Runaway – Wayne 12

[For back story go here: Story so far at 12 June 2020 and more recents Wayne episodes]

On Wednesday, Bentley received a fine for poor food hygiene in a restaurant he didn’t own and had never been to.

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Wayne was studying chord progressions with the aid of an online tutorial and a chord chart. His hands ached (both from chord making and strumming) and the tips of his chord making hand were sore with a couple of blisters forming nicely on the end of his index and ring fingers. Even with these small pains, Wayne was happy in his work.

ManzDown had always worked frenetically, pulling in material, samples, beats and rhymes from all over the place. The idea behind his scene, so he found out as it developed, was to cut to the chase and get the hell out of there. There weren’t many songs that outstayed their welcome, a 4 min 50 second track being the exception that proved the rule – that was an epic. However the guitar slowed everything down. Indeed, things were so slow sometimes that if he was tired he fell asleep, nodding off over the guitar and jumping awake just as it started falling away from his lap. It made everything harder – at least at the moment – but it also made everything more contemplative, deeper somehow, more rich. And he was damned if he was going to be beaten by B flat sus 4.

That said he felt a little cooped up this afternoon. The lyrics weren’t flowing. He’d got as far as thinking that this might be a love song, and then that it might be a love song to the city, or the world or the planet or at least a wide enough target to be both specific and general for lyric purposes. But with a sort of chorus under his belt including a wavy metaphor about feelings welling up as if they were in a well that was welling up (it sounded better in his rhyming scheme and with the three chord progression he’d found) he felt everything was working fine.

Dave called him and said he was going out for a run and would he like to join him? Wayne was a little worried about the prospect, pointing out his track record wasn’t a particularly good one. Dave said not to worry, his form wasn’t great either, he was just looking for a break from working out social distancing in the restaurant. “We can just jog it out,” he assured Wayne. “Fresh air, bit of motion, we’ll get a fresh perspective on everything, come back and knock it out the park.”

Wayne agreed and put on a different set of running clothes from last time, although the trainers were the same, and still blood stained in a couple of places. The two headed out in good spirits and decided to take a short tour of the nearby park.

The pace wasn’t strong enough to prevent chatting and they appreciated the cooler weather as well as pointing out ducks, trees and anything else that caught their eye. Having turned for home they passed under an old railway tunnel. As they came out the other side a hand sized rock landed on Wayne’s shoulder. He stumbled and hit the floor, more shocked than anything but battered all the same.

He was about to curse his exercising luck when a voice shouted an obscenity at the couple and a figure ran off down the disused railway line. Dave shouted back at him, was about to run after him but Wayne held him back.

“Let’s go home,” he said.

With a pack of frozen peas on his shoulder, Wayne started in on social media. It wasn’t long before he found what he suspected. Not only was his love life now up for discussion it was up for abuse.

“That doesn’t mean the guy on the bridge knew who you were,” said Dave. “He was just an idiot, looking for someone to have a go at.”

“I don’t know,” said Wayne. “Not like I’m inconspicuous. And two blokes out for a run together – it's a pretty usual occurrence. He shouted at us. He must have known it was me."

“You can’t let this get you down. You knew this could happen.”

“Yeah, but for some reason I didn’t think it would happen like this. Not in this ‘hood.”

“Nothing wrong with your sweatshirt is there..?”

“The neighbourhood. Here. Where we live.”

“Idiots everywhere,” said Dave.

"Guess so," said Wayne. "Maybe I should get Cath to make a statement or something. Make sure everyone knows and then it's not just, you know...  Oh."

His voice trailed off. Wayne swivelled the laptop to Dave's field of vision and showed him the email in which Cath formerly resigned from his 'project' stating that she felt too thinly spread and would now concentrate on BarnStormerz. Where this left Wayne in relation to the record company she didn't know and would leave him to find out.

"Tell you one thing though," said Wayne, "It's sorted the second verse of the song. Just not sure I can play the guitar at the moment though."

Dave grinned. "You'll have to teach me how to play it then," he said.

Dave went off to get them a drink and a note pad in case Wayne wanted to write anything down. As he did so a chime he didn't recognise came from his phone.

Looking at it he realised it came from a new app he'd installed to test for a friend of a friend. He wasn't entirely certain what this app did and he hadn't looked at it since he'd downloaded it. He made a mental note to check it out later, there were other things to think about now.