Autumn Tears And Winter Leaves

"Guitar?"

"Check."

"Bass?"

"Check."

"Drum kit?"

"Check."

"Lyrics book?"

"Check."

"Leash?"

Torben paused, his expression flushed with confusion. Turning from the back of the band's van to face Lawen, he frowned. "Leash?"

"Yeah," Lawen replied, dropping the list to her side. "For Pasco. We're so gonna need it when he sets eyes on Billie Joe."

Torben nodded in agreement and grinned. "Somehow I think the words, 'Down, boy', would only encourage him more."
Lawen laughed as Torben flicked one anxious glance into the back of the van. Pressing his lips together until all of the blood was squeezed out of them, he slowly spun back to Lawen. "I think we've got everything." he told her solemnly.

Scrolling her eyes down the list and cross-referencing her insecurity with the back of the van, Lawen nodded. "Uh huh."

"Nervous?" Torben asked tentatively. He softly shut the back of the van and locked it carefully. Turning back to Lawen, he smiled quietly.

Capturing Torben's gaze, Lawen reflected his smile back to him. "Crapping myself," she confessed. "You?"

Releasing a tight laugh, Torben eased Lawen into a hug. "Petrified."

Lawen buried her head onto Torben's shoulder. She let a light laugh brush against him before pulling back slightly to look at him. "We will be ok, won't we?"

Sensing her draining confidence, Torben fixed Lawen with a determined look. "Of course we are." he reassured. Coaxing Lawen around until her eyes were rolling across the clouds, he pressed, "See that? It's our horizon. And it's so much closer than you think it is."

"Are you sure it was the last left?" Conall asked, his forehead furrowed with frustrated lines. He leant over the steering wheel to analyse the road in front of him, sucking in short breaths violently.

"Yes, Conall." Torben replied, shortly. Folding the map into his lap, he looked across the passenger seat to him. "For the fifth time, I'm sure."

Feeling Torben's bottled aggression scorch the side of his face, Conall glanced back at him briefly before sighing. "I'm not even getting into this argument."

"See," Pasco noted from the back, gently nudging Lawen. "This is why they never have married flight-teams. They'd argue all the way to your destination. You wanna go to Turkey? They get into an argument. End up in Torquay."

"Pasco. You're not helping." Conall threw from the front of the van.

"Neither are you." Pasco retorted, shamelessly.

Stretching forward with a resigned sigh, Lawen gently tapped Torben's shoulder. "Give us the map, sweetheart." she asked as he turned to face her. Looking down with disdain at it, he frowned deeply and handed the map to her gratefully. "Thank you." Lawen said as she settled beside Pasco to scour it. "Where are we now?" she quizzed rhetorically, resting her head against the window to find some kind of signpost. When one flickered past her gaze, she turned sharply to the map, browsing her finger across the various knotted lines on the page. After an torturous silence, Lawen dashed up sharply, her finger fixated on one spot on the map. "Well, I'd hate to tell you boys," she started. "But you were both wrong." Slicing into the gap between her silence and Torben's protest, Lawen wrapped her arms around Conall's headrest. "Darling, you need to calm down. We're not that far off. If you take the next right then we should be back on course."

Pasco grinned as Lawen settled back beside him and sprawled an arm around her shoulders, saying, "I knew there was a reason we had a woman in this band."

"I'm gonna be sick. I'm gonna be sick. I'm so gonna be sick over someone right now." Lawen paced outside the doors to the audition room in frantic anxiety.

Looking up from burning a rhythmic hole into the carpet with his drumsticks, Pasco frowned. "Don't be sick over me." Bounding his gaze across to Conall, he grinned. "I nominate him as sick bucket." he added, indicating to Conall with one drumstick.

Smiling faintly, Conall shook his head. "Not me." Twisting his gaze to look across at Lawen, his smile wavered and faded. "Lawen, darling. You're making me dizzy." he complained, slicing across the room to capture her in a hug.

"I'm sorry," Lawen murmured in a child-like voice against his shoulder. "I'm just so nervous."

"Me too." Conall confessed as he smoothed her static hair. "We'll be ok though," he reassured. "We know this song. We could play it backwards if we had to."

"Uh huh," Pasco reinforced with a hyper-active nod. "We are at one with the song." Awkwardly crossing his legs, Pasco began to emit loud droning hums as the others stood and laughed.

"Our Teenage Kicks?" a voice pierced through the laughter.

Spinning in unison to the slightly parted doors, the band registered a casually-dressed representative wedged in the gap. Feeling slightly uneased as his eyes slunk across them, Lawen nodded. "Yeah." she replied in a numbed voice.

"We're ready for you." the representative announced before vanishing through the gap and sealing the door on his presence.

Turning back to the band, Lawen chewed her lip savagely. "You know, it's not too late to turn back." she suggested as her hands began to tremor with sweat at her sides.

"Nuh uh." Pasco quiped. Stepping forward intently, he seized Lawen's hand within his own clutch. "We are going in there and we are showing them what we are made of. How many opportunities like this are going to come to low-lives like us?"

"He's right, you know, Lawen," Torben encouraged. "We've got to do this." Placing a delicate hand on her shoulder, he soothed, "We'll be fine."

Nodding as she swallowed her biled doubts, Lawen released the clamp she held on her lip. "OK. Let's do it."

Launching the door open, Conall led the group onto the stage already arranged for them. As her trembled footsteps echoed across its emptiness, Lawen wondered how many bands had purged their energy there, sacrificed every fibre for this one luck-tinged opportunity. And she couldn't help but question how many bands had left the stage with nothing left but the knowledge that they were nowhere near good enough to grasp their shooting-star dreams just yet.

Feeling warm pressure against the small of her back, Lawen twisted out of her thoughts to see Pasco grinning into her ear. "Look at him. He looks so damn screwable." Gnawing on her lip once again to suppress an eager laugh, Lawen permitted her eyes to gradually roll up the hall to the table where Green Day were sat, distracted in conversation.

"My God. They're real." Lawen gasped in reply.

Laughing violently, Pasco gently nudged her. "Of course they're real. They're hardly puppets, are they?"

Hearing Pasco's reverberating response, Green Day looked up in unison and smiled at the band congregated on the stage. "Hey." Billie Joe greeted, grinning across to them.

"God, he even sounds screwable." Pasco whispered in Lawen's ear.

Shoving him slightly, Lawen faced Green Day once again. "Hi." she greeted in a miniscule voice.

"You're 'Our Teenage Kicks', right?" Billie Joe questionned, checking the papers in front of him.

Nodding in response, Lawen tried not to focus on the six extra eyes now focussed upon her nor the expectations that they seemed to subconsciously hold for the band. Instead, she forced her mouth into a shaking smile and leant against Pasco slightly.

"OK then. Let's see what you've got." Billie Joe said, placing the papers on the table once again.

Gulping helplessly, Lawen took a trembling step to the microphone at the front of the stage. As she left Pasco's side, she felt his equally-clammy hand slide into hers, squeezing it reassuringly. Flicking one final smile back at him, Lawen wobbled to the microphone stand and clasped her hand around it until her knuckles were bleached white.

It wasn't the penetrating gazes that unnerved her, nor the succession of lights that slowly roasted her skin with prickled beads of sweat. It was the prolonged, painful silence as the other band members checked their instruments and strided into position, the knowledge that, whatever trick Fate dealt them during the next five minutes, determined the pot-holed path their future carved. It was a lot of responsibility and required so much strength that Lawen only just realised that she never had. But, up on stage, there was no time for second-thought impulses, no space for emergency-exit escapes. All that was there was the band, the silence and the judges.

Until Pasco struck the rhythmic introduction.

And that was the point where nothing else mattered. Winding herself around the music, Lawen drew enough passion from her serrated heart to entwine around the melody, merging Pasco's energy, Torben's tentative bass-lines and Conall's defined chords. And everything meshed in vivid perfection, drawing an unrealised fervour from the band that no member realised they nurtured.

And, as the song strummed to its climax, Lawen found herself planted within reality once again, unable to recall where she had been for the past four minutes or why she was perched on the edge of the stage, dripping molten emotion from every pore. Pacing backwards, she glanced over her shoulder to see the other three members just as drenched as her and wearing mirrored-bemused looks.

Reluctantly, her body pulled Lawen back to face Green Day who leant across the desk in animated discussion. Pressing her lips together, Lawen placed the microphone back into its stand with shuddering hands, running them down her side when she finished. Lingering on the edge of ecstasy, she realised how tragically wrong her thoughts were before. The most unnerving part of the performance was waiting for the verdict.