Before the Journey
Begins

In St Andrews, summer was more of an academic legend than a meteorological reality.

Among the students who’d stayed on for the summer term, it was debated in the corridors of the Science Department with the same fervour as gravitational waves or Kantian ethics — but no one had ever actually seen it.

That day the sky hung low and grey, suspended in the kind of waiting that smells of rain not yet fallen.

And yet that very evening, at 55 East Scores, the windows were shaking under the weight of a proper student party. Laughter mixed with the crunch of crushed bottles, while amplified music saturated every corner, overturning St Andrews’ usual buttoned-up calm. The smell of warm beer and sweat mingled with something sharper — a vinyl record that had been trodden on once too often.

Every room was a microcosm, a social experiment in progress, shadows moving frantically against walls scrawled with peeling posters and wobbling shelves. Philosophers lost in thought, physicists with their hats askew, literature students with weary faces, mathematicians with nervous hands — all of them writhing through uncoordinated dancing and overlapping conversations.

Sofia — twenty years old, brown eyes, dark hair pulled back any old how — was only there because a friend had dragged her along on a mission of clear intent: to make her socialise.

The friend — the one whose exams were always late and whose head never held a single doubt — was waving her arm about with the conviction of someone who’d already decided for both of them. Impossible to resist.

Sofia, who had no intention whatsoever of socialising, had dressed with a kind of dishevelled care: a beige cardigan, far too big, a suit of armour against the din, while a pair of thin-framed glasses gave her the air of a melancholy scholar.

A philosophy student, she collected existential doubts the way other people collected stamps. She’d given herself twenty minutes, tops, then home: Schopenhauer, black tea, Sigur Rós, and her soul in pieces, exactly as it should be.

Then she saw him.

Leaning against a wobbling bookshelf, among computer science volumes, textbooks on astrophysics, heat transfer, linear algebra, and a DVD of Interstellar kept like a holy relic, stood a boy with an air of not caring, a half-warm beer in hand, and a burnt-sienna hoodie so worn it looked older than he did.

Isacco seemed to be the only one in the room who didn’t need to raise his voice to exist: still, silent, immune to the party chaos boiling around him — as though someone had pressed pause just for him.

He had a passion for phenomena that gave ordinary mortals a rash: quantum theory, hidden harmonics, and those invisible bits of magic that explained why the wi-fi never worked in the university toilets (a problem which, it must be said, quantum physics has yet to fully resolve).

And yet, that evening, Sofia felt something different: one of those feelings that knocks on the door of defensive logic, gets no answer, and lets itself in through the window anyway, pours itself a cup of tea and settles in as though it lived there.

That way he had of being a centre of unshakeable calm — the kind of calm you usually only find in Tibetan monks or switched-off radiators — exerted a pull on her that every good intention had fought against, and lost.

She went over. After all, in the university betting shop, no bookmaker would have taken bets on his silence — a certainty like Rome standing empty in August by some unwritten decree.

‘D’you like this song?’ she asked, nodding towards a classic Primal Scream track bouncing off the walls with a tangible energy.

Isacco looked at her: a girl stepped straight out of some alternative theory of time — something unexpected, incongruous.

‘Yeah. But only if you listen to it at the right volume,’ he answered slowly. ‘Too quiet and it loses the point. Too loud and you’re stuck with tinnitus for a week.’

Sofia smiled, caught off guard by the answer — so reasoned, and yet so natural.

‘Interesting. You’re the kind of person who calculates the optimal volume for feeling something, are you?’

‘Actually… I have thought about it. Every song has its own ideal frequency, an emotional resonance. You just have to find it.’

‘Physicist, right?’

‘Given away by the jargon?’

‘And the crumpled shirt. Are you lot some kind of secret club, you physicists?’

‘We recognise each other by our odd socks,’ he shot back, with a half-smile.

‘Perfect. Then I hereby declare myself a pure philosopher.’

‘A philosopher and a physicist. Destined to argue for hours without ever convincing each other.’

‘But at least with a decent soundtrack.’

The conversation dissolved into a game of music and words — an unusual understanding, almost out of time, for two twenty-year-olds whose ears, by rights, should have been filled with the present far more than with the eighties, the nineties, the early two-thousands. But neither of them stopped to ask why it was so easy to recognise each other in coordinates that, strictly by date of birth, weren’t theirs at all. They were like two explorers drawing maps of continents no one had discovered yet.

Sofia challenged him with curious questions, perhaps to test that loyalty to an era that wasn’t his own. ‘From that sacred age of yours, what would you save?’

‘If you mean music, it depends what day of the week it is, but okay, I’ll try. First off: zero Beatles — too easy, makes it sound like I discovered them yesterday. Then yes, everything that still gives me goosebumps today: Midnight Oil, the Stone Roses, R.E.M., the Smiths, dEUS — the Belgians almost no one’s heard of, and that’s exactly how it should be — Talk Talk, Oasis, and James. Watch out for James, they’re practically giants in the UK.’

‘Breathe,’ Sofia interrupted, laughing. ‘It’s not an exam.’

‘Sorry — then Happy Mondays, Kasabian, Depeche Mode, who’re still twenty years ahead of everyone, New Order, Jesus Jones, Human League, Underworld, early Coldplay before they went stadium, The Streets’ answer to U2, Cake, the Police, Carter USM and the pure genius of Jim Bob… okay, I’ll stop, or I’ll be going till morning and they’ll kick me out of the house in sheer despair. But above all of them, the Clash. Joe Strummer, Mick Jones. Lester Bangs called them “the only band that matters”, and I swear, some of Spotify’s “made for you” playlists seem to agree.’

‘Yeah, honestly, the Clash are brilliant, but sorry, who’s Lester Bangs?’

‘No idea. But I like the name.’

‘Okay, approved. And more recent stuff?’

‘Dunno, it all sounds a bit the same, if I’m honest — though obviously there are exceptions, and the old greats keep putting out stuff that’s brilliant. But yeah, every so often I discover something three years late that changes my whole week. Like certain indie tracks that sound like they were written by someone who’s just ended a relationship and hasn’t worked out what happened to them yet.’

‘Such as?’

‘The National, always. And especially Jamie T, and also…’

‘Really?’ Sofia interrupted him. ‘Did you say Jamie T? I love him too.’

‘Yes, him — an underrated genius. Then there’s Mr. E and his Eels, who still sounds like someone who’s just walked out alive from an emotional snowstorm. I’ve been listening to music properly since I was five — and yeah, I know how that sounds coming from someone my age, but if you think about it, that’s part of what’s good about now: with streaming, there’s no more “my generation” and “your generation”, there’s just whatever reaches your headphones, and this is what reaches mine. And then I love Italians, with a capital I: the talented Umberto Maria Giardini, who used to go by Moltheni, the eclectic Motta, the legendary Bugo, but also Cosmo, and the sacred monsters — Battisti, Battiato, Rino Gaetano, early Ruggeri. I had the luck of a dad with wide-ranging taste and a mum who was a classical pianist, so I got to choose without limits — and I ended up with an ear that’s never really lined up with whatever’s on the radio now. Call it a family deformity, if you like.’

Sofia nodded, caught up in that list and that tone. ‘I’m more chaotic, honestly. Mozart, then hip-hop, then American country, no warning at all, and I’m not ashamed of it. I really like Stormzy and Little Simz too, who I only discovered this past year, but my favourite Englishman is still, like I said, James Alexander Treays — the mighty Jamie T from Wimbledon. I saw him live at Finsbury Park. I also love listening to Roberta Di Mario, an Italian pianist and composer I saw live once, and I haven’t been able to stop since. And yes, Italian singer-songwriters too. Last year, actually, a flatmate hammered my eardrums for two months until I gave in to some classic Scottish and English indie-pop — Starsailor, Editors, Doves, Snow Patrol — which I love now. Generally, though, beyond the music and the melodic structure, I like trying to understand the lyrics, or rather, interpreting them my own way — so sometimes I end up with completely opposite versions of the same words.’

‘You’re a philosopher: it’s normal. You lot always have to contradict yourselves.’

‘We like structured incoherence. And I love it when a Beethoven symphony rips your stomach open, and straight after, an electronic beat puts you back together.’

‘I like that. Musical surgery.’

‘But if you want something real, something recent, that’s literally obsessing me right now, it’s the Last Dinner Party — have you heard them? They’ve got this huge, theatrical sound, almost baroque, like they’re trying to make a musical and a rock record at the same time. And then Wet Leg, who make me laugh and think in the same verse, and English Teacher, who I discovered a month ago and have been on loop ever since. They’re the bands of the moment — the ones that in ten years everyone will say “I was listening to them back then.” I’m listening to them now.’

‘I’ve heard them’ Isacco replied, with a half-smile more sceptical than he actually felt. ‘They’re good, yeah. But give me time — let’s talk again in twenty years.’

‘Wait. Twenty years? Are you serious?’

‘Dead serious. Only then will I know if I actually like them, or if I just like the fact that they’re new.’

‘You’re a discography fundamentalist, you know that?’ laughed Sofia. ‘Whereas I’m convinced you can love something born yesterday with the same intensity as something forty years old. Time isn’t a guarantee of quality. It’s just time. You trust what’s already passed the test. I trust what hasn’t passed the test yet, but promises to. Two different ways of being right, I think.’

She smiled, half-fearing a shadow of pity, then asked him a new question: ‘And you? Do you ever listen to anything outside your sacred era — the eighties, nineties and turn of the century — though it’d probably be more accurate to call it sacred for your parents?’

‘Now and then. But I’ve got a weakness for soundtracks. The ones from films I’ve never seen.’

‘Strange.’

‘No, it’s genius. That way I get to imagine the film myself.’

Sofia laughed properly, a short burst that hung in the air a few seconds too long.

‘I’m noting that one down.’

✦

Perhaps the right frequency. The right moment. The right place. The right people. When they swapped phone numbers, it was a little like tuning two instruments destined to play the same song.

Neither of them imagined that this synchrony would carry them far, well beyond St Andrews, and much deeper than either had ever dared to hope.

To the rhythm of vinyl and unanswered questions, their journey was beginning. And outside, summer remained a legend still: motionless in the dark air, a secret biding its time.