Communion Town Read online

  ‘If I have died, then I am in heaven, said the sweep to himself. Or perhaps I am asleep and this is a dream, and my heart will break when I wake up. But when dawn crept into the mansion of the fine lady, the sweep found that everything was real. She was dozing in his arms, warm and perfumed.’

  The master leered in my direction, I thought, and winked.

  ‘When the sun was up, the fine lady said to him, take this and go to the baths, and come to me again this evening. The poor sweep did as he was told. He made haste to his hovel on the other side of town, and then looked at what she had given him. It was a silver-stitched handkerchief in which five gold coins were wrapped. Not knowing what to do with such riches, he buried them in the ground, and sat on the stoop of his house for the rest of the day, wondering what it might all mean. Evening was drawing in when one of the servant girls appeared, and said to him, come along, my mistress is waiting for you.

  ‘Well, friends, what would you have done? The sweep went along with the servant and everything happened just as it had the night before. He dined with the fine lady and spent the night in her fragrant bed. It seemed to him that each hour lasted forever and that the night was over in heartbeat. Time is strange indeed for a sweep in a lady’s room. You might think he’d have trouble believing it was real, but you’d be wrong. Through that secret night, he knew very well this bedchamber was real. What struck him as unlikely was that anything else might be – that he had ever led his mule through the streets, that dawn was going to come, that there was a city beyond the curtain.

  ‘And in the morning, just as before, she gave him a handkerchief full of coins and ordered him to come back to her in the evening.

  ‘But on that third night, when the sweep, with more swagger in his stride than usual, walked up to the mansion, something was different. The gate beside the house was open, and he thought he could hear the sound of horses from the courtyard, and from an upper window the intimate laughter of a man and a woman. Still, he went up to the door boldly enough and knocked. He was answered not by the pretty servants, but by a couple of eunuchs who asked him brusquely what he meant by coming to the front of the house. When he could give no reply, they beat him and drove him away. He fled back to his own hovel, and there he nursed his bruises and sobbed the night through.

  ‘Many days later, in the marketplace, who should he see in the distance, once more, but the fine lady and her entourage? Of course, he dared not approach her. That was the last he ever saw of any of that household.’

  The actor playing the sweep was left alone in the middle of the platform, fixed motionless in a pose of comical longing and despair, his mouth turned down at the corners and his arm extended after the lady. The master paused with one eyebrow flexed until the giggles quietened. The crowd became more attentive.

  ‘And do you know why all of this happened to this little sweep?’

  He looked around.

  ‘No?’

  He looked from face to face.

  ‘None of you know?’

  They waited.

  ‘Then you never will!’

  Mirth surged back more loudly than before. The master gave a perfunctory bow, swished his cane through the air, and grinned around at his crowd. For a heartbeat his attention settled on me, and his moustache twitched as if to enquire why I was not laughing along with everyone else. But then the children reappeared to dance a faultless polka to the strains of flute and mandolin, all except for two of them, who threaded through the crowd with velvet bags held open. She dropped in a handful of coins, tousled the boy’s head and led me away.

  That night I sat in the guest room with my guitar beside me on the cot, listening through the house to the muffled sounds of her having a row with her father. My eyes and nose were not streaming so badly since I had taken one of the tablets Leo had given me this morning. A chemical stink had surrounded the complex of concrete outbuildings they called the sheds, and from somewhere inside I had heard groans, the abandoned sounds of sickness or despair. Leo had not invited us into his workshop. As we had walked away she had explained to me that visitors from towns and cities were sometimes disconcerted when they came out here, but that this was just ignorance and sentimentalism.

  I couldn’t make out her words or her father’s, only their voices drumming through the house. Tomorrow we would be back in the city.

  The next few weeks passed quickly for me, and soon I was living in her flat. I never thought to mourn my bachelor freedom. I took to the routine right away, seeing her off in the morning and greeting her when she arrived home in the evening, and felt no qualms about domestication. She was going through a busy time at work, so I bought groceries and made the dinner every night.

  One morning she was dashing out the door of the flat, late for her tram; but as I kissed her goodbye, she paused, and reminded me she couldn’t wait to hear my new material. We had agreed that from now on I’d concentrate on writing songs. Finally I could get down to work. For too long I had been full of possible songs, nestled deep down, frail seedlings which would stay for a while and grow if given the chance, or shrink away again if they were ignored. Now I could attend to them all.

  I shut the door after her and turned to face the empty flat, tightening my dressing-gown cord. I had the place to myself all day, with nothing to keep me from my guitar and notebook and the multi-track program on her laptop. First, though, I got dressed and cleared away the breakfast things. I tidied the flat – I was positively house-proud these days – then sat on the sofa and eyed my guitar. Eventually I picked it up, tuned it, and strummed for a while. But nothing was happening, and the prospect of settling down to a day’s songwriting filled me with dismay. I was becoming alarmed. The fact was that since we’d moved in together I had written nothing at all.

  My old songs, when I played them through, sounded transparent, ill-made, full of clichés and dishonesties. ‘Serelight Fair’ was still the best I’d written, and it was wearing thinner every time I played it: what had been unbearably true seemed now like cheap theatrics. But when I tried anything new, the jotted lyrics and sketchy chord sequences crumbled to pieces on my guitar strings. I told myself I only had to hold my nerve and keep going, but I found that I didn’t know how. My attention lapsed and whole days drained away, wasted. I was getting nowhere. The suspicion was creeping in that I had already written my songs, that I had no more left to write. I put the guitar down. Mid-morning already. What I needed to do, I decided, was go for a walk.

  My daily errands had been growing longer and longer. Often I walked for miles all over the city, through somnolent avenues and deserted municipal parks with empty flowerbeds, or through the main streets where I was surrounded by office workers hurrying to and from their lunches. I told myself it was all part of the process: you couldn’t write songs by sitting in a flat, you had to go outside, keep on looking at the world, find out what it was like. Once, in Communion Town, I had heard a shred of melody, and seen a tangle-headed figure whistling for unresponsive afternoon shoppers. I had taken a different street instead.

  Now I pulled the latch shut behind me and headed for the river, to join the tourists and students who would be out on the boardwalk, watching the human statues and browsing the tables of second-hand books. I began to hum a song I’d heard not long ago, but I found myself repeating the same line over and over. A thousand black umbrellas and a thousand hungry dreams …

  An hour later I paused to lean against the parapet beside an open quadrangle, edged by brightly graffitoed walls, where skateboarders were showing off among brutalist concrete sculptures. A short way off, a spindly pedestrian bridge spanned the river. The water crawled far below.

  It was only after the first shock of recognition had made me straighten up and take a step or two away from the parapet that I realised what I had seen. She was approaching across the bridge. I didn’t know what she was doing in this part of town so early on a weekday afternoon. If it was for work she hadn’t mentioned it. I hesitated. My first instin
ct had been to hide, not to let her know I was out wandering around when I should be in the flat working on my songs. But that was ridiculous: no one had said I was supposed to stay indoors all the time. I began to walk along the boardwalk so I’d catch up with her as she stepped off the bridge.

  But before I got close enough, someone else moved forward to meet her, a tall chestnut-haired figure. They embraced, and kissed on the cheeks three times. It was Leo. He was dressed more smartly than before, in a dark overcoat, but he carried himself with the same outdoorsman’s self-possession. I could easily have waved, called out and joined them, declaring a happy coincidence, but I held back. I couldn’t have told you why, but I dropped behind one of the signboards that showed maps of the waterfront and watched as she slipped her arm into his. As they walked off together, I followed.

  They left the Old Quarter and walked south along the quays. I kept them in sight all the way down the promenade, where coloured flags hung between the lamp posts and the daytrippers were busy using up the last of summer, and into the emptier streets of an unfamiliar part of town, a suburb where the breeze had an abrasive edge and stank faintly of diesel. I had always thought of this as a city which turned its back to the sea, but here each corner gave another angle from which to look down into the bay. I saw places where the bricks ran out, so that you could have climbed down to pebbles, bladderwrack and sea-wet sand. Beyond the grey water the factory chimneys were merging with the sky. The well-dressed pair continued ahead of me, passing bleak little bakeries and guesthouses, all shut, and I followed, hanging back until they were almost out of sight, hurrying forward to the next doorway in which I could conceal myself. Had they been paying much attention to their surroundings they would have noticed me, no doubt, but they were absorbed in their conversation.

  We came to a cul-de-sac of terraced houses. I watched from the corner as they walked to the end of the row. They had run out of talk now; there was something sad, even hopeless, in the way she leant on his arm. The yard was overgrown in front of the last house and the upstairs windows were boarded over. She searched in her bag, produced the big, messy bunch of keys she always carried, and opened the front door. Leo placed a hand between her shoulders and followed her into the house.

  I lingered a while at the end of the street, trying to work out what it was that I had seen. Then, automatically, I retraced my steps until I was home.

  The image of that house, with its tangled yard and defaced exterior, lay on my mind like a sheet of glass for the rest of the day, suppressing other thoughts. When she arrived home I greeted her with a kiss, gave her dinner, listened to her day at work and spoke to her in reply, but I didn’t have a clue what either of us was saying.

  That night I lay awake until she was breathing regularly, then I got up and dressed in the dark. I went through her bag and took her keys. As softly as I could, I let myself out of the flat and set off into the city. It was well past midnight, quiet, few people around. All noises had retreated. The night seemed to have its own resonance. At that hour, the city’s a gong that was struck at noon and is not yet quite still.

  There were no signs of habitation when I reached the house. Half the streetlamps on the cul-de-sac were dead. Her key-ring held several keys I didn’t recognise, but it didn’t take me long to find the one that fitted the lock. Without knowing what I expected to find, I opened the door.

  As soon as I stepped into the hallway, I was swamped by a sense of déjà vu so disorienting that I came to a halt on the threshold and had to force myself to carry on. I couldn’t shake the illusion I had been here. I groped along the wall for a switch, and a bare bulb came feebly alight overhead. For a minute or two I forgot all about her and Leo.

  The house was crammed from top to bottom with what looked like junk, or the debris of a lifetime’s work on some questionable, arcane project. To enter the downstairs room you had to thread your way through a maze of wooden and cardboard crates, disordered bookshelves, chests of drawers and filing cabinets. Two large workbenches stood buried beneath stacks of manila folders and loose papers, antiquated computer equipment and boxes of tools. One of the benches was strewn with retort stands, stained, odd-shaped glassware and microscopes of various sizes. A fat reference book was held open by a tool-roll of black cloth, weighted with slender steel instruments: scissors, forceps, scalpels. I picked up a brass baton with a small glass eye at one end. It all reminded me of something, but I couldn’t think what. I paused and listened. Nothing was moving in the house. The night murmured away outside.

  Upstairs, the smaller of the two rooms was completely empty. It had no window, only blind bulging plaster, featureless except for an iron ring bolted at waist-height into one wall. The dark-blotched floorboards had not been swept for a long time. There was nothing remarkable about the room, but just like the bookshelves and the equipment downstairs, like the damp smell of the hall, the looseness of the stair carpet and the sticky-greasy feel of the bannister, the empty room produced a peculiar mixture of emotions in me. It felt like the time I had left my songwriting notebook lying open on the kitchen table, and had come back to find one of her flatmates idly turning the pages. As I closed the door again, I noticed the heavy bolt on the outside.

  The last room showed signs of more recent use. It was a chaos of papers, but the workbench was clear except for a cuboid metal filing box, and a monitor hooked up to an obsolete-looking electronic console. A spot lamp craned over the desktop and an office chair stood as though it had just been vacated. Three of the walls were lined with shelves filled with more metal boxes, all of them identical, each one displaying a small handwritten label. But against the fourth wall stood an upright piano. A window in its front showed a spool of paper punctured with a complex pattern of holes: it was a pianola, I realised, a player piano. I tried pressing on one of the treadles, but nothing happened. Then I saw the bundle of wires that protruded from the lid and trailed across the floor into the console machine on the workbench.

  At this, the feeling of déjà vu returned, redoubled. This room too was familiar, but as it would be familiar to hold your own polished skull in your hands. My eyes moved to the metal boxes on their shelves, and to the labels on their sides. Written on each label was a person’s name. None that I recognised. They were in alphabetical order. I searched along the shelves … but the one I was looking for wasn’t there. I broke the silence by laughing at myself. Why in the world would it be? Nothing but a gap on the shelf. I looked again at the box on the desk, and felt my face drain. Sinking into the chair, I leant closer to make sure. My name was on the label.

  I glanced at the door behind me, undid the catches of the box and lifted the lid.

  Most of the space inside was taken up by a thick, scuffed hardback binder with my name on the spine. I opened it and began to leaf through pages of closely printed text. It looked old – the pages, thin, low-grade computer printout, were faded, dog-eared and soft at the edges. As I tried to make sense of the contents, I became calm, giving myself up entirely to that sense of uncanny reiteration, because now I knew that I was dreaming or mad. It was an impossible book. I could not bring myself to read more than a few words at a time. ‘Later I strummed my guitar …’ Wincing inwardly, I thumbed back and forth through the pages. ‘… Without looking at her, I walked out …’ I felt dizzy with embarrassment. ‘The first time we met, she was climbing into a rickshaw. It was a bitter night …’ I tore my eyes from the page. Of course, I had never written any kind of autobiography – I had never even kept a diary, never thought of it – but still I recognised the words right away. There was no accounting for it and no denying that they were mine. I slapped the binder shut, mortified.

  At the bottom of the box was a bundle of data cartridges, labelled only with codes scrawled in soft pencil. Part of each number seemed to be a date, the earliest corresponding to last spring, the latest just over a month ago. I chose one at random; the old console on the desk had a slot the right size, so I clicked the cartridge into place and
pressed the button. Then I nearly leapt out of my skin as the monitor and the player piano both came to life simultaneously.

  It took me a minute to realise that the clonky old piano was playing one of my songs. It was exactly as I had written it, but it sounded oddly unfamiliar, perhaps because I had never heard it performed on anything other than the guitar. The monitor screen was split into several parts, one showing a horizontal line fuzzing out into jagged peaks and valleys in time with the sound from the piano, while a second showed staves full of black and white spots; I don’t know how to read musical notation. In the third, my lyrics scrolled up the screen. I listened through to the end of the song, took out the cartridge, and tried another. The song that played was one of my very earliest attempts: I had never dared perform it to anyone, had all but forgotten it, but here it was, exactly written out and reproduced.

  There weren’t very many cartridges. One of them, I noticed, didn’t have a code at all: the label was marked only with a circle, or perhaps a figure zero. I turned it over in my hands, wondering if I’d ever get rid of the feeling that all of this had happened already.

  I was distantly aware, as I clicked the cartridge into the console, that the front door of the house had opened and feet were climbing the stairs, but by the time she burst into the room with Leo at her heels, the music was already playing.

  The tune from the pianola consisted of several neatly overlapping, tinkling phrases – jaunty, sentimental and melancholy all at once. We stood facing each other as we listened. After half a minute it finished and immediately began over again. I knew the song well. It was the music that had always been pulsing through me, marked by each spasm of my heart, and all my other songs were only variations on the theme. I breathed in and out to the pulse of that tune, tapped my fingers to it in idle moments and dreamt it whenever I slept. I could hear it, now, in the ripple of my gut. Its harmonics were the vibrations of my blood pressing its way through the tissues of my brain. Its banal melody described the limits of my emotions, and its prosaic structure was the absolute framework for my thoughts. It had been jingling away inside my body, in my heart, ingrained so deeply that I had not been able to recognise it until it was played back to me by an automatic music-box. I had never before heard it: its cheapness, its small, comprehensible ingenuity, its limited charm.