THREE

Mark had this idea for a song but I thought it was shitty.

“That’s a shitty idea, Mark” I said and he punched me in the face. It didn’t hurt that much and I’d deserved it after I’d slept with Fran last month. It hadn’t been the worst thing I’d done or the worst thing that the band had been through, but it was up there. It put strain on things. I mean, I could handle it OK and so could Mark; we’d grown up together you see. He broke my arm when we were six and I threw his bike down a flight of steps when we were ten and he broke my sister’s heart when we were seventeen. He was a shit, but so was I and that’s how we worked and we wrote fucking ace songs together.

I think sometimes it must have been hard for Phil, like being in a band with two brothers. Mark and I would shout our heads off at each other at practice then get twatted that night and share an amazing adventure and write a fucking cool song about it. Phil was a uni friend of my sister, that’s how we met him when we’d moved to the city. But he wasn’t from our town and he didn’t understand our ways of doing things. This practice, when Mark had punched me in the face for saying his song idea was shitty, Phil had said

“Come on boys! This is ridiculous! You can’t just keep punching each other and getting mad at each other all the time! We all know it’s not about the song, I really think you ought to just settle what happened instead of acting like you’re fine about it.”

Although my face hurt, I couldn’t help but laugh. Mark was laughing too and we looked and each other, laughing our heads off. Mark was still looking at me and pointing at Phil when he said “This guy! HAHA! This guy!!” and I was laughing too.“Mate,” I said still looking at Mark but talking to Phil “you took the number 15 bus, but you don’t even live in Cloughton!!” and Mark and I pissed ourselves. “What?” that was Phil, all confused by our back-home jokes.

“You’re in the wrong band” Mark and I chanted in unison and we were still pissing ourselves as Phil was slamming the praccy room door.