The Songs

by Charles Elton

  “I bet you are. You were great. Really.”

  She put her hand on his cheek and made a little clucking sound. They were observing the niceties.

  “This is Gav,” Joseph said.

  Her meeting-the-public voice clicked into place. “Hello, Gav, how are you, love?” She gave him a big hug. Gav looked stunned. “Can I have your autograph?” he blurted out.

  “You are very sweet,” Michelle said. “Isn’t he sweet? Do you want a photograph, too?”

  Gav nodded. She reached into her handbag and produced a pile of pictures and signed one of them. Gav gave her an inarticulate thank-you grunt.

  “We should go,” Joseph said. “Let you get some rest.”

  “Thanks, love. Couldn’t have done it without you. Fingers crossed!” Then she gave both of them a big hug.

  When they got out into the lobby, Gav whined, “You shouldn’t have told her my name, man. She’ll know.”

  “She’ll know what?”

  “She’ll know,” he repeated.

  “And what if she does know? Who will she tell? I don’t suppose she’s got a direct line to your family, Gav. Or the Almighty.”

  Gav was in a funk when they got up to the room. He slumped on a chair and put his hood up. He turned the television on.

  “Are you hungry?” Joseph said. Gav didn’t answer. The minibar cheered him up. Joseph guessed he had never seen one before. With a look of wonder on his face, Gav said, “This is so cool. Are these, like, free?” Joseph didn’t know why he wanted to know. All drinks were free for Gav. He took all the miniatures out, arranged them on the table and drank several of the little vodkas one after the other. It was nice to see him happy.

  They had some coke. They had quite a lot of coke. The miniatures weren’t going to last. Room service brought a bottle of vodka up and some sandwiches. They started on the vodka. The sandwiches were not going to be eaten. Gav had taken his trousers off and was bouncing on the bed in his socks singing “Like a Virgin.” He was using the vodka bottle as a microphone. Then he found the bathroom. He loved that. Joseph found him surreptitiously putting little bottles of shampoo in the pocket of his hoodie.

  “You’re allowed to take them,” Joseph said. “It doesn’t count as stealing.”

  “What do you mean?” Gav said angrily.

  “You can have them. Take the soap. Take the shower gel. You can have the bathrobe, too.”

  Gav looked at him. “Maybe I’ll have a shower,” he said.

  “Don’t have a shower,” Joseph said. “I like you the way you are.”

  “I’m not doing it,” Gav said.

  “What?”

  “All that stuff you make me do.”

  “I don’t make you do anything, Gav.”

  “I’m going. I need to get back for my job.”

  “Oh, Gav, do you really have a job?” Joseph said wearily.

  “I’m working with my uncle.”

  Gav seemed to have a variable number of uncles. “Is this the uncle who’s the fashion photographer? Or the one who was a stuntman on Casino Royale?”

  Gav grabbed his arm hard and twisted it behind him. “You don’t trust me! You don’t believe me!” he shouted, slurring his words. He pushed Joseph roughly against the bathroom wall, his cheek against the tiles. Joseph twisted round out of his grip. They looked at each other. Gav was breathing hard. He grabbed Joseph’s wrists. Joseph pulled him towards him and kissed him. Gav pushed him down to the floor roughly and went out of the bathroom. Joseph could hear him chopping up a line in the other room.

  Gav came unsteadily back into the bathroom. He had brought the vodka bottle. Joseph was still on the floor. He looked up at him. Joseph’s heart was beating fast.

  “Sing some more.” Joseph gestured to the bottle. He laughed: “With your microphone.” Gav wasn’t looking at him. He stood very still. His mouth was open, but he did not start singing. The sound in the bathroom cut out for a moment, like it did in the show when the radio mikes had gone down. Then it came back and Joseph heard something — a guttural kind of cry. At first he thought it came from Gav, but then he realized it came from him. He felt blood streaming down his face and into his eyes.

  It was all much clearer now. The sound of the bottle breaking on the tiles was pin-sharp and Gav’s strange wail and the click of his knees as he bent over Joseph and hit him again. The shirt that Shirley had bought him for the opening would be torn and bloody. But now Joseph had gone somewhere else. He had gone to his country. The boundaries had begun to break down, everything was running into everything else, like a row of dominoes knocking one another over.

  Who is Joe Hill? he thought. Am I him? Says I, says he, says who? Maybe Gav was Joe Hill. Maybe Iz was Joe Hill. Maybe everybody was Joe Hill. It didn’t seem to matter much. Joseph was just thinking about the songs. They were all he had now and suddenly they all joined together into one song:

  I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night

  At a zoo with chimpanzees.

  Says I, “Oh let them see my scars,

  Speak to me, father, please.”

  Shirley

  BEING OUT OF TOWN with a show was always hell. She had been on more tryouts with Alan and Joseph than she could count: more hotel rooms, more cold theaters, more late-night crisis sessions. Shirley knew that the good thing about her was that she was objective. She did not have an axe to grind like everyone else.

  At least in London there had been some vestige of civility between her and Kevin although she could see the look of hostility in his eyes whenever she came to a meeting with Alan and Joseph. She was always polite despite his pathetic attempts to get rid of her. After a day in Manchester, it was open warfare. It’s not healthy to be in a bubble of delusion, she thought; let’s be realistic about the problems. That’s why she said what she did in that awful pizza place.

  When they got back to the hotel after the dinner, everybody was subdued. Shirley could understand that it was not pleasant for everyone to see their producer, if you could call him that, practically getting into a fistfight with the composer’s wife. Everyone was tired and nobody wanted to have a drink with her in the hotel bar. Well, it had been a long night. Alan was in an odd mood, too, and Joseph had simply vanished. He had left the pizza place early and nobody knew where he had gone.

  As for her, she was fizzing with energy with nowhere for it to go. Maybe that’s why she didn’t sleep. Normally she was out like a light. The moment of serenity that would be needed for Alan’s Viagra plan to happen was clearly not going to be found in Manchester. He had been distracted and grumpy, huddling together with Joseph trying to do the new songs. Anyway, she wasn’t feeling very serene herself.

  She could not tell whether she had not gone to sleep at all or whether she had slept fitfully and woken up. Whichever it was she was wide awake now. The last time she had seen Alan he was nursing a glass of minibar scotch at the mean little desk that the hotel had given them when she complained there was nowhere for him to work. But now he wasn’t in the room at all, nor did he seem to have got into his bed — the covers were untouched.

  She got out of bed, but then instantly felt shaky. She leaned on the bedside table to steady herself. Little flashes of light were going on and off in her head, odd little pops of noise. Although it was not exactly like what had happened at the shiva all those years before, it was similar enough for her to know that something was happening. She could feel — almost hear — her heart beating faster.

  Then the noise in her head was overlaid by a different sound. It was coming from the bathroom. She could see the light on under the door. Alan was talking in there, not so distinctly that she could hear what he was saying but his low tone seemed to have a strange kind of urgency. She felt like she was sleepwalking, but she was conscious enough to put a dressing gown on over the new nightdress, ridiculously silky and low-cut, that she had bought in a giddy moment after her discovery back in London.

  She pushed the door open slowly. Alan was standing with
his back to her by the shower holding his phone. “I know. I know,” he was saying softly. “I know you do. I do, too, but…”

  He turned round and clicked his phone off quickly. She looked at him. She could not imagine what expression was on her face.

  “I was just going to the loo,” he said. “Go back to bed.”

  “Who were you talking to?”

  “Talking?”

  “On the phone.”

  “Joseph,” he said. “I was talking to Joseph. About the song.”

  “Why are you sitting in the bathroom talking on the phone to someone who’s five doors down the corridor? Why don’t you just go to his room?”

  “I didn’t want to wake him up.”

  “But you have woken him up if you phoned him.”

  “Get him up,” Alan said, “I didn’t want to get him up.”

  “You’re not talking to Joseph,” she said in a whisper.

  There was silence, then tears began coming down Alan’s face. Shirley had not seen him cry since the shiva. He moved forward and tried to take her in his arms, but he was irrelevant now. Something bigger was happening, something awful, but she knew it was nothing to do with Alan. The strange popping noise came back into her head, like a vacuum being released. There were little glimmers of light but they were not consistent enough or long enough to tell what was being lit up, what was waiting to be seen. It was muddled and messy and crackling like bad reception on a radio channel, but as she ran out of the bathroom she saw two bright flashes, the first murky but the second as clear as a photo taken on the brightest, brightest day. The first was Sally and the second was Joseph. He was looking at her with a terrible look on his face. She said his name out loud and repeated it again.

  Alan tried to grab her arm as she ran to the door but she was out in the corridor in a second. She was so disorientated that she couldn’t remember whether Joseph’s room was left or right, in the direction of the lift or the other way. All she knew was that she had to get there as fast as she could. She didn’t care that the room service tray that someone had left on the floor went flying, a wineglass shattering against the wall and then a sharp pain on the sole of her foot as she ran over the pieces.

  A door was open, Joseph’s door. It was bright in there, glaring after the dimness of the corridor. It was hot and fetid, a moldy sweet smell permeating everything. And messy: bedclothes on the floor, a tray of sandwiches overturned, only one curtain left on the rail. As she went into the bathroom, identical to the one where she had just been with Alan, she felt something wet on the floor, something warm and sticky. Some of it might have been the blood from her foot, but there was too much for it to be only her blood.

  The other curtain from the bedroom was covering a large bundle by the bathtub and as she bent down to pull it off, she suddenly saw Sally again. Before everything went mad, before she uncovered the bundle on the floor, she thought, Oh, Sally, thank you. You’ve let me glimpse you again.

  The first time she had seen Sally was after her funeral. Shirley’s mother had taken everything over. She and Alan would not have done the funeral that way. She hated the cemetery at Golders Green. She hated that there were no flowers, no roses for Sally. She tried never to think about the funeral but when she did, the thing she remembered most clearly was Joseph. Her and Alan’s grief was compulsory — they were her parents — but Joseph did not have to feel so deeply. His grief was voluntary. Sally had loved him. He was the only person apart from them she allowed to come to the hospital at the end.

  It was announced at the service that they would sit shiva from 8:00 p.m., but as the funeral was over by 5:00 p.m., a lot of the non-Jews came straight over to the house. These were Alan’s work friends: actors and music people. The one thing they had in the house was drink and a lot of it was drunk before the Jewish contingent arrived.

  By then, Shirley’s mother was organizing the food, barking out orders to the caterers, who had brought little salt-beef-on-rye sandwiches and mini bagels and cakes. Her mother had wanted to do Sally’s favorite foods, but that was a hard act to pull off with someone who was anorexic. Shirley told her that one radish sliced into thin pieces and four apple segments would not hit the spot.

  As the non-Jews got more raucous her mother found it difficult to hide that look of disapproval Shirley knew so well. Her mother’s best friend, Bonnie, had set up a nonalcoholic bar at the other end of the room and was offering exotic cocktails made with ginger ale and pomegranate or mango juice. She had prepared a tray full of bits of fruit and she threw some of them into each drink, then added a candy-striped straw for good measure as if she was presiding over a children’s birthday party. Her husband, Phil, was running the coffee next to her from a huge steel urn that was steaming all over the place.

  Her mother was expecting her and Alan to sit on low stools. Shirley had no idea why the bereaved were meant to sit low. It was bad enough having her hand endlessly grasped as she moved around the room and people saying “I feel for you” without being pinned down like a target on a stool at floor level. She knew she looked awful but luckily her mother had covered up the mirrors — another of the bizarre things you were meant to do at a shiva — with a selection of horrible shawls.

  By now there must have been seventy people in the house. Shirley didn’t even know some of them: her mother’s imports. She was glad to see a lot of Sally’s school friends there. They had visited her in hospital for a while, but then they had gradually stopped. Shirley didn’t blame them: Sally did not want to see people towards the end anyway.

  Shirley’s strategy was to keep moving around the room so she did not really have to talk to anyone. She kept doing circuits trying to hold a distracted look on her face as if she was on her way to do some hostessly duty that urgently required her presence somewhere else. It meant that she only had to stay for a moment with whoever had hugged her or threw some platitude stolen from a greetings card at her. She felt dizzy with the effort, and finally after a fifth or sixth circuit, like a child jumping off a roundabout, she left the room and headed for the kitchen to escape.

  They had had it remodeled a while ago. New cabinets, new double oven, new marble tops. An island in the middle which doubled as a breakfast bar. Shirley had no idea why kitchens were so expensive. It was a waste of money with an anorectic in the house.

  Jews always brought food to a shiva — the bereaved are not meant to do any cooking while in mourning — but this was unbelievable: big Tupperware boxes of stews and salads, giant casserole dishes, tureens of soup and trays of brownies and cakes on the marble counters. There was enough food to last for weeks. It would have been Sally’s worst nightmare, a house heaving with food. The smell alone would have ensured that she stayed in her room for days.

  Her mother had delegated the task of organizing the kitchen to her friend Naomi. She jumped when Shirley came in and her hand was instantly over her heart in shock when she realized who it was.

  “Oh, my dear, you shouldn’t be in here!” Naomi said. “You sit down, Shirley. I don’t know what you’re even doing in here! Now…” she said, shuffling dishes of food around, “I’m going to put together a little plate of things for you. And a strong cup of tea.”

  “I’m fine, Naomi. Really.”

  “I’m just sorting things out. I’ll put some stuff in the freezer, just to be on the safe side.”

  “Oh, Naomi, please stop fussing.” Being on the safe side was not high on Shirley’s list of priorities at that moment.

  Naomi suddenly turned all mock stern and waved her finger at her: “You need to eat, my girl.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  Later, her mother — predictably — called it a breakdown. Shirley didn’t see it that way. As Naomi was fiddling with the cling film that covered the turkey, she thought she was going to faint. She leaned on the counter so she would not fall. There was a strange flash of light in her eyes that flickered like a malfunctioning neon sign. She knew she was going to throw up: not the kind of thr
owing up that you can circumnavigate with a little discipline and positive thought, but the kind that you know is inevitable.

  Naomi gave a little scream as Shirley lunged towards her in order to get to the sink. She got her head there in time and out it all came. When she brought her head up from the sink Naomi was in shock. Her hands were holding her cheeks and her mouth was open like in that Munch painting. It goes against everything Jews hold sacred to throw up in a kitchen, Shirley thought.

  “I’ll get your mother,” Naomi whispered, not the first port of call a rational person would have gone to in an emergency, but it gave Shirley a bit of time alone to do what she needed to do.

  A few minutes later, there was a clattering down the corridor and Naomi, her mother and a gaggle of her friends burst into the kitchen. They stood in the doorway and looked at her in stunned silence.

  “What are you doing?” her mother screamed.

  “I’m clearing up,” Shirley said calmly. “Go back to the living room. I’m fine.”

  The vats of soup were halfway down the sink and she had left the tap running so the drain would not get blocked. The room looked a mess. It was hard to keep the black garbage bags open with one hand and put food in them with the other. Some of the seams had split and gloopy bits of stew were leaking out. Shirley would clear it up later. She didn’t want her new kitchen to look like a dump after they had spent all that money on it.

  “Excuse me,” she said to the ladies as she maneuvered herself past them into the corridor. She was holding two bags and she moved quickly so that they would not leak on the carpet. The front door was ajar. She pushed it open with her foot and then she went outside and put the bags in the little wooden shed where the dustbins were.

  When she got back to the kitchen, Dr. Gestetner was there. He had retired recently, but he had always been their family doctor. They had taken Sally to him for a while, but then had to move on to more specialized care.

  “Shirley,” he said in a soft, putting-her-at-her-ease voice, “what are you up to, you silly old thing?”