If I Fell

~50~

Bristol 5pm

"Call the office, check again Neil" Brian Epstein tapped his foot beside the motor in the carpark. Mal had been trolling through the few cars that were in the lines but none was a fancy green Aston Martin and none contained a young lady on her way to a Beatles concert.

Neil made the dash 200 metres to the phone box and back, Freda was beside herself back in the central London office, 'no Abigail hadn't called apart from just before she left the house at 8am that very morning'.

Brian's watch ticked and he made the decision to head back to the hall, time was closing in on the first performance of the evening and Mal, Neil and he were needed as security and for a multitude of other matters. One being to get four tired boys on the stage at 6.15pm.

"Not a word you two" Brian also made the decision to not breathe a word about the young lady that was supposed to meet them in the Bristol pub's carpark at 4pm, an hour and a quarter ago.

The first show was seamless and on time, the usual screaming and fainting and mad rush of human flesh towards the stage. Mal did his job but only with half his brain on the task the other was wondering if Abigail sat forlorn in a dark carpark, both John and Paul would have his hide.

A couple of girls made the stage while the National Anthem played and were up and out the back after the lads in seconds, Mal lumbering down the narrow backstage corridor after them. He finally found them hiding in a janitor's closet three doors down from where the lads were trying to rest up for the second show.

Showing the girl's the back door of the Colston hall, Mal took in the buildings off toward the Hatchett and made the quick choice to go and fetch Abigail, surely she would be there twiddling her thumbs by now, he thought.

A doctor approached the hospital bed and she shrank back whimpering almost. Two hours of torture had been inflicted and hours more in the extraction from, and collision with, the lorry, she was white with bandages and her shoulder throbbed from the dislocation being set proper. Both feet burned in varying stages of pain.

Something shiny glint in the light near her arm and she slept.

Shaking his head Mal walked up the steps slowly as he returned to the hall, Neil had already walked out minutes before and called Freda with no more luck than his previous phone call that afternoon.

Mal loved the girl, she was sweet and thoughtful and bloody good at making Paul and John toe the line although making John admit to that would be a hard-fetched thing to do.

He told himself, convinced himself, she had a flat tyre. Something trival had occured. He walked back into the room and smiled as though nothing was wrong.

Second show a mirror of the first, Paul and John joked around making George laugh and Ringo clap, they were all enormously happy because the second that show finished meant home.

Home to missed girlfriends and sister, and soft beds.

The standard setlist disappeared faster, much faster the thirty minutes and closed in to under twenty-six and as the national anthem repeated they charged into the tiny back change room with small windows, dropping guitars haphazardly but carefully into cases, suit jackets flung on chairs and drumsticks on the table. They were noisy, full of beans and bore no sign of the tiredness of earlier that day.

"Where's Mal? He should be packing this lot up quick smart so we can get back to London" Paul stuck his head out the door to garner Mal's attention but the short corridor was vacant and almost quiet, the girls yelling had abated and they could all hear themselves think, even though their ears where still ringing from the incessant screaming.