Sway

by Zachary Lazar

  Mick is watching Brian now, whose head is still bowed, intent only on the sound he is making. The sound from his guitar has no meaning, it is only a set of tones, but it seems to imply a range of ominous meanings. Maybe part of Mick already suspects that in that grim flat he is in the right place at the right time.

  The flat smells like vegetables and cigarettes. The ceiling is ringed with the black stains from the candles they sometimes burn in place of lightbulbs. They put their socks on top of the radiator until they smell the wool start to burn and then they put them back on and have a minute or two of relief before their toes are numb again. It is so cold they sleep with all their clothes on. They sometimes have to sleep together in the same bed.

  Mick is the only one who ever talks about money. For the other two, money is an abstraction, something you get in exchange not for labor but for demeaning yourself in front of other people. Brian works in the electronics department of a large store in Bayswater, but he will soon be fired for stealing. Keith subsists on whatever his mother sends him from home. The two of them have only the vaguest sense of living in a physical world: a place where windows keep out rain, chairs make it more comfortable to sit, electric lights allow one to see. When they get drunk, they break the furniture and imitate Mick’s queenly gestures, and one night they burn his bathrobe in the sink.

  They play for hours at a time, their two guitars the warp and weft of the same fabric. They weave minute variations on a single pattern, forgetting themselves in the trance of detail. They spend days and nights in this way, almost wordless, signaling to each other until their fingers bleed. When the pipes freeze, the toilet down the hall won’t flush and so they piss in jars. When the water comes back on, they leave the jars in the basin. Over time the basin fills up with cigarette butts and the newspaper wrappings from food. Mick thinks about quitting, concentrating on his economics course, but the more he has to sit and watch, the more he needs to stay.

  Italian suits and Cuban-heeled shoes. White dress shirts with tab collars. Narrow black ties that look even better when he lets the slack end dangle free of the clasp. These are some of the clothes that Brian has managed to wangle out of his various girlfriends, or to steal from his job at the department store in Bayswater.

  A week before Christmas a girl arrives just before dark, standing behind the iron fence. Her wild hair makes her ordinary topcoat look misplaced, somehow severe. She looks more lost than she really is, which is her odd way of deflecting the hostility of this strange city. She has a pram with her and inside it is Brian’s infant son.

  When she won’t stop ringing the bell, he goes outside to greet her. Upstairs, he and Keith have been practicing, and he knows that Keith is mocking him now in his mind, thinking of dishrags and nappies, and so the thing to do is to act responsible and concerned, to surprise him in this way.

  “Tricia,” he says.

  She looks shaken for just a moment, but then turns on him with a familiar, disappointed smile.

  “I’m here for just a day or two,” she says. “I’m staying with Claire. You know, my cousin Claire, the one you used to fancy.”

  He looks at the baby, touching its cheek with two fingertips. “It’s cold,” he says. “Is he all right?”

  She touches his hair as he’s still bent over the pram. She brushes it back behind his ear. “The bohemian look,” she says. “So unruly. But it suits you, though. Really.”

  He stands straight and looks off down the row of identical stone buildings, his hands in his pockets. “We’ve been practicing,” he says. “Getting some numbers down.”

  She nods her head. “I just thought you’d like to see Christopher.” She bends over the pram and nuzzles the baby, her nose and lips on his face. “London,” she says. “We’re in London.”

  After a few drinks with Keith and some friends, he takes the train to Clapham to visit Tricia at her cousin Claire’s. It turns out that Claire has a husband, Neil, a tall and chinless man with a shock of black hair who works as a pharmacist. The four of them have a home-cooked dinner and Brian drinks some wine and finds himself relaxing into a magnanimous mood, riding a wave of sincerity that he begins to believe in. He holds his son high in the air and makes airplane sounds. He and Claire’s husband talk about Algeria, where there has been a revolution. As he speaks, Brian looks almost like a child. It’s clear that his enthusiasm has less to do with politics than with enthusiasm as an end in itself.

  “One more loss for Europe,” he says. “But it’s all down to America and Russia now, isn’t it? Just a matter of which side they join up with.”

  “Do you believe that?” says Neil.

  “Believe what?”

  “That it’s just a matter of which side they join up with. That the world is split in two like that. That there’s no chance for real socialism in Algeria.”

  Brian smiles at Tricia, then back at Neil. “I don’t know,” he says. “What do you think?”

  “Well, there’s no point in not thinking so, is there?” says Neil. “There’s no point in not being fatalistic.”

  Brian pours out another glass of wine for Neil, then tilts the bottle slightly toward him as if making a toast. He pours for Claire, and then for Tricia and himself. The conversation turns to safer things — London, the cold weather, the cost of heating a flat. When they’ve finished eating, Brian and Tricia do the washing up, and they splash soapsuds on each other and sing songs the way they used to, childish songs about the people back in their hometown of Cheltenham. He is not quite insincere; in this particular moment he sees himself as fundamentally playful, a spreader of good cheer. But when he feigns sleepiness, it’s obviously a ruse, and Tricia does what he knows she’ll do. She lets him spend the night, leading him back into the extra bedroom with the baby.

  She feeds their son with a bottle, patiently and gravely, then bounces him on her shoulder for a while, singing to him, until he burps. When he’s finished, she wipes his mouth with the large white napkin on her shoulder, then carefully lays him in his crib. For a long time, she makes faces over him, mewing and speaking baby talk, as if they are the only two in the room. Brian notices how bare it is: the half-empty bookcase with a lamp on one corner, Neil’s pharmacology diploma on the wall, the slanted cot with its creases visible through the sheets and the thin pink quilt. The neatness of the room — its air of a newly married couple just starting out — inspires in him a surprising resentment, then a desperate, half-convinced pride in the mindless shambles of the flat in Edith Grove.

  “Do you think there’s a chance for real socialism in Algeria?” he says, moving toward her.

  She is still doting on the baby as he runs his fingers through her tangled brown curls. “I don’t know what he was on about,” she says. “They wouldn’t let him in at Oxford. He’s never gotten over it.”

  “I bet he has a stash of pinups in here somewhere. A leather mask.”

  “What?”

  “You know, he serves Claire a dinner in the nude, wearing just a mask. Eats his own meal from a dog dish.”

  She pushes his hand away with a distant, skeptical smile. “I thought you were sleepy.”

  “I’m going to thrash you, Neil. You’ve made me very upset,” he mocks.

  She doesn’t seem to be hearing him. She lies down on the cot in her bathrobe, crossing her bare feet and closing her eyes. Her arms are folded beneath her head and she smiles faintly, a girl again. He switches off the lamp and takes off his shoes. Something about her competence with the baby has made it feel as if it were nothing more than a game they had both been playing. He can’t see her exactly, can see only her blurred image in the near darkness. In the sepia light, he sees the curve of her hip, the length of her body beneath her robe.

  There is that moment when they finally take off their clothes and he feels her skin against his and his vision fades out almost completely. There is only a vertiginous blur, a torrent of inexpressible messages. What binds him too closely to girls like Tricia is this deluge of feeling
. He is not very careful or skillful, but almost always he is strangely sincere, moving over their bodies with an obsessive slowness that verges on the embarrassing.

  In just a few hours he sees what’s really there. The baby is screaming. In the bald lamplight, Tricia stands over the crib and tries to soothe him in her arms, tired and puffy-faced, sore but also somehow alert. He can see how natural this is for her, how bound she is to their son, and he feels suddenly displaced, confused by the idea that Tricia might think that this has anything to do with him.

  Onstage, they are all awkward, all except Brian. His face is almost feminine, pale and wide-lipped, but his hands are large, blocklike, and they handle the guitar like a shovel. He attacks the strings with wide up-and-down sweeps of the wrist, forms the chords with wide-stretched fingers, making his playing look more difficult than it is. He does this while standing still, not looking at the crowd, his face unaccountably stern.

  They have a bass player now, and a drummer. They are basic and direct, steeped not only in blues but in jazz.

  There is no stage — it is not a club, just the basement room of a pub called the Wetherby Arms, where there are thirty people or so drinking pints and smoking cigarettes, not necessarily interested in music. What they hear now comes across as deliberately abrasive. They’ve never encountered anything so unpolished, as if the whole point of the music is to be aggressively unmusical, knowingly a fraud.

  Mick moves with little head-bobbing steps around his microphone stand, pigeon-toed. What he doesn’t realize is that the collar of his shirt has ridden up above his suit jacket, bringing with it the knot of his tie, which makes his neck look comically long. The noises he makes have nothing to do with singing. But his sheer persistence is a provocation because it’s clear that he isn’t joking.

  They’re playing Muddy Waters. Their version is faster, less free. The two guitars veer in and out at different angles, never touching. Brian moves his shoulders in a strange, fluent way, as if the music were somehow circular and he hears its center in the space between the beats. There’s something misplaced, something feyly undergraduate, about the length of his blond hair in combination with his somber three-button dress suit. Across the stage, Keith pounds out his chords, crouched down by the drum riser, his thin frame hunched around his instrument. He had never bothered to put on his tie and now he has taken off his suit jacket as well. He has no showmanship, but he is the one who is secretly guiding them forward, the drums following the lead of his guitar.

  Some of the boys in the crowd are starting to taunt them now. They can see what is starting to happen, see that these boys with their instruments have started to believe in their own act, especially the singer, Mick.

  He sneers in his weird drawl, Well I could never be-e-e-e satisfied and I jus-s-s-t can’t ke-e-e-p on crying. He looks sideways at Keith, pursing his lips. There is a jostle of guitars. He twitches his head, chin raised, marching in a slight crouch or stoop.

  Their hair is long and they look both ugly and vain. They look like women, that’s what people will say, but in fact they don’t look like women at all, it’s just that they’re sexual, aware of their bodies. If anything, their hair makes them look like very careless transvestites, with something devious and brittle beneath their outer resolve. The music is making them move in ways that might be embarrassing, but they’re trying to master that embarrassment by seeming not to care. This sense of fakery has something vaguely to do with being English and playing the music of black Americans. They’re trying to be serious and sarcastic at the same time, emotional but also cool. All the helpful commonsense distinctions are being made pointless by their grating, persistent music.

  The crowd breaks the tables and one of the bass player’s amplifiers. They smash a few pint glasses on the floor. Brian is set upon by six boys who claw at his long blond hair and tumble after him in a scrum up the broken stairs.

  After that, the gigs start to draw crowds. It’s the violence that draws them, the violence in the music, and the violence that ensues. They play every Wednesday at a new pub in Ealing, weekends at a hotel bar in Richmond. Almost all the shows end in some sort of confrontation: a skirmish in the crowd, a verbal brawl between the band and some heckler, a fistfight broken up by bouncers and then continued on the pavement outside. There is always a tension in the rooms, the darkness and heat accentuated by the tight jostle of too many people in too small a space. The anticipation of what might go wrong becomes central to the music, which gets louder and more jagged in response.

  One night when they’re onstage Mick notices the way that Brian rattles his tambourine. He smirks at the crowd and gives it a single hard shake, as if he’s cracking a small whip. The next night Mick taunts the audience along these same lines, turning his face in profile between phrases, laughing at some private joke, then sneering and pointing his finger. All the lights seem to be on him. He pushes it further and further but not too far.

  In February, Brian meets a girl at a pub in Soho. He’s trying to get another booking for the band, and he’s brought some money — he’s borrowed it from the band’s common fund without telling them — so that he can make an impression on the bartender. But he forgets this mission as soon as the girl comes in out of the rain with her group of friends. From the bar he can see her hair falling in wet strands over her narrow face. She’s tall and thin and she wears a shiny black raincoat, a coat that seems to be made of some rare, expensive kind of plastic.

  Within a minute or two, he has become the center of attention at their table. He’s wearing a tweed jacket and a narrow black tie whose ends dangle free of the clasp. He buys a bottle of champagne and has it brought over to the girl and her friends. The girl in the black raincoat regards him at first with a comic skepticism, a feigned hostility, but he pours her a glass of the champagne nonetheless. Before long she is speaking in a way that almost mirrors the way he speaks, sarcastic and deliberately peculiar, as if they are in together on some secret.

  He asks about her raincoat. He says he had a dream once about a girl in a raincoat just like hers. He asks her if by any chance she speaks German, or if she’s ever been to Germany. Her raincoat looks German to him.

  She looks down at the lapel of her coat as if she’s never noticed it before. When she looks back up at him with the same suspicious smile, he notices the little gap between her front teeth, the faint groove on the underside of her nose, between the nostrils. When she asks him for a cigarette, he tells her that she will have to fight him for it, and after a confused pause she raises her two fists to the level of her cheeks and pretends to stare him down.

  That same evening, Tricia arrives at Edith Grove, this time having left the baby with her cousin Claire in Clapham. Her hair has been cut shorter, curled at the ends like Jackie Kennedy’s. She’s in high spirits, planning to meet Brian on his own terms, but it turns out that he isn’t even home; he’s somewhere in the West End at a jazz club, looking for gigs.

  It’s Mick who tells her this, after he’s invited her inside. He’s loafing around the flat in a new bathrobe and a worn pair of pajamas that look as if they’ve been twisted in tight knots and left for a year in a damp trunk. A textbook is spread out on the sofa beside a parcel of fried potatoes wrapped in newspaper. As he sits down on the sofa, he indicates a chair for her to sit in with a wave of his hand.

  He puts his feet up on the table and lifts a martini glass filled with something tepid and brown. He has a long strand of dried toothpaste on the lapel of his robe.

  “Didn’t he know you were coming?” he says.

  The chair he’s offered her is piled with dirty clothes, which she picks up in a clump and places on top of one of the amplifiers. In recent weeks, her disappointment over Brian has reached an apex and turned into something resembling exuberance, a desperate, unashamed yearning.

  “Do you think I would have come all this way if I hadn’t told him?” she says.

  She sits down and lights herself a cigarette, breathing out with close
d eyes. She’s wearing mascara and a new green dress beneath her topcoat.

  “That’s our little till,” Mick says. He points to a cigar box on the floor, lying sideways with its lid agape. “We keep our savings in there, to make the payments on the instruments? As you can see, there’s not much in it now. Nothing at all, in fact. Keith just ran off a little while ago to try to find him.”

  She leans forward with her elbows on her knees, her feet splayed out dejectedly in front of her. Mick raises his glass awkwardly and sips some of the strange liquid.

  “Beef tea,” he says. “Would you like some?”

  She stands up and starts to appraise the clutter in the room. On the wall near the kitchen is a long Bakelite-covered table stacked with dirty plates, ashtrays, newspapers stained different shades of bright yellow and beige.

  “Are you sure?” she says.

  “Sure of what?”

  “Are you sure that it was Brian who took the money?”

  Mick stands up. He yawns, stretching his arms by clasping his hands in a bridge behind his waist.

  “It’s his band,” he says. “You know that. He needs that money to keep himself in shampoo, I suppose. Shampoo for that lovely hair of his.”

  He is standing right behind her now. She can feel him pausing there, watching her with a kind of scorn. She closes her eyes and feels a warm swelling inside her, not anger or guilt but some fusion of these that brings with it a tinge of her earlier anticipation, her excitement over seeing Brian.

  She imagines him making one of his funny faces, jabbing two fingers up his nostrils and sticking out his tongue. She sees him doing this in a circle of girls whose faces she can’t see, wearing the dark suit she gave him as a present when they lived back in Cheltenham.

  “I’m sure he’ll be back soon,” says Mick. “Why don’t you come sit down?”

  When she feels his hands on her shoulders, she stands very still for a moment. Then she turns and stares at him. Their kissing is a way to avoid having to look at each other any longer.