The Songs

by Charles Elton

  Later, Shirley told him what had happened in a tone of awe. She asked him if he remembered the girl being in his room — his sister, Rose.

  “Yes, I remember someone being there.”

  “You said her name. You said ‘Rose’! It was the first time you really spoke. Maybe she willed you to do it. She’s a very extraordinary person.”

  “Oh, Shirley — what are you talking about? It wasn’t some kind of spiritual experience. It was just me getting better. Why did she come to the hospital?”

  Shirley seemed to have to think about that for a moment. “Well, I just thought I’d send a letter to your…well, the Herzl house in general, telling them that you were in hospital.”

  “I wish you hadn’t done that, Shirley,” Joseph said. “What? You thought that the great man would come and visit me?”

  “Well, I didn’t know. Anyway, Rose came, so that’s good.”

  “Why do you think she’s so extraordinary?”

  “Actually, I think she’s rather like Sally. Well, maybe it was just a coincidence that it was the day she saw you that you spoke for the first time. Anyway, whatever happened, she came and you’re getting better.”

  And it was true: he was getting better. A nurse fed him soup, but when he could move his jaw and bring his hand up to his face, he began to be able to feed himself. He knew he must look awful, but it did not matter much. Luckily there weren’t any mirrors in the room, not that he could have got out of bed to check his appearance even if he had wanted to. Maybe his face would be scarred, but that might look distinguished at his age. It was only young people who were meant to look beautiful, like Gav.

  What happened that night had mostly come back, not every detail but enough: he got the gist of it, as if he had been reading an abridged book or listening to the highlights of an opera. He tried not to think about it, but he did think about Gav. In a relationship not characterized by much tenderness, it was the few tender moments they had had before that last night which were in the sharpest focus for Joseph, like the few days of a holiday when the sun came out. Gav’s skin, Gav’s brown eyes, Gav’s shyness: his voice sometimes so soft that Joseph had to lean towards him to hear. He tried not to remember the times when his voice was so loud and aggressive that Joseph had to lean away from him, the times when Gav was anything but shy.

  Why couldn’t you just have the good part of a person? It seemed to be all or nothing. What was wrong with eating the best things on the plate and throwing the rest of it away? Joseph was sick of thinking in metaphors, but that was what he was good at. That was what songs in musicals were like: you’re younger than springtime, all the hurts you wanted healed grown to flowers in the field, you’re going to wash some man right out of your hair. He just wanted things to be unadorned by metaphor, just simple and direct. What a childish wish that was: a wish that ignored all the complicated realities of life — the unrealistic hopes, the unrealized ambitions, the untold secrets.

  His had been untold because he had always suspected that the more secrets you revealed the more dignity you would lose. With Gav, he had discovered that it was true. Both your secrets and your dignity are gone if you get involved with someone like Gav. When I met him I entered a different world, Joseph thought, I went through some strange portal.

  There was a time when there had been a kind of playfulness between them, certainly a kind of make-believe that could be left behind afterwards when you returned to real life. But before long it stopped being make-believe: it became the only reality he and Gav had. And then the drugs — at first to make them feel good, and then to stop them feeling bad. Like people who only smoke at a party, Joseph only took them with Gav. Gav took them all the time, but then his life was harder than Joseph’s. He had to lie to his family but he was good at lying. Joseph didn’t really care whether the things Gav said were true or not. He knew one thing: what he felt for Gav was not a lie, it was the only thing that was true. That was the problem.

  He wondered what had happened later that night in Manchester. He and Gav had talked to Michelle on the way up to the room and she knew his name; the hotel staff would have seen them go upstairs. Gav would have panicked. He would not have stayed in Joseph’s room for long. He would have been a disheveled boy acting suspiciously, running out of the hotel with his hoodie up. His fingerprints would be all over the room. There was nobody else the police could be looking for and they would find him — Gav was not good at flying under the radar.

  The curious thing was that Joseph did not feel anger towards Gav. In fact, he felt sorry for him, sorry that he would probably go to jail. People might say Joseph had it coming, that it was a consequence of that kind of lifestyle, but he did not really have the kind of lifestyle everybody presumed him to have. No, what had happened was not about consequence: it was about something else. It was about what Joseph had been looking for. He wondered whether what had happened on that night was what he had wanted all along, some kind of final, painful comfort, some kind of release from the songs and the hotel rooms and the loneliness and the things he wondered about his father. He did not blame Gav — how could you blame someone for knowing what you really wanted?

  Shirley spent a lot of time complaining about the hospital and Joseph’s doctor. Joseph rather liked him, but after all these years he was used to Shirley’s likes and dislikes, her irrational opinions and her barely contained anger. She was determined to get him out of there as quickly as possible. She wanted him to recuperate at her house in Muswell Hill.

  He was walking now, up and down the corridor with crutches in one of those hospital gowns that looked like a dress without a back. Soon he would be able to walk with just a stick. The bruises on his face and body were fading. He was not sure he really wanted to go to Shirley’s but he would not be able to cope in his flat on his own for a while. She was excited about him moving in — she would have something to do now instead of being on her own thinking about Alan or Sally.

  “Oh, Joseph — it’ll be such fun, won’t it? I can start cooking again. We’ll watch lots of DVDs. I’ll pamper you. Maybe when you’re better we can go on a holiday. Somewhere sunny, somewhere that’ll put some color in your face.” Shirley paused, and then she said, “You could stay in Sally’s room. Nobody’s slept there since she died. She loved you, she’d want you to be there.” She gave a tinkly little laugh: “Maybe you’ll feel her spirit.”

  “Well, I won’t stay for too long.”

  “You’ll stay as long as you have to, and that’s that.”

  They had talked cautiously about what had happened that night in Manchester.

  “How did you find me?” he asked.

  “I was so upset. I had just discovered what Alan had done…” Shirley paused, as if she was trying to remember what had happened then. “And, well, I took a walk along the corridor to pull myself together and I passed your room and the door was open. And I found you.”

  They were both aware that there was an unmentioned part of the story. It was only when Joseph seemed to be getting better that the subject was raised.

  “Joseph: I wanted to ask you…”

  “Yes?” he said.

  “Well, you don’t have to tell me, you know how I respect people’s privacy. The boy: Did you know him? I mean from before.”

  “Yes, I did. I knew him from London.”

  She nodded her head. “Was it an argument? An argument that got out of hand?”

  “Something like that.”

  “But it was so violent!”

  “Yes,” Joseph said. “Do you know what’s happened to him?”

  “Only what I’ve read in the papers. He’s been arrested. Apparently there was CCTV everywhere — in the corridor and the stairs and the lobby.” She laughed. “The only thing in that bloody hotel that worked. I think he’s on bail. There’ll be a trial.”

  He nodded.

  “You know the police want to interview you? I asked the doctor to say you weren’t well enough yet.”

  “Well, I thin
k I am well enough. They might as well do it sooner rather than later.”

  When two detectives came a few days later, Shirley was with Joseph and she greeted them as if she was the hostess. She placed chairs round the bed and offered to get them a cup of tea. There was an awkward moment when it became clear that she was planning to stay. Politely, one of the detectives said that she would have to leave the room.

  “I just thought I could help,” she said crisply.

  “Help?”

  “I was the one who found Joseph. I was the one that dialed 999.”

  He looked down at his notes. “Yes, we have a record of the interview you gave to our Manchester colleagues after you found Mr. Carter.”

  “Well then — you’ll understand how involved I am.”

  “We need to interview Mr. Carter about the incident itself, not what happened after the incident. I presume that if you had any more information about the incident, you would already have told us.”

  “I am Mr. Carter’s carer. I don’t want this to be too tiring for him.”

  “If Mr. Carter needs care, I’m sure he will be able to tell us himself. And then we will just come back another day to complete his interview.”

  There was a short silence. Shirley stood up. “I’ll be just outside,” she said. “If you need me.”

  There was no preamble. One detective did all the talking.

  “Do you know that a man has been arrested in connection with the alleged attack on you?”

  “I had heard that, yes.”

  “How long have you been in hospital for, Mr. Carter?”

  “About a month.”

  “Your injuries must have been very serious.”

  “I seem to be recovering pretty well.”

  “Good,” the detective said. “That’s good.”

  “Yes.”

  “We need to ask you about the night of March twenty-seventh.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you know Gavriel O’Donnell before that date?”

  “Yes, I did. Do the police always ask questions that they already know the answer to?” Joseph said. “I’m a writer. I’ve written these kind of interrogation scenes myself.”

  “This is not an interrogation scene, Mr. Carter. It’s an interview scene. You’re not being accused of anything.”

  “Shall I just answer the questions you’re circling around? I know what you want to ask.”

  “If you’d like.”

  “He came up to Manchester to see me. He didn’t force his way into my hotel room. I invited him there. We had an argument. We had a fight. It got out of hand. That’s it. There’s nothing else that’s relevant really.”

  “When Mr. O’Donnell was arrested, he appeared to be unharmed. It sounds like rather a one-sided kind of fight.”

  “I’m not going to press charges,” Joseph said suddenly.

  The detective laughed grimly. “If you don’t mind me saying so, you must be a very forgiving person, Mr. Carter. This is not a black eye kind of situation where you can tell people you walked into a door. It doesn’t matter whether you want to press charges or not. It’s for the Crown Prosecution Service to decide what action is appropriate in the public interest. You will need to write down as much as you can remember for a statement. I’m afraid there will be a trial and you will be summoned to appear.”

  Joseph closed his eyes. He did not want to think about a trial. He knew that it would be the last time he would ever see Gav. He had read in reports of trials that sometimes the accused kept their eyes averted and could not look at the accuser. Since Joseph was not accusing Gav of anything — it was the legal process that was doing that — he hoped that Gav would look at him. He would like that to happen.

  Back in Muswell Hill, as she said she would, Shirley pampered him. Joseph thought he would go mad. He felt like James Caan in Misery, which Alan and he had once considered turning into a musical. She hovered around him all day, bringing him breakfast in bed before he wanted to wake up, making him mid-morning coffee which he did not want to drink, preparing elaborate meals that he did not want to eat. In the afternoons he said that he had to take a nap, but even that was not much of an escape: within an hour she was bringing him a cup of tea and homemade biscuits, sitting on his bed chatting. It felt as if Shirley was the one coming back to life rather than him. He was grateful to her for her support and loyalty, but he did not really want to be there. The trouble was he did not want to go either. It’s the Stockholm syndrome, he thought gloomily.

  The only good thing was she tended to go to bed early. Sometimes, just to have someone else to talk to apart from her, he called Alan late at night. Alan was not allowed to come to the house: Shirley would not see him. He was in a terrible state. Joseph had been shocked when Shirley had told him, but underneath the shock he was a little hurt that Alan had not confided in him. However well you knew someone you never really saw what went on behind the flickering net curtains of their lives. While on the surface it seemed a terrible betrayal, he was not going to judge Alan. Joseph loved Shirley in his way but he could see that nearly forty years of being married to her might drive you over the brink into madness. He imagined that Alan’s woman might have been someone rather voluptuous with a bit of life in her, someone who might drink a little too much and get giggly, someone you could fall into like a soft cushion in a way that would be impossible with Shirley. But, of course, Alan’s bond with her was almost unbreakable. He wanted Shirley to allow him back, but that was not a service she would provide.

  One night, after he had drunk too much whiskey, Joseph made a different kind of call: he found himself dialing Gav’s number. He was sober enough to block his caller ID. He knew that Gav would probably not answer the call if he saw Joseph’s name come up. He had no idea what he would say.

  Gav’s phone rang for a long time, then just as Joseph was about to hang up, he answered. Joseph felt his stomach tighten. Gav did not say anything. The only sound on the line was a faint rushing noise, as if Joseph was holding a conch shell to his ear.

  Finally he said, “Gav?”

  There was nothing. “Gav? It’s me. It’s Joseph.” His voice was trembling.

  He waited and then at last Gav spoke.

  “I can’t talk to you.”

  “Please.”

  “I’m not allowed to talk to anyone.”

  “Who says?”

  “The police. Anyone to do with the case. I can’t talk to them.”

  “Just for a moment.”

  There was a silence.

  “How are you, Gav?”

  “You think I’m feeling great? I’ll be sent to jail. That’s what the solicitor guy says.”

  “I didn’t want to press charges. I’ve told them as little as possible, but I couldn’t say you didn’t…do it.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “There’s no way I could get out of it.”

  “They’ll stitch me up. You’ll stitch me up.”

  “I won’t. I’ll try not to. We just have to keep it simple. Just say we had an argument and you lost your temper. The more detail you go into, the worse it will sound for you. You’ll probably have to go to jail, but if we get our story straight it might not be for too long. I don’t want that for you. I’m not going to say anything bad about you.”

  “They’ll ask me things.”

  “They have to ask you things — it’s a trial. Make sure they know it wasn’t premeditated.”

  “What?”

  “You didn’t plan it. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing. I think that makes it better. Well, less bad, anyway. You might get a shorter sentence. You just have to stay calm, don’t let them rattle you.”

  Gav grunted.

  “Where are you?” Joseph said.

  “I can’t see you.”

  “I’m not asking to see you. Are you with your parents?”

  Gav gave a grim laugh. “Of course I’m not with my parents. They won’t speak to me. They won’t have me in the fucking house.”
r />   “So where are you?”

  “My brother’s. He’s been cool.”

  “What are you doing with yourself?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What are you doing all day?”

  “I pray. I read the Bible.”

  “Really?”

  “Why shouldn’t I?” Gav said aggressively. “I just took the wrong path, that’s what my brother says. He told me that if you’re punished in this world, God doesn’t punish you again in the next world.”

  “That’s a good way of looking at it,” Joseph said as encouragingly as he could.

  “You don’t believe in religion, that’s your problem,” Gav said sulkily.

  “I just want everything to be all right for you.”

  “It can’t be all right!” Gav shouted.

  “There are courses you can do in prison. You can get some qualifications.”

  “Yeah. Right.”

  “Are you okay for money? Do you want me to send you some?”

  “You can’t have my address.”

  “Gav — I don’t want your address. I’m just trying to help you.”

  “Nothing to spend it on. I don’t go out.”

  There was a pause. Joseph could not think of anything more to say.

  “I didn’t mean it all to happen,” Gav said suddenly. “It was just that…”

  “I know,” Joseph said, “I know.”

  Then he could hear Gav crying, and the line went dead.

  Rose

  SHIRLEY HAD WRITTEN a letter to me that came a few days after I had seen her at the hospital.

  Dear Rose,

  I just wanted to let you know that your brother, Joseph, is much better. It actually began to happen the day you visited him. I am going to ask him to come and live at my house until he is fully recovered.

  Perhaps your father, even if he wishes to know nothing else about his son, might like to know that he is, at least, out of danger.