Excerpt from The Music Shop by Rachel Joyce, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

2
It's a Kind of Magic
Oh No Not My Baby

Tick, tick. It was dark inside the booth, with a hushed feeling, like hiding in a cupboard. The silence fizzed.

Everyone had warned him. Be careful, they'd said. He just wouldn't listen. So he asked her to marry him and he couldn't believe his luck when she said yes—her so beautiful, him so ordinary. Then he took her a bottle of champagne after the wedding breakfast, and there she was, upside down in the honeymoon suite. At first he couldn't work it out. He had to take a really good look. He saw a dress like a sticky meringue with four legs poking out, two with black socks, one with a garter. And then he realized. It was his new wife and his best man. He left the bottle on the floor, along with two glasses, and shut the door.

He couldn't get that picture out of his head. He played Chopin, he took pills from the doctor, and none of it made a difference. He stopped going out; he cried at the drop of a hat. He felt so bad he called in sick at work.

Tick, tick—

The song started. A twang of guitar, a blast of horns, a chirruping "Sweet-sweet-ba-by" and then a bam-bam-bam-bam from percussion.

What was Frank thinking? This wasn't the music he needed. He went to pull off the headphones—

"When ma friends tol' me you had someone noo," began the singer, this Aretha, her voice clear and steady, "I didn' believe a single word was true."

It was like meeting a stranger in the dark, saying to them, "You'll never guess what?" and the stranger saying, "Hey, but that's exactly how it is for me."

He stopped thinking about his wife and his sadness and he listened to Aretha as if she were a voice inside his head.

She told him her story—something like this. Everyone said her man was a cheat; even her own mother said it. But Aretha wouldn't believe them. He was not like those other boys who lead you on. Who tell you lies. She started the song calmly enough but by the time she got to the chorus she was practically screaming the words. Her voice was a little boat and the music was a Japanese wave, but Aretha kept riding it, up and down. It was downright pigheaded, the way she kept believing in him. There were strings, the bobble of the guitar, a horn riff, percussion, all telling her she was wrong—("Wohhh!" shrilled the backing vocals, like a Greek chorus of girlfriends)—but no, she hung on tight. Her voice pulled the words this way and that, soaring up over the top and then scooping right down low. Aretha knew. She knew how desperate it felt, to love a cheat. How lonely.

He sat very, very still. And he listened.

3
It's a Kind of Magic

Frank shook a cigarette from the packet, and as he smoked, he watched the door of the booth. He hoped he wasn't wrong about this song. Sometimes all that people needed was to know they were not alone. Other times it was more a question of keeping them in touch with their feelings until they wore them out—people clung to what was familiar, even when it was painful.

Excerpted from The Music Shop by Rachel Joyce. Copyright © 2018 by Rachel Joyce. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.