by Rachel Joyce
It seemed he had no shape left, nothing you could hold and say, This is Frank. He was unstrung. He told himself to keep moving, not to think. If he kept moving, he might just stay in one piece. He lost his footing and stumbled past the people selling off their possessions on blankets; he almost sent a woman flying as she turned the corner. Behind him, the cathedral stood solid against the sky and a flock of pigeons scattered upwards.
Run, Frank. Run.
Shutters were coming down on Castlegate. Traders shouted at customers to get their bargains before it was too late. The sky was a hollow extending outwards and outwards to infinity.
Frank weaved past tables on the street, where couples sat drinking wine and taking in the beautiful evening. He passed the clock tower where junkies hung out, and old men on a bench, sharing cans of Special Brew. He took the turning towards the park.
The warmth had brought people out in crowds. They lay on the grass, they shared picnics, they rode bicycles, they scampered after balls, dogs, hoops. A group of deckchairs were set out for an evening concert in the bandstand, and a Mr Whippy ice-cream van was doing a roaring trade in cones with flakes. On the lake, the pleasure boats were all out, children splashed in the shallows, a man threw bread for the ducks, sunlight hit the water like fallen stars. All these normal people. Out doing regular, normal things.
She loves me.
She TOLD ME she loves me.
He had managed in one short time to say all the wrong things to the right woman, precisely because she was right. He was so afraid of having what he most wanted that he had tried to destroy it, once and for all.
She loved you from the start.
He felt his heart and chest swell against the restraint of sinews and cartilage; his ribs seemed to crack open. He had no idea how he would survive the rest of his life without Ilse Brauchmann.
But it was not over. There was time to start again. A picture of the music shop came to him, a little golden at the edges but never mind, he was allowed to be romantic now; Frank at his turntable, Kit drawing posters, Ilse at the shrink-wrap machine. He would offer her everything. His shop, his records. He would lay it all at her small neat feet.
Run, Frank, run.
Park gates. Oof oof. (Mind the road.) Castlegate. Market stalls. Oof oof. Come on, Frank. Turn the corner. Alleyway. Cobbled stones.
By the time he reached the Singing Teapot café, it was closed for the night. He thumped at the door, but the waitress did not appear. The lights were out and chairs were stacked on the tables.
Cathedral? Try the cathedral.
Two priests were studying the new carpet, but there was no sign of the woman he loved.
He started asking strangers. Passers-by. Have you seen her? Huge eyes? Hair kind of up, kind of down? About this height? Funny mouth. She’s beautiful, no one like her—
He lumbered after a woman with a green scarf, only to discover she was blonde.
Maud. Maud knew where she lived. It was not too late. He must go back to Unity Street. He must get her address. He could be with Ilse within the hour. He would apologize. Confess he loved her. He would go to Germany with her, if she wanted. Yes. He needed to see more of the world. He could do that—
If only his body would move faster, but running had become more onerous. His legs were mush; his knee joints kept slipping. His face was so hot his head was jumping, and he constantly had to wipe the sweat from his eyes. It was as much as he could do to keep breathing. Alleyway. Castlegate. If he carried on like this he might have a stroke before he found Ilse Brauchmann—
‘Excuse me, sir? Do you have a moment?’ Four women in little box hats descended on him, asking if he would care to sample a new scent.
Down to the right. Across the road – he was almost there.
As Frank took the corner of Unity Street, he saw black clouds and smelt something bitter.
Maud was coming towards him, her mouth agape, her face grimy. Behind her there were flames, wreaths of smoke, flakes falling through the air like black snow. The noise was extraordinary. People ran with buckets of water, yelling at one another. Blackened boxes lay strewn down the street and yet another person seemed to have landed on the pavement.
‘Frank! Frank! Where have you been?’
The music shop was on fire.
38
Hallelujah
IT WAS THE handbrake, the policewoman told him. The handbrake.
She had to keep repeating it because he was shaking so hard, he couldn’t hear the words. They wouldn’t seem to stick to the part of his brain where words went to make sense.
Peg had pulled over on the cliff edge to watch the sunset.
Hit the earth like a falling planet.
The policewoman drove him to the hospital where Peg lay corpse-still, laced up to machinery, an array of bottles suspended above her head. The blue respirator tube poked from her mouth. He kept waiting for it to blow smoke.
He remained beside her. Every day, every night. He had no idea where else to put himself. He fetched drinks from the vending machine, and failed to lift them to his mouth. It was as though his body had forgotten how to be a body. And presumably Peg’s had forgotten too, because three weeks later she died. A nurse gave him Peg’s clothes in a bag, along with a tissue to blow his nose.
Then came the news.
‘Charity?’
‘Yes,’ the lawyer repeated. ‘Charity.’ He read out the list again. A sanctuary for women, a children’s home, a musicians’ trust, the local church, the local hospital, a society for the protection of endangered butterflies. It went on and on.
‘In the white house?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘These people will be living with me in the white house?’
Patiently the lawyer explained all over again. In her will, Peg had made a provision leaving her extensive record collection to Frank. But everything else – his home, in fact – she had left to charity. Hundreds of people would benefit from her estate.
‘But what about me?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I’m her son.’
The lawyer apologized. He couldn’t answer that. It was certainly an unusual arrangement but the will was bona fide. It would take a while for all the paperwork to be settled; until then Frank was welcome to stay. ‘To be honest,’ the lawyer said, ‘the place will be sold for redevelopment.’ Apparently she had also requested the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ at her cremation.
When the day came, Frank dressed in his only black jacket and spent the morning in the pub. By the time he got to the crematorium, it was packed. Standing room only. The funeral director spoke in rhyming couplets about God and gardens and Peg being a flower. She seemed an utter stranger. He announced the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’, and the music hit Frank like a wallop to his insides. When it got to the final pause before the end, it was too much. He felt overcome. He had to stagger out for air.
There were pictures a few days later in the paper. CROWDS MOURN THE LOSS OF LOCAL BENEFACTRESS.
Peg didn’t get a turnout of three thousand, like Handel. She didn’t get a state funeral like Beethoven. But at least she had music at the end. At least there was a crowd. She did better than Vivaldi.
It took a year to complete the paperwork. Frank stayed in the white house. He drove into town and did odd jobs – sweeping leaves, cleaning windows – to scrape enough cash together to buy a flat. He stopped looking after himself. Smoked a fair bit of weed. Any relationships he tried failed. Usually he couldn’t even get it up.
Then one morning he noticed a woman down on the beach. She was plump, nothing special to look at, but there was something engaging about her. She sat with towels and a picnic while her little boy threw stones at the waves.
‘You don’t recognize me, do you?’
‘Deb?’
He hadn’t seen her for seven years.
She made a space beside her and he sat. She offered him a jam sandwich, cut into a triangle. She waved at her boy and told him not to go too close
to the water.
‘How old is he?’
‘Three now.’
‘Are you—?’
‘Happy? Yes. I am. I’m really happy, Frank.’
He took a bite of his sandwich. It was sweet and soft in his mouth. Despite the wind on the beach and the cold, suddenly he felt wrapped up and safe, as if someone had put a coat on him and done up the buttons. The feeling was entirely new to him and now that he had it, he was desperate not to let go.
‘Mummy!’ yelled her little boy.
‘Look at you!’ she shouted back. ‘Aren’t you the clever one?’ She blew him a kiss. ‘Aren’t you my best?’ It was tender and easy.
She turned back to Frank. ‘I heard about Peg’s accident. I’m really sorry. I know how much you loved her.’
His throat felt full of stones. There was no accounting for the loneliness that yawned open inside him. He said, ‘Yes, well. It turned out I wasn’t enough.’
It was supposed to be a joke at his own expense but neither of them laughed. Such a great big man and he felt barren.
‘I am sorry, Deb,’ he said. ‘I think I let you down.’ He couldn’t eat any more sandwich. He could only look.
She reached out her hand. ‘Let’s face it, Frank. With a mother like Peg, you were never going to be ordinary. You were never going to love like the rest of us. It’s probably in your genes.’
It was supposed to be another joke, but this one keeled over, same as the first.
He thought of the sweater she had knitted, the way she once stroked his hair. All those normal things. The distance between him and the rest of the world was immeasurable. Above him, a single gull sailed on the wind.
That night he packed his van.
Gone first thing.
39
Two Swans
IT WAS LIKE being dispossessed all over again. Years ago, he had lost the white house by the sea, but compared to this, it was nothing.
The heat met him like a slap. Tongues of flame darted from the counter, the central unit and those to the left. The old Persian runner was a river of fire. He began to retch almost as soon as he was inside. His eyes felt scraped.
All around him there were shelves blazing, boxes of vinyl like incinerators. The fire had practically run out of things to do. Water and broken glass swished at his feet. Then at the far end a knuckle of flame punched through the door of one of the listening booths and as it went up, dry as a match, the varnish blistered and the mother-of-pearl birds cracked open, and the whole thing was swallowed. Above it, the ceiling opened with a groan, sending out an orange rain of sparks. The second booth went up in flames, followed by his turntable. Frank tried to rescue the nearest crate of vinyl, stooping to grab it with his hands; it leapt alight even as he touched it. That for some reason was the thing that confounded him, not the pain, but the familiar box of records, one he had so carefully arranged and loved for all those years, now apparently intent on wounding him. Father Anthony pulled him roughly by the arm and the next thing he knew he was coughing his guts up on the pavement.
Frank’s injuries were minor. A few small burns and cuts to his hands. But Kit, who had been working the shrink-wrap machine when it burst into flames, was taken to hospital.
He cried as they lifted him on to a stretcher. ‘Frank, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean it. I was trying to get something right for once …’ Tears squeezed from his eyes and made tracks down his dirty face. ‘Will you ring my mum? She needs to take her pills. Dad will be asleep, you see.’
It was the smell that people remembered. For months to come, they would complain. Not just the smell when you passed the derelict shop, with its caved-in roof and smashed windows, but another one, a ghost of a smell, a bitterness, that seemed to have infiltrated the walls and windows of Unity Street, and crept inside drawers and cupboards. When the wind blew, a fine grey coating of dust covered everything. You couldn’t even hang out your washing any more, one woman said. It was worse than the stench of cheese and onion.
In September, several more families moved out. There were boarded-up houses either side of Mrs Roussos, though kids pulled down the fencing surrounding the old bombsite and once again it became a playground. England’s Glory served its last pint and pickled egg in October. Father Anthony’s gift shop closed a week later. He put a sign in the window: Thank you to all my customers for the years of pleasure you have given me. Beside it, he left a folded paper bird.
But Maud was wrong about one thing. She was not finished in the summer, as she had predicted that day in January when the air was kind of blue, and Ilse Brauchmann came. There was fog in November, rain and wind in December, a day or two of snow. By the end of the year, Unity Street was a line of boarded-up homes and shops. Fort Development tried repeatedly to buy out the tattoo artist but she wouldn’t budge, and neither would old Mrs Roussos. By ’89, they were the only ones left. Kit’s posters still hung at some of the empty windows. SAY NO TO FORT DEVELOPMENT!!
Maud saw Frank from time to time. Despite the irreparable damage to his shop, he kept trading. At first, he set up a table outside on the pavement, selling off what had been saved from the fire; at that point he was still trying to pay back his overdraft. Collectors drove over to see if he had anything worthwhile, but mostly people just dropped by to hang out with him and talk music. When he sold the shop to Fort Development, it was for a pittance. And he had no insurance, of course – he’d failed to send off the renewal. His friend Henry tried to talk him into applying for another loan but Frank was having none of it. Maud suggested he should live with her, but he shrugged and smiled and told her he needed a break from Unity Street. She met him another time drinking tinnies outside the clock tower and repeated her offer. He looked more tired now. Fragile.
‘I’ll come over later,’ he said.
She cleaned out the spare room. She switched on the fairy lights in her little garden. She made a casserole and set out glasses. Paper napkins.
She waited all night and the bastard didn’t show up.
She tipped the meal into the bin, dish and all, followed by the stupid napkins.
Next time she caught sight of him, it was about a year after the fire, and he was selling records down the alleyway by the cathedral, where people laid out their personal possessions on a blanket. He had a line of 7-inch singles, nothing else. He was with quite a few men and women, though none of them looked especially steady on their feet. One had a big quiff. She had a feeling she recognized him from years back; whoever he was, he was hugging Frank a lot and falling over a lot and she didn’t much like him. She wouldn’t have said Frank seemed especially unhappy and if she was honest, she felt angry. He didn’t spot her.
The last time Maud saw Frank it was November. She was going to meet a friend when she noticed him, this great big man, alone in the park on a bench by the lake. He was wearing the old suede jacket she knew, but it was more torn at the shoulder. She sat with him for a while. Asked once again if she could do anything to help.
He smiled. ‘I’m OK. Thanks.’
So she talked about the first time he found her a record. How she’d asked for heavy metal and instead he’d played her Adagio for Strings. She described being in the little dark booth, like hiding in a cupboard when she was a kid; the music pouring through her veins like water, bringing her back to life. ‘It was magic,’ she said. ‘You made real magic, Frank.’
He laughed as if they were talking about someone he had never met, but thought he might quite like if he did.
Mid-afternoon and it was getting dark. The ghost of a mist hung above the lake; two pleasure boats drifted side by side, like swans.
She said, ‘Frank? I’m cold. I’m going now. Do you wanna come?’
He didn’t answer. He just sat gazing at the two empty boats.
She left him to it.
SIDE D: 2009
40
The Four Seasons
2009. THE INTERNATIONAL year of astronomy, natural fibres, reconciliation and
the gorilla. Also, as it happens, the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Handel’s death. There are mobile phones, iPods. There is Facebook, YouTube, iTunes, Friends Reunited. Sales of digital music have overtaken CDs. Woolworths has gone. So have Tower Records, Our Price and hundreds of small independent record shops. Like vinyl before it, like cassette tapes too, the CD is on its last legs.
And yet music is everywhere. Supermarkets, shopping malls, subways. Pubs, restaurants, lifts, hospitals. Phone the bank, and she gets an orchestral rendition of ‘Yesterday’ as she waits for a connection. Even her dentist plays music. Bach once; the Goldberg Variations while he gave her a filling. Whenever she takes the bus, all she can hear is the thud of music from the headphones on the person next to her.
In a small suburb of Munich, Ilse Brauchmann shops in Lidl. There is not much she wants, just a loaf of bread, a few slices of ham, as well as something for tomorrow. It always surprises her, how empty her shopping baskets are next to everyone else’s great big trolleys, how few things she seems to need. She is dressed in a green coat, green-and-white scarf, swingy trousers and nice shoes. Her hair is chin-length, silver strands threaded through the black, but these days she wears it in a bone comb that was her mother’s. It still has a tendency to dangle or flick without warning.
It’s a cold autumn day. The sky is a wedge of cloud that doesn’t want to shift. She exchanges greetings with a few locals. They know about her working life (violin teacher). They know she has no children of her own but many godchildren whom she frequently drops everything to look after. People know she is happy, not badly off. (They don’t need to ask that question. She is well dressed, even for a trip to Lidl.) Her own apartment, it turned out, was worth a fortune when she put it on the market. The once-poor quarter had turned into a very desirable one.
People like it when she tells them things, in small portions, and they think they know her, but they do not, they cannot possibly understand all the decisions she has made, the choices that have turned her into the woman they see today. The things she has left. The people she has loved. And there have been many. Several long-term relationships, lots more short-haul ones. Holiday romances. Flirtations. One-night flings. An affair that overstayed its welcome. Oh, the tall dark-haired men in great big jackets! They were her undoing.
