Dead Girl Walking Read Online Free PDF

I got more and more flustered. But when I was playing well it was a thrill to be getting it right in front of other people. Even now, whenever I’m in front of an audience there’s still this tension between my fear of flustering under the spotlight and the way adrenaline can bring out a level of performance that would be impossible if I was by myself.
    Even when I got more confident and my abilities were really starting to develop, I would still get butterflies whenever I was asked up in front of family, mainly because I could feel how nervous my mum was. She was always anxious that I should play well, especially in front of Granda.
    They sometimes say that talent skips a generation. I don’t know about that, but I’m sure my mum believed it. Growing up on Shetland, where the fiddle is practically a way of life, she was always worrying she had disappointed Granda. She had put in the hours and achieved a certain competence, but she didn’t have a gift and she didn’t have a passion. That was why she was so adamant that I’d be a great fiddle player, and so hard on me about practising. She desperately wanted my playing to please her father in the way hers never could.
    I could always sense that she was on edge whenever I played in front of him, or even in front of anybody who knew him; which on a place like Shetland didn’t leave out many people. And just as she didn’t want to disappoint her dad, I never wanted to let down my mum.
    It’s why I’ve always been a bit of a goody two-shoes. I was never in trouble as a child, not even a hint, because my mum is a teacher. At primary school, while the other kids knew that their carry-on might earn them a punny but that would be the end of it, I just assumed that if I stepped out of line, it would get back to her before I even got home. And at my secondary school, where she actually taught, I reckoned she would find out in the staff room by the end of the next interval.
    So I was hard-working, well behaved and a bit quiet. Too quiet still, I think. I’m shy, which is hardly a vice, but sometimes I hate myself for shrinking into the background when I’ve got something to say. I know it’s easier for other people, but deep down I know I’m being cowardly.
    I can take the spotlight if I’m playing my fiddle, but otherwise, those sidelines look quite comfy, thank you. That’s why folk were amazed to learn I was joining a band: not just doing session work in a studio, but actually going on the road. They could picture me taking my place in the orchestra, even travelling to the Mod each year, as it was easy to imagine me playing my wee part of something so respectable. But a band?
    They’d even double-check the word, carefully chosen by me. A
band
, you say? Yes. Not a group, as in folk, or a quartet, as in string. A band. As in … well, let’s let the critics argue about that one. (Rock? Indy? Grind-core death metal? Maybe not the last.)
    And if folk who knew me were amazed, there aren’t the words to convey my own levels of surprise, which continued to plague me all the more the closer it came to the start of the tour.
    I know I was in denial during the rehearsals. It didn’t feel that different to studio work: just a bigger soundproofed room, except more of the floor was messy with flight cases and there was no recording console.
    Whenever we all sat in the pub afterwards, or went for a curry, it went through my mind that I was about to go away for months with these people I barely knew. And this wasn’t going to be like going on tour with an orchestra. This was … well, I didn’t know, and was trying not to let my imagination run away with me. How wild could it get? I asked myself. We were never out that late on those pub nights. Damien, the lead guitarist and the most rock-looking guy in the band, was always imposing a curfew by buying the ‘last round’, reminding everybody of their professional obligations to turn up to rehearsals on time in the morning and