“She fucking left.” The best man is a twerp in a badly fitting suit that’s too short in the wrists, and he’s leaning up against the wall, pressing his hands through his sweat-soaked hair. The venue lighting’s bad. Even Fletcher is sweating, and he resents this. “She walked out. She fucking did it.”

“Good for her.”

This means Terence Fletcher and his world-class jazz trio are released from the obligation to play the accompaniment to any father-daughter dances, any first dances, last dances, awkward and incestuous mother-son swayings around the badly waxed dance floor. It also means no tips, but he’s willing to let that slide. Fletcher hates weddings – hates playing weddings, hates everything about them, smarmy brides and cold feet and wheelchair-bound grandmas and civil partnerships and requests.

“I never thought she’d fucking do it. She blew him off.” The dark-haired kid doesn’t sound especially dismayed, and God forbid, not even a little shocked. Nastily pleased, in the manner of a 21-year-old, tops, who never wanted to be anybody’s best man to begin with. Maybe he fucked the bride.

They aren’t paying Fletcher enough to care. Fletcher’s band are already packing up their gear; with luck they can be out of there and on the road before the bride’s father, who’s footing the bill for the jazz trio and probably the oyster bar, the floral arrangements, and the shitty dance floor too, realizes they’re gone.

The idiot groom’s other two equally jackoffish friends are comforting him across the venue’s empty floor. Presumably they are en route to the men’s room, to go and cry it out and swap handjobs. The best man isn’t even looking in their direction. He’s looking at his phone, and Fletcher experiences the near-irresistible impulse to smack it out of his hand. Instead Fletcher snaps shut the brass latches on a reinforced case, with a satisfying crack. It makes the best man jump. His dopey dark eyes blink in Fletcher’s direction.

“That’s very sad. Now help me carry this shit out to the parking lot before the surcharge kicks in for wasting my time. Or don’t.”

The shoulderless kid struggles after him, hefting an amp in his arms instead of one of the infinitely less expensive and less foot-breakingly heavy folding chairs – Fletcher’s sense of regret immediately flares, squinting back over his shoulder and watching the little asshole come close to falling flat on his face. At least he hadn’t touched the double bass.

“If you drop that I’ll break your fucking spine.”

“Jesus, you were just playing the reception. When was this thing made?”

Shit, he thinks they’re bantering. He thinks Fletcher is a charmingly irascible old guy. He thinks he’s doing him a favor. Fletcher kicks open a door, scattering a couple escapee doves. “Fuck you. Carry.”