Aurora Read Online Free PDF Page A

manage to keep talking to each other as if nothing had changed.
    She sat forward expectantly, but soon sank back into her seat. This was nothing but noise to her. The bass boomed, and occasionally an interesting little phrase from the lead guitar would break through, but when the synthesizer could be picked out at all it sounded like a fairground organ. The piece ground to a ragged close and received a few desultory claps from the audience. Next came a slow, turgid and apparently endless composition, throughout which the synthesizer made sounds like rushing winds or waves, but with no obvious relationship to whatever else was going on. When this dirge finally stuttered to an uncertain finish there was no applause.
    And so it went on. Her mind began to wander. Lefty had remarked to her that they had started out as “pretty much your standard heavyish rock band”, and the description appeared all too accurate. He seemed certain that, when they could afford all the equipment they needed and time in a recording studio, they would take the charts by storm with a single, followed up closely by an album. “Of course, the single’s only for the publicity— Top of the Pops and all that, you know. And the money, of course. We’ll be an albums band really.” She had gathered that he was a bit worried about Synth, who “fancies himself as a dab hand at the old electronics, but he’s a pretty ordinary keyboards player really. Maybe he’ll improve with practice. I hope.”
    Aurora was actually leaving her seat to go when Lefty caught her eye and jerked his head back in a “come here” gesture. She walked forward and, still playing, he squatted at the front of the stage, putting his mouth close to her ear.
    â€œIt’s not going too well tonight—there’s just no feedback from the audience. It’s like that sometimes.” She had to strain to hear his voice. “...and Synth hasn’t really got the hang of his new toy, though he’s been playing with it all day. It’s not helped, of course, that he’s got himself half-stoned on a bottle of the old vino while we were setting up. Feel like having a go?”
    â€œWhat d’you mean? Play up there? Me? I couldn’t!” Aurora whispered, then shouted above the racket: “There’s no way I could play that thing! Especially in front of an audience.”
    â€œCome on,” ordered Lefty, grabbing her hand and abruptly standing up, so drawing her up onto the stage whether she wanted to be there or not.
    â€œJust do what you did on the old joanna this morning. Let’s face it, you couldn’t make it any worse, could you?”
    Synth allowed himself to be dispossessed with less objection than might have been expected, and went off to find more wine. Aurora stood in a pool of blue light, surrounded on all sides by humped black shapes with glowing, winking red eyes, some emitting, at this close range, baleful hisses or throaty hums. She wanted nothing more than to fly out of the gaping door and lose herself again, wandering as she had wandered for half her aimless life.
    â€œI don’t know what to play—I don’t know any of your bloody tunes!” she wailed.
    â€œJust play anything, but do it,” hissed Doug from behind his mountain of drums and cymbals. “‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’, if you like. We’ll jam around it.”
    Ginge played a couple of rapid scales on his guitar, establishing a key, and Acker followed him on saxophone. She tried an experimental note or two, a chord, and almost reeled at the blast of sound from the PA system around her. Herbie leaned over and touched a knob. “That’s the gain control. Volume, OK? This”—he rotated a miniature joystick—“is for the quad effect. Quadraphonic? And this slider’s the note-bender.”
    Volume she understood; the other terms might as well have been Arabic. She turned