And Your Girl Can Sing

Chapter 50: In Eckhorn We Trust

"Bless Eckhorn," John snickered. "And this meal."

I rolled my eyes at his religious blasphemy as he bowed his head over his baked ham and dinner roll. "Thank you for your 158 dm for Macca and our dear Pete. What can we ever do to repay you—! Georgie is eighteen, so I suppose I thank you as well for inventing aging. Although you too invented immigration laws—"

I hit him playfully over the shoulder and his elbow fell into his orange juice. He opened his eyes and stared at me, aghast. "You, Cora, you have interrupted my offerings to our great Eck—"

"John," I said, taking the dinner roll and putting it in his mouth to stop him from talking. "People are staring." And they were; there was an elderly couple on the plane who were sitting across from us, the elderly female wearing a purple dress and matching shoes, the white-haired man clad in a black sports jacket which too matched his shoes. "Verrückte jugend," the woman muttered to the man, and John quickly turned back to his food, bowed his head, and muttered a string of German: "Vater unser im Himmel, geheiligt werde dein Name—"

He paused and opened his eyes at his elbow not being doused in orange juice to see me staring at him. "Wherever did you learn the Lord's Prayer?"

"Just picked it up," he said quietly, changing the subject by buttering his roll and putting a little in my mouth. I mused over his statement as I chewed the bread and butter. There was always more of John than you thought there was, surprising you around every corner. He didn't particularly strike me as one who knew the Lord's Prayer, much less in German. Maybe he picked it up in a German church somewhere. They were indeed beautiful, architecturally speaking, and the sermons that happened must have been heightened by the stained glass, warming your soul like a fireplace, even if one didn't understand the language in which the sermon was being preached.

Honestly, I had no idea what I was doing in Germany. I thought I would end up like Cynthia or Dot, staying behind in Liverpool, waiting for the boys to return home, but when I had timidly brought it up, all of them had looked at me like I was crazy.

"You joking with us, Cora?" George had said, looking serious for once. "You blaggin' me head? You were with us in Germany, you're coming back then."

And so I had, under the assumption that I was going to be part of the band... somehow. My bass was placed in the plane with the rest of the instruments. Once we had taken the plane back and a boat and found ourselves in Hamburg, we felt right back at home. The bustling people, German being thrown around, chic Soho fashions, and once night hit, the ones wearing a lot less than usual—it was so familiar, strangely like sipping hot tea.

Peter Eckhorn welcomed us as we trooped into the Top Ten, exhausted from the trip. As we lugged our things past the stage area (a wooden stage with background curtains and an elevated platform for Pete) up the stairs, and into the rooms (a dormitory like setting with two sets of bunk beds), I saw the familiar rooms in which we had stayed in very, very briefly before we were kicked out of Germany. "You had better not try to set my wall on fire," Eckhorn joked, shaking his finger at John for some reason, and Paul quipped, "Yes, John, please don't do that this time. It was me, Peter," he admitted, turning back to a laughing Eckhorn. "John here just looks like he could cause trouble."

"Suppose I'll have to keep an eye on the ones who look like good boys, then!" He turned to me. "And you as well."

"Oh, I'm not staying," I hastily told him. "Although the prospect of starting a fire sounds delightful—"

"You not staying?"

"I'm staying with a friend. I'm just here to help unload," I told him.