The Thrill of It All

by Joseph O'Connor

  ‘Carry in that poor girl’s cello!’ Alice commanded. ‘Dear God, do you call yourselves gentlemen?’

  The chances of anyone calling Fran or me such a thing were remote, but we did as were told, grumbling slightly. Our estate wasn’t one in which you saw a cello too often, and to leave one on the front step, guarded only by Jimmy’s garden gnomes, might be a high-risk venture. When we returned, cello borne lengthways between us like a coffin containing a heavy president, Alice and Trez were seated at the kitchen table, Trez reading mum’s tea leaves, predicting happiness. ‘You’re a beautiful and sensitive woman,’ she was saying. Which was true. ‘You find it difficult not being listened to, am I right?’

  ‘God preserve us,’ Alice replied. ‘What else? What else?’

  Apart from at Shay’s graduation ceremony, where she wept with fierce, embarrassed pride, I’m not sure that I ever saw my mother in such a moment of uncomplicated happiness. Here in our house was an embodiment of the most wondrous creation to have ever lighted this earth: an ordinary, human, teenage girl. All parents of a daughter will know what I mean. Our home had been a monkey-house of maleness for so long: the grunts and smells and fondnesses expressed through coarseness, the burps and gibes and joustings and grumbles, the shavings in the sink and the loo seat left up. Here, perhaps, was that most unsayable of absences, the young woman my mum would have loved for a daughter.

  Presently Jimmy arrived home from work, on his face the visor of unaffectionate cheerlessness that Mum insisted made him look handsome. It was clear that he’d lost in his little flutter on the ponies, for his greeting to the dog was of Nietzschean glumness. ‘If I backed the fukken tide, it wouldn’t come in.’ He glared bleakly at Fran, whom he enjoyed pretending to dislike, and performed the bitterly ironic ‘jazz hands’ gesture he often employed to mock what he saw as our showbiz aspirations. Then he started uttering low imprecations about the peacefulness of the house being disturbed yet again by the infernal bloody rock and roll racket. For some time it had been our habit, Fran’s and mine, to start ‘rehearsing’ in the kitchen after the evening meal supplied to us had been cleared, our efforts punctuated by Jimmy’s scoffed curses and aggressive rustlings of his Daily Express. ‘Feck off to that chalet, for the love of Sweet God.’ Against our self-penned lyrics he mustered his favourite mask in the arsenal: a stare of pitying incomprehension. In truth he rather liked having us about the place because it gave him something new to grouse about, and there was amiability in his Irish brand of derision. ‘Youse pair of bukken bangers. Do you want a cup of tea? Christ almighty, listen. Have a biscuit.’

  Also, to be fair, he was privately a man of compassion, a quality he had in common with my mum. When they heard my friend was an orphan – I told them what little I knew of his childhood – they were incapable of being anything but kind to him. The weeks after his eviction were hard times for Fran. He’d show up at the house unannounced. They’d always let him in, no questions. Mum would feed and water him, even if I wasn’t on the premises, or permit him to watch the television while he awaited my return. One night I came home late and half-cut from college to find her quietly tearful in the kitchen. When I asked what was wrong, she said ‘nothing’. It was many weeks afterwards when she told me the truth. Fran had called up earlier, was asleep on the sofa, thumb in his mouth, ‘like a baby’. It hurt her that his birth-mother had met whatever was her fate, that the people charged with caring for him had now turned their back. ‘He’s only a boy. Another woman’s son.’ Darkness was fighting the light in him, she said. Of all the evaluations of Fran I would hear down the years, I never heard a more accurate one.

  It didn’t stop Jimmy ridiculing his clothes, hair and make-up, or calling him ‘a funny tulip’ or ‘a daisy’. But that evening, the first Trez ever called to the house, we were into some new realm of Jimmydom.

  Jimmy’s glance met her face. And a silence fell over him. She stood graciously from the table and accepted his hand as I made the required introductions. She had on a cardigan and a blue knee-length dress she must have found in a charity shop, a waif from the ’40s, perhaps. It was cinched in at the waist and had buttons up the front; a horse-shaped brooch adorned its pocket. Her hair was tied back, every freckle on her face beseeching you to kiss it, and her eyes were the auburn of pine cones.

  Jimmy didn’t actually genuflect and touch the hem of her frock to his lips but you reckoned it was an effort for him not to. He was floored, poor man. It was touching to see. She said how nice it was to meet him, that I’d spoken often of him fondly, (a lie), that she hoped she wasn’t interrupting his ‘private time’ with his wife, whom it had also been a pleasure to meet. By the time she’d finished speaking, I had the feeling Jimmy wanted to run away with her. He was knocked-out loaded. He was Trezzled.

  ‘Would you have a cup of coffee or a sandwich, Sarah?’ he croaked. Coffee? From Jimmy? The beverage of the devil? I wanted to say ‘Who are you, alien being, and what have you done with my father?’ But no point. He wouldn’t have heard.

  No she didn’t want coffee, many thanks all the same. She’d be grand with a drink of water, ‘if possible’. Jimmy thrust out his hand towards the sink with the speed of a hostage at gunpoint. Water, I command thee. Bow down and be served. I am Jimmy, Lord of Elements, fear my power. Alice hurried over and filled a teacup at the tap. You felt she was about to kiss the saucer she fetched from the press while traversing the lino between them. Unless Mrs Prior who led invalids to Lourdes or some other personage of high eminence happened to call, saucers, in our house, were usually employed as ashtrays, except at Christmas, when they were persuaded to hold gloops of cranberry sauce or the spat-out pips of satsumas. The idea of bringing one into play as foundation for a cup to be held by any person under fifty would have been seen as affectation. But then Trez.

  ‘You’ve lovely manners,’ Jimmy said with a smile of dazed adoration, ‘not like these two Comanches here.’ Trez had indeed, and has still, ‘lovely manners’, a quality you don’t think is hugely important when young. As I’ve aged, I’ve come to the realisation that things like drive-by shootings and wars can only start without it.

  ‘And Robert tells me you’re from London, Sarah. I don’t hear it in your accent?’

  Who was ‘Robert’, I wondered for a moment.

  The divine visitant confirmed that she had assumed human form in London, very mention of which Gomorrah would habitually inflame Jimmy to subvocalisations of guff or have him looking up exorcists in the phone book. But here he was, nodding admiration and fetching out the chocolate biscuits, and remembering a pleasant trip to the capital he claimed to have made with my mum some time in the late 1300s. (‘That wasn’t me, Jimmy.’ ‘Sure of course it was you.’ ‘Some fancywoman I suppose.’ ‘It was you.’) Excellent, the city of London. It would never be bettered. One could travel the world ten thousand years without meeting someone finer than the Londoner. Like all Irish people, Jimmy had a great talent for making an exception. It was as though Princess Diana had dropped in.

  ‘And I’m told you’re a musician. I see you play the voilin?’ This little sonic tic was a feature of his speech, the pronunciation of all ‘io’ sounds as ‘oi’. There were roits in Belfast, the zoo was rebuilding the loin cage, the Midwestern United States contained Oiwa. My brother and I enjoyed tormenting him about it, little bastards that we were, frequently driving him to the threat of voilence.

  We knew he idolised us. How we punished him.

  ‘And what are you studying at the college, Sarah?’

  ‘Boilogy,’ I said.

  He managed not to punch me in the throat.

  Alice gently remarked that Jimmy’s tea was beginning to grow cold and that the young people should now be left to their fun, to go down to ‘the chalet’ and play music.

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The chalet.’

  ‘Is it that dirty oul shed? Sure you couldn’t have a, a’ – he waved his hand at Trez –

  ‘Voilinist,’ I sugg
ested.

  ‘You couldn’t have a visitor in a dirty oul shed.’

  Well, nothing would do him then but that we practise in ‘The Good Front Room’, a place of hallowed sacredness in the house. ‘It would be nicer for Sarah,’ he reminded my mum, who by now was looking at him strangely. Like many Irish couples of their era and milieu, Jimmy and Alice maintained a ‘Good Front Room’, into which you were rarely considered good enough to go. It contained items of Waterford Crystal and other little fancies given them as wedding gifts, a Chappell upright piano with several broken keys, and the many trophies won by Jimmy for ballroom dancing in his oft-recalled youth with his partner, one Bernie Foy. It was fun to subject him to an occasional tease about Bernie, who had emigrated to Canada with her chap, a plasterer by trade, thereby denying my future progenitor the All-Ireland title for rumba/cha-cha-cha and who knows what darker pleasures. ‘A poignant farewell,’ Shay and I would say. ‘Did you ride her down to the docks on your crossbar?’ Alice didn’t like this, but Jimmy sort of did. The intimation that he’d been a bit of a lady-slayer was one he found pleasing, though he’d always command you to stop. Almost to the end of her life, Alice felt Bernie Foy was about to come wiggling up the rhubarb patch in her scanties and haul Jimmy away by his cummerbund. ‘That girl’ had been ‘a certain sort’, she once confided to our neighbour Mrs Park, as Shay and I eavesdropped, chuckling.

  Into The Good Front Room we were led by my dad, Fran and I hefting the cello. By the time we put it down, he was showing Trez his trophies. ‘Oh those old things, dear me; you wouldn’t want to mind those. No, I wasn’t a bad dancer, Sarah. Only amateur, of course. Dublin silver-medallist mambo and bolero, mind you. But the knees went baw-ways on me. It’s all in the knees. If you don’t have the knees, you’re bunched.’

  Then he switched on both bars of the electric fire, mirabile dictu, while Fran exchanged little bits of initially guarded but amiable girl talk with Trez, about where she had bought those lovely tights, he buying his own in Primark. It was nice to see him make the effort, and she returned it appropriately, complimenting him on his footwear but wondering aloud did he ever get a heel stuck in a grating. And then a marvel happened that I wouldn’t have believed possible had I not been there to witness it.

  Jimmy didn’t drink, being a member of the Poineer Total Abstinence Society, but occasionally from some hidden keep a dusty bottle of Guinness might be produced for the visitor. It could happen on Christmas Night, say, or if war had been declared or a loved one raised from the dead. Well, he turned to doe-eyed Trez, and forth from out his beak came words of unimaginable strangeness.

  ‘I believe it’s permissible nowadays for a young lady to enjoy a little refreshment. Would you take a glass of beer, Sarah, love? Since it’s a special occasion. The first, I hope, of many future visits.’

  Trez considered a moment or two before smiling her acceptance, if he was certain it was no trouble at all. He nodded, sage scholar who feels progress must be allowed. Had she told him she fancied a couple of buckets of meths, he’d have cantered down the chemical factory to get them.

  ‘And I suppose youse two Balubas might force down a drop?’

  Fran and I supplied the required whinnies of gratitude.

  ‘A nice pair of flibbertigibbets, aren’t you now? Sure liquor never sullied them lips.’ He chuckled at his witticism and ruffled our hair. Well, Fran’s was hard to actually ruffle because of the lacquer and the gel but he sort of patted it before wiping his hand on the antimacassar. ‘You’re good lads all the same. Not the worst, not the worst. Do you know what youse should call yourselves? If this “band” of yours takes off? Two Mules for Sister Sarah.’

  And away he quietly backed, the man who threw the zinger. Trez unzipped the cello. Off we went.

  Playing music with someone you barely know can be embarrassing in its way, like getting naked with a lover for the first time. Everything’s suddenly out there. You’re hoping to impress, at least not to cause a scream of horror. Even when fondness and trust have been haltingly established, the awareness that what you’re offering might prove a disappointment can sometimes be the ghost in the wardrobe. Trez was pretty quiet as Fran and I strummed our chords, the opening sequence of Roxy Music’s ‘The Thrill of It All’. It was my favourite song at the time and we’d worked it out carefully. I will never be able to put into language the bolt that shot through me as Trez began nodding along.

  Now (Christ!) she was playing, her bow in strutted blurs, mouth set in what I can only term a snarl of excitement as she sawed out great buzzes and groans. Fran crossed to the piano and vamped out that demoniac riff, hunching like the boy who never had a lesson, stamping on the sustain-pedal as though it would give him back a drumbeat and shaking his head at the ceiling. The cello was too loud, my guitar was out of tune, and Fran’s fingers had all the wrecking-ball finesse of Jerry Lee Lewis and none of that master’s skill. But I was gone. I wanted to weep. I don’t know how I didn’t. Fran began to sing. Trez thwucked an evil bass. I thrashed that innocent guitar, the closest friend of my youth, and I stood to my reflection in the black rainy window, asking it if such joys could be.

  Had the Horsemen of the Apocalypse ridden up Rutherford Road at that moment, I’d have felt we could kick their gloomy arses back home to Hell or, better, charged them admission to the show. Trez picked up her fiddle and coaxed from it a screech that made me want to shove my guitar through Jimmy’s display case and decapitate every piece of Waterford in the room. I didn’t even mind the way she was smiling across at Fran. Well, I didn’t mind much. Well, I did. But there was a moment when she winked at me, and nothing else mattered. ‘I love your playing,’ she said.

  Hope is like Abba. It never goes away. In the days and weeks that followed, she would sometimes link my arm as we waited at the bus stop or walked by the lake. We talked of music, of our childhoods, of Fran, of one another, with an openness I’d never known existed except in great songs. She had one sibling, a twin brother, whose jokes she often quoted. But much of what she said wasn’t funny. She’d had sufferings to contend with: no father in her life, a mostly shit school, a mum who’d been hurt, anti-Irish graffiti on the door of their flat whenever the Provos bombed England. What had got her through was music. I knew what she meant. Every song I heard on the radio was about Sarah Sherlock. You know what it is when you’re nineteen.

  FROM ROBBIE’S DIARY

  Sunday 5th December 1982

  SONGS THAT REMIND ME OF SARAH

  What I feel when I see her? On the Street Where You Live.

  What I feel when I don’t: Blue Monday.

  Her eyes: Brown Sugar.

  Her smile: Here Comes the Sun.

  That frown she sometimes has: Ruby Tuesday.

  All the poems she’s read, all the novels she knows, all her lightness when talking, her gestures, her clothes, and all her insistences, laughing You’re wrong. And the moon is eclipsed by her song.

  What I don’t want her to be: My Best Friend’s Girl.

  What I’d do if she went: Cry Me a River.

  Way she walks? Rebel Rebel from Devil Gate Drive.

  How she dances: Rock Lobster by the B-52s.

  What she sometimes makes me feel: Send in the Clowns.

  What she never makes me feel: Pretty Vacant.

  The way she laughs at something irrelevant: Pennies From Heaven.

  But the expression on her face, that morning in class: Don’t Look So Sad. Sea of Heartache.

  Music on her Walkman: Tainted Love, Soft Cell. Beethoven’s First. Jimi Hendrix.

  Her favourite song ever: Famous Blue Raincoat.

  Runner-Up? In the Bleak Midwinter.

  And her kind, sweet laugh. And the way she shakes her head.

  What she sang when I bribed her with my second-last smoke: Cum On Feel The Noize.

  First single she ever bought: Puppy Love by Donny Osmond.

  A classic she dislikes: Reet Petite.

  Her greatest stanza ever in the hist
ory of poetry? There is a house/in New Orleans/They call the Risin’ Sun/Thass bin the ruin of many poor boy/And me, oh Lord, I’m one.

  Fave Dylan song? Watchtower, Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll. Masters of War. Only Bleeding.

  What she actually does own: A leopard-skin pill-box hat.

  My favourite Dylan song? Sarah.

  How she looked at me, then: Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands. Bell Bottom Blues. Sound of Silence.

  What she’d like us to be: ‘Really good mates.’

  What I feel right now: Nowhere Man.

  I’ll Never Fall in Love Again. Crying in the Rain. Take a Piece of My Heart. So Lonely.

  Five

  FRAN AND I pinned up an ad in the music pubs around the town, because we couldn’t afford to place one in What’s On In Luton. TRIO SEEKS UNBEATABLE DRUMMER. ANY GENDER. NO MESSERS. GIGS LINED UP. SERIOUS OUTFIT. I pointed out to Fran that the word ‘any’ should properly be ‘either’ but he accused me of provincial small-mindedness and lack of imagination. Like all the great insulters, he knew the truth hurts.