Ah tha' comin'?

(AKA Will You Be Joining Us?)

This memory has stayed with me for years — the first time I stepped into a world that didn’t know my story, didn’t know I was grieving, didn’t know how breakable I felt — and still made room for me anyway.
It wasn’t polished or pretty. It was messy, loud, unfinished.
And somehow, it was exactly what I needed.

Ah tha' comin'?

The first time I visited Chengsville, I stood outside knocking long enough to start doubting myself.

Through the door, I could hear The Spasms tearing through another song — the bass rattling the window panes, guitars skidding and howling with more hunger than precision. I knocked again, harder this time, trying to catch a silence between songs. No response.

After five or ten minutes, my knuckles smarting, I wandered around to the back of the house. Through the windows, I caught sight of Mr. and Mrs. B., sitting calmly in their armchairs, watching television at a polite volume while upstairs their son’s band raised holy hell.

When I knocked on the window, Mrs. B. glanced over, utterly unbothered. She pantomimed — theatrical and cheerful, like a suburban Marcel Marceau — that I should just let myself in and head upstairs. No ceremony. No suspicion. Just: the door’s open; you belong here.

And so I did.

The kitchen was the first thing that hit me — the low thrum of the Aga, the heavy farmhouse table planted right in the middle, like it had been there forever and wasn't planning on moving.

I didn’t know then that I'd spend the better part of the next year orbiting that table — eating Mr. and Mrs. B. out of house and home, working my way through buckets of tea and endless B's butties like I'd been born to it.

What struck me most that first day, though, wasn’t the smell of freshly toasted bread or the clatter of distant drums — it was the surplus of doors.

Not doorways — the house had the proper number of those.
But doors: leaning against walls, tucked into corners, stacked patiently in odd places.
Later, I learned that making doors was Mr. B’s hobby, and that he hadn’t stopped once he’d filled every doorway. He just kept crafting them, a quiet testament to an instinct that didn’t need to be useful to be real.
The house was ready for thresholds that might never come — and somehow, that felt right.

Following the noise, I made my way upstairs to the practice space.
The room was large, half-renovated — fresh plaster already scarred with graffiti. Some of it funny, some sharp, some already sagging under the weight of hindsight.
It reminded me of the way people scrawl on a cast after a break: a rush to mark the damage, to make the hurt visible, to prove you were there when it started to heal — or when it didn’t.

The Spasms rattled through their set, a blur of half-remembered covers and homemade anthems.
The Clash’s White Riot crashed through the air, stitched alongside a Stranglers song whose name has long since slipped away.

I found a space by the window, careful not to interrupt the huddles of conversation leaning into each other along the walls.
I slid down onto the bare floor, back against the graffiti-smeared plaster, trying to be small without being invisible.

There were maybe a dozen, maybe fifteen people crowded into the room — teenagers, a few early twenty-somethings — all working-class kids like me.
If any of them came from money, they wore their camouflage well: army surplus jackets, torn band t-shirts, jumble sale chic stitched together with safety pins and a hint of snarkiness.

And even though no one had spoken to me yet, even though I still felt the stiff awkwardness of being an outsider, something in me shifted slightly.
The music, raw and relentless, was like a deep-tissue massage — the kind I wouldn’t discover a love for until twenty years later.
I could feel my internal organs reverberating, rattling into some rough kind of sync.
The laughter, the casual shoving, the way the room sagged and swayed with shared energy — all of it knitted a world that, maybe, if I stayed long enough, might let me belong.

Just as I found myself relaxing — starting to believe in the possibility of it — the set clattered to an end.
The guitars dropped with a clunk, the amps buzzed into silence, and people started pulling on jackets and stomping for the door.

I looked around, uncertain again, trying to read the room.
Was it time for me to slip away unnoticed?

Jules had invited me — at least, I assumed she'd mentioned it to the band.
She hadn't.
She wasn't even there that night.

When I first realized that, I felt a prick of discomfort — the cold edge of feeling like I'd stumbled in where I wasn't wanted.
But what I came to understand, over time, was that Chengsville had a standing invitation: to waifs, strays, misfits.
To anyone who needed a place to land for a while.

It was the most unconventional of found families — no permission slips, no need for explanations.
It didn’t matter where you’d come from, or what you were carrying.
It mattered that you showed up.

One of the lads — who I’d later understand was higher in the pack order, mostly because he owned the van that hauled their gear to gigs — caught my hesitation.
"Ah tha' comin'?" he called over his shoulder.

Just like that.
No fuss. No grand welcome.
Just a door swinging open where I hadn’t even known to look.

I scrambled up and followed them down the stairs, out into the bruised twilight.

For the first time in what felt like forever, I wasn’t walking away from something.
I was walking toward it.

Toward the sound of boots on wet stone, and laughter snagging in the cold air.
Toward whatever waited, past the doors I hadn’t even known were open.