At the sound check the guitar string broke.
Not the thickest one. The thin, high one, the one that talks the most. It snapped once, and the room suddenly went quiet, as if somebody had pulled the whole thing out of the socket.
“There’s a spare,” said Ákos, already rummaging in the case.
Ákos was the drummer, and he was the only one who never got nervous. Beside him stood Réka, who sang, and who wrote the melodies in the air when there was no paper.
We were supposed to play at the freshers’ ball. They had asked for three numbers, all covers: songs everyone knows, songs everyone dances to.
And there was a fourth.
I wrote it. Nobody had heard it yet, only me, in my room, humming into my phone so that I would not forget it.
“Shall we put it in?” asked Réka at the end of the sound check.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because it isn’t good.”
That was not true. We did not put it in because I was afraid.
On the night of the ball the hall was full. They had decorated the gym, and two hundred people stood in front of the stage, all of whom knew all three songs by heart.
After the second number Réka turned away from the microphone and leaned towards my ear.
“I can’t sing.”
“Sorry?”
“My voice. It’s gone.”
It really was hoarse. She had been coughing since the morning and had not said anything, because she did not want us to cancel.
Ákos looked at us from behind the drums. The audience waited.
“There’s one song,” I said.
Réka looked at me. She did not ask which one. She only nodded.
Then I understood that she had known all along. That she had been in my room the whole time, somehow, in the melody, waiting for me to say it.
I started to play.
In the first line nobody recognised anything. In the second, a few people stopped talking. At the chorus Réka sang — hoarsely, quietly, not beautifully, but truly. And Ákos, who never made a mistake, made one then, and it was the best thing that happened that day, because from that moment everyone knew this was not a recording.
At the end there was silence.
Then applause. Not like the applause after the covers — that applause was for the familiar songs. This was different. This was for the fact that something new had happened, and that they had been there when it did.
Backstage Réka sat down on the floor and buried her face in her hands.
“I’ll never sing again,” she said. “That was my voice, and it’s gone.”
“No,” I said. “That was your voice. That’s different.”
I do not know whether I was right. But I know one thing: that evening the school does not remember us for the three covers. It remembers us for the fourth, the one we did not want to include.
The guitar string has been replaced since. The melody is still on my phone, and sometimes I listen to it.
Not because it is beautiful. But because it reminds me: your own voice does not speak up when you are ready for it. It speaks up when there is nothing else.
