The Rockin' Rodents

Getting to the Gig

Where the fuck is he?"

Ariadna and Johnny exchanged glances, Johnny's lips turning downwards in an expression of surprise. Ger rarely swore. Anyway, at that moment Ger's dad was only fifteen minutes late. As the time passed with agonizing slowness, Ger's assumption that his father had let them down began to take on inertia that moved inexorably towards an apparent truth.

In reality, Ger was worried that his dad had driven under the influence and that the Fire brigade was somewhere extracting his bloody corpse from the mangled wreck.

A knife-plate scraping change of gears, the bang of an exhaust long due replacing, and a factory's worth of carbon footprint oily black smoke announced his dad's arrival. A white Ford van, its white paint stained with patches of rust, suspension creaking under its empty weight. The breaks screamed under duress as they slowed the van to a halt rather than safely stopped it.Ger's dad jumped from the driver's seat genuflected a little and with a theatrical flourish declared.

"Your chariot awaits."

"Nice wheels!" said Jerry Lee mouse who as a rat saw the use of things until they wore out as a simple frugal common sense. Rats didn't suffer from the fear of missing out unless they wanted to become rockstars of course.

"I thought you said this van was new!" said Ger's Uncle.

"It is! A new second-hand van! She doesn't look like much, but she'll get you there!"

"That's what Lynard Skynard's manager said about their plane," his uncle replied showing a rare moment of gallows humor.

"I'll take my car, that way we have a backup plan in case this heap of junk doesn't make it. Does anyone want to come with me?" said Ger's Uncle.

"No, if we die in this piece of junk, we die together as a band," said Johnny melodramatically.

"Die together as a band," he repeated softly "Is too late to change the band's name?""Johnny!" chorused the rest of Papsaurius Rex or whatever the hell they were calling themselves.

"Stop yer moaning, and get the gear in the van, we're late as it is," Ger's dad finished the discussion with a let's get down to business tone.

They loaded their gear, Ger got into the passenger seat with his father, and the rest balanced where and how they could using amps and hard guitar cases as seats.

They set off, Ger's dad turning on the cassette player, "Born to be Wild" blazing, which caused additional vibrations to shake through the van's body as it picked up speed and started to go into high gear.

Ger turned down the music a little as they left Ballycraicsdown.

"I thought you weren't going to show," he said as the music reached background ambiance level and he had a share of the sound volume in the air them to use.

"What! And miss your big debut? No way son, I wouldn't miss this for the world."

Ger looked at his father as he spoke. He smelt no liquor on his breath, he didn't stink of cigarettes and there was a wild spark in his eye, a spark which burned with the thrill of being alive that he hadn't noticed that the alcohol extinguished when his father drank. The thought triggered memories of his father when Ger was a little boy and he remembered seeing the same flash of energy when he played his guitar. He checked himself in the rearview mirror, as though to search out that same spark, the same glow of the muses. He couldn't see it.

They sat in silence as the country roads became meandering trails that twisted and turned sharply as his dad needed every ounce of concentration as the van wheezed like an old man with a sixty-a-day smoking habit. Sometimes they had to stop at crossroads where the vegetation was too overgrown and prevented them from looking around the corner, so they sat with the windows open listening for the oncoming traffic.

There was a part of Ger that was grateful for the silence as he was still unsure about what to say to his father. Their last meeting had been far from civil.

Finally, his father broke the silence.

"You know son, I wanted to tell you something... It's kind of difficult to say but since we're alone and well, I might not ..." his father tried to collect his thoughts, and pluck up the courage to say what had to be said.

"It's just; I wanted to apologize to you... you know, for all the stuff I put you and you're mother through" he said with a quivering voice as he tried to hold in his emotions.

"Thanks, Dad, I appreciate that, but it's going to take a while before I can trust you. I need to know you can stay sober before we can start thinking about letting you back into our lives."Having to tell his father that made his throat hot and dry and his face muscles burned with force as he tried not to cry, Ger looked away.

"I understand son."

His attention came back to the road as cars appeared ahead. Ger was happy for the reprieve of silence.

"Son, I mean Ger... the last night you saw me I was so out of my head drunk that I saw a speaking mouse. The next day I could still see its eyes, beady and pink."

"You mean you thought you saw a talking mouse," said Ger, picking a suspicious moment to be pedantic.

"Yeah, of course, obviously mice can't talk, but at that moment; I don't know maybe it scared me enough. Maybe it made me face myself, and I saw just how much damage I was doing to the people around me."

"That's great dad, but you've said you were on the wagon before, and well, your auditioning today as much as we are," Ger said, hoping he wasn't being too harsh.

In the back of the van, the very talking mouse that had brought on the father's epiphany was telling the band resting awkwardly on the equipment how he finished his own talent contest.