Street Song

by Wilkinson, Sheena;

  ‘It’s really not the kind of thing I would normally do. And – oh God!’ – she glanced at her watch. ‘We’ll need to decide in the next thirty seconds because the bus is at ten, and it takes hours.’

  ‘Hours? Where d’you live?’

  ‘Belfast,’ she said, as if I should have known.

  Brighton – Ballymun – Belfast. What did it matter? I stood up and set my guitar carefully in its case. I took out her one euro coin. ‘I’ll take this for the guitar lesson,’ I said, putting it in my back pocket. ‘OK – so – Belfast.’

  3

  ‘I don’t even know your name,’ she said. ‘Mine’s Toni.’

  I changed my guitar case to the other hand. Then I said, ‘Cal.’

  ‘Short for Callum? Or Cahal?’

  ‘Neither.’

  We didn’t say much as we hurried to Busáras, the bus station. It was never Dublin’s finest joint, but it was particularly grim that night. At the door a thin, dark-haired woman emerged from the shadows. She was dressed in a shiny tracksuit. She held her hand out. ‘Have you a few euros towards a hostel?’

  ‘Sorry.’ I shrugged her off.

  Beside me Toni stopped, and took out her little beaded purse. ‘Here you go,’ she said, her accent sounding very northern compared to the woman’s Dublin whine. She handed her a coin. ‘I hope things get better for you,’ she said.

  ‘God bless you, miss,’ the woman said. They were always overly polite. I hated it when you walked past and ignored them and they shouted out God bless you, have a good day after you. They only did it to make you feel bad.

  ‘She’ll only spend it on drugs,’ I said, as we went through the glass doors into the bus station.

  Toni shrugged. ‘It’s up to her what she spends it on,’ she said simply. ‘But she’s a person. She probably wouldn’t have chosen for her life to turn out like that.’

  She looked after the guitars and backpacks while I got myself a ticket from the machine. Belfast. Single, €18.50. Return €28.50.

  My fingers dithered. I turned round and looked at Toni. She was so cute, the light shining on her short red hair, her boots the brightest thing in the grim bus station. I pressed Single.

  ‘OK.’ I stuffed my ticket into my back pocket and picked up my guitar case. ‘Belfast here we come.’

  ‘Cal,’ Toni said. It sounded so weird. ‘I don’t want you to think I’m the kind of girl who normally—’

  ‘It’s fine. Look, the bus is in.’ It was a blue-and-cream Ulsterbus; I’d never been in one before.

  ‘I mean – there’s a spare room.’

  ‘I know. You said.’ I gave her my most reassuring smile. ‘It’ll be grand.’

  The bus was pretty empty so we could put our seats back and relax. It was weird sitting close to a girl that wasn’t Kelly. Toni was much more solid than Kelly, much more there. As we headed along the quays and through the lit-up port tunnel, we settled into easy chat about music. I asked about her band.

  ‘Polly’s Tree’s only just started,’ she said. ‘But we’ve written loads of songs. But this is my A level year so I can’t give as much to the band as I’d like. I’ll probably need straight A stars. And Marysia needs top grades too, for medicine.’

  This was all foreign to me. I knew they had different exams up north, but even caring about exams seemed weird to me. She must be clever.

  ‘I take it you’ve left school?’ she asked.

  I hesitated. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘So what do you …?’

  I hunched a shoulder. ‘Gap year. I’m planning to travel.’

  The bus came out of the tunnel and the motorway stretched ahead. ‘You are travelling,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah.’ I grinned the slow easy grin girls liked.

  After the bus left the airport and started making proper speed we both lapsed into silence. The motorway lights sped by, mesmerising me into half-sleep. I slumped sideways, closed my eyes.

  Think about Toni.

  Think about the rhythm of the bus.

  Don’t think about Ricky.

  Something cushioned my cheek. Soft. Nice.

  I jerked awake, realising the bus had stopped. I smelt sweat and perfume. Rosy with something sharp underneath it. My mouth was open. I snapped it shut and swallowed quite a lot of spit.

  I was lying against Toni’s arm. My nose was practically in her boob. That damp patch on her sleeve – that wasn’t sweat; that was my slobber. Was she asleep too? She looked asleep, her eyelashes dark on her cheeks, her mouth neatly closed, not slack and drooly like mine. Her lips were firm and pale with a couple of freckles on the top one. I shifted over to my own side of the seat, ran my fingers through my hair, looked out the window. We were somewhere. A bus station, lit up. A couple of people got off, and we had to wait while they collected their suitcases.

  ‘Hey,’ Toni said. She peered out the window. ‘Newry,’ she said, and yawned.

  ‘Is this the north?’ The wet patch on her T-shirt bloomed darkly. Her face was rumpled and pink.

  ‘Just about,’ she said. The bus left the station. I looked past her out of the window. The road signs were different. Belfast 37 miles. A siren wailed in the distance.

  ‘I think I was asleep,’ I said. ‘Sorry. Long day.’

  ‘Me too.’

  We both slept again after that but I made sure to lean in the other direction, even though it wasn’t as comfy. But oh, it had been lovely leaning against her like that. She must have thought so too – I mean, she’d let me lean. By the time the bus finally wheezed into the Europa Bus Centre in Belfast Toni’s T-shirt sleeve was dry, no sign of my slobber at all.

  4

  ‘Hey.’ Toni came into the kitchen dressed in jeans and a baggy jumper, her hair damp. ‘I heard you playing.’

  ‘I hope I didn’t wake you.’

  ‘No. It was kind of a lovely sound to wake up to.’ She smiled.

  ‘I made myself at home,’ I said. ‘I hope that was OK.’

  She poured herself a coffee from the cafetière I’d set on the table. ‘You been up long?’

  I nodded. I’d been awake for hours in the small guest room, feeling how weird it was to be lying in a stranger’s house in a strange city, trying not to think about Ricky, tempted and terrified to turn the radio on. In the end, playing the guitar was the only way to keep the fear at bay. And the guilt. A fat black cat had stalked into the kitchen and arranged itself beside me, and it blinked at Toni with its amber eyes. ‘Traitor,’ she said. ‘You always hide when I play.’

  I strummed a chord sequence. ‘So when do you want to get started?’ I asked.

  ‘Let me get some brekkie first! Marysia’s coming later, so we can have a proper practice.’

  ‘So what’s Marysia like?’ I asked.

  ‘Lovely,’ Toni said. ‘She’s Polish, she’s really clever, and she’s brilliant on the bass.’

  ‘That’s unusual – a girl playing the bass.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t she?’ Toni demanded. ‘I haven’t told her about you – just that I have a surprise. She’s always nagging me about my bad guitar playing so she’ll be thrilled.’

  Marysia walked in about an hour later, tall, pale, slim, with thick light brown hair misted with rain and, when she spoke, a faint Polish accent overlaid with Belfast. She didn’t look that thrilled to see me, her blue eyes narrowing with suspicion as she set her bass down.

  ‘What’s going on?’ she said, pulling off her coat.

  ‘This is Cal. The surprise. Can you not hear what he’s playing?’

  Marysia frowned, concentrating. ‘“Plastic Girls”?’ she said, which was the name of the song Toni had been teaching me.

  ‘Yep,’ Toni said. ‘He’s a fast learner. I met Cal in Dublin – he’s going to help us – well, me.’ She grimaced. ‘You know I’m pretty bad at playing. And when Dad let me down – well, Cal sort of stepped up.’ She didn’t say she’d picked me up in a park.

  ‘Toni said you’re brilliant on the bass,’ I said. OK
, I was sucking up a bit. But I wasn’t used to girls being so – well, hostile.

  ‘Polly’s Tree’s a two-piece girls-only band,’ Marysia said. ‘That was our vision from the start.’

  ‘He’s not joining the band.’

  I kept on strumming like I wasn’t bothered at all. ‘If you don’t want me around, that’s cool.’

  ‘We do!’ Toni said. ‘Marysia – wait till you hear the difference he’s made to me already.’ She took up my guitar and nodded to me. ‘“You Think You Know Me”,’ she ordered, and I nodded and played the opening chords. Toni joined in, the two guitars sounding great together, and when it was time for the vocal she sang really confidently:

  You think you know me but you really don’t.

  You think I’ll love you but I know I won’t.

  She was right about being a good singer: she had a gorgeous voice – sometimes husky, sometimes high, always pitch perfect. It was an upbeat song about thinking someone fancies you when they don’t. At least, I thought that was what it was about. By the third line, Marysia had plugged in her bass and was joining in, the bass keeping the whole thing grounded. By the second chorus, I was harmonising with their vocals.

  ‘It’d be great with a harmonica in the chorus,’ I suggested.

  ‘No way,’ Toni said. ‘We don’t want to sound folky.’ She actually shuddered.

  ‘It would suit the song.’

  ‘Well, neither of us can play it.’

  ‘I can,’ Marysia said. ‘It’s the first instrument I ever learned – it was all I could afford when I was a kid. It’s probably lying round somewhere, if Tomasz hasn’t nicked it from me.’

  ‘A harmonica’s just a whiney drone that makes everything sound like Bob Dylan,’ Toni said. ‘Which is fine for actual Bob Dylan but nothing else.’

  ‘OK, boss,’ Marysia said. She pushed her heavy brown hair back and twisted it into a knot at the nape of her neck. I grinned at her, and for the first time, uncertainly at first, she smiled back.

  After that it was all about the music. I wasn’t used to making music with actual people, but I picked up all Polly’s Tree’s songs really fast – to be fair, they weren’t the most complicated, musically, but also I concentrated like mad. Partly because I wanted to impress and partly because it helped keep my mind from thinking about what was happening back in Ricky’s white seaside mansion. If Ricky was alive or dead.

  Toni was singing even better. It was as if when she didn’t have to worry about the guitar she could let go with her vocals. Marysia’s deeper voice blended well with mine on backing vocals and let Toni’s really soar when it needed to without the song getting shrill.

  As the rain kept up outside, streaming down the windows so that we had to turn the lights on, the day wore on, full of music and occasional chat and, when we all realised we were starving, pizza.

  It was magical. The living room became its own world, with the constant soundtrack of our songs.

  ‘So d’you write your own stuff, Cal?’ Marysia asked, when we’d reached the stage of lying around chatting, though I still had my guitar on my lap. My fingertips burned as they hadn’t since I was first in there, when playing guitar most of the day had kept me sane.

  ‘Not much.’ I picked out the melody I’d been playing yesterday in the park – the one that had made Toni stop and give me a euro.

  ‘Go on,’ Toni said encouragingly.

  ‘Nah, the lyrics are shite,’ I said, suddenly mortified. ‘Far too depressing.’

  ‘You don’t seem the kind of person to write depressing songs,’ Toni said. What did that mean? She saw me as shallow? Carefree? And how did she know what kind of person I might be? But I was used to being judged quickly. (‘Ten seconds,’ Ricky used to say each week before PopIcon. ‘That’s how long it takes people to make up their minds about you.’)

  ‘I have a kind of love song,’ I offered. ‘I wrote it a few years ago.’ I don’t know why I thought of ‘Jenny’ after all this time. Maybe something about the effort to impress these girls – especially Toni – was bringing me back to that time. Jenny O’Neill had been an intern with the production company who made PopIcon. She had black corkscrew curls and she was nineteen. I made a fool of myself over her. The night she told me I was just a kid was the night I got stoned for the first time. And behaved in a way which no doubt proved her point, but which thankfully I couldn’t remember.

  I started playing a plaintive, simple chord sequence, and then, for the first time, I sang on my own in front of Toni and Marysia. I was strangely nervous. As soon as I started singing, I wished I hadn’t. Their songs were clever and quirky and all the lyrics meant something – though I wasn’t always sure what. ‘Jenny’ was just a standard pop song, and when I launched into the chorus, which, OK, went ‘Jenny, Jenny, Jenny; oh Jenny, Jenny, Jenny’, Marysia caught Toni’s eye, and a snort of laughter escaped. They were trying not to giggle, but they weren’t trying that hard. Even Ricky hadn’t laughed at the song – just told me it was no good.

  I stopped playing. ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Told you I was shite.’ I shrugged, like it didn’t matter, and set my guitar down.

  Toni looked stricken, though in fairness, ten minutes ago she’d put up with me telling her she played guitar like she had socks on her hands. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I think we’re all played out.’

  ‘Let’s go out,’ Marysia said. ‘It’s Saturday night.’

  ‘Yes!’ Toni turned to me. ‘This is your first time in Belfast and all you’ve seen is my house.’

  ‘I’m grand here.’ I looked round the living room. It felt safe. ‘You go,’ I said. ‘I don’t mind staying here. I’m pretty tired. I can watch TV or whatever.’ I wondered if they had boyfriends.

  Toni hesitated. I saw the thought flit across her mind – We don’t actually know anything about this guy. What if we get home later to find all the computers gone or something?

  ‘Well, it’s still raining,’ she said. ‘And Mum’s filled the fridge with food so we can have a feast.’

  ‘Have you got any beers?’ I asked.

  ‘No beer. But there’s loads of wine in the kitchen. Mum’s pretty cool about drink; she won’t have hidden it away or anything.’

  ‘Actually the fact that we’ve been here all day playing music and nobody’s even mentioned alcohol till now just proves how mature and sensible we are,’ Marysia said.

  Two hours later we were all smashed.

  5

  Marysia was sitting on the floor, leaning against Toni’s legs, singing a Polish song and swearing in a mixture of English and Polish because she kept forgetting the words. Toni was playing with her hair, and the firelight turned the brown strands gold.

  I couldn’t believe I hadn’t even come close to scoring with either of them.

  I was sprawled on the other sofa, one arm slung round the neck of my guitar – I was too pissed to play but I didn’t want to let go of it – the other hand caressing Billy, the cat, who’d done the rounds of our leftovers and was lying across my stomach, purring a deep bass note. I leaned down and lifted up a bottle of red wine, squinting at it. ‘Not much left here.’

  ‘Not my turn to go and get more,’ Toni said. ‘And I can’t disturb Marysia.’ Marysia kept singing, and swearing, leaning her slim shoulders against Toni’s legs. It was like a picture: two hot girls. Only – I was starting to wonder if they were actually hot for each other? Was this just girls doing that girly affectionate drunk thing, or had I been missing something the whole time?

  ‘No more for me,’ Toni said. ‘It’s late.’

  Marysia stopped singing. ‘Oh no. Did I say I’d go to Mass tomorrow?’ She groaned, and her shoulders slumped.

  ‘So don’t go,’ Toni said.

  ‘You know Mama and Tata’ll be expecting me to be there,’ Marysia said. ‘It was the only condition on which I was allowed to stay at yours.’

  She suddenly sounded very young.

  ‘Oh,’ she moaned. ‘I am going to feel like shit in
the morning, aren’t I?’

  ‘Not if we stop now and Cal goes and gets us lots and lots of water.’ Toni smiled winningly at me. Stop flirting, I thought. You can’t have it both ways.

  ‘Ah, go on. I don’t want to drink on my own,’ I said.

  ‘You could stop too,’ Toni suggested. ‘You’ve had way more than us anyway.’

  ‘I’m a boy,’ I said. ‘I can take it.’

  Toni threw a cushion at me, much to Billy’s disgust, and I leapt up far too fast for someone who’d put away that much wine, and caught it. Then I groaned, fell back against the sofa, and closed my eyes.

  ‘You’d better not puke,’ Toni warned me.

  I opened one eye. ‘No. Give me a minute.’

  Marysia wriggled and dragged herself up. ‘Oh God,’ she said. ‘How did we get to be so drunk?’ She looked at the mess of bottles and plates and discarded guitars. ‘You’re a bad influence, Cal.’

  ‘It’s been said before.’ I opened both eyes, grinned, and said, ‘OK. Three pints of water coming up.’

  I stumbled off into the kitchen. When I got back Marysia’s head was buried in Toni’s lap, her hair spread like a veil. I set down two pint glasses of water on the coffee table. ‘Get a room, ladies, will yez?’ I wasn’t going to ask, but I could hint. Show them I wasn’t totally clueless.

  ‘We intend to.’ Toni downed her water, reached for Marysia’s hand and led the way up the stairs.

  I was too wired to sleep. Lying in the spare room, my shoulders ached, my fingers throbbed and my head buzzed with wine.

  And now the fear was seeping back.

  It had been OK when I was playing – then it was just about the music. And when the music had stopped the drinking started and that was always good for a bit of reality blurring. But now – I was on my own, sobering up, in a cold spare room with two hot girls next door who only wanted me for my guitar. What a waste. I put my head under the pillow to blot out their giggles and whispers.