Chinaski

by Frances Vick

  * * *

  Upstairs, the hastily booked band was nervous. If they had started playing earlier in the day they could have counted on the goodwill of the crowd, but now, after a hot afternoon of drinking and grieving, the audience were likely to turn nasty. The boy in a Chinaski t-shirt fumbled his chords, scared. They all were, and they were all so horribly conscious of Peter, silent and fretful in the corner.

  By now the bar area was stifling, despite the opened windows and the propped open doors. But still, even more came. Something about the discomfort made it feel more worthy somehow, as if physical suffering in public beefed up the grief and made it more real. When two new figures appeared in the back door, there was a lull in the chatter as Carl’s mum was excitedly pointed out. She was on the arm of a woman in her thirties, ‘Who is that with her... who is that?’ and people reverently edged closer to try to glimpse a family resemblance – his sister? His aunt? But too soon the woman tunnelled out of the crowd, leaving Miriam sitting at a central table, ready to talk and soon surrounded.

  Word got to Peter that Miriam had arrived and he began to panic. He’d only met her twice. Once when she’d arrived at school, drunk, to try to collect Carl and had to be escorted unwillingly to the headmaster’s office, and once much later when she’d turned up after a gig and tried to take the door money. This was bad. Miriam had the sick gift of being able to tip any situation into hysteria, and here she wouldn’t even have to work hard to do it. He sent down Lawrence to try to persuade her to go, but Lawrence came back convinced otherwise.

  “It’s her right, man. It’s her son.”

  He didn’t tell Peter that he’d told the bar staff to let her drink for free.

  * * *

  Dom Marshall, at the pub since early morning, worked quietly and diligently unloading equipment, taping down cables, hauling barrels, collecting glasses. Every now and then he’d duck down behind the bar and help himself to a glass of water – no booze today – and although his shakes seemed worse, his eyes were clearer than they’d been in months. Every time the album finished on the PA system, he’d change the tape to the EP. When the EP finished he’d put on the single, the Peel Sessions, the first album. The order never changed, and the crowd became so used to hearing the same songs over and over again that they barely noticed them anymore, but their gestures and steps were in time to the music; snatches of lyrics entered normal conversation. Over the hours Dom turned the music up so gradually that they were like lobsters unwittingly brought to boil in a pot. On his glass collecting circuits, he kept an ear out for the conversational trend. If a group wasn’t talking about Carl the first time he stopped by them, he’d leave them alone. If they weren’t the second time, he’d make sure to hum a part of the single – just enough to make sure that a seed was planted, that Carl wasn’t being forgotten. He prodded the saddest looking girls with empathy and whispered angry tears to drunk boys.

  He also kept an eye on Miriam. She’d brought some childhood photos of Carl, and had them arranged in date order on the table. The girls, unable to hear her over the din, nodded mistily whenever she tapped a new photo with her polished nail. Dom positioned himself behind her, impassive and watchful, sharply pinching a girl’s arm when she tried to stuff one of the photos into her bag. She put it back on the table without anyone noticing.

  “Have a heart girl,” he hissed in her ear. “She might be a daft cunt, but she’s his mum. Have a heart.”

  * * *

  Someone told Peter that there was another news crew outside. Looking out of the window he saw someone who looked a lot like Chris Harris being interviewed, and there was Sean, too, roaming about taking pictures. He also saw Lydia, ill-looking and slow, on the edge of a spur of people spilling out of the side door. Oh Christ. Lydia and Miriam. Each bringing their own unique brand of melodrama to an already fraught situation. At least Lydia didn’t seem to be coming in, that was something. Maybe she’d be content to stay outside. She did look unwell and uncertain, which boded well. She might even go home. And then he saw that Chris Harris had beckoned her over to the camera crew, introduced her, was putting his arm around her, had made her cry. Almost immediately a knot of people tightened around them, Chris’ hand gripped her shoulder, and Lydia began to talk.

  * * *

  Lydia was sick. Closeted at her parents’ for the last week, lying on the sofa watching TV and taking Mother’s Valium, it was Freida who’d tracked her down to see if she’d seen the flyers and planned to go to the memorial. Not really in control of herself, she’d washed her lank hair, pulled on some clothes and arrived, zombie-like, at The Bristolian an hour later. Now, amongst crowds, music, lights and cameras, she allowed herself to be propelled here and there, she spoke when she was told to, accepted hugs, drinks, sorrow. She told her story; the story that hadn’t really been hers for years. The mourning girlfriend, the lover in shock.

  * * *

  Peter knew that the thing was now out of control. Lawrence had been anxiously prodding him to come downstairs for an hour – just to show his face, just to keep people happy – and he knew that he couldn’t skulk upstairs any longer. The bands that Lawrence had hurriedly lined up to play were getting restless. The best thing, Peter thought, would be for anyone with a stamp on their hand to be allowed upstairs, the first band to start playing, and Peter to make his appearance in the bar with a good third of the crowd absent. That might give him enough breathing space to persuade Miriam to leave and then deal with whatever havoc Lydia was causing.

  What he didn’t know was that the rumour was gaining strength: Carl wasn’t dead. Carl wasn’t dead. He was alive. He was here, now, tonight.

  * * *

  Lawrence announced that those with stamps could go upstairs.

  Upstairs, the boy in the Chinaski t-shirt finally had his chords down and nodded to the drummer to begin. Peter stayed at the side of the stage with his head down, waiting for the right time to head downstairs.

  Upstairs, the first few notes were all but drowned out by cheers from the crowd. Downstairs, kids with heads full of heat and beer sat up straight-backed like meerkats. Those outside cocked their heads and paused mid-sentence. Some surged forwards through the doors, pushing the crowd at the bar closer to the stairs. Those near the stairs saw the surge, stood up and moved forward in turn. Another cheer was heard from the room upstairs.

  “Listen, listen, it’s them,” someone shouted.

  “It’s Carl!” cried a girl.

  And unsteadily, untidily, the crowd downstairs and outside began to flow upstairs and in, pulling the kids on the edges with them. They heaved onto sills and landed on crowded tables. Glasses scattered and rolled. They forced the toilet windows and clambered through, not noticing cuts and scrapes, humming and singing the song they assumed they were hearing. They trampled, shoved and panted past each other up the stairs, the first of them crashing into the room just as the vocal was about to start. A collective intake of breath, and a note sounded from dozens of throats as they lumbered towards the stage, towards a slight boy with hair in his eyes, a boy in a Chinaski t-shirt, singing a well-loved melody in an unfamiliar voice.

  And then the surge stopped. It was a slightly different song. Not the same song at all. At All. And someone howled from the back, “Fuck you! Fuck you!” in a voice that broke and the disappointment travelled from mouth to mouth down the stairs becoming bitterness at the bottom. A chant began, “Fuck you! Fuck you!” Lawrence advanced as far up the stairs as he could manage, pushing people back against the wall as the band upstairs played bravely on. Clambering over legs and pushing aside flailing arms, he shoved his way to the front of the stage and climbed up, waving away the singer and signalling for Peter to pull the plug.

  Lawrence began to talk, but it was tough to hear him. The chant grew louder and eventually fractured, becoming more general noise. The back of the room was still angry at the absence of Carl. The front had already transferred their frustration onto Lawrence, “Fuck you! Fuck you!” and there wa
s the sudden sound of glass smashing, of furniture being thrown down. Dark waves of sullen faces pushed and pushed against the stage as more and more people scrambled in. The volume increased with the heat. Someone shouted, panicked, that they couldn’t breathe. A few sank at the edges of the stage and were trampled before fighting themselves out. Lawrence shouted himself sweaty before Peter thought about plugging in the microphone again.

  “It’s not him! He’s not here!” went the cry at the back of the room, heard in the bar below. There was a metallic crunch and Lawrence was heard amplified, shouting,

  “Of course he’s not here, twats. He’s fucking dead. Now get off the fucking stairs or I kick you out. Move away from the stage. Move AWAY from the FUCKING STAGE or you’re all barred.”

  An uneasy, unsettled murmuring edged out the shouts, and those at the bottom of the stairs drifted back into the bar. The crowd upstairs thinned out.

  A girl said, “You said he was here?”

  “Who did? Who fucking said that? I didn’t. I never said that. No-one said that,” shrieked Lawrence.

  “Someone did. People did,” the girl finished, confused. “Don’t swear at us!”

  More backed away, heads bowed, dazed. In the bar they slumped at tables and the floor, sitting in spilled beer. Up until this moment, most of them hadn’t really understood that Carl was dead, and some hadn’t felt especially upset until now, right now, when it was brutally confirmed. For most of them, it was their first taste of death – outside of family pets or silent grandparents – and it hit hard. And no-one was being nice to them about it. They weren’t told that Carl was In a Better Place, or that he was looking down on them smiling. It wasn’t a publicity stunt, or a way of finding out who his Real Fans were. He was just Fucking Dead. Someone young, like them, someone they felt as if they owned in some way, that they were kin to. It was terrifying.

  These were normal kids, middle-class kids for the most part, who’d come in from the suburbs in their father’s car, or from their university residences on the special bus service to the centre. They’d planned their day of mourning in the Student Union, in each other’s comfortable living rooms. They’d run up their parents’ phone bill discussing the day. They’d dressed with care, stocked up on booze, and prepared their emotions by listening again and again to the album (the new album. The first was a little too difficult). Poring over the lyrics, they knew Carl. They knew him. They each knew him better than anyone else ever could. They each of them knew how and why he’d died. He’d killed himself because Fame Was Too Much To Handle. It was an accidental overdose. He hadn’t killed himself at all. He had been worried about selling out. He’d had a heroin problem. He’d been murdered. He’d had powerful enemies. They’d learned these narratives from movies and TV. Now they found that the dead can’t return to tell us what really happened, to tell us we’re right; that there is no omniscient narrator; that there are no neat conclusions. Playing at mourning, they’d had a great day out, feeling like they were part of something big, some movement, and now, cruelly, they had found out that they weren’t going to be rewarded for their constancy by the reappearance of Carl. Loss, an adult emotion, fell on the children in the bar, silencing them.

  19

  The album had come to an end and no-one moved to put anything else on the PA. There was no sound from upstairs except the forlorn twang of a guitar being tuned, and in the relative silence of the bar, the noise from outside was intrusive, almost insulting. The loudest sound inside was Miriam’s voice, going through Carl’s school days again, talking about holidays in the caravan, where they were posted, how many schools he’d been to, how adaptable he was, how it was that she hadn’t seen him, how much he’d missed her...and on and on to her now mute companions.

  Lydia, outside still, was sitting at the centre of a group of girls who sympathetically held her hands and wished she’d speak more about Carl. Sean positioned himself at a discreet distance, carefully framed the knot of girlish sympathy that had formed around her, and snapped away at Lydia, zooming into her face as someone said something to make her cry again. Then it was time to start on Miriam, still sitting pert at her table with her photographs arranged in front of her like a tarot spread, her gnarled fingers tapping Carl’s Holy Communion photo, girls’ droopy reverence. And then something happened.

  In the quiet bar a voice was heard, louder even than Miriam’s. It drowned out the guitar upstairs and made the crowds outside pause. It was a young voice, with a slight rasp to it. A voice with the overtones of the regional accent but with many other overtones as well, a voice that had travelled, a voice that made you listen. Few recognised it, but everyone knew who it was. Carl’s voice.

  People put their drinks down, opened their mouths and breathed loudly. The reverent girls turned from Miriam to the speakers. Lydia, close to the door, felt powerfully sick. And Sean carried on creeping and snapping, sometimes looking at Chris Harris for nodded instructions.

  The voice on the tape was charming, boyish, old, self-deprecating, funny, wise, naive and heart-breaking. It was the voice of someone you had always wanted to know, someone you had always wanted to be like. The crowd inside and out found themselves smiling at his laugh, and also feeling angry, more and more bereft. Some shook and gulped down tears, while others let them flow unknowingly down their face, and nobody looked at each other. Nobody comforted each other. Everyone was alone with the voice and their own sorrow. Snap snap snap went the camera as Lydia wept, as hands tightened on hands, as Peter, pale and disturbed, finally came down the stairs. The whey-faced boy in the Chinaski t-shirt put down his guitar, and the ghetto blasters, finally, were turned off. Kids in the nearby pubs, aware that the street noise had stopped, went out to see why. The only people who moved were Sean and Chris Harris, quietly tiptoeing through the crowd, looking as if they were judging a game of musical statues.

  Carl just about to get in the van. It had been a successful show. Yes, he was looking forward to the future, yes, it was incredible how much they’d achieved in such a short time. And yet, and yet, none of it seemed real enough to count on. He still couldn’t sleep. He was still ill sometimes. He still wasn’t sure it could last. He still felt, somehow, lost. Not real. And then he laughed nervously. Or heartily. Or sarcastically. Depending on who heard it. He still felt as if there wasn’t enough time, as if he was running out of time. As if it was all going to end soon. The tape stopped there. There was a clunk as the record button was switched off and the hiss of the tape was startlingly loud. Sean glanced at Chris Harris who crinkled his eyes and gave him a thumbs up.

  And now the applause started outside and rolled inwards. People stood up and aimed their applause and shouts at the speakers bracketed to the ceiling. Miriam sagged in her chair, blinking rapidly, looking suddenly 10 years older. Sean took a series of photos at the moment Lydia crossed the room to comfort her. Peter ruined a few of them as he ploughed through the crowd to get to Chris Harris.

  “What was that?”

  “What?” Chris widened his eyes.

  “That tape? What the fuck are you doing? I mean, his mum’s here.”

  Chris Harris glanced at Miriam and shrugged slightly, “She’s heard him before.”

  “That’s not...that wasn’t right. That wasn’t right of you.”

  Chris was amused in a tired way, “Who said I put it on?”

  “It’s your tape. You made it! I was there when you made it.” Chris didn’t answer. “I was there.”

  “You weren’t the only one there. Maybe someone else taped it.”

  “Who? Who could have?” Peter realised dimly that he was allowing himself to get side-tracked, “Lydia? Did you put her up to it?”

  “Oh, Peter. Christ. Does it matter?”

  “Yes it fucking matters. Yes! I need to know who’s messing with people here! You must have given it to whoever did it though, you must have told them to put it on!”

  “Maybe,” Chris was bored.

  “You can’t do that to people.
You can’t shock them like that, you –”

  “Oh really? Really? Because what was this little party all about, Peter? Tell me that?”

  “It was meant to be about Carl. But it got out of control, I mean, I wanted it to be more people who knew him, but then Lawrence printed up the flyers and stuff. But listen, that’s not what I’m talking about here –”

  “Oh fuck that,” Chris was angry now and there was no trace of the languid gentlemen. His face was an ugly red, his lips pulled down in contempt, “Fuck you. This was some sentimental fucking kids’ party that went wrong. With your stupid little local bands and your tiny venue and your – Christ! – shortsightedness. What did you think would happen? All these little girls and boys whipped up into a frenzy and you give them some local college rock fucking cover band and hide upstairs? Be honest with yourself, for fucking once. If you wanted to give the guy a send off you should have done it properly. If you wanted to keep it private you shouldn’t have done it at all. As it stands you’ve got a genuine event on your hands here that you’re just letting slip through your fingers, and do you want the focal point of that event to be a politely failed riot? I didn’t. They didn’t. They came here because of Carl, and that’s what I’ve given them. Because you were too gutless to. So either you help me or cry into your fucking beer because I’m running the show now.”

  The crowd’s applause had morphed into a happy drunken chant: “More! More! More!” and Chris Harris twirled his index finger at Dom who obediently turned over the tape. Carl again, playing acoustic versions of songs from the EP, stuff that Peter had hated. Carl had talked about releasing it – an attempt to go for the mainstream market and make Chinaski more generally palatable. These tinkly, winsome versions of hard, grisly songs had embarrassed Peter at the time. Now they reminded him of the difference between him and Carl that had sprung up in the last year or so. Once, semi-jokingly, he’d accused Carl of wanting to become Nick Drake, and Carl hadn’t taken this as an insult.