The Travelling Hornplayer

by Barbara Trapido

  I fall in love with a boy; a boy I meet unexpectedly in Ellen Dent’s digs. It happens on the morning after I run away from my flatmate. I won’t bother you too long with the story, but the fact is that, after an unhappy, misfit first year, I arrange to share with a girl called Grania – though what draws us to each other is little more than that we admire each other’s clothes. I have beautiful expensive clothes because my mother spoils me rotten, and Grania has beautiful expensive clothes because her family has serious money.

  In due course, we bodge our letting arrangement, by forgetting to confirm it with the landlady, so we find ourselves facing a term with nowhere to lay our heads. Then, instead of letting us kip on people’s floors until some doss comes our way, my mother, of course, comes to the rescue. She tramps herself flat-footed visiting agent after agent, while Grania and I are off vacationing abroad and, finally, she signs the lease herself on a much too mod-cons flat in Stockbridge – a shiny pine ‘executive’ number, with central heating and newly fitted kitchen and a pile of brand new, squeaky clean, shop floor stuff. It’s all there is, she says. By doing so, she extends my dependence on her all through that year and stacks the cards against me with Grania and her friends.

  Grania materializes in no time as a super-confident party-girl. She fills the flat every evening with revelling public schoolboys, and it’s not long before The Rake’s Progress is happening in our living-room. And there am I, Miss Goody Two Shoes, plucking by the sleeve these confident creatures and asking them, please, to be careful. Please be careful because my mum has signed an inventory for the ready-to-hang polyester-and-cotton-mix curtains, for the naff but pristine cane-and-glass coffee table with handy magazine-rack below.

  Not unnaturally, the champagne set think of me as major creep and spoilsport. They see no reason to be careful with supermarket wine glasses when their parents drink out of Waterford crystal. They see no reason not to have fork-bending contests when the forks are hardly heirloom, after all, they are high street stainless steel.

  There is one particular favourite of mine. He’s called Simon Baxendale. ‘What’s up, angel?’ he says to me one day. ‘Is it Louis Quatorze?’ I’ve been trying to stop him stubbing out his cigarettes on a self-assemblage, roll-top desk.

  Always omnipresent in my relationship with Grania is the plastic bucket factor. Because, on my first day, my mother and I arrive early and Mum promptly makes a list of all the things the flat still requires, in her opinion – a laundry basket, a doormat, a clothes-line, a dustpan and brush, etcetera – Grania is able at once to typecast me as the partner with responsibility in the Bissell Mop department, while she becomes guardian of the higher aesthetic of the household. It is her family photographs that soon grace the chimneypiece. It is her exhibition posters that hang framed on the walls. Everything about me is quickly marginalized, until I become effectively invisible.

  It may be difficult for anyone to believe that I, with two foot of orange hair that looks acrylic in sunlight, can become invisible, but in the right conditions it’s possible. I know this because I’ve been there. Some evenings, other people are sleeping in my bed. Some days I watch, without protest, as people leave the flat in my clothes – but even I can’t fail to see that the partnership is bad for my state of mind.

  The night I decide to leave, it’s because I realize that I’m watching in silence as Grania is giving away my toaster to Simon Baxendale right in front of me.

  ‘Here,’ she says, ‘take this. I think it’s surplus to requirements.’

  Within the half-hour, I flee. I flee with nothing except my winter pyjamas and my toiletries and my wallet in a Kenyan basket. And, of course, I take my cello. I make my way down Glenogle Road and cross the bridge. I flag down a cab in Raeburn Place.

  ‘Where to?’ says the cabbie. It’s only then that the necessity of fixing upon an address begins to impinge. Where to? The address I fix on is Ellen’s. Ellen is a person whom I do not know well, but then I really haven’t got to know anybody well. I’ve never found my niche in student circles and I’ve become a bit of a recluse. I can’t explain how or why this has happened, but all through my first year I just watch other people making alliances around me. I’m like the intruder in the joke about the jokers’ convention. Remember that joke? The delegates merely refer to jokes by number and everybody laughs – except that when the newcomer offers a number, none of the delegates laugh. He doesn’t tell them proper, as the punchline goes. Then I team up with Grania, whose friends do not like me, while the rest of the student body doesn’t like Grania’s friends. Something like that. Or, more succinctly, I have great potential as social cripple.

  Ellen is a first-year student who manages to be a mainstream, popular, joining sort of girl, and one who – unusually – does not fill me with revulsion. This is the best I can do. Something about Ellen’s manner must suggest to me she has it in her to take on the walking wounded.

  Ellen lives in an averagely down-at-heel student apartment with rather inadequate heating, but with the usual compensating loftiness of Edinburgh’s stately structures. The apartment has three bedrooms and a shared living-room. She looks surprised to see me, especially given the hour, but she takes me in and puts me up on the sofa. Having found me two blankets, she goes into the kitchen and returns with a hot water bottle and a mug of cocoa.

  ‘God,’ I say, with my hands around the mug. ‘Isn’t this obsolete? Isn’t this delicious?’ I’ve never before tasted cocoa, only those little sachets of drinking chocolate.

  ‘“Perfection Recipe”,’ she says briskly. ‘My sister and I learnt it from the back of an old tin. Drink up and you’ll stop shivering.’

  I begin to tell her my story, with my bare feet on the hot water bottle, but Ellen cuts me short.

  ‘Frankly, Stella, it’s late,’ she says. ‘I’ve always thought that Grania was completely round the bend. As for lending her my toaster, I wouldn’t lend her a matchbox in hell. Not if I wanted it back.’ Then she goes to bed.

  Being in need of extra warmth, I climb out of my day clothes and into my porridge-coloured pyjamas. These are my miracle pyjamas, bought, of course, by my mother. The top is a thick, outsize version of a grandad vest, bum length and fleece-lined. The bottoms are soft ribbed long Johns with optional built-in feet that join at the ankles with Velcro. God knows where Mum bought them, but on this night they certainly prove to be the goods. When I wake just before nine, slightly stiff-necked in the unheated air, I am still nicely insulated all the way from my shoulders to my toddler’s felt feet. I tiptoe into the kitchen and make a cup of Nescafé. Then I do what I always do. I begin to practise the cello.

  I have been doing so for no more than ten minutes before a boy barges into the room, presumably from across the hall. He brings with him the stink of white spirit mixed with cigarette smoke, which has been faintly on the air all night. He is wearing nothing but a pair of saggy threadbare Y-fronts made of white cotton that have gone dishcloth grey after years of launderette bagwash, I expect.

  ‘Fuck’s sake, will you fuckin’ stop this fuckin’ racket?’ he says. ‘There’s folks here need some sleep.’

  I make no serious attempt from henceforth to represent his accent, but suffice it to say that he uses the word ‘folk’, not to be folksy, but merely as a synonym for ‘people’. He does the same, as I discover, with words like ‘lassies’ and ‘bairns’. The boy is nothing but bones and skin – strangely dark olive skin, for a Scot, and jutting bones.

  ‘There’s folk have been working through the night,’ he says. His small, pointed, rodent face is pushed self-righteously forward, his eyes dark and large. Having fired off this volley, he turns and heads for the door, his shoulder-blades showing prominent, like wings of bone on either side of his spine. Then, in the doorway, I watch him stop for a count of four seconds. He turns back to me and stares.

  ‘Fuck’s sake,’ he says, his tone mollifying. He looks me up and down from the hair to the toddler’s feet. He gropes crabwise for a ch
air and sits down without taking his eyes off me. ‘Carry on,’ he says. ‘Just keep on playing that thing.’

  Somewhat mesmerized by his presence, I continue with my practice. For more than half an hour he sits there and stares intently, his arms clutched about his knees, his legs drawn up against his washboard chest, hugging himself against the cold. His testicles, delicately pouched in the threadbare cotton, make an outline under the cloth like two hen’s eggs nestling side by side. Finally I stop. I lay the cello carefully on its side and put the bow beside it on the floor. Then I stare back at him. My heart, for some reason, is pounding in my chest.

  ‘D’ye fuck?’ he says. He does not blink or turn away. Though I have never yet in my nineteen years done such a thing, I nod mutely with downcast eyes, indicating, I suppose, not so much a willingness as a curious inability to deny him.

  The boy gets up. He takes my wrist and leads me to the door.

  ‘But you’re freezing,’ I say, feeling the touch of his hand on my skin.

  ‘Don’t blather,’ he says as he pulls me across the hall and through the doorway of his room.

  His bed linen, upon which I soon thereafter place my white nakedness, is a tumble of grubby layers, more like the stuff you’d get in a dog’s kennel. The room stinks quite strongly of turps and old ashtrays. The walls are stacked with canvases, cardboard sheets and drawing boards. Capless and twisted tubes of student oils lie in clusters on every available surface. Two large, makeshift palettes are on the floor, one made from what appears to be the glass front window of a motorcar. There are beer cans and brimming saucers of fag-ends. In the centre of the room, an easel stands on rumpled newspaper, its face turned away from me, the canvas blasted by the room’s only source of light, which comes from two precariously rigged-up Anglepoise lamps fitted with ghoulish blue bulbs.

  I lie obligingly still for him among the muddle and crushed beer cans, my long orange hair spilling over the pillow, my bloodless whiteness in the blue light like the corpse of drowned Ophelia. The boy makes an abrupt attempt upon my crotch but, finding me as one in rigor mortis, desists and addresses me instead.

  ‘You a lesbian?’ he says. I say nothing, I shake my head slightly. ‘Christ’s sakes,’ he says. ‘How old are you?’ I do not answer. I watch him suck on his right middle finger, blodged as it is with titanium white. Then he shoves it high into my chalk-dry virgin orifice.

  Afterwards he dispatches me, still naked, stunned and dribbling down one inside leg, to go and fetch my cello. He scoops the clutter from the chair alongside his bed and instructs me to sit on it and play. Naked, I continue with my practice. I watch him climb into my pyjama bottoms. He substitutes the canvas on the easel for another and scratches at it with a brush. He looks up irritably if ever I stop playing.

  ‘Just keep on playing the bastard, will you?’ he says. When I need to pee, he follows me to the lavatory. I play until those silent tears learnt at the feet of the Dragon Lady begin to fill my eyes.

  ‘I’m hungry,’ I say. ‘I’m cold. I can’t go on.’ The whole thing is very strange. He agrees that we should take a break. It’s mid-morning and I’ve missed all my classes. We get dressed and go to a café where he stipples his omelette with ketchup and slurps his tea. I pay. Before I agree to return, I say that we have to buy some coal and firelighters and kindling. We pay for it all with my money. The boy is quite weedy out in the street. He staggers and grumbles under the weight of the coal. He coughs his smoker’s cough. I almost offer to take it from him, but I don’t.

  Once back in the room, I scrape the grot from the fireplace. I lay three firelighters in the iron basket and on these I place six rosettes of rolled-up newspaper gathered from the floor. I make a neat gridwork of kindling, just as my dad always does. The boy does nothing. He sits and stares at me and smokes.

  ‘You can deal with the coal,’ I say. ‘I don’t want coal dust on my cello.’

  ‘Wear that plastic bag over your hand,’ he says. ‘Just wear it like a glove. I’m busy.’ I turn to him for a moment to see if he is being serious, but I do already appreciate that staring is a form of being busy in his book.

  Then I turn back to the fire. In my innocence it has not occurred to me that I am on all fours with my bum end pointing in his direction – an Allen Jones coffee table presenting from the rear. The boy comes up behind me and drags at my leggings, pulling me back a foot or so from the grate, exposing my little moon-white buttocks in their cotton piqué knickers. Spoilt girl knickers; Mummy’s pet knickers. Stella always has the prettiest things.

  He is so skinny that when he unbuckles his belt his jeans fall to the floor.

  ‘Varoom,’ he says. ‘Voom, varoom.’ Boys’ comic-book lingo, as I gasp and almost pass out, trapped between revelation and nausea. The nausea is being exacerbated because the boy keeps two fingers of his right hand pressed against my anus almost throughout. He removes them only to pass his hand over my nipples, while I feel myself compromised that my breasts, for all their merciful smallness, are hanging downwards. Then he forces his right index finger between my teeth so that I taste the remnants of oil paint and nicotine and ketchup along with the faint odour of my own anal sweat.

  When the boy removes his finger from my mouth, I find that I am dribbling. He leans back, apparently relaxing. He makes ironic hobbledehoy movements, shambling casually from one knee to the other. It makes my insides go haywire. The boy pauses and watches me. In panic, I think that he will turn from me and take a drag on his cigarette, which lies nearby in a saucer.

  ‘No—’ I say, because I want him to shape and structure the hopeless meltdown that is taking place in my abdomen. He does. Varoom.

  Afterwards I lie down on the floor among his mangled paint tubes and unwashed, cheesy socks. It is remarkable to me to discover that through what feels like shame and compromise and total loss of dignity, I also feel more adult, less clueless, more poised. His room has a sink. He pees down it, leaving the cold tap running. Then he gets dressed and makes the fire. When I am not playing the cello, he plays hip-hop on the tape recorder. Once the fire is going, he switches off the tape and he returns to the easel.

  ‘Play,’ he says.

  By six o’clock in the evening I am dead with exhaustion. By eight, the perennial cello player’s calluses on my right finger-ends are burning and itching like chilblains. The boy has had no sleep for twenty-four hours, but he is still on his feet at the easel.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say, ‘I’d like to have a bath.’ The boy nods. He wipes his brush on a rag and flings it into one of his old pickle jars filled with turps.

  ‘Do you have a towel?’ I say. The towel is one he picks up from the floor. It has Snoopy on it, sleeping flat on his back on top of his dog-house, his ears hanging downwards. The underside has no nap.

  ‘Thanks,’ I say.

  He comes with me to the bathroom and sits on the lav seat while I run the water, which, thank God, is brilliantly hot and copious. I take a giant grip from my Kenyan basket and hold it open in my teeth while I bunch up my hair. Then I clip the hair into a bathtime topknot.

  ‘I’m not likely to run away, you know,’ I say. I climb into the water. I slide down and watch my white thighs develop tide-marks of pink in the marvellous heat. ‘I wouldn’t go off without my cello.’

  ‘I need to watch you,’ he says. That’s all he says. Once I have soaped and rinsed myself, he throws off his clothes and joins me. He sits folded small at the tap end with his back to me. After a while I sit up and begin to soap him. I explore the surfaces of his brown washboard thin body with my callused right hand. I feel tenderness for him begin to flower like pain. Rinsed and stretched out we lie, our arms intertwined. We let in more and more hot water until it almost reaches the rim of the tub. I turn the tap on and off with my left foot. Finally we fall asleep.

  When we wake the water feels like melted jelly, blood-heat. The room is almost dark. Ellen is knocking on the door.

  ‘Stella!’ she says. ‘Are you in there? A
re you all right?’

  I start in some confusion. ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘yes, I’m fine.’

  ‘Why are you in the dark?’ she says.

  ‘Oh,’ I say, ‘I think I fell asleep.’ There is a pause.

  ‘Have you got Izzy in there,’ she says, ‘by any chance?’

  ‘Izzy?’ I say. The boy has his head on my shoulder. His strange beautiful eyes are closed. He has incredible long dark lashes. His awesome genital equipment is now wafting innocuous on the ebb of the water like a small toy bird. I am all at once quite certain that I love him, that he is absolutely precious to me, that he is everything.

  ‘Izzy the painter boy,’ Ellen says. Then she adds pointedly, ‘The Guttersnipe.’ The boy opens his eyes and laughs. He kisses me noisily, ostentatiously, on the mouth.

  ‘For heaven’s sake,’ Ellen says. ‘First Grania and now this. You really know how to pick them, Stella, don’t you?’ Then, when I say nothing, she says, addressing both of us, ‘Look, Pen has made some soup. Why don’t you both come out and eat?’ Then she goes away.

  ‘Stella,’ the boy says. He licks my face and laughs.

  ‘Izzy,’ I say. His name is Ishmael Valentine Tench: brilliant name, brilliant boy. He is from Dundee or, as he says, ‘frae Dundee’. He says it like Fray Bentos. Brother Bentos, Brother Dundee. His mother works in a cake shop. His father, once a Lebanese engineering student in Scotland, was deported soon after his visa expired. The neighbours reported on him. He was carted off in the night and locked up at the airport. The boy was three at the time. His mother has never heard from his father again, nor received any child support. Valentine is because his mother liked Val Doonican. She doesn’t know it’s a saint’s name and neither does the boy. They think it has to do with pink hearts and quilted greeting cards.

  Stella draws a heart in the steam on the bath tiles. ‘Do you love me?’ she says.