by Stella Duffy
The following Sunday, his eyes switching from one end of his street to the other, the old man just passed (‘Never trust a pretty woman in high heels, either she’ll trip up or you will’), about to start on his cinnamon bagel, he sees the door open on the other side of the street. The door to his maybe. A woman comes out. Middle aged, middle dressed, middle face between smile and scowl until she checks out the sky – it is sunny, she turns to smile. She is dressed to run. Locks the door behind her. (She has a key! She is one of them!) Makes a few cursory stretches, jogs down the steps, up again, down, stretch and away to the west end of the street. Ryan notes the time. Twenty minutes later she is back. Red faced, puffing hard, she is not running fast now, did not start off fast either, a slight lean to the left, lazy – or unaware – technique, bad shoes maybe, she stops at the steps. Sits, catches her breath. She takes off her shoes, removes a stone from one, replaces the sticky insole in the other. Runs fingers through her hair, red fingers, red face, faded red hair. She is his mother’s age maybe. Ryan has a young mother, but she is his mother’s age all the same. He is both disappointed and comforted. If she is the singer, then they are lullabies. Not the young mother lullabies to the wailing baby, but this older woman’s lullabies to him. And they work. He is soothed. Would sleep in the bath but for the cooling water. She wipes sweat from her forehead. She is not beautiful, or particularly strong. She does not look like the singer of the songs. He watches her go inside and some minutes later follows. In the hallway, before descending the dark stairs to the basement (a lightbulb to replace, time to do it now, time and inclination) he catches the scent of her in the air. Woman older than him and more parental than him and sweatier than him and under all that a touch of the perfume she must have worn yesterday, last night. A stroke of the perfume she will wear again, proud to have been out and sweating, pleased with her slow progress towards firmness from age, flushed through with the pumping blood. Ryan scents all this in the hallway. And is happy to think of something not himself. Not Theresa. Brand new.
Then the songs change again. Britney and Whitney and Christine and Lavigne and other song lines he doesn’t know the name of but knows what they look like, what they all look like, MTV ladies of the night, little bodies and lithe bodies with low pants or high skirts and bare midriffs, flashing splashing breasts beneath wide mouths with good smiles. They are up-tempo these songs and they don’t soothe him any more, but they do excite him, awake him a little, remind him of what else and possibility and – when they rail and rant and proclaim and damn (mostly men, mostly boys, mostly life) – Ryan is reminded he is not the only one. The identification with sixteen year old girls may be a little unusual, but he is not the only one. He is glad to be joined in his suffering-into-ordinary. Glad to have companionship in his ordinary-back-to-life. And, given the choice, he feels happier shouting along with the Lolitas than looking on with the old men. Ryan has never done letch very well. Naked and wet, he is all too aware of his own vulnerability.
Ryan decides the third woman must be her. The She. The Singer. The One. Of course, either of the other two might be the singer, but he just can’t see it. Not the young mother, tired as she seems to be from the baby and the college books she carries in and out every day. He knows they are college books. He has stopped and asked her. Helped her with them once, when the baby was screaming and she couldn’t find her keys, and then another time too, when it was raining, summer rain, hot rain, and she needed to get the baby and her shopping and her books all inside at once. She asked him then, if he was always going to sit on the low wall opposite the house. If he didn’t get bored. And Ryan wondered before he answered, what it must look like, him there, every day. How to answer her question without sounding insane. Or frightening. He told her that it was dark in the basement flat. He wanted to be outdoors. And she nodded, agreed. She used the fire escape herself quite often. Not that it was very safe. Not that she’d ever let the baby out there. But she needed to see the light sometimes, have it fall direct on her skin. And then she went upstairs. Grateful for his help with the books and the baby. And he smiled, realising he’d told her the truth.
It couldn’t be the older woman either, his singer. Not that she didn’t have a good voice. He’d heard her as she ran. She was getting better at running, faster, a cleaner stride. After the first few times listening to her own panting, she decided music would be easier and played tapes to keep herself going. Show tunes mostly. He heard her coming round the corner. Of course she had the slightly out-of-tune twist that comes from only hearing the sound in your ears and not your own voice as well, even then though, he knew she could sing. But she was a high, very soft, sweet soprano. Quite breathy. Perfectly nice but not strong. And the siren who sang down into his bath time sang with a low growl, a full-throated roar, a fierce, passionate woman’s voice. This older lady was sweet, but she wasn’t the one. She nodded at him now, as she had started to do when she got back to the house, wiped her brow, loosed the pull of her shoelaces. He heard the click of her tape recorder and the 42nd Street tap-skip-hum as she made her way up the steps.
Ryan nearly missed Carmella the first time. He’d almost given up waiting. Was worried about what it looked like to be sitting there day after day. Was worried that the old man thought he was a fixture, that Ryan himself was a fixture like the old man. Was worried he needed to get a job. The redundancy package that left him without Theresa and without an apartment only left him with three months of feeling sorry for himself as well. And he’d wallowed through the first and now sat through another. He needed her to be the one. And, just as he was thinking now might be the right time to get up from the wall and walk to the shop and buy a newspaper, look for a job, there she was. Tall and slim and gorgeous. She’d been singing it last night, Girl from Ipanema in her swinging gait. Walking slowly down the stairs from her apartment, out of the gloom of the hallway to the glass of the front door. She stopped to check her mailbox. Long perfect nails, each one pretty pink. And Ryan knew this was her, she, the one, his singing angel. He started to get up from the wall, he didn’t know what he would say but he knew he had to say it, must make a move, he’d lost Theresa, this wouldn’t, couldn’t happen again. She opened the door, he had his foot on the bottom step, she pulled the door back, he was looking up, she down, brown eyes met blue eyes, she smiled, he smiled, he started up, she started down. And kept coming, she fell on the second of five steps. Ryan decided it was meant. She fell into his arms, they tumbled to the pavement, arms and legs, hands and feet. When he sat up she was leaning against him, his right hand holding her left shoe. She smiled again.
‘How kind. If you wouldn’t mind?’
And he knelt to replace the shoe and knew with a startling clarity that this time, this one, this vision … was a man. A beautiful, tall, delicious, perfect, angelic … man. Ryan replaced the size ten shoe and looked up.
‘You may stand. If you wish.’
He did. Both.
‘I’m Carmella. I live on the second floor. I’m a singer.’
‘Yes.’
‘I have to go. I’m sorry. I have a show.’
‘Yes.’
‘Thank you so much.’
She walks away. Ryan calls after her ‘No. Thank you.’ Except that he doesn’t. When he opens his mouth there is no sound. She has stolen his sounds. And then Ryan laughs and, gives in. Maybe the dream woman is not waiting for him on the other side of the grille. Maybe she isn’t really there. But she has woken him anyway.
That night Ryan lies in the bath and waits for his siren. She comes through the mist, singing of dreams and awakening. Of perfect men and wonderful women. The next day, waiting by the doorstep at the appropriate time for the appropriate woman, Ryan asks each one of them out. He asks the young woman to breakfast – on the way to the nursery, via the park, then quick to college.
‘Thanks, I’m really busy, but … yeah. OK. Thanks. Anyway.’
The older woman agrees to lunch. An hour – and then another half – grabb
ed from the office, damn them, why not, why shouldn’t she, after all?
‘I’m never late back. Who’d have thought? Late back? Me!’
And then with Carmella to dinner. In her high heels and short skirt and no need to catch when they fall.
The young mother is delighted and charmed and astonished to be treated as anything other than Jessie’s mum. The older woman is delighted and charmed and astonished to be treated to anything by a younger man of Ryan’s age. And Carmella who is Colin is delighted and charmed and astonished to be treated generously by such an obviously good-looking, obviously straight man. (And it’s such a long time since Ryan thought of himself as good looking that he too is astonished, charmed, delighted.)
There is eating and drinking. They are nice, good to do. There is music and singing. Of course there is singing. Time passes. Because it does. Ryan feels better. Because he can. Life goes on. It cannot go back. The baby grows, the young woman takes on another year at college. The older woman enters a six-kilometre fun run. It takes her ninety-eight minutes to complete the course and Ryan waits for her at the finishing line. Carmella gets another gig, a better show, learns a whole new repertoire. And buys a new wig, lovely shoes. Ryan gets a job, one he thinks he might like, where the office is high above the street and floor to ceiling windows let in the light missing from his home. He begins to date again: good dates and inappropriate dates and wildly misjudged dates. And then the right one comes along when he isn’t even looking, when he has a paper to be worked on this minute, before lunch, right now. Passes his desk. Stops for a chat. Stays for coffee. Ryan has met another woman. Carmella sings into the night. A right woman, a good woman. Carmella sings clean through the morning. And Ryan tries harder and the new woman tries harder and it works. Carmella tries out her opera routine, segues into slow ballad, then fast rock, hint of lullaby calm. Ryan and the new woman are giving it a chance. For now, for as long as it can, for as long as they will. As is the way of these things.
And, in the basement apartment with the deep claw-foot bath and the sound of possibility echoing down the golden grille, Ryan and his new love Chantal bathe happily ever after. More or less.
The Gilder’s Apprentice
WHENEVER THE GILDER finished a task he took a moment to himself before allowing anyone else to see the piece, be they his own apprentices or the person who had commissioned the work. He would tell the apprentices to step back, ten, fifteen paces. Then he would bring his hands together, one on top of the other – the left hand always went down first – touching the piece very closely, yet not touching it either, so that not a lifeline or fingerprint whorl might be seen on the finished article. He told his apprentices he did it to feel the gold, that they needed to learn to feel the gold moving beneath their fingers, feel it settling on the wood or the clay or the iron, feel it becoming part of whatever it covered. He held his hands close enough to touch the warmth of the gold, for the gold to touch him. When he was done his cheeks would be drawn, his face pale, and he needed to take a minute, to breathe deeply. Then the work was handed over, and the next job begun.
The gilder was much in demand. When he handed back the frame, unveiled the gate, showed the precious jewelled box that had been restored to an even finer state than hoped, people would comment on the depth of the gold, its richness, its warmth. Always its warmth. In fifty years of working the gilder had known difficult times, of course, but there was still a queue for his skill. He was known to supervise his apprentices closely, and their work was also highly rated, but a premium was paid for his own craftsmanship, for the knowledge that his hands had been placed/not-placed on the piece at the very end.
The gilder began as an ordinary carpenter’s boy, an unsuccessful carpenter’s boy at that. There was nothing in dovetail joints or mitre cuts, in chalk lines or plumb lines, in frames or lathes that excited him. He was a good enough worker and although he didn’t much care for the job, his was a time with little work and less security; to work was better than not, to bring home a wage was always welcome, what with his father broken since the war and three younger children at home, his mother’s face grey with worry and the reflection of other people’s dirty laundry. He would work out the years of his indenture and being a carpenter would be good enough.
Except that it wasn’t enough. He got by, brought in enough, made a living – just. And the day came when just wasn’t enough. He wanted more. He wanted special and good and his own. He wanted passion.
He tried to speak to his mother about it but she was too busy filling the looping line with the neighbours’ washing and the neighbour’s neighbour’s washing, as a plain stew bubbled on the stove for her husband’s tea.
She looked up from the washing basket, held someone else’s clean dirty laundry out to her son and said, ‘Passion? You don’t know the half of it lad, you don’t want to ask after passion. This is what passion gets you. Ask your Dad.’
And so he asked his father and his father, speech slurring from a mouth half-opening, one eye half-closed, always, against light too bright, any light, the other glass and unseeing, his father answered,
‘Passion? Passion got me this – ’ and he pointed to the foot that was blown off. ‘Passion got me this –’ and he held up a shaking arm, always shaking.
‘Passion, a cause, desire running hotter than my stupid head lost me an eye. You don’t want passion, boy. You want safe. Now get off to work and be thankful you’ve a job to go to and a body whole enough to do it.’
And yet.
He tried to be thankful. Under his boss’s supervision – one boss, two apprentices, three jobs – he put in a new loft for one of those couples in the terrace where everyone had a new loft. Then he extended a side return for another family in another terrace where everyone had an extended side return. And the clients always exclaimed both their pleasure at the work and their shock at the price. They always thanked him, but they also shook their heads as they wrote out the cheques, offered chunks of cash for less, offered VAT-off ready money. They were grateful, but not that grateful. And he understood the feeling. He was grateful for the job, but not that grateful. He could see when he’d made a good job of his work, completed on time, costs just to the edge of budget, cleaning up after him as he went; the boss insisted on that, nothing made the owners happier than seeing the work done and everything clean and tidy – as if the work had never been done, as if the new things had always been there. The clients wanted new and at the same time they wanted it to look as if the workers had never been there. But the apprentice wanted to do more. Wanted to make a difference, wanted to cause change, wanted his work to shine. Wanted it, and went home, to the family where there was no loft conversion, no extended side return, just three younger siblings and a sad-eyed mother, and a bitter, shaking father, and a wage at the end of the week. Be thankful lad, be thankful.
The apprentice wasn’t thankful. He was bored. And as the boredom set in more strongly, so did his tiredness, and the tiredness turned to a lethargy and the lethargy to a depression and although, by rights, he had nothing to worry about, to be sad about – it wasn’t his body that was broken, his job that was lost, his child missing out – the apprentice just couldn’t shake the sadness. The sadness of every day being not quite enough.
And then.
His boss noticed and sent for him.
‘Look here, we can’t all have what we want, we can’t all be captains of industry, high-flyers, the makers of difference, we can’t all be that. Someone has to stay down here, on the ground – holding down the ground. It would all fly up if some of us weren’t down here, you know that, don’t you lad?’
He didn’t, but the apprentice appreciated the smile in the boss’s voice, the attempt at levity, appreciated the older man trying to lift him up while pinning him firmly down, and he took the next job handed out and he determined, this time I will do my best. And I won’t mind if the owners want it to be a job that becomes unnoticed. I will know, I will note it, I will do this job as if
it were a job of joy forever.
It was a job of dust for five days. Every floor, every window, every door to be sanded, hot-air-gunned, blasted, stripped back to the original wood. (The original wood the Victorians had never meant to be shown as wood, but never mind, the apprentice didn’t bother telling them that.) He smiled. He thanked the couple and pulled up carpets and closed doors behind him and went to work. After the stripping and sanding and revealing came the waxing and varnishing. Another five-day job of redoing to undo the undoing.
It was Saturday morning, the young couple were downstairs. She, six months pregnant, looking forward with every passing week to her maternity leave and a nesting instinct she didn’t yet feel, hoped she would feel. He, first-time father checking books and figures, online statements and paper files, scared to be dad. Both excited and worried, neither fully honest with each other about their fears, preoccupied.
The apprentice was working on the last room. The young couple’s bedroom. The other rooms had been exclaimed over, praised, and then – varnish dry, wax polished – the doors were closed off to protect them from the prying eyes of the apprentice who had looked into every nook and cranny, had counted more skin cells and lost hairs in the folds between floorboards than he could remember. Never mind. And, if he didn’t feel much cheerier, any less tired, any less hopeless, he could at least say he’d done his best. Given giving it a go a go.
And then. The loose floorboard by the pregnant woman’s side of the bed. The floorboard he had fiddled with while sanding, promising to return with claw hammer and new nails before varnishing. That floorboard. He slipped the claw in carefully and began to lift, gently gently, bad timing now to chip, splinter or crack. He felt the slightest resistance, almost as if something were pushing the two-pronged claw of the hammer away, something lightly, kindly, saying no, and then the board gave and lifted, it sat up to welcome him. And beneath the board, in the recess between this floor and that ceiling, in the in-between, there was a mechanism. A slightly rusty, very dusty, spring-loaded mechanism. It was the bell to call the maid who must once have lived in this house. A maid who might have worked for a couple just like these two, a maid who blacked the grates and emptied the slops and scrubbed the front step and polished the floors and perhaps even left a casserole warm in the oven when she went back, once a fortnight, to her own family’s smaller, meaner home. The apprentice shook his head. The young couple, a few years older than he was, owned an ordinary three-bedroom terrace. He couldn’t see himself ever having the deposit for something like this, not even round here, where gentrification would only ever reach the edge of the old council estate. Not even round here. And so it must always have been. A young couple, with a few rooms, in a newly-built Victorian terrace, in an unfashionable part of the city where the railway ran. And they could afford a maid. On his hands and knees, peering into the in-between, the apprentice thought about chance and birth and luck and good fortune and just how it was. How it is.