Note: This piece was originally inspired by a certain rock 'n roll goddess who remains my idol to this day. There is something about female bass players who kick arse that pleases me very much indeed! Probably because I want to be them. :)

Post-Elation Devastation

Lights, camera, action, electricity.

Haha, try if you want to. You just try and make me sad right now.

She smiles her dark smile, sweeping her icy gaze across the crowd from left to right and back again. She's been called scary, and many other things. She sometimes meets the avid gazes of adoring fans, the ones who bother to focus on her—and that’s quite a few, really. Brain is not the only rock god in this band, no matter how middle stage he might stand. Andreas is not the only consummate musician. Steven, skinsman extraordinaire, is not the only source of raw power. There is her, also. Always her.

Althea is the ‘darkly eloquent nightmare’, the evil, playful one. She is blasting the audience’s minds to oblivion right now. She is tall, slender, an ice queen dressed in black and silver, shining with make-up and divinity. Her white blonde hair halos her ageless face. But it's the rest that's important. The bass line underpins it all, you see. It holds everything together. Without bass, this sound would be a mere dream in Brain's head, never fulfilled. Without bass, this song would sound like shit.

She smiles, she laughs and runs nimble fingers along the fretboard without really thinking. The one thing she actually knows is that she can barely see ahead of her, thanks to the spotlight she is drowning in. They make her whiter than usual, like a ghost. She blinks, realising that if they are taping this show, she will look like a frosted owl on playback. She smiles shakily, wanting to look less like an owl for just one moment, and more like…

No…Althea doesn’t smile that much. She shouldn’t be smiling if she wants to look like herself. She should just turn her face up into the light, pretend that she’s standing at the gates of heaven, and play. Play, play, play, as if her life depends on it. Perhaps it does.

Brain looks like a lost little boy. A six-foot-three, thoroughly lost little boy. That’s how he wants to look. He is turning his face up to the light. Perhaps it isn’t her place to do the same. For this song, ‘Ethereum’, the light is all blue. The stage went dark before those blue lights kicked in. Brain is bathed in blue darkness, while Althea is off to the side, hidden in the shadows. That isn’t because she’s ‘just the bass player’. It's for theatrical effect. Brain is the centre of it all for this song. The lights make him blue, and then the main spotlight blinks on, and he is all white, illuminated, delineated in his celestial glory. He looks like an angel to her. She feels dizzy, but she never once stumbles on her bass line.

Soon she is finding it hard to breathe as she stares out over the ocean of fans, screaming, singing, waving, swaying fans, all staring straight at her, turning their faces to Brain, back to her, to Andreas, craning necks to try and catch a better glimpse of Steven, and then finding her again. She looks away. It’s ‘me-time’ now. They’ve had enough of her attention. They've gotta earn more. She holds them all in her thrall, burning away on her bass, thrilling at the feeling of power at her fingertips, the power she gets from driving home into the pocket. Right now she is driving her line through the middle of ‘Empathy Out’. Just try and bring me down from here, she murmurs inwardly, nodding gracefully to the crowd before swinging one booted leg out in front of her and bending the other at the knee, holding a ‘cool’ pose for the span of ten seconds. She leans back. Then she curls again, bending over her bass, smiling secretly to herself. She knows the magic.

Encore swings around with surprising rapidity. The band doesn’t even go off stage. Well, Althea doesn’t. Maybe the other three do. It'd be easy to miss when she's in this state. She huddles in the curtains at stage right, hunching her shoulders in anticipation, hearing the roar of the crowd. She blinks stupidly down at the new bass guitar that has been placed in her hands. Better put this on.

Next they are on stage again, and she knows that the crowd loves her, all of them. They paid to come here. They paid to see her, to see all four of them together, but what would they be without her?

We are cool. We are so cool. We’re the ones they love. We inspire them, and no one can take that away from me. She smiles her grim smile as the arena suddenly sinks into the bass solo of ‘Winter’. She can hear the crowd more easily now. Not just screaming. Whistling, humming, electricity, buzzing, sighing, singing, all of it… They are loving her for this. She is giving them what they want, the bass, just the bass, this is her moment to shine, and then Brain starts to sing, and she feels a momentary tearing at her heart, for their attention is on him now, on him, all him, him him him…

Tears sting her eyes as she continues to play. The song powers up again, and her fingers take on a life of their own, dancing on the frets, making their own wonder. She is really mastering it this time; she is the lady of darkness. When did she last make a mistake? She can't even remember, it's been so long. Goddess, goddess – and they want to be her. They want to be me. Therefore she's something.

She notices then that her fingers are no longer moving. The crowd roars but the music has died. There is feedback, of course. Artful feedback.

She sees Brain walk past her, having bowed to his fans and touched a hand to his heart. He's a poser, but he means it, and they eat it up. His love for them radiates out of him, and they understand it. He's a humanitarian, heart and soul.

Encore is over. She wants to play more, but encore is over. The show is over. Time to get backstage. But she can't move. She stands still, gazing into the distance. Her bass is unplugged, and her fingers itch to plug it back in. If she dared start another song, Brain would kill her. Lyrics to one of Brain's new songs float into her head:

They're tired. We're all so tired. Ready for bed in the biggest way. It's been a long day. Been a long day. Get your arse off stage. Don't play with me this way.

"Thea," Steven murmurs, touching her arm. "It's time." Time to get off stage, is what he means. But for Althea, being offstage means being dead. Why can’t they understand that?

Steven takes her hand and pulls her gently along. Her ears are ringing, but she isn’t sure if it's from the playing or just from the sound of the crowd.

That oceanic roar is suddenly sucked into a dulling vacuum as Althea walks between the folds of side-stage curtain, still led by her bandmate. She is separated from the crowd now, from those who love her – heading for backstage. She finds herself gripping Steven's hand tightly, and clenching her jaw too. Feeling is welling up in her – bad feeling.

When they're on tour, they all live here in the backstage area. Right now the whole band is here – members of one of the greatest rock outfits to have graced the face of the planet. Brain isn't known for his modesty, and he'd claim they were the greatest band on Earth. He's like that. But Althea only feels that way onstage. Back here, she has a hard time feeling anything good at all.

They stand around and they stare at each other, at the floor or the table top, even at their hands. Althea stares at the wall for a while, and then allows her gaze to slide sideways, meeting Brain’s, then Andreas’s, then Steven’s.

“That was…” Steven starts.

Andreas finishes, “…Good.”

Brain raises his eyebrows and murmurs, “Good? Is that all? Shit. It was fucking awesome." He turns to Althea and shakes his head. His hands are spread out and for a moment he's lost for words. "Thea…my god, you…"

I was good, wasn’t I? she thinks, knowing that this is the time to smile. She not only blew the fans away, she blew the fuck out of these guys too. It's something to be celebrated, a memory to relish. But they are staring at her, and she feels like a fraud. She has no idea why, but she feels it nonetheless. She knows she should be smiling right now, for she has triumphed in the loudest way. She has shone tonight.

Brain continues, still trying to find the words, “You were…”

He doesn’t get to finish the sentence, for Althea suddenly feels her face crumpling, and she is raising shaking hands into the air in front of her, opening her mouth, loosing a wail of anguish so heart-wrenching that she sees one of the others wince. She wails, and presses hands against her mouth in an attempt to stifle the sound and the pain. Tears stream down her face as she sinks into the nearest chair, dimly aware of one of the others sitting next to her, putting an arm around her, awkwardly trying to comfort her over something that can never be fixed, never be healed; perhaps never even understood.

Out there onstage she is Althea, ice queen and teaser of crowds, sultry bassist and enigmatic extrovert. Out there, she is what they all love and crave. But in here, in back where no one can see, she is just a girl; a hopeless, useless, unwanted girl. Even the momentary bouts of onstage time are never enough to fill the void within her. She doesn’t know how to exist when this is what she is.

How can she ever be happy living so far from the stage?