Communion Town Read online

  I would happily have spent all my time in the slovenly female warmth of her room, sitting on the bed with the guitar in my lap, working out one song after another from her collection, or lying face to face on the pillow, my hand on her hip, watching her lips form words while her music, turned down low, murmured were they in love, or only in love with a song … On mornings when I woke up in her bed, I was perfectly indifferent to any fate I might meet that day. I wouldn’t have minded if on my way home I had been mown down by a tram or shot through the heart by a vengeful rival.

  One morning she sat up and gave me an appraising look.

  ‘It’s my cousin’s birthday tonight,’ she said. ‘I want you to come.’

  While she was at class I visited a department store and bought, for a startling price, my first suit. The fabric was scratchy, the trousers too long, the shoulders far too broad, and the whole outfit hung off me, but I supposed I’d get used to it, and to the constriction of the domino-patterned polyester tie which had come packaged with the shiny charcoal shirt. I couldn’t stretch to new shoes, but maybe my plimsolls would go unnoticed.

  We rode out to Rosamunda by tram, and found ourselves in a suburb full of unobtrusive mansions behind evergreen hedges. We strolled the rest of the way to a walled garden. It was a private park for residents of the district, she explained; you paid a subscription. She spoke in low tones to a guard in a kiosk, while he gazed at me, sucking his teeth and rubbing a pimple on his cheek. He took a minute to think about it, but finally the gate opened on its pneumatic hinge.

  We followed the path through the park, around landscaped hillocks and a miniature lake. For the first time this year the air was balmy. Pale green spikes poked through in the flowerbeds, and handsome iron lamp posts lined the pathway, their globes not yet lit. A game of tennis was finishing up. Other figures moved ahead of us towards the party. Beyond the lake stood a pavilion with a rococo conservatory, from which light spilled out to a terrace set with white iron tables. Decorous jazz wandered from the french windows, and as we drew closer there was the intricate murmur of voices and the chiming of glasses on glasses. The pavilion hung above the lake like the idea of another life, a future swimming in minty light and odoured evening air.

  I would have liked to walk around in the dusk for longer, admiring the glow from a distance, but she was distracted. She undid her hand from mine and led the way in. Recently she had dyed her hair a chemical-looking carmine, and for a moment as she moved ahead she seemed quite unfamiliar. Bodies surrounded us. Lights flared. Someone called her name: the stream of the crowd caught and whirled her away.

  The knot of my tie was pressing on my throat. Would it matter if I took it off? I couldn’t see anyone else in one. None of the partygoers, it appeared, had made any effort to prepare, but all were elegant in their soft shirts and worn jeans, short dresses and block-heeled mules. They spoke with their hands and stood with tilted hips. The music – louche, swung instrumental standards – was provided by a trio in the conservatory. Everyone seemed to be absorbed in exceptional conversations; they scintillated, debated, gossiped and flirted; their eyes were never still.

  What was happening here? I saw no clues. I dodged through the crowd and paused in the shelter of a grotesque ornament, a decorative cage containing a pair of artificial brass chaffinches. As the birds hopped along their perch, a tune played from inside each of their breasts, each just a couple of tinny notes, tricking in and out of harmony, over and over. They canoodled, blinking red glass eyes, then whirred against the bars, their wings flickering faster than I could follow. I listened to them, my head touching the wires of the cage, until I began to feel conspicuous again.

  Behind the bar a cohort of waiters polished glasses and mixed drinks. They wore smart navy jackets and white breeches, and their faces had been painted with such care that they seemed masks of polite white enamel, each with an identical, gentle set to the lips. Their hair, dyed poster-paint yellow, was tied in braids and secured with tiny bows. Others, identical to the bar staff, slipped deferentially through the throng, positioning their trays beneath empty glasses as the guests’ fingers let go.

  All the waiters moved with the same practised discretion, wasting no gesture, spinning like weathercocks attuned to the needs of the partygoers, meeting no one’s eye. They were silent, except for the music-box tunes that tinkled away continuously in their chests. Each of them, I noticed, had a slightly different melody; you could make them out, pinging and plinking away beneath the chatter. Each repetitive phrase interlocked with the others, and seemed to fit with the trio’s jazz. I wondered if they could change tempo and key signature to match the local ambience. As they went past, I tried to lean close and hear better: perhaps it was the inbuilt rhythm and harmony of these small tunes that enabled them to serve everyone so gracefully.

  The room’s clamour swelled, everyone determined to talk loud enough to drown out everyone else. Jaws worked, lips pouted, eyes danced. An outflung arm caused a waiter to veer and weave, smiling, with a loaded tray. Beyond the windows it was solid dark. The noise and heat and alcoholic humidity had fused into a thick pane between me and the room. Beside me, a youth with dark smudges under his eyes was talking to a girl in a shiny black wig.

  ‘How do you know her?’ he was asking.

  She sighed. ‘How do you think?’

  ‘Um. Right. So … what do you do?’

  ‘Do? I dropped out, so I work in a shop. All right?’

  ‘Right.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘Um, which one?’

  A longer pause. Then: ‘Dees. All right?’

  ‘Draughtsman Gray? Very nice!’

  ‘What’s nice about it?’

  ‘Well, it’s – it’s so exclusive …’

  ‘Yeah, I work in a shop. Thanks for that.’

  They fell silent, although neither moved. At my other elbow, a young man in blue-tinted spectacles was leaning on the bar, smoking a cigarette. When he glanced in my direction I pulled a neighbourly face. He considered me without hurry, then looked away.

  The room darkened and swam and I realised that the party was a sort of paranoid conspiracy. These ruthless creatures were watching each other in perfect mistrust. They smiled little incredulous smiles. Was something wrong with my suit? Had I overlooked some social nicety? I was the only living thing in a place full of cunningly animated mannequins. I had no idea how long I’d been in here, but I needed to get away. I pushed off from the bar and began to sidle back across the room. I couldn’t see her anywhere. I caught sight of myself in a mirror, a waxy face sprouting from an ill-fitting collar. Behind me a french window was open, and without further thought I escaped into the dark outside.

  I took a breath, letting cool air flow into me, and crossed the terrace to sit on a wall. Twilight had submerged the garden, but evening was still bright above the skyline. A few partygoers were dallying out here in pairs and threes, but none paid me any mind. Seen from outside, the party appeared benign. I exhaled.

  ‘You haven’t spoken to me all evening.’

  She sat down beside me.

  ‘I’m glad you’ve been enjoying yourself,’ she said in a pointed undertone. She was glaring at me. ‘I was watching, you know. You should have seen yourself. I should have known better than to bring you. Oh, don’t even try. You’ll only make it worse.’

  As she spoke, it dawned on me that I had never seen her so angry. Dumbly I understood that I’d got the evening wrong. All at once it was obvious: I’d got it all wrong, somehow, from the beginning.

  I said nothing.

  ‘It was so blatant,’ she hissed. ‘Don’t you care what anyone thinks?’

  I wondered what I had expected if not this. It occurred to me there were probably certain words I could say, now, that would change what was happening, but I could not begin to guess what they were. I stared down at my ragged plimsolls and wondered how I would get home tonight.

  ‘Don’t you dare ignore me!’ She shook my arm. I loo
ked up, and her eyes searched my face.

  ‘Did you think for an instant about the position you’ve put me in? No, you couldn’t care less, could you. It wouldn’t even cross your mind. Don’t you have any shame?’

  She paused, slightly out of breath. Then her fingernails were in my scalp and our mouths jammed together. Her weight laid into me so that we tipped backwards and rolled off the wall into a flowerbed. After a frantic minute I struggled up and hauled her to her feet. I pinned her wrists in my hands and led her deeper into the park, to find privacy among the hedges.

  New experience made me bold, and I began to frequent parts of the city I would never have dared before. I found myself walking at a slower pace, happy to get lost in the spacious maze of all these flower tubs and iron railings, these stained white pavements, locked restaurants, fire escapes and commercial accessways, these airy canyons whose windowsills were crowded with geraniums, these deep arcades where shopfronts glinted: chocolatiers and milliners and dealers in delightful bits of junk. One afternoon near the November Bridge I discovered a secluded square dominated by a grand café. I decided to go inside and spend a while writing in the notebook I had bought myself earlier that day. I thought I had an idea for a song.

  Inside, the café was a single high-roofed space, full of wood and brass and potted palms, the customers in pairs or alone. Two or three figures moved among them with silver pots. As I sat, a waiter appeared and took my order: moments later a tiny cup of black coffee stood in front of me and the waiter was melting away again even as he answered my thanks with a bow. His ceruse-white face paint was flawless. The tinkling music-box phrase that accompanied his movements stepped continually from major to minor and back. An overweight customer, sweating into a double-breasted wool suit, watched him narrowly as he crossed the room.

  I sipped my coffee and opened my notebook at the first page. The words, which had seemed to fit so well in my head as I walked along, were harder to get hold of now that the tip of my pencil was resting on unmarked paper.

  The fat man drained a bulbous glass of some viscid, dark-brown liqueur, and signalled to the waiter for more and quick about it. His small features, which were dwarfed by the swags of his cheeks and chins, wore a congested expression. His pointed patent shoes rested wide apart under the table and his short thighs lay puddled over the seat of his chair.

  As the bottle was brought to his table, the customer glowered stolid-faced in the other direction. From my vantage point, though, I could see his hand settling on the back of the waiter’s thigh, and sliding upwards. There was a clatter: the sticky brown fluid had slopped across the table, and a couple of spots were spreading on the customer’s shirt. The waiter pulled a napkin from his apron and pressed it to the tabletop.

  The customer, chins quivering, slapped the bottle from the waiter’s hand so that it bounced across the tiled floor, splashing gouts of liqueur. As the waiter stooped to retrieve it, he was jabbed in the behind by a pointed, polished toecap, hard enough to send him sprawling in the mess. The fat man resumed his seat with a righteous twitch of his trouser legs, his eyes darting around the other patrons of the café. My cup rattled in its saucer. No one moved. Conversations continued; the other waiters went about their business. I swallowed the last of my coffee, and hesitated. The waiter rose to his knees, his white shirt blotted with syrup and grime.

  The door at the back of the café banged and a young man appeared, his feet clicking fast on the tiles. His tie was slung over his shoulder and his hair neatly gelled. He saw the urgency of the situation: he caught the waiter a ringing slap across the back of the head, then took hold of his ear, dragged him to his feet and propelled him through the rear door. Returning to the customer’s table, bobbing and bowing, he began what promised to be a virtuosic apology. Another waiter brought a mop for the floor.

  The espresso machine rasped, and on the other side of the café a pair of ladies exclaimed their agreement about something or other. I closed my notebook and stood up.

  One afternoon she brought me to a grimy street behind Festal Place, to a shop whose window was full of fiddles, mandolins, ukuleles and banjos: glossy wood in every autumn shade. Inside, guitars dangled overhead like extraordinary fruit. The myopic, dandruffed shopkeeper seemed as doubtful of my business here as I was myself, but both of us went along with what she wanted. Hopelessly conscious of my ignorance, I pointed to instruments which he lifted down for me, and, sitting on a tall stool, I ran my hands over the strings, strumming and picking the most impressive-sounding figures I had so far managed to invent. Right away I realised how flimsy and ill-made the guitar in her bedroom was. These were real instruments, sound and responsive, sweet and resonant. They had no end of music in them if I could find it.

  I chose a traditional guitar with an unusually small body, a maple veneer and an inlay of darker wood around the sound hole. Every joint and curve, every detail, was flawless. In my hands it had the strange feel of future intimacy. It seemed heavy for its size, but the lightest touch pinned the strings neatly to the fretboard. I hung back, holding the instrument in both hands, while she paid. I never learnt how much it cost.

  The city had music wherever you went, I discovered. Walking home from work through Belltown Park, I heard a tuneful racket from the old bandstand, where two bearded youths and a pale girl were playing amplified folk tunes, singing close harmonies through tinny microphones. Most people were ignoring them or pausing for half a song and moving on, but I stayed an hour, listening with envious delight. A grey-haired woman and a small boy stopped in front of the bandstand, her arm around his shoulders and his fist bunching her coat; she gave me a sharp look, but then seemed to decide I was permissible. A gang of teenagers around a park bench whooped half-sarcastically after each song. As the band packed up, I left, wanting to approach them but not knowing what to say.

  I went through all the music she had in her room, listening to the same songs over and over and shadowing them on my guitar, chord by chord, until I knew them by heart. For a while I was preoccupied with a dead singer who had a trick of double-tracking his voice on his recordings. His eloquent, subdued melodies were so distinctive they must have been coded deep down in his cells. Daylight from your bedroom window, That was what we wore … My own songs were diffident and wary, so far. I could finish the writing quickly – on more than one occasion, half an hour of panic, strumming and scribbling with my face inches from guitar strings and notebook, gave me the whole of a song – but I was slow to begin anything new. My voice was sweet enough but I could only hold it steady over a single octave. It would surely improve with practice, and I reckoned my vocal muscles were getting stronger already. The interval of two notes could divide your heart and the tug of words against rhythm could mend it: I’d stumbled on the means to say whatever was true in this life. I only wanted the skill to do it.

  We went out to a gig, a showcase night for promising local acts that took place monthly in a Communion Town bar. We walked across the November Bridge, through the Esplanade and under the floodlit face of the Autumn Palace – the trams weren’t running, for some reason, and in the central metro plaza we glimpsed a confusion of ambulances and police cars – then continued down the Mile, across Impasto Street and into a side lane where, past a bouncer and down a flight of stairs, the music had already begun. The band, a duo, consisted of a long-haired girl who squeezed dark, complicated chords from a concertina and sang, while an older man – her raffish uncle, we speculated – waggled his eyebrows and played the clarinet. As far as this duo were concerned, a song was a melodramatic story full of ghosts, criminals, murders and revenges, told in spiky rhythms and pungent key-changes. When I went back to my songs the next day, they seemed flimsy and humdrum, and it was obvious that they could never win the cheers and foot-stamps that the duo’s rowdy ballads had drawn from the crowd. The very idea of playing in public made me ashamed: but, for all that, I knew I was not going to give up.

  In her room, late, I let her persuade me to play. S
he never asked if the songs were about her. Perhaps they made her shy, as nothing else did, or perhaps she understood better than me what a song really was. I had to keep myself from demanding more assurances, wanting her to guarantee that they were good enough – for what, I had no idea.

  After graduating she took a job raising funds for a small, well-connected development charity. Spring was waking the city up just then, opening doors and windows, warming the separate streets into a single organism. Time felt spacious. If you woke early, the day was there waiting for you, untouched. Each morning the pitched window above her bed turned a fresh card from the deck of clear skies. Even a lunch-hour was wide enough to get lost in, and a free afternoon contained all possibilities. The dusks kept lengthening and you felt that if you took the right path, up the wynds past a paper-lanterned tea garden into the Old Quarter, or along the river, towards the sky’s end-of-the-world pinkness, you could follow the evening as far as you wanted and never reach nightfall.

  I met her from work at the end of her first week in the job. The charity was based in a small city square whose limestone townhouses had been converted into solicitors’ and architects’ offices, advertising agencies and boutique business premises. She was bare-legged in a pleated dress. I had my guitar; I was seldom without it, now. We walked along Mino High Street, against a flow of young men with their suit jackets off and their ties loosened, and stopped for takeaway iced coffees.

  As we left the café, she hesitated, handed me both of the cold plastic beakers and skipped back inside to visit the lavatory. I waited on the pavement, glancing over at a torpid down-and-out who sat with his forehead resting on his knees so that only his greasy wool cap was visible. As I stood there, a rusty noise like a sigh scraped from his chest. A few copper coins lay on the ground between his feet. I thought of adding to them, but my hands were full and I wasn’t sure whether I had any change. I closed my eyes to feel the sun on my face, and smelt hot tar and rotting vegetables. I hummed a song from the park.