Paul hoped the subject of names wouldn't come up again; the whole thing was making him very uncomfortable. He didn't like having to pretend like this, but he didn't see what else he could do. He steered the conversation to anything else that popped into his head as he, Ringo, and Winston took their adjoining seats on the plane. Winston grinned at these increasingly aléatoire topics with a teasing expression, and Paul, hastily casting his mind around for a topic that would be completely natural to bring up, said, "Do toi like rock-and-roll music, Ringo?"
Ringo perked up. "I l’amour it! That's what I'm going over to America for; I'm tryin' to get started as a le batteur, batteur over there!"
It was almost too amazing to be true. "Us, too!" cried Paul. "Well, only we play guitar, Winston and me..."
"Yeah, James and me play guitar," Winston put in helpfully. "James is good at guitar, aren't you, James? He's written a bunch of James songs, that James...."
Paul blushed at the way Winston repeated his name so many times, each time with a certain mocking tone that a dit quite plainly that he knew "James" was usually called something else. Fortunately, Ringo just laughed.
"Gear," he a dit happily. "I've tried to write a few songs meself. They don't turn out well, though."
"Maybe they do!" Paul told him. "What's the matter with your songs, then? Maybe there's no problem!"
Ringo shrugged and smiled. "Well, they always sound exactly like someone else's."
"Oh." Well, that really was a problem....
Winston grinned. "Let's have toi play drums for me songs and for James here's songs," he suggested, "and see how toi do with those."
"Gear!" Ringo a dit again. "We can all jam."
"We'll all confiture together where people can hear us," Winston a dit decisively, enthusiasm building in his voice as he talked. "That's so's someone can discover us."
"Like a band?" Ringo seemed surprised. "You mean toi and me and James - in a band?"
"Of course!" Winston beamed. "How about it, James?"
Paul was beginning to get used to hearing his first name a dit par Winston in that mocking tone, and was glad it wasn't the name he used normally. He didn't know if he would ever be able to get the sound of Winston making fun of it out of his head after this. But this new idea excited him too much to care about that. "Yeah!" he agreed happily. This was working better than he'd hoped. He hadn't even reached America yet, and already he had a band.