At breakfast I asked her. “You’re home all day; do you want the office?”

After Jess had thought about it a bit she shook her head.

“No, I’d only get little bits of time and it would be frustrating. I’ll wait until Izzy is old enough to go to kindy.”

“You still won’t have a space.”

Jess grinned. “By then you’ll have made our fortune. We’ll live in a big house and I’ll have a studio.” She untangled her hair from Isabelle’s fist.

I grabbed my lunch off the bench and kissed them both.

“Last night was nice,” I said.

Jess grinned. “Yeah, we should do that more often.”

Maybe we would. There was that feeling anything was possible. I headed for work. A big selfish bit of me was really glad Jess didn’t want to paint yet.

I got home from work then hid in the room. I started making notes. It turns out even if you’ve got an idea, lyrics don’t come perfectly formed. But there was enough coming out on that journal to think they could be crafted.

Then it happened. I wrote, “You’ve got me thinking.” I knew Mr Cohen had written something similar, but it had rhythm and sounded like a start.

It all went from there. I wrote about giving up what I loved, my ambivalence about this life, how I felt about Isabelle and Jess, and how I feel about Laura.

It was all mixed up. Now I had turn it into something I could work with. It was way after midnight before I got to bed. But it was like electricity had flowed through me and I’d come alive.

It took a few more days before I was ready to show Collins. I phoned him.

“Come around after work,” he said. “It will be good to get my teeth into something new.”

I went to his house. I’d been running timber, so I was still covered in sawdust. But who cared? I’d been preoccupied all day. The boss probably hadn’t got his money’s worth out of me.

“Earth to Isaac,” Reg said a couple of times.

Collins read through what I’d written, looked at me for a moment, then gave his nose a scrub. “Okay,” he said. “You’ve got plenty to work with here, but you don’t need to fit every idea you’ve got into one lyric. We might need a focus.” He sat down at the piano, put the book on the holder and got out his pencil.

He spent time reading what I’d written through again, then underlined, You’ve got Me Thinking.

“What if we start here?” he asked.

Thursday 1^st January

The Christmas holidays arrived, and we went to the beach with Jess’s family. That was fun, with Jess’s dad watching and waiting for me to put a foot wrong. Lucky Laura only stuck around for Christmas day and then went on a trip with some mates.

On New Year’s Eve, we went to the Coroglen Tavern again. Jess’s mum and dad babysat Isabelle. We all piled in the cars. About twenty of us.

Denis was tour leader. He had this big plastic flower on the end of a stick to prove it.

We got there and watched Fat Freddy’s Drop. We watched the guy up front singing and playing the guitar.

Jess leaned her head on my shoulder.

“That should be you,” she said. My soul twisted and reached out to the stage and the lights and the music.

“Yeah, I’m trying,” I said, and she hugged me.

I turn nineteen in a few days. A lot can happen in a year.

Saturday July 24^th

I went back to work. Me and Collins kept working on the lyrics. It’s taken us more than six months to knock those lyrics into shape and we are almost happy with what we’ve come up with.

Isabelle’s nearly one. She still cute. Any time I’m home during the day she follows me around.

“Daddy,” she says and toddles up to me and hugs my legs, then buries her head between my knees. I pick her up and her little hand slides around my neck, she smiles like she’s happy to be wherever I am.

She’s just learned to say “Daddy,” she used to say, “Dada.”

Just learned to walk too. She’s real cute in her baby jeans and RedBands, like a tiny farmer. But who spends thirty dollars on label gumboots for a baby? My mother.

Collins and I keep working on those songs. We figure we’ll have eight by the time we’re finished. And it’s like that first year when Stadium was just getting going, we’re beginning to believe what we’re doing is good.

When we think we’ve got the lyrics and music about right, I start to record them. I want to see if I can make them sound the way they do in my head. I’ve got the programme on my laptop that will let me layer the sound and record one instrument over the other.

One night after dinner, I was in my room recording the guitar, for the Temptation track. The door swing open a little bit and Isabelle peeped around it. She knows she not meant to come in here, but I think she likes music as much as I do.

“Daddy, ‘tar,” she said, and tried to help me pick.

I turned off the laptop. I’d have to record that bit again.

I gave wheels on the bus a spin, just for her.

But after a while, I wanted to get back to work.

“Hey, Jess,” I yelled. “Can you come and get Izzy?”

Jess came in, scooped her up and took her away so I could keep working.

Then just about when me and Collins think we’re pretty much finished, I’m out on a job with Luke.

“How are the new numbers going?” Luke asked. “We need something new, what we’re doing is getting stale.” He’s been pushing for this since Christmas. I guess he has a point. We’ve got fans at the pub, and they’re loyal, but we’re still not setting the world alight.

“Nearly there,” I said.

“Can I hear them?”

“Yeah, I guess.” I got out of the truck and started unpacking the gear, so we could get started.

“When?”

I thought about it. It was all recorded. A couple of the numbers were going to need a bit of tweaking, but it was there.

“When’s the next university break?” Luke knew that sort of stuff because he was still in charge of the bookings at the pub, and we still didn’t work in the holidays.

“End of semester break at the last week in August,” said Luke. “Noah and Adam will be in town then.”

“Come around then, and we’ll all listen.”

“I’ll sort it,” said Luke.

Now, I had four weeks to make them perfect. When I was just with Collins we think those lyrics and melodies are good, but that’s a lot different to giving them this first outing. I was nervous.

I recorded fake drum loops on a separate track, because we wouldn’t have drums when we tried them out. I wasn’t sure how Jess would react to the lyrics. They were all about the yearning of the heart, ambivalence and temptation.