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Iris looked to the stage, where the crooner was singing “Blue Moon.” She put her hand in his, and he assisted her to her feet and led her to the small area in front of the band where sweethearts swayed like dandelions in the breeze. He noticed as he placed his hand on her waist that they were the only man and woman dancing together. He grinned. What a pair of inverts they were!
Charles leaned in closer and whispered in his wife’s ear: “Why don’t you lead.”
Chapter 20
The Flapper stood teetering over the Birmingham canal like a dipsomaniac who could topple into the water at any time. Dusk had not long fallen, strings of artificial lights twinkled over the water, and Patrick felt this city working on his defenses again. She was letting her hair down, all right.
“I haven’t been here in ages,” Will breathed as he held open the gate for Patrick. “I practically lived here as a teenager.”
Will wore a battered leather jacket with the collar popped and the sleeves rolled up. He looked, frankly, devastating. By comparison, Patrick felt hopelessly square in his gray hoodie, stone-colored khakis, blue baseball cap, and hiking boots. He didn’t want to think about where Will had procured this “straight-man drag,” whether he had a box somewhere filled with detritus from old boyfriends and one-night stands. But if the object of the evening was camouflage, then mission accomplished: Patrick was dressed so unremarkably, he imagined he could walk straight into traffic and the cars would pass right through him.
He allowed Will to lead him across the narrow walkway over the terrace below into the building itself, and downstairs to the small, packed space where the gig would take place. Margo stood near the front of the crowd, chatting with a dark-haired man who could only be Dylan’s father. Will and Patrick found a spot at the back of the room, where they were less likely to be noticed, and squeezed behind a standing table.
“Good for him for showing up,” Patrick said, jerking his head toward the front. From what he had gleaned, Margo and Owen hadn’t been together since not long after Dylan was born.
“Good for him?” Will frowned. “Dylan’s his child. Jesus. The bar for straight men is on the floor.”
Patrick flushed, embarrassed by his own remark and uncertain if Will’s ire was aimed at him or at the man who had once hurt his sister. Eager to change the subject, he glanced around at the stickers and band posters plastered all over the walls and low ceiling. “I wouldn’t picture you as the kind of guy who’d come to a…rock pub? Is that what we’d call this?” he asked.
“You’re adorable,” said Will. “But yeah, I used to knock about here all the time.”
“Aren’t you full of surprises?”
“Margo had a grunge phase. Which meant I had a grunge phase.”
Almost on cue, as if to illustrate his point exactly, an instantly recognizable electric guitar riff broke out across the sound system, and Will’s eyes widened in pleasure. He threw one arm around Patrick’s shoulder and another in the air, singing along to the opening verse. “Oh make me over!” he belted. “I’m all I wanna be!”
“Wow. You’ve got some pipes.”
“Thank you for noticing.” He smiled shyly. “I was in a band once, you know.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yep. A million years ago. I was, like, seventeen maybe, and spending basically all of my time with this boyfriend who was a year older and knew somebody who knew one of the Scissor Sisters. Which, as I say it now, I realize was probably complete bullshit. But yeah. We thought it would be a great idea to start our own band. I sang, he played the guitar. We were like if Alex Turner and Jamie Cook from the Arctic Monkeys were actually sleeping together. We called ourselves the Nine Bob Notes.”
“I don’t get it,” said Patrick, pretending not to feel the rankle of jealousy. He did a pretty good job, he thought. Acting!
“It’s an old saying. ‘As queer as a nine-bob note.’ I don’t even think it meant queer in that way. I think it meant you were like a bent cop or something. Nobody called us on it, though. Mainly because we played exactly one gig, and then we broke up.”
“A short-lived era,” said Patrick. “But wow, to be one of the people who can say they were in the room when the Nine Bob Notes played their one and only show!”
“I know, right?” Will laughed. “We were pretty good, too. Are you hungry? They do Korean fried chicken upstairs. It’s quite good.”
Patrick shook his head. “No thanks,” he said. “How come, if you sound like that, you always lip-sync onstage?”
“You’re going to think it’s silly.”
“I would never.” Beat. “OK, I might, but tell me anyway and I’ll pretend it’s not.”
“I get stage fright.”
“You? You get stage fright.”
“Yep.”
“You literally just told me you used to sing in a band.”
“I was a child. You don’t know to be afraid of anything when you’re that young.”
