Two Songs In, No Drummer

The Crown in Ennis paid two hundred euro and a round each, and it had done so every second Saturday for three years, which was long enough that the regulars knew the setlist better than the band did. Ciarán set up the PA at six. Aoife tuned the bass against her phone. Decko was texting. "He says he's on the way." "He said that at half six." "He's saying it again now." By eight the front bar was full and the back was filling and there was still no drummer. The landlord, a man called Hughie who never took off his coat, came over and looked at the empty stool behind the kit with the expression of somebody looking at a hole in a road. "Ye'll go on anyway." "We've no drummer, Hughie." "Ye've a bass." He walked away. They went on anyway. Ciarán counted in the first song, an old Thin Lizzy one that usually started with a snare roll, and the snare roll didn't happen and the room noticed. It's hard to explain what a room noticing sounds like. It's a lot of people not quite talking. Aoife found it first. She dropped the bass line to just the root notes, long and heavy, and started stamping her heel on the hollow stage so it thudded through the monitors. Ciarán heard it and stopped strumming and started hitting the strings instead, muting them with his palm, chuk-a-chuk, the way he did at home when he was pretending to be a drummer. By the second chorus somebody at the bar was clapping on the two and four, and by the third chorus it was all of them, and Hughie was tapping a pint glass with a spoon. They did the whole set like that. Two hours. The slow ones they slowed down further and made everyone sing. The fast ones they told the room, "You're the drums, don't let us down," and the room did not let them down, mostly, except during the Fleetwood Mac number when it fell apart completely and they all just laughed and started again.

Decko turned up at ten past ten. He came in the side door with his sticks in his back pocket and his face already apologising. His car, he said. Then his phone. Then the road out of Gort. He sat down behind the kit and picked up the sticks and looked out at a room full of people stamping their feet, and he put the sticks back down. "Are ye grand without me, then?" "Sit in for the last two," Aoife said. "But quiet. They've got the rhythm now. Don't take it off them." He played the last two with the brushes, barely, like someone stirring tea. Afterwards Hughie paid them two hundred and twenty and said the extra was for the stamping. In the car park Decko said, "Was it really that good?" Ciarán loaded the amp into the boot and thought about it honestly. "No," he said. "It was worse. It was a good deal worse. But it was ours, and they were in it with us, and I don't know how you'd get that back with a snare drum." Decko was quiet the whole way to Gort.