by Graham Joyce
“That was something special,” one of the boys said.
Richie nodded and wiped his face of the sweat induced by the stage lights and the overcrowded atmosphere of the pub. “Thanks. Praise from another musician is the best kind.”
“We were shit and you know it,” said one of the other boys.
“You weren’t shit; some of what you did was good. You just lost the audience, and once you’ve lost them it’s very tough to get ’em back.”
“Got any advice for a young band?” said the first.
“Don’t look at me, ’cos I’ve fucked up everything I’ve touched. Here’s good advice: do what I don’t do.” He picked up a sports bag stuffed with CDs. “Now I’m going out front, and if I can flog a handful of these I might eat this week.”
Richie went out again and set up the CDs on a table near the stage. He could usually sell ten or a dozen copies at a good knock, and that helped bulk out his slender income. He always mentioned the CDs two or three times during the evening, so there were a few people waiting by the stage with ready cash.
Someone wanted his CD signed, and Richie was happy to snatch off the cellophane packaging and sign the cover; otherwise he would pocket the flat ten pounds he charged for each copy, offer a handshake, and look to the next person in the line. He sold a few copies and then turned to a young woman in dark glasses and a leather jacket who had already picked up a CD from the table.
“Of course I want it signed,” the young woman said.
“Fuckin’ hell,” he said, “fuckin’ hell.”
He just hadn’t expected her to turn up at one of his gigs. That was not how he’d imagined it after Peter had said that Tara would want to see him. His hands trembled. He needed a glass of something.
She didn’t take off her dark glasses. Even though the venue was dark, he could see her looking shyly but evenly from behind the tinted glass. Her lips were slightly parted. “Well?”
“Okay,” Richie said. “Look, go through to the lounge bar. It’s quieter. I’ll finish up here and come over.”
She looked at him again, quietly placed the CD back down on the table, turned, and went.
Someone else wanted a copy. “Nice set, Richie,” a disembodied voice said. Money changed hands. He signed a couple more copies. More money changed hands. He hardly knew what he was doing. He nodded and smiled but his heart thumped and his migraine was splitting his skull.
Then there was just one more person wanting a copy. It was the man who had been giving him the evil eye all evening. “Sign one for me,” said the man.
Richie looked into the stranger’s eyes. There was no recognition. As far as he could tell the man was a complete outsider. “What’s your name?” Richie asked.
“Just sign it.”
Richie signed the copy and accepted the ten-pound note that was pressed into his hand, and the man slipped away through the noisy crowd of drinkers.
“He looked like a wrong ’un,” said one of the boys from The Dogs.
Richie blew out his cheeks, shook his head, and gathered up his bag of CDs. He planned to come back for his gear later. Squeezing through the drinkers, he accepted a few pats on the back as he went. “Nice one, Richie.” “You ain’t lost it, son.” “Lovely stuff, Richie, mate.”
Then he went out of the room in search of Tara.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
In a utilitarian age, of all other times, it is a matter of grave importance that fairy tales should be respected.
CHARLES DICKENS
The lounge bar of The Phantom Coach was the oldest part of the pub. It had a low ceiling with exposed oak beams, and horse brasses on the brick walls. The room winked with reflected light on copper and brass. Richie found Tara sitting at a table in the corner, a delicate hand resting on the empty table. She was still wearing her dark glasses.
He asked her what she was drinking, and she asked for a snakebite, a cider and bitter mix with a shot of black currant, a ridiculous concoction they used to drink when they were kids. Drinks at The Phantom Coach were on the house for Richie. He ordered himself a more sensible pint of bitter and a whisky chaser.
Setting the drinks on the table, he sank down beside her. He tried to look into her eyes behind the dark glasses. He thought she blinked. She picked up her cloudy glass of snakebite and took a sip before carefully replacing it on the table.
“I’d like you to take those glasses off.”
“The light hurts my eyes.”
“Could you take ’em off anyway?”
“Why?”
“So we can talk.”
“Talk with your mouth. Not your eyes.”
Richie didn’t answer.
Tara sighed and took off the dark glasses, folding them and placing them on the table beside her glass. Her eyelashes fluttered. She squinted at him.
Christ, he thought, Genevieve was right. She did look incredibly young. “What’s a-matter with your eyes, then?”
“I’m sensitive to light.”
“Seen a doctor? Optician?”
“No.”
“You should. Get it sorted.” He took a sip of beer and the foam left a trace mustache on his upper lip.
“Maybe I should.”
“Don’t leave it. That’s when things go wrong.”
Richie tipped back his whisky and he winced, not because of the taste of the scotch but because of a flash of migraine. He tapped his whisky tumbler on the table and looked at an elderly couple almost canoodling near the door. He and Tara had been thrown out of this very pub twenty years ago for a bout of overexuberant kissing.
“You don’t seem to have much to say,” he said.
“No. I don’t.”
Without knowing it, Richie instantly fell back into the rapid dialect he might have spoken with Tara twenty years earlier. “I mean, Peter tole me, like, he tole me all abart this fuckin’ story you giv’ ’im. Christ, that’s precious, that is, precious. Comin ’ome wi’ that on yer back. Teks some trunk, Tara, it teks some trunk and I always knew you ’ad a beautiful imagination, burra would nerra guessed that you’d think anyone else would cop a story lark that. It’s soo bad it’s good. It’s soo far aht it’s.… what can ah dream up that is sooooooooo off the wall they’ll atta believe it, double-bluff, kind o’ thing, shit or bust.”
“Right.”
He came out of dialect again. “Twenty fucking years, Tara. Twenty. And I almost got banged up in a prison cell for doing you in, but you know what? I have been in a prison cell. I have.” He tapped the side of his head. “In here. Twenty years, hard, breakin’ rocks.”
The elderly couple by the door looked up as Richie raised his voice.
Tara reached across the table to stroke Richie’s hand but he snatched it away.
They sat in impossible silence for a while.
“Your playing is incredible now,” she said.
“Yeh?”
“Really. I can’t believe how different it is.”
“Well, you’d hope for a little improvement after twenty years, wouldn’t you?”
“But it’s like you reached your goal. You’re as good as you wanted to be. Better.”
“Where you been, Tara?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yeh? You don’t know?”
“No, I don’t know. I’m not pretending. I just don’t know. I can account for six months and then there’s a gap of nineteen and a half years that’s missing. I’m seeing a shrink. He’s going to help me find the missing years. And before you say anything, I don’t expect you to believe me. I don’t expect anything except hurt, anger, contempt, and puzzlement. Now can I put these glasses back on, because this light is really hurting my eyes.”
Richie looked hard at her. Her face didn’t seem a day older than it had been when he’d last seen her. She had a pleasing tan now that she’d never had, a tawny or golden hue that suited her. When he looked into her eyes he saw hurt, but he also saw youth, the crystal fountain. He thought there were tiny, silvery
laughter lines around her eyes that hadn’t been there before. There was something in her demeanor, however, that had never been there before, something that sat on her shoulders. It might have been wisdom, but whatever it was, it was new.
Richie nodded and she slipped her dark glasses back on. It occurred to him that she might simply be hiding behind the shades, using them so that her face couldn’t be read properly. Sore eyes were a convenient cover for people who didn’t want to be seen. “You really don’t know where you’ve been? What are you, like an amnesiac?”
“Apparently. Except for six months. Which are very clear to me.”
Richie glanced away from her again in exasperation, but as he did so he spotted someone glowering at him through a small glass panel in the door to the lounge. It was the man who had been staring at him throughout his performance that evening.
He mouthed back at the figure: “Want my ass, do ya?”
Tara had to turn to look over her shoulder in order to see whom Richie was scowling at, but she was too late and he’d gone. “What is it?”
“Some bloke giving me the dead eye.”
“Who?”
“No idea, but if he doesn’t fuck off I’m going to slam my fist in his face.”
She smiled, but it was a painful smile. “You haven’t changed in that regard.”
She reached out to touch him again, and this time he let her stroke the back of his hand. He shook his head. “How are you getting home tonight?”
“I’ll walk.”
“It’s nearly two miles.”
“We used to think nothing of walking two miles. Or ten. We’d walk ten miles back from some concert with a crap band.”
“I’ll drive you home.”
“No, thanks. I watched what you put away on stage all night. Sink a battleship.”
“Then I’ll walk you home.”
“No need.”
“Yes, I will. You never know who’s out there.”
“All right.”
“Drink up. Let’s go.”
“It’s not eleven o’clock. The landlord hasn’t called last orders yet.”
“That’s all changed. They don’t do that anymore,” he said. “That’s all gone.”
RICHIE COLLECTED HIS GUITAR and amplifier and the rest of his gear and dumped it in the trunk of his estate car in the pub car park. He planned to walk Tara home and then walk the farther mile to his own house; he would collect his car in the morning.
Before locking his car he handed Tara one of his CDs. “Here. Might as well have one o’ these,” he said.
“CD, right?”
“Duh.”
“I’ve never actually played one. I remember how you used to go on about vinyl records giving way to tapes. And now tapes have given way to CDs.”
“Are you pulling my leg?”
“No. I saw some at Mum and Dad’s house. It’s just a disc, right?”
“Know what an MP3 is? Don’t answer. Come on, let’s get walking.”
They set off along the footpath and after a few hundred meters they came to a wooden stile offering steps into a field. “Go the Badger Track?”
“Of course.”
A track ran across a field and then alongside a thin woods; and from there lay a climb up a country lane to the top of a hill before a minor road snaked its way to the Martins’ house. They had walked it in the darkness or under moonlight many times together, years ago, sometimes with Peter; more often hand in hand. No one else called it the Badger Track. They did because one night on their way back from the Coach they’d encountered a huge black-and-white striped creature in the middle of the path; it had stopped dead and looked at them almost in astonishment before scuttling away.
More than one spring evening before Tara disappeared they had lain down in the grass after a night at The Phantom Coach and had sex; and that was where Tara had fallen pregnant.
“Can I tell you about a dream I had last night?” Tara asked him as they took the track across the field. There was still a dusting of snow caught in the grass. A waxing moon shone down on the snow, and the earth underfoot was crusty and hard. “I keep hoping that my dreams will unlock what’s going on. I wanted to tell it to the shrink but he wasn’t interested. I always thought shrinks were supposed to be interested in dreams.”
“Tell it to me.”
“I was walking up here and I was looking for you. At first it was a trick, you know, a joke, and you were supposed to be hiding. I got anxious. I looked all round here. Then I found a big pile of leaves and I scraped a few off the top and there you were, sleeping. I said, ‘What are you doing?’ You woke up and yawned and you said, ‘Hibernating.’ Then I woke up. What do you think that means?”
You’re the one, he said, you’re the one who has been hibernating, if that’s what it was. Not in my dream, Richie; in my dream it was you. That don’t change anything. Yes, it does, I don’t know how it does but it does, and aren’t you cold? A bit, I was expecting to drive home. You’re pissed so why would you drive, and anyway, do you want to take my arm?
That’s a good ’un. Twenty years not a peep and now you want to snuggle up. Pardon me if I don’t go along with that one.
You don’t want to take my arm but you do want to walk me home through the snow in that thin shirt. I’m having a smoke. Want one? Is it true you can’t smoke in pubs anymore? Stop screwing with me. I’m not, I really am not … Hey, there’s a fox.
With Richie about to light the cigarette in his mouth, they watched a fox slink through the slender birch trees, its russet coat and tail painted silver by the moonlight. It stepped into moon shadow and was gone.
Do you remember the badger? Course I remember the badger. Do you remember what you said to me that night? To hell with all that, where you been, Tara, where you been?
She took off her dark glasses and looked at him straight. Her pupils were hugely dilated, spinning with moonlight, like someone who had been taking drugs. She looked right into him and for a moment he felt dizzy and scared.
Think back on that promise. If I left you it doesn’t cancel it out. You’re my one hope, Richie. My one horse in the race. Mum and Dad are just too shocked and bewildered by my coming home; Pete is in a rage with me; his wife looks at me like I’m a specimen of piss in jar; and then there’s the shrink who just stares at me like he wants to pull my pants down and spank me. And then there’s you, Richie. You, the man I’ve hurt most but the only one who can give me half a chance to work all this out.
Give us a break, Tara.
See that spot over there? We made love over there, didn’t we? Well, as true as that is true, what I’m telling you is all true. All I ask is that for one second you open up your mind, for one second, and allow the possibility for that one second that I might be telling you that something extraordinary happened. Really happened. Then after that one second you can go back to thinking I’m a liar or I’m insane or whatever you want. But I demand it, I demand one second.
Nope, can’t do that.
You have no idea, Richie. None of you. There is a veil to this world, thin as smoke, and it draws back occasionally and when it does we can see incredible things. Incredible things, Richie.
What things?
Don’t make me prove it, because I can put things in your mind if I want to. Really, I could.
You’ve already put some murderous thoughts in my mind, Tara. Are you doped? Are you damaged? Are you just playing?
One second. One second in which you entertain the idea that the world is not exactly as you think it is, that everything unusual can’t be reasoned away.
No.
Just one second. The time it takes to say your name. Because if I get that from you then I have a fissure in the wall and I can make the fissure into a crevice and I can scratch the crevice into a hole and then the wind will blow through and the wall will start to disappear.
What are you on, crack cocaine?
Don’t need it where I’ve been.
Come on, that’s
your house down there with the light on: haven’t been in a long time.
One second, Richie: give me one second of your life.
“YOU WANT TO COME in?” Tara asked him, with Richie hesitating at the gate. “Mum and Dad need to see you.”
“I’m not sure I can.”
“Really? They feel the need to … you know … put things right.”
“Another time, eh?”
“Okay. If you think so.”
“I do.”
“Well. Good night, then.”
“Good night Tara.”
They waited at the gate, looking at each other.
“Thanks for walking me home.”
“I enjoyed it. I think.”
“Oh, do you want me to get you a coat? Dad could easily lend you one of his.”
“No. I’d have to come in, and all that.”
“And all that.”
“Well, good night. Again.”
“Okay.”
Richie swung away and retraced his steps. He glanced over his shoulder to see Tara stepping into the house. A security light had switched on above her head. He turned up his shirt collar. The pavement was gleaming with a rime of frost, and the bright moon lit his way. At least his headache had passed.
One second, she had asked for. One second, whereas if she only knew it she’d had twenty years. He’d deny it if she asked, but of course he had entertained the idea that she might be telling the truth, or at least the truth as far as she understood it. The thing that had made him fall in love with Tara all those years ago was her integrity. She was so scrupulously honest as a teenager that she often put the adults around her to shame. Neither was it the kind of honesty that doesn’t care about trampling on another person’s feelings. She had empathy in spades. She just wouldn’t compromise what she said to advantage herself or take the easy way out of a situation. It was an unusual trait in anyone.
Richie decided that Tara believed what she said. That, of course, was not the same thing as it being true.
What shocked Richie more than Tara’s clinging to her story was how he felt about her. Nothing had changed. A lot of waters had flowed through him since the day she disappeared. Drink. Drugs. Women. But he felt as passionate about her as he had all those years ago. The intervening time might not have happened.