It was 7.30. Two countries were about to start a new life in the EU, and I was playing in a concert to celebrate. There was a glass of Pilsner I hadn’t touched in front of me on my table. Jason, The Point of the Bomb’s roadie, was still playing with the amp so I couldn’t run through my sound check. Behind the bar a CD player broke the quiet – just – with acoustic jazz covers of Kraftwerk so cool my breath formed little clouds that danced over my beer.

The Grey Wolf was off Lipscani Street, the centre of Bucharest’s trendy bar quarter and the heart of the historic city. The entrance was under a small neon sign and led down some cramped stone stairs to a basement. I was amazed anyone could find it, but a steady stream of punters filled it out and soon the seats were all taken.

“Hey!”

I looked up from my beer. The woman sitting opposite me was smaller than her voice. She had short, pixie hair and wore a tight, black cotton polo. She must have been about twenty, but in the artificial light it was hard to tell.

“Hi.”

“It’s OK to drink it, you know.” She smiled at me. Her eyes flashed mischief. “I won’t tell anyone you’re underage.”

“Eh?”

“It’s OK. I had all my best hangovers when I was fifteen and away from home.”

I laughed. “I’m seventeen. It’s my first time in Bucharest.”

“Me too,” she said. “So what are you doing?”

“Waiting for that guy to finish playing with the set,” I said, pointing to Jason.

“You’re a musician, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“Cool. I’m Ilke.”

“Sandrine.”

“No way! With an accent like that.”

“My Dad,” I said. “I’m from Hungary, but he saw a film with this French actress in it, just after I was born. The register office wouldn’t let him spell it the same, though, so technically I’m Szandrine with a z. Which doesn’t make sense in Hungarian or French.”

“Cool!”

“So where are you from?”

“Berlin.”

Berlin.

“You OK?” asked Ilke, but I was too lost in thought to answer.

***

I was a week old when Mum went back to England and left me and Dad in our huge house at the heart of the vineyard. It was the 9th of November 1989, the day the Berlin Wall came down.

There were no photos of her in the house. Dad never talked about her, and taking my cue from his silence, I never asked. I filled in her story for myself until it was stronger than any real memories I had. In my version she walked across no man’s land towards the Berlin Wall. When she was almost there it disappeared, and without slowing she walked through the empty space where it had stood. She became smaller and smaller on the horizon, but as far away as she got, I could still see a trickle of dust from her hands snaking back towards me, and I knew one day I’d use it to follow her to the West.

In October 2006 Mum came back. She came to Hungary on a research trip, with an assistant called Claire. I was asleep when they arrived. In the morning I was up early, woken by my heart racing. In the excitement my shoulders got caught up in the fabric of my dress as I pulled it on. When it finally fell into place and I could see again, there was Claire, standing in the vineyard like she’d been waiting for me all her life. I blinked in case I was still dreaming, and when I looked again she was gone. I sat on the corner of the bed, trying to breathe while my pulse skitted over my skin like a moth caught in a lamp. By the time I’d collected myself and gone down to breakfast Mum had left, and taken Claire with her.

***

I felt a tap on my shoulder. “Wanna try it out?” a deep voice shouted in my ear.

I looked up. It was Jason. I turned to say goodbye to Ilke; but she was no longer there.

I took a gulp of beer and stood up. My head swam for a moment but then it cleared.

“You bet.”

I threaded my way through the packed bar without touching anyone, as though some kind of force field had surrounded me. Before I knew it I had my guitar in my hands, and Jason and I were lost in conversation about music.

I’d been writing and sharing songs online with the guys from The Point of the Bomb for months. Some nights when I sat typing the lyrics into my computer as I sang them to myself, I imagined the words floating out of the window and speeding their way down the cables and fibres of the Web, and finding their way eventually to an internet café in Paris or London or Barcelona where Michael and Janie and Steve and Greg were waiting.

On October 17 my screen had flashed. 

Mike’s in the Shack. Wanna chat?

I clicked through. What’s up?

Wanna play?

Play?

Yeah. Bucharest. New Year’s Eve. Half an hour. Try out your new songs.

You’re fucking kidding?!

When I’d finished setting up, Steve signalled for me to join the band at their table, huddled next to the stage.

“What’s it like outside?” I asked.

“Piata Universitǎţii’s filling up,” said Michael. Big city squares were the kind of venue Michael and the band were used to playing, but tonight they’d chosen low key. No having to watch what they said or did for the cameras, and no big deal having a beginner like me as support.

“It’s heaving out there,” said Steve. “It’s like feeling the blood rushing back after you’ve slept on your arm.”

“That’s a metaphor we could run with,” I said. “Ceausescu cuts off the country’s blood …”

“And then he’s gone, but sensation still doesn’t return for a while,” said Steve.

“Yeah,” I continued. “You just have pins and needles and the dull throbbing pain of trying to readjust.”

“And finally the blood comes back and life goes on,” said Michael.

“Fuck me!” said Greg, the drummer. “Do you guys never just chill out?”

Before I knew it, the lighting had changed. I was on stage.

I had a half hour set, ten three minute songs I’d written after local thugs killed a Serb called Radko because he had a job and they didn’t. Musically they were formulaic. I’d sing the verses in a folk and torch song cross with my guitar. Then I’d thump out the choruses to a metal bass line and drums, courtesy of Steve and Greg, who’d been playing around with the music online for the last week. The structure was always the same – verse, chorus, verse, chorus, fade.

I sat on a barstool, put the guitar on my knee, and began strumming Mostar Bridge, a diatribe against the chattering classes, complete with rhymes that were little more than the kind of doggerel we did in language classes at school:

I was gonna join Bono and Midge

But you headed me off at Mostar Bridge. 

What happened as I played was unlike anything I’d experienced alone in my room. The audience pounded their fists in the air to my choruses. They were expectant through the verses, still until the next crescendo. The Grey Wolf was a single living creature and I was its heart.

Too soon I was building to the chorus of my final song, Greg pounding drums behind, Steve thrashing the bass beside me.

A gut full of lead

And a face full of steel.

He’s dead but the wounds will heal.

I could feel the force of the noise I was making pushing me forward. I opened my throat and sucked in a lungful of passion and fury, spitting it out in a scream.

The wounds will heal,

The wounds will heal,

The wounds will heal.

He’s dead…

Pause.

But…

Just me and a near-silent arpeggio on my guitar:

The wounds will heal.

There was a second’s silence. I took in the crowd of faces. They were all looking at me. At that moment, absolutely nothing separated us. I breathed in, and my head fell onto the belly of my guitar.