Communion Town Read online

  She re-emerged from the coffee shop, took her drink and slipped something into my hand. It was a scrap of cotton, still warm. ‘Look after those for me,’ she said, and held my eye for a few seconds.

  A few streets away we found a bridge, and, beside it, the top of a narrow brick staircase. I followed her down. The city’s canals were a sunken world, dank and green, hanging below street level like a reflection. Bright algae lay just under the surface of the water, clumped around the remnants of shopping trolleys and rotten planks, while above the waterline vegetation flourished on worn structures of brick. We walked the towpath, pushing through curtains of weeping willow and stooping along the tunnels. On the other side of the canal the unkempt ends of back gardens sloped down to the water. She kept just ahead of me, twitching away from my hands and hurrying us down the dozing watercourse until we found a place where you could leave the path to enter a strip of undisturbed woodland. Beyond it was a meadow, a place to learn about bark’s texture, damp earth and the taste of grass. Later I strummed my guitar.

  One Sunday afternoon she sat curled on her sofa, reading Under the Net and threading the fingers of one hand in and out of my hair. I was cross-legged on the floor beside her, running through my finished songs. By now I had six or seven I was more or less happy with. As the city sailed towards summer, half the pubs in the central district were advertising folk-club nights, photocopied fliers for local gigs were pasted on every hoarding and bus shelter, and most coffee shops I passed seemed to contain a boy or a girl perched on a stool with an acoustic guitar. This evening I would play at my first open mic.

  The one I’d chosen took place in the upper room of a pub on the Part Bridge. I’d gone last week, just to listen. As I practised, now, with my back against the sofa and her fingertips at my nape, I held in my mind the image of that dingy room with its low stools and tables and its corner stage one step up from the floor, under walls and ceiling papered with old theatre posters. Tonight the place would be packed with musicians pulling on pints and beer bottles, each waiting for a chance to perform. Some would be old hands who turned up every week, but others would be new. If you wanted to play you had to arrive early and sign up for your ten-minute slot with the pair of middle-aged men who ran the night.

  Last week they had taken the first slot themselves, performing raucous, straightforward folk-pop with harmonica and twelve-string guitar, to the delight of the crowd. A mixture of acts had followed: shy singer-songwriters mumbled their private codes into their chests, picking sparingly at their guitars, while others, more extroverted, bashed at their instruments with no aim beyond getting everyone clapping along. One young man specialised in extended, string-snapping solos like a stadium rock star, and as he stepped down from the stage he held his guitar up at shoulder height to receive its due applause. A woman draped in green taffeta spent her allotted time with her eyes shut, using a wooden pestle to draw one continuous, weird note from a brass singing-bowl, and improvising in a high-pitched wail.

  As I watched all this, it became clear that the stage was a bubble of delusions, and that these people had come here in pursuit of some mistaken idea of themselves. But then, halfway through the night, a mournful-looking, deep-voiced girl played a single song, honest and catchy and personal without a trace of self-absorption. While she sang I felt the presence of the whole city, live and real outside the beery room. Colours and textures opened in my head. Her lyrics were casual phrases, ordinary rhythms of speech with everyday flashes of anger, emphasis and silliness, as though she was just throwing together fragments of a conversation; but the words fell into patterns. Her playing riffled through me.

  That was what I wanted, I knew, without articulating it to myself or really understanding why. I’d practised all I could. I’d borrowed her laptop to make demos, layering strumming underneath fingerpicking and working out harmonies to sing with myself. I had listened endlessly to these recordings, alert to their flaws and frailties, correcting and polishing. What did I want with the offhand approval of strangers? I didn’t know, but communing in secret with a laptop wasn’t enough. Two songs were ready to perform but I was hesitating over a third. Was it tender and truthful, or would it make that upstairs room fall uncomfortably silent? I uncrossed my legs, stretched my socked feet across the carpet, and began to play through the intro again.

  She laid her book down. I looked around to find her glaring at me, and the words of the first verse faltered on my tongue. She let her breath out in a disbelieving snort.

  ‘You keep on playing that,’ she said. ‘I’m right here! What are you trying to tell me?’

  I opened my mouth to explain that I had to practise for tonight, that I needed to work out whether it was ready to perform –

  ‘Yes, the damn open mic night, I know all about it,’ she said. ‘So what? You think you can keep on playing that song, over and over, and I’ll just sit here and listen?’

  She had raised herself up against the arm of the sofa. I twisted around to face her, the guitar slipping from my lap with a soft discord.

  ‘Don’t interrupt me,’ she said, ‘I’m getting going now. Are you actually trying to torment me, is that it? Have I done something to deserve this?’ Her eyes were bright with frustration and, I noticed with a shock, also with tears. One brimmed over, then the other, brushing trails down her cheeks.

  ‘You just keep on playing those damn songs – and yes, they’re fine, they’re beautiful – you keep on playing until I start to think they’re all just words and they don’t mean anything. Or maybe you’re doing it on purpose, seeing how long I’ll smile nicely and keep waiting. Were you ever actually going to say it? It’s nothing strange, you know! It’s not difficult!’

  She rose and crossed the room to steady herself against the mantelpiece, sniffed loudly and rubbed her face with the heels of her hands. She let out a big sigh. ‘Sooz and Ceelie are leaving at the end of the month,’ she said. ‘I wanted you to move in, can you believe that? I thought you could move in here and it’d be just us. How stupid am I? I mean, how was I supposed to ask, when you couldn’t – when you wouldn’t even say? Never mind. Forget it.’

  I was on my feet, the guitar still in my hand. I took a hesitant step towards her, but she turned away. My skin stung, my head pulsed with pressure, my vision darkened. Sunlight fell through the window and her novel still lay open on the sofa, but the room had been pumped full of cold water. I couldn’t speak. Her eyes were hidden behind her forelock. My guitar, brushing against my leg, gave another gentle, tuneless twang, an isolated syllable of sound.

  ‘You’d better go,’ she said.

  I didn’t play at the open mic that night. After leaving her flat, I crossed the street and hailed a tram, but when I felt in my pockets I found I’d brought no money with me. I had to apologise and climb back down to the street. The driver swore as the doors slapped shut and the rubber wheels sneered away.

  I set off on foot instead, and walked a long way, not noticing where I was heading but not wanting to stop moving. Eventually the daylight failed and drizzle began to mist down. No more trams went past.

  I passed through negative spaces, beside railway sidings, under archways clogged with litter and past industrial lots where the floodlights blinded me with after-images of concrete and wire. All was darkness and halogen. I didn’t know where I was. A long way off I could hear a major road roaring like the lip of a waterfall. Soon, I thought, I would surely merge into the limits of the city itself. But instead I began to hear sounds ahead, yelps and bellows, the coughs of machines, sirens, infra-bass noise beating away in cellars deep under the pavement. Around me the streets came to a comfortless kind of life, warmed by exhaust fumes, lit by pornography shops and nightclubs that had not redecorated in twenty years.

  I negotiated a grille in the pavement belching steam that stank of fish and starch. A woman in a shredded anorak observed me, while beside her on the doorstep her companion tugged at his dreadlocks and, in time with the faltering ditty of his inn
ards, croaked for help, unless he was saying some other word. In the gutter a slow trickle of fluid found its way around rotting fruit, broken glass and the remains of a dog. Kerbstones and railings took their definition from pink neon signs. Further along, a vagrant, dressed in sacking but with enough sense of propriety still to have smeared streaks of white stuff down her cheeks, wandered from person to person, holding out palsied hands, ignored. A youth spat casually in her direction. Overhead, half the windowpanes had been smashed.

  I turned the corner into a broader street, but, before I could take another step, a man burst from a doorway in front of me, knocking me aside as he went sprawling full length in the road. Catcalls and laughter pursued him from inside the bar. The man cursed, rolled on his side and retrieved his hat. He hauled himself to his feet with the aid of a lamp post, peering redly out of a mess of cuts and bruises, one hand fumbling to straighten his ruined tie. Someone told him to sleep it off.

  I gripped my guitar case. The street swarmed with citizens of the late night, jostling their way from one den to another in search of whatever it was that they needed. As they pushed past they moved me out of the way with cordial roughness, so that I found myself manhandled along the street by the crowd, smeared with its perspiration, smelling its armpits and breathing its alcohol breath. It was easier to accept the embrace than resist it, easier to go where I was guided. I felt that if I chose I could simply let myself be carried forward forever as a particle in the city’s bloodstream, dissolving. I tasted hot fat marbled through the air around a cluster of stalls selling sausages, sweating pies and whelks. I was hungry but my pockets were empty.

  Up ahead, somebody was whistling tunelessly. Surprised at how the cracked melody pierced the din, I craned to see where it was coming from. The whistler was pestering people, jinking back and forth to obstruct them, conducting his own performance with his forefingers. He was an emaciated creature with a long, bony face and a shock of pale hair which in the glow of mercury vapour could have been peroxide blond or prematurely white. He kept on repeating the same jingle, a few shrill notes forced between his front teeth.

  Periodically he paused, grinned and held out an open hand to the crowd. No one responded, but he didn’t seem to mind. He would caper lopsidedly along the street and whistle his phrase again. Drawing closer, he gave me a hostile glare.

  ‘Keep moving,’ he said. ‘These ones are mine.’

  His skin had a damp, unwholesome texture, as if its pores were clogged with powder, and his eyes were the hard and sunken eyes of an insomniac. I thought he might be suffering from some serious illness.

  ‘This is my street. Get your own.’

  Taken aback, I said nothing. Then I noticed that his eyes were darting to the guitar case in my hand, and I understood what he meant: what he thought I was and what he was telling me would happen. If I were to do as he told me, I would keep moving until I found a street of my own; there I’d find a place to sit and play, people would give me pennies and soon I’d be able to buy myself something to eat. At this vision of the future, sweat prickled inside my clothes and I felt an irresistible need to get away from this whistling scarecrow. I turned and walked.

  ‘Hey, you.’

  He was limping along after me. He walked painfully, pressing a hand to his groin and pitching sideways at every other step, but he could still move at speed.

  ‘You!’

  He grabbed hold of my sleeve. Although his clothes were wrecked, he wore a fresh carnation in his lapel, its tight green bud barely showing the white furled inside.

  ‘Where are you going?’ he said. ‘What’s the hurry?’

  He grinned the ingratiating grin he used on his patrons, and whistled a couple of notes.

  ‘Wait a minute. Listen. Listen, I had some songs.’

  He was close enough for me to smell decay on his breath and see the clots of grime in the tangled white mop. His fingertips brushed my guitar case.

  ‘They call me idle,’ he said. ‘They call me good for nothing. But I don’t believe them. They don’t know our calling, you and me. They don’t know what we are.’

  He nodded, showing me the gaps in his teeth.

  ‘You see? I’m just like you. A flâneur. I walk through the city. I hear its songs and I sing them back, and all I ask in return …’

  I wanted to walk away, but there was something needy in his face, something desperate, that would not let me.

  ‘I was a guitar man once, too,’ he said. ‘I made songs in my time. Such songs. Set them on their feet, they’d fly. You know what I’m saying?’

  He tapped the back of my hand.

  ‘I can tell you know. There’s nothing like making a true song, a real one. It might take a lifetime but it doesn’t matter. It costs you everything but you never think twice about paying. But then it stopped. I lost it. Something went wrong, and all the songs left me. It was a long time ago. I can’t remember.’

  His fingers rested on my hand that was gripping the guitar case. His eyes were fixed on the instrument.

  ‘I wish,’ he said, ‘I only wish I could try once more to play my songs.’

  I held tighter.

  ‘I only want to borrow it,’ he said. ‘I think maybe it’ll come back. Maybe I’ll play like I used to. I only want to play one song.’

  He was staring at me in what looked like dire need. I pictured the two of us sitting down on the kerb and opening the case, and then his ragged voice lifting and his fingers rippling over the strings to release unforeseeable music. I imagined him restoring the guitar to my arms, and rising with a new ease, relieved of his pain.

  ‘One song,’ he said. ‘Give me one song.’

  I pulled away, grimacing in apology, and started walking again. Behind me the whistler began to shout.

  ‘Who are you?’ he bawled. ‘Where are your songs?’

  He was still following me, dragging along with his broken gait, and before I could get away he made a grab for the guitar. We tusselled, and as I wrested the case away from him he stumbled backwards and fell. Sitting up, he coughed and wiped snot across his face with the back of his hand.

  ‘They’re not your songs, boy,’ he said. ‘They’re mine. You’ll see.’

  He looked up at me with the same sly surmise I had seen on his face to begin with.

  ‘A mirror,’ he called after me. ‘It’s like looking into a mirror!’

  But I heard no more from him, because as I turned another corner I realised where I was. This was Serelight Fair. The night’s journey fell into place: I’d been here often enough pulling rickshaws for stag parties, and tonight I had only failed to recognise the district’s drunken thoroughfares because I’d come by a roundabout route. I was fifteen minutes’ walk from Three Liberties and my own bedsit.

  As I set off in the right direction, the past night already seemed less than real.

  * * *

  It was close to dawn by the time I got back to the bedsit, exhausted from walking. Looking around, I saw that I hadn’t been back here in days. Heaps of dirty clothes lay on the floor and the dishes in the sink showed spots of mould. I looked in the fridge but there was nothing to eat. Outside my window, the glass tube of a streetlamp glowed against the beginnings of first light.

  I snapped open the guitar case, lifted out the instrument and settled on my bed with my back against the wall, wide awake. I strummed aimlessly for a while, and then wrote a new song. It took twenty minutes and was the best I had ever written. It was still built around those same few favourite chords, more or less, but inside them and between them I discovered new kinds of longing, new kinds of sweet and bitter regret, not having to dig but finding them in plain view as you might find precious flotsam after a flood.

  As I sang, my sinuses seemed to fill with a clean liquid. My voice grew thick. I could feel something twisting and tightening in my chest, and as I played – feeling for the shape of the song, making sure of the rhythm, trying out a pattern of fingerpicking, tracing the melody of verse and chorus,
locating the bridge, piecing together the lyrics – the sensation grew deeper until I could have sworn that the twisting had levered my chest wide open and whatever it contained had been plundered, that she’d plunged her hands in up to the shoulders and ransacked me hollow, leaving nothing behind.

  The title came last. Everything that had happened between us, I realised, had folded itself down into a single night’s walk through the city, sleepless and heartsore, and so the song must be named accordingly. It was called ‘Serelight Fair’. I played until it was perfect and broad daylight was coming in at the window. Eventually I fell asleep.

  * * *

  She liked to walk through the park after work, so I waited all afternoon near the gate, leaning against the railings where the joggers and dog-walkers passed. I watched for a long time, occasionally thinking that I must have missed her, or imagining that she had walked right past but I had somehow failed to recognise her. Mostly I thought about nothing at all.

  But when she appeared there was no mistaking her. She was in one of the short knitted dresses she wore with coloured tights, and she looked serious, gripping her shoulder bag close against her, with eyes forward, forehead creased and mouth pursed. I could never have missed her. She was the more strikingly herself for being a stranger again, another pedestrian on her way home to a life you could only guess at.

  I hurried after her, calling her name. Heads turned, and she paused and waited, but her face gave nothing away. Other homebound workers stopped to watch me approach, and a couple of the males, seemingly by instinct, moved forward a step or two as if they might need to put themselves in between us: but they weren’t sure of what they were seeing, and as we came together they turned dubiously away.