?” Will asked.

“Yes, come on Will! We do need to get it right this time,” Chris pushed on. They had been in Liverpool for about two weeks now, writing songs for the follow up to Parachutes and still needed to learn to play the songs together before recording them.

“Fine, let’s do it.”

“Ready? One, two, three…”

The music started again, first the piano, then the guitar and finally the drums and bass, the four instruments combined brilliantly to make a wonderful piece, it was almost flawless, until Jonny missed a note. Again. Chris winced but they kept playing, when it happened a second time, Chris stopped abruptly and gave the guitarist a hard stare. It was the eleventh time they had gone over the same song. After the first few mistakes, Chris had been forgiving, but he had started to lose his patience.

Ashamed, Jonny lowered his head. “I’m sorry, fellas, I don’t seem to be having a good day,” he quietly said.

“Too much lager last night Buckland?” Guy taunted trying to lift up the mood.

“No, I don’t know. Let’s do it again, let’s play it one more time,” he suggested.

“Sure?” Will asked. “Maybe we should move to another one.”

“Yeah, I’m sure. Let’s continue, I’ll concentrate harder,” he said and repositioned his fingers on his guitar once more.

“Ok, here we go,” Chris said, “One, two, three…”

They had not even made it to the chorus when Jonny missed the note again. Chris wanted to scream in frustration. They had been working on the same song for three hours in a row and Jonny would fuck it up every single time. It was unusual for him to be so distracted. The singer tried to be understanding but he was at the end of his tether, he, however, could not lash out at Jonny. You just could not lash out at someone as sweet and gentle as him, especially when he was obviously not doing it on purpose.

“Why don’t we take a break?” he proposed instead, not quite managing to hide his annoyance.

No sooner had Will and Guy left the room than Chris approached his friend, whose attention was focused on tuning his guitar, his fingers quietly twisting the pegs on the instrument.

“What’s wrong, mate? You’re not usually like this,” the blue-eyed man asked grabbing a stool and sitting opposite him.

“It’s nothing, I’m just not focused, I’m sorry.”

“Are you sure there’s nothing else?”

He was about to answer when his mobile started beeping. The guitarist glanced at the screen. Jonny’s face showed defeat at the sender. What was going on? Chris curiously watched his friend read the text and sigh. He took a moment to notice how tired Jonny looked, how cloudy his green eyes were.

“Is everything alright?”

“Yes, well,” he let out a deep breath, “I just broke up with Anne,” he told him, scratching the back of his head.

“Really? When? Why didn’t you tell me?” Chris suddenly felt guilty for getting angry with his friend. If only he had told him about his break up, he would have been more considerate.

“We’ve been on the rocks for a while, but I told her last night. She, I don’t know if you guys had noticed, but she was, she had become kind of too controlling, too jealous,” he explained.

They had noticed. They had all noticed the countless text messages Jonny received, the calls at random times, the hushed tone in which Jonny would tell her where he was and to not be so paranoid.