Street Song

by Wilkinson, Sheena;

  ‘Here.’ Joe offered me a pint glass full of cold water. ‘OK?’ he asked.

  ‘Yeah. Sorry.’ I rinsed my mouth out.

  ‘Och, you’re OK. Least you made it outside. And the rain’ll wash it away.’

  I looked at the mess I’d made and shuddered. ‘This is your house, isn’t it?’ I remembered.

  ‘It was my granny’s. She’s in a home. I’m looking after it for her.’ He did air quotes round ‘looking after’. ‘It got me away from home. My da’s a bastard. Here I can do what I like. Have my mates round. We have the best parties in Belfast. Seriously. Mental. People stay all weekend. You can if you like. Play your guitar. It’s not always this crazy. But there’s always something going on.’

  I sipped the rest of the water slowly. For the first time since Beany walked in and found the dope, things were staying still.

  ‘You’re not from round here, are you?’ Joe asked.

  ‘Dublin.’

  ‘Where are you staying?’

  ‘I’m – between places.’ I looked sideways at him. Behind the beard he had a roundish face with very pale blue eyes. Very ordinary. Kind, even. Who was I to judge him for having an underage girlfriend when he wasn’t judging me for puking all over his yard? ‘I was in a hostel but I kind of – well, had a bit of a fall-out.’ I grinned to show it wasn’t a big deal.

  ‘Homeless hostel?’

  ‘Christ, no.’ What sort of person did he think I was? ‘Just a backpackers’ hostel. Need to find another one. Or a B&B.’

  ‘Ah, you don’t wanna do that. Wasting your money. Stay here.’ He waved his hand at the house behind us. ‘There’s a couple of free rooms. Seriously.’

  ‘Ah no, you’re grand. Thanks.’

  ‘Well, if you ever need a place. Give us your phone.’

  I scrabbled it out of my pocket. He looked at it in disbelief. ‘My granny had that exact phone,’ he said. He keyed something in. ‘Right, you have my number now, kid. Just in case.’

  ‘Cheers.’

  Joe looked up at the sky and shrugged his shoulders against the cold. ‘Frigging baltic out here,’ he said. ‘I’m going in. You wanna—?’

  ‘I’m grand here.’

  ‘Soon be morning.’

  Not soon enough. After a damp shivery hour in the yard, sobering up, listening to the party at a remove and wondering why the neighbours weren’t complaining, I decided the house was the lesser of two evils. I was shivering so badly the boozy, druggy fug wrapped round me like a blanket when I headed in through the back door. Shania was asleep in the living room doorway where I’d left her, a thin trickle of saliva congealed on her chin.

  I’d find somewhere to crash for a couple of hours, and then I was out of this crazy dump and never coming back.

  33

  ‘Cal?’ Toni took a step back, her eyes widening in surprise at seeing me on her doorstep. ‘We don’t have a rehearsal today. Marysia’s away, remember?’

  ‘I just thought – I don’t know, you might want to hang out or something.’

  ‘I’m working.’

  ‘So, maybe I could just come in watch TV or something? I won’t be in your way.’

  ‘You smell like a brewery.’

  ‘Oh.’ I clamped my mouth tight but then had to open it to talk. ‘Sorry. Bit of a party last night.’

  ‘Whose party?’

  ‘Joe? Remember he came to see Backlash?’

  ‘Oh.’ She wrinkled her nose; I didn’t know if it was at the memory of Joe, or the smell of my breath. ‘You can’t just turn up here when you feel like it, Cal. I have stuff to do.’

  ‘Sorry. I just – well, I didn’t feel like busking.’

  And I thought, after yesterday at the beach, we were back to being proper friends? Who could call in on each other? Not that I exactly had anywhere that Toni could call in on.

  She pulled the door open wide. ‘You’re in luck,’ she said. ‘Mum’s taken my granny to some National Trust house. She won’t be back until teatime. I’ll put the kettle on.’

  I grinned. ‘You’re an angel.’

  ‘You look like shit. Are you hungry?’

  ‘I don’t know. Pretty hungover. You know how—’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t. Look, go and have a bath. You know where it is. There’s clean towels in the cupboard.’

  ‘Cheers.’ I lumbered upstairs, my guitar case bashing the wall.

  ‘Leave that here before you wreck the place!’

  I lay for ages in the hot scented water, imagining it sluicing away all the alcohol from my pores and all the stupidity and embarrassment of last night. I imagined Toni coming into the bathroom. A fantasy that went the way you’d expect it to. That left me feeling worse in a way. Because it wasn’t going to happen, and even though she’d let me in, and been nice to me in an exasperated way, she hadn’t been pleased to see me. She was only putting up with me. And I was mainly here not because I was in love with her but because I had nowhere else to go.

  When I went into the kitchen, in clean rumpled clothes, my hair drying in waves on my neck, she was sitting at the table, frowning at a book, holding her hair out of her face with one hand.

  ‘I don’t want to distract you,’ I said. ‘I know you have work to do.’

  She gave Hamlet a dirty look. ‘Ever read this?’

  I shook my head. ‘We did Macbeth.’

  ‘Yeah, well, at least Macbeth got on with it, even if he was a psychopath. Hamlet just talks about it, and pretends to be mad, and faffs about – I mean, he’s very poetic and tortured and everything, but he does my head in. Such a loser.’

  ‘You going to say that in your interview?’

  ‘Oh God – if I even get an interview.’ She said it like it meant something to her – I wasn’t so sure she was doing this Oxford thing only to please her mum.

  ‘I need a break,’ she said. ‘Do you want some lunch? I could make scrambled eggs.’

  Lunch, as I’d hoped it might, segued into lolling on the sofa, chatting about Backlash, and what the standard would be like in the final, and what Marysia would be doing in Poland. Then Toni picked up Hamlet again, said, ‘Stay if you want,’ and I lifted the Observer from the coffee table, and started reading the music reviews. I didn’t care what I did; I just wanted to stay here. It all reminded me of the week I’d spent with Toni back when this all started. The gas fire was lit, and I had to struggle to stay awake. Billy came in, sniffed at my backpack and jumped up between us.

  ‘Cal?’ Toni asked suddenly. ‘Why do you have all your stuff with you?’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I’ve kind of – I’m moving on. From the hostel, I mean. Had a bit of a – well, a row I suppose, with Beany – Mervyn – the guy who runs it. I did a favour for the Germans and it went a bit wrong … It doesn’t matter. I’ll find somewhere else. I’ve actually booked into a B&B for the next few nights. Near the university. Only I can’t check in until later.’ I hoped it wasn’t too obvious that I was kind of using her as a place to hang out until then.

  ‘What kind of favour?’ She frowned. ‘No, don’t tell me. I don’t think I want to know.’

  And how could you be so broke on Friday that you couldn’t buy anything to eat, and flush enough on Sunday to be booking into a B&B? She didn’t ask that, but I could see her wanting to/not wanting to.

  ‘Don’t look so worried,’ I said, because I couldn’t bear her to know how worried I was, and how close I’d been to accepting Joe’s offer to stay in that horrible house. ‘It’s grand. I’ll get back to busking tomorrow. Or maybe I’ll get a job. I’m going to start asking around in bars and that.’

  ‘Cal – you’re not just going to disappear? I mean – you are committed to Polly’s Tree?’ Her eyes were dark with worry.

  ‘I’m not going anywhere.’ I put my hand on her wrist. ‘You know I’m committed to the band. It’s why I’m here.’

  ‘I know,’ she said. She pulled away. ‘I’m being daft. I’m sick of that whingeing Hamlet. Fancy working on a
couple of songs?’

  34

  I stood at the corner of two grey streets with a gale blowing up the back of my anorak. My fingers were too frozen to play, and anyway, nobody was stopping. I’d paid for a third and last night at Greenacres B&B, which was like the Ritz compared to the Crossroads, so I might as well head back there now. After that – I didn’t know.

  There was less than a pound in my guitar case. And weeks to go before the Backlash final. You won’t disappear? Toni had said, as if she couldn’t quite trust me. And I had promised. Right now that promise felt like the only thing I had. But I wasn’t sure how to keep it.

  35

  Joe and I stood in the doorway of the attic. ‘Em, there’s kind of no bed,’ I said. I didn’t want to sound ungrateful. He hardly knew me, and he was happy to let me doss in his house for free. I couldn’t start making demands. And the room wasn’t bad – a back attic, overlooking the yard, though you could only see it if you stood on tiptoes and pushed open the skylight. There was a huge mahogany wardrobe, obviously his granny’s, and what looked like a table but was actually an old sewing machine. That was it.

  Joe looked thoughtful. ‘All the beds are taken. Kevin’s fell out with his girlfriend so he’s moved in downstairs. Anyway, sure whatever you like. I’ve to head off here and do a bit of business. Here’ – he pulled a key off a ring – ‘Mi casa es tu casa.’ He grinned.

  He left me looking at the room. On the minus side, there was no useful furniture and the house was stinking. I couldn’t believe the first time I’d seen the Crossroads I’d thought it was a dive. It was a palace compared to this.

  But on the plus side, Joe was friendly. The house clearly wasn’t full of drugs and parties 24/7, and this room was tucked away at the very top and back. Its lack of amenities probably meant it wasn’t used much – in fact, though it was dusty enough to be tickling my nose and making me sneeze, it was probably the cleanest room in the house.

  And best of all, bottom line, if I stayed here, I could afford to have a bad day’s busking and not worry that I wasn’t going to have a roof over my head that night. I would even be able to stay here during the day and just chill. Maybe some of Joe’s friends would be nice. Maybe there’d even be a girl who’d help me forget about trying to impress Toni. Which was never going to happen.

  Yeah, some jailbait kid, Toni’s voice in my head whispered. Shut up, I told her. I didn’t let myself think about Shania. It wasn’t any of my business.

  * * *

  I went out exploring the neighbourhood, feeling light without my guitar and backpack weighing me down. I’d been here before, of course, but it had been dark, even when I’d left the morning after.

  It wasn’t a middle-class area like Toni’s but it wasn’t a wasteland like the streets round the Crossroads either. You could see the mountains beyond it. I liked that. That day in Bangor – the sea air, the bigger sky – had reminded me of how hemmed in I felt by city streets. Maybe after Backlash, wherever I went and whatever I did, it would take me back to the sea.

  Joe’s house was on the main road, on a terrace of other identical houses. The one beside it looked empty, the windows bricked up, and the one on the other side had the same down-at-heel look as Joe’s, with grey net curtains hanging raggedy in the windows and weeds choking the front garden. It wasn’t derelict, though: two bikes leaned against each other on the front path, and a TV blared from an open upstairs window.

  Two blocks down the road was a pound shop. It was full of cheap Halloween costumes and plastic pumpkin lanterns, but there was normal stuff near the back and I bought some cleaning stuff and a few cheap packets of pasta. I didn’t really want to cook in that kitchen, but I knew how fast money went when you had to eat out. And I definitely needed to clean my room; I’d been sneezing my head off ever since I’d been in there. It was the kind of area where most of the shops were charity shops, pound shops, carryouts and pubs. And it was in a charity shop that I found the sleeping bag. The idea of sleeping in someone else’s sleeping bag did gross me out a bit, but I unzipped it and made myself smell it, and fair play to whoever had donated it, it was a bit worn but it smelt of fabric conditioner and there were no stains. I could roll up my clothes for a pillow. That’s what I used to do on camping trips with Louise when I was a kid. She’d hated camping, but I loved it, so every summer she’d take me into the Wicklow mountains in an orange-and-blue tent. I wondered where the tent was now.

  I tried not to think about Louise as I cleaned up my room. There was an ancient hoover in the cupboard under the stairs and I dragged it up to the attic and hoovered up the worst of the dust. I wiped the surfaces with a damp cloth and wedged open the skylight. The stairs and landing carpet looked disgusting compared to the clean swept lines in my room so I gave them a bit of a hoover too, much to the shock of Kevin, who came out of one of the first-floor rooms rubbing his eyes.

  ‘Fuck’s sake,’ he said. ‘I came here to get away from all that.’

  ‘Cheers,’ I said. ‘You’re welcome.’ And went on hoovering. Maybe I should have apologised for waking him – after all, we were going to be housemates, but I wasn’t going to turn into some kind of wuss just because Joe was letting me stay here. Partly to annoy Kevin, I hoovered the bathroom, living room and kitchen as well. The house was a funny mixture of granny and dosser chic. The living room was dominated by a huge three-piece leather suite that looked brand new, and the biggest TV I’d ever seen, even bigger than Ricky’s. A few dog-eared posters – Keep Calm and Skin Up, and the Mona Lisa smoking a joint – clashed with the pink-swirled granny-wallpaper. There were no books, but loads of DVD box sets of American series stacked up beside the TV. I emptied ashtrays and filled a bin bag with takeaway cartons and empty cans. The kitchen, clogged in grease and piled with unwashed dishes, was worse, but I wanted to be able to cook in it without getting salmonella so I cleaned it as well as I could. There was a radio on the windowsill and I turned it on while I washed two sink-loads of dishes.

  Louise would have fainted if she’d seen me. She could never even get me to take the mugs out of my room and put them in the dishwasher.

  I didn’t know why I kept thinking about her.

  Joe came in as I was wiping down the cupboard doors, and I suddenly worried that I’d offend him.

  ‘Oh my God,’ he said. ‘You got OCD or something?’ He set down a plastic supermarket bag on the table.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind?’ I ran the cloth through my fingers. ‘I – um, I just wanted to thank you for letting me stay, and I – well, I haven’t really much money so …’

  ‘Work away, kid. I don’t mind. It looks like it did when my old granny was here, God love her.’

  Unless his granny had had pretty low standards – I hadn’t even tried to do anything about the fag burns and teabag stains over most of the worktops – I doubted this was true, but at least he wasn’t annoyed.

  ‘Only thing is, kid, it’s going to get messed up again pretty quick. Halloween party tonight. This place is going to get wrecked.’ He smiled in anticipation.

  My first thought was I’d go out. But where? It was Halloween. The city would be crazy, and I didn’t want to be in a bar full of drunk strangers. Might as well stay here with drunk strangers. And it would look a bit standoffish not to join in with the craic on my first night.

  Only I wasn’t going to take anything. I wouldn’t even drink much. Not after last time.

  ‘You can play your guitar,’ Joe said. He grinned. ‘It’ll be mental.’

  * * *

  I wasn’t sure if it was more or less mental than last Saturday. I was sober, which made me more aware of everything. The house seemed smaller now, and some of the faces were familiar – Shania sitting on Joe’s knee, rubbing her head against his cheek; Kevin, drinking vodka in the corner and moaning about his girlfriend, and of course Joe himself. All the rest might have been the same as last week, or different. Some stuck around all night, others came for an hour or two. I sat on the broad arm of o
ne of the leather armchairs and played my guitar. Some people ignored me, which didn’t bother me at all. It was just like busking except without the money, though Joe kept bringing me cans of lager. After the third one I refused any more. I didn’t want him thinking I was a freeloader and a pisshead, though I didn’t think he minded about either of those things. He watched my fingers attentively.

  ‘I wish I could do that,’ he said. ‘Could you teach me?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said. Maybe that would be my new job: travelling the world teaching people guitar in return for a free room. The teaching troubadour.

  ‘Then you can play me those love songs I bought you,’ Shania said, her face all shiny. Her eyes looked at him adoringly and I was reminded, with a squirm of unease, of Louise looking at Ricky. He didn’t answer, but ran his hand down her thigh, and she rested back against his shoulder.

  A girl said, ‘Have I seen you somewhere before?’

  Why did people ask that? But she was pretty in a plump, soft way, with dark hair and eyes, and she was at least as old as me, so I smiled – not a RyLee smile, just in case – and said, ‘I busk a good bit round the city centre. You might have seen me there.’

  ‘Nah. I’m never in the town these days.’ She took a drag on her cigarette. ‘You look dead familiar. I’m Lola.’

  I looked down at the guitar. ‘Maybe you saw me here last week?’

  ‘I wasn’t here last week. Couldn’t get a babysitter.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘You’re class. You should go on TV.’

  ‘Maybe. Hey – I’m tired. Going to head up to bed.’ Lola looked at me suggestively. ‘Um. See you,’ I said and scarpered.

  The first-floor landing was crammed with people smoking and talking, and the bathroom was in the kind of shape you’d expect after four hours of partying, but when I went up into the attic and closed the door, and wedged the sewing machine against it just in case someone was looking for somewhere to shag, it wasn’t too bad. I’d made up a bed on the floor with the sleeping bag; my guitar was leaning against the wall, my clothes were in the wardrobe and fresh air came through the skylight with the occasional distant squeal of a banger. The party sounds were only a dull bass roar and the odd raised voice, not enough to disturb someone who’d stayed at the Crossroads Hostel for weeks.