9cc

‘You want one of the beers I stole earlier?’ I said.
‘No thanks.’
‘How’ve you been?’ I asked looking at him chewing a mouthful of a bread roll he’d taken, like me, from the wicker basket offered us by the man telling the story. ‘I was thinking how long since we’d seen each other...must be...’
‘...seven and a half years,’ he said, - I thought it was fifteen - ‘and mother was right behind me as always.’
We’d drifted away from the crowd. In the distance behind him I saw a church steeple pointed in a blue sky.
‘It wasn’t easy being with you both all the time,' I said. 'I realised that later.’
He said, ‘one day she missed the glue and I don’t know where she got to after that.’
I read the writing on the mustard yellow back cover of the CD he’d given that named me as singer on the fourth song - “9cc” - the three of us had played when we first arrived that afternoon. We moved chairs and trumpets marking off our space in the recording studio we were sharing with a seven-piece brass band of miners from Nottingham.
‘I should’ve sung more of other people’s songs,’ I thought.
Now, as I approached the house in the woods where we’d meet earlier, I felt jealous of his talent, of what he’d done and who he’d done it with.
‘If only I'd stayed with him, I could’ve been so much more.’