by Adam Thorpe
Jack ran out of courage. He tried no more doors.
Walking back down the quiet, residential streets of Bounds Green, keeping his head lowered in case, he wondered why no one in power had thought to knock down the ribbon of houses either side of the North Circular, and put it all to woodland. Compulsory purchase in the name of humanity. Applicable to whole swathes of the country, that was the trouble. He passed an estate agent’s and saw that even here the houses were a bicycle race of noughts.
Descending into the Tube on the steps (the down escalator was out of service), he saw the young hoodie in front unwrap a chewing gum and toss away the wrapper – not even toss it, just let the paper and the foil drop fluttering on the steps. Jack wanted to say something, like an old prat.
He wondered what Kaja made of the civilised, wealthy West. He would like to know. She would be interesting about it. He very much wanted to hear what she had to say about it, but he could no more talk to her than he could ever talk to the kid who’d littered the steps and was now three yards away on the platform, happily and noisily chewing.
What right had Howard got to give her the fucking number?
Anyway, the East was as bad. A friend had just got back from a tour in provincial Russia and said that the towns and their hotels were not just dilapidated, it was as if no one saw the point of even cleaning them any more. It was a society in decomposition. Even less equal than England. The first thing he’d done was to rush into W.H. Smith’s at the airport, gagging for normality. Sad.
Jack, sitting again in the Tube, wondered if Kaja, as an Estonian, as a member of a country bubbling with enthusiasm, might think that this was all Russia deserved. He very much wanted to hear her views on Russia as well as England. He very much wanted to hear her voice, the way she’d laughed with her upper lip curled back, the way when he’d told a joke or put on a funny voice she’d squeezed her face between her hands and gone, ‘Oh God, you are so mad,’ and then squeezed his. The way she’d used a CD in her bag as a mirror to brush her hair in, that day they’d walked on the empty little beach of Haaremaa’s main town, hand in hand, when he’d wondered what further joy would ever be possible, feeling the warmth and weight of her against his shoulder and the brisk wind off the Baltic that made the netball posts hoot hauntingly, like ghost owls.
Did she remember it all in the same way? Or with anger, even with grief? A frenzy of loss, anyway.
Did that satisfy him, then? Serve his vanity?
Maybe she just thought he was a spoilt knobhead.
He felt trapped and afraid of dying, sitting there in the Tube carriage as it lurched through the under-darkness, recalling these moments of his life, spotlighting them, their curiously hushed quality; his life was an extraordinary gift and he didn’t want it stolen from him. He might have been that ugly, thickset bloke living right on the North Circular. He might have been a leper in the thirteenth century. He might have been the obese, chalk-white teenage kid squeezed into the seat opposite, munching through a giant Wispa, in her short pink skirt, spots like bogeys on her forehead, a track top from somewhere like JJB Sports making her sweat. Pure chav, he thought. (‘Chav’ was a term Milly was fanatically opposed to, likening it to ‘Yid’ or ‘darkie’.) Then the fireball might come and it would all be over in a painful few seconds or maybe minutes, or with the true horror of a slow suffocation.
And he would have entirely wasted his gift. Fumbled and frittered it away. Those days with Kaja were the true potential of the gift; they had compelled him to be more than he had settled for. The trouble with England, he thought, was that it compelled you to be exactly that: what you had settled for, which was always less than you had originally imagined or anticipated. Or, worse: what England had settled for you. Even Roger Grove-Carey had not prevailed against that.
It was not a question of money, he corrected himself. He had once seen a huge scrawl on a railway bridge which had said: Poverty Stops You Making Love. At the time, before he had teamed up with Milly, when he was living hand to mouth off meagre grants as a student, that graffito had struck him as having a point. Now that he was immensely comfortable in material terms, he was not so sure it was true. Being rich also got in the way of love. In his case, however, it had granted him a reprieve by making it clear that it had limited powers: it could not make children.
Ultimately, he thought, as the station lift delivered him from the depths at Hampstead, the time with Kaja six years back was a magical interlude. No more than that. He could not mistake it for the main action.
Wednesday was nervously indifferent and Thursday was very good right up to the phone call – mainly because Jack put the Kaja problem to one side, it being the first day of the final test. England were heading for the Ashes, but it could all go wrong. It usually did go wrong. Hell’s umbilical cord.
If she were to phone and Milly answered, he would double-bluff, say she was an ex-lover, ooh la la. He rehearsed it on his own in the study. It sounded incredibly unconvincing to his own ears: he was a hopeless actor. But it would fool Milly because she was not the suspicious type and, anyway, he had never otherwise cheated on her. This made him all but unique in the music world. Perhaps it explained everything, he mused.
He was still in demand, though. He had to give a talk tomorrow contrasting Stockhausen, Cardew and Pärt at a conference in Newcastle, but he would scribble it on the train going up. Since he would be in competition with the cricket, he was not expecting more than about three peculiar people. In two months’ time he was due in Stockholm for a couple of nights, at a music festival whose theme was the New European Music, in which someone he felt must be out of touch had asked him to perform his twelve-minute solo piano piece, Take Delivery of the Sumptuous (2001). Milly had thought it indulgent to spew thousands of gallons of burnt kerosene into the atmosphere for the sake of twelve minutes on the ivories in front of thirty or forty Swedes, but Jack had accepted. Demands on his time were not that frequent, these days: he was lazy about meetings of the various committees he was on, and had been politely asked to drop himself from the RCM board. Only now was he beginning to realise that entropy had set in: the fewer of these meetings he attended, the fewer the commissions.
Out of sight, out of mind. Whenever they went off the radar for a few days down at Wadhampton Hall to chill out, Milly would come back to two hundred emails. Jack would come back to two or three. Never mind that most of Milly’s were pointless, it was still an indication.
He had the feeling that, were he to write a devastatingly good major work – an opera, say, with a crazy and ironic title like (he amused himself opening a Guardian supplement languishing on his desk and stabbing his finger on a couple of pages, finding adverts both times) A Reasonably Well-Adjusted Dog or The Peculiar Incident of the Fishmonger – well, were he to write this work it would probably be ignored, because he was so out of the swim. It would end up being done in the smaller hall in Cirencester and then disappear. There wasn’t even an avant-garde to make waves with, these days: the only way he could bring attention to himself was by composing something flagrantly anti-Islam or anti-Born-Again Christian; but it would be very unwelcome attention, and possibly fatal. It was like living in the Middle Ages. The delicate sensitivities of the fanatic must not be hurt.
Ultimately, of course, it was his own fault. He had taken the lonely path of the full-time artist, which got lonelier and lonelier by some poxy internal law. Sometimes he thought he might actually have produced more were he a fully-fledged lecturer, especially at some rich college in the States. Or a massively busy festival organiser, his shoulder permanently crooked from the phone, his brain microwaved by the mobile, his voice hoarse from use. You accreted confidence, that way. You gained status, like an ape did. He saw it in trains. Right now he was in no-man’s-land, neither young nor old. When you were old with a big beard and about to die, people rediscovered you, though perhaps not for long.
Trescothick, who’d stroked ball after ball over the boundary line, was caught by Hayden a
t slip. Jack groaned aloud, listening. England were eighty-two after eighteen overs. No sweat.
He preferred cricket on the radio. As a kid, he’d bike about with a tranny Scotched to his handlebars, listening to the commentary. England were slogging away just beautifully. Life could quite often be fairly good. Milly had bought him, for his fortieth, an early nineteenth-century ceramic lantern, yellow and blue, with its original candle still inside; a beautiful object cheering his desk. If England won the Ashes, he would light the candle.
He looked around him at his eyrie in the eaves, sensing like something oversweet the massive dollops of cash sunk in to make it this way – casual chic, as Tim the funky designer called it, with thermal comfort and fine-grained hardwood flooring (FSC certified), and Ligeti playing through the Bose (theoretically, only now there was cricket). It was OK. But it was also killing, because he was not getting it together. But today is today and I am free until the evening to compose, he said to himself, rolling an apple over his desk, sucking on a wine gum – a green one, which was his least favourite flavour. He was supposed to be working on the piece for the Purcell Room inspired by the bus accident in Pond Street on the day of the second bombings, but It’s Just Such a Bad Day, or maybe Echo, was stuck.
He switched off the radio as Strauss cut to the boundary. It was a cruel, self-lacerating act. He swept the pencilled score sheets aside and took a fresh one and bit into the apple and hunkered down and the fragments started to link and mutate and stream out through the day until at least two minutes of music had occurred that had never occurred in the world before. He didn’t do lunch, or not properly: just a graze around one o’clock, catching the score, checking no more Tubes or buses had gone up while he wasn’t around, rolling his shoulders, doing fifteen minutes on the treadmill in the bedroom, saying hi to Marita in the hallway and asking her please, please, to keep her music down if she was staying in, which she wasn’t, she said, smiling at him with her perfect teeth and fridging the tub of cottage cheese he’d forgotten on the kitchen table. Her T-shirt said Expecting Style since 1987.
‘Anticipating,’Jack smiled, almost prodding her chest.
She flinched and looked vaguely alarmed.
‘I mean, instead of Expecting. On your T-shirt.’ His ears were red, he knew it. ‘That’s English for you. It’s weird. You can just miss. Right?’
She was off to the Globe, unbelievably; it was part of her English course.
‘To shee Sexspeare.’
‘The Winter’s Tale?’
‘Shorry?’
‘About a woman who comes back after years away? As a statue? Paint still wet?’
‘Oh my rally shens,’ said Marita, which Jack interpreted about two hours later as ‘human relations’.
The only caller was Trevor Norris, from three doors up, at about half past one. Trevor was eighty-odd, fighting fit and head of the local neighbourhood committee. He gave Jack the impression that if he had been his father he would have sorted him out, but as he was not Jack’s father he would have to keep his mouth shut. It was about the new couple fighting to remove the disabled space in front of their home in Gayton Road. Jack remembered just in time, before he looked as if he was on drugs.
Jack agreed that it was a strange way of going about things, interfering with the neighbourhood before you had even moved in. He heard his voice as Trevor must hear it: Middlesex vowels, immature, failing to be a cool dude.
‘I agree, Trevor, it’s pretty strange.’
‘This was once a community. We looked after each other. Now it’s all self, self, self.’
Trevor Norris swept his pale blue eyes up and down the street like enfilade fire. ‘The rot set in with the coffee shops,’ he said, his eyes now fixed on Jack. ‘El Serrano’s. Dubious men in duffel coats ordering risottos. The rise of the bed-sitting room.’
Jack realised, after a moment’s confusion, that Trevor Norris was talking about the 1950s. Trevor would have been barely thirty years old, his white shock of hair greased down and dark, a rolled umbrella under his arm. The last clatter of deliveries by horse and cart.
He had a nice new Labrador with him, like a guide dog, with an irritating bell on its bright red collar.
‘It’s my chief staff and comfort,’ he said. ‘Meet Spritzy.’
Spritzy mounted Jack’s thigh on trembling back legs as Trevor gave him the brief. The relevant authorities had decided that the disabled space would go, it was all very technical, and Jack made the right scandalised noises while trying to shake off the fervid dog, its heavy, hard chest pressed against his thigh, its tiny bell ringing like a mockery of Pärt’s.
‘All they care about is if the place looks clean,’ said Trevor, moving off towards the gate while Spritzy stayed put on his extendable lead, gagging for a touch more of Jack. ‘And they can’t even get that right.’
The whole day was mostly pro, therefore, right up to the phone call – the only real con being an hour of Edward’s painter-decorator drilling through into a party wall, and the faint whisper of his tranny tuned to the cricket that Jack first excluded by keeping the windows shut, which made it too warm, and then by wearing his moulded ear protectors, which made it hard to hear the phone he didn’t want to answer, anyway – but Milly didn’t like the idea of being out of contact in these ‘in case’ times, so the phone was next to him as he scribbled with his fine pencil on the score sheets right up till she came back home at seven, as totally drained as he was, though for such different reasons: while he was hunched over his desk, way down on the glamour scale, she was shooting up to Hull and back.
‘Hi. How’d it go?’ she sighed, coming up the stairs, head and shoulders appearing beyond the beam. She gave him the dazzling smile bit.
‘OK. And you?’
‘Incredibly irritable,’ she said. ‘I think I need iron. Or magnesium. Or both.’
‘I didn’t listen to the cricket.’
‘So?’
A pang of disappointment, like a little boy expecting praise for not eating his sweets.
‘How was Hull?’
‘Boots, Dixons, Primark, McDonald’s, Waterstone’s, Lunn Poly, Starbucks, Thomas Cook, Top Shop,’ she said, moving her head from side to side like a metronome, her fish-scale earrings swinging. ‘Nice views from the train, though. Nice light on the water.’
‘That’s something,’ he said, feeling envious of what she had seen, of the unimaginable complexity of her day. She had dark rings under her eyes. She helped herself to a wine gum, one of the black ones he’d saved up for himself.
‘You stopping? I need a drink.’
‘Lemme get you a drink, Mill,’ he said, as if he hadn’t heard.
‘Trouble is,’ she said, as she led down the stairs in her bare feet, leaving faint prints of perspiration on the steps, ‘you feel a loon, talking about captured rainwater in the middle of Hull. It’s all like, so ordinary and you’re just the weirdo, imagining the end of the world. Like those smelly guys who used to go round with placards saying The End is Nigh.’
‘Yeah, that’s how I feel,’ said Jack, the reasonable glow of his day shrivelling. ‘A complete weirdo.’
While she changed into her usual combats and sloppy shirt, he splashed a couple of Johnnie Walker Blacks in the front sitting room, one small, one large, and opened a beer for himself: his nip was a chaser. He suddenly felt a need to listen to Ravel. Any Ravel. This happened, sometimes. Or Janáek. Janáek would fire him. But he resisted. Milly would want something else. Something easier.
Sitting on the sofa with her Scotch, Milly asked him how his work had gone. Jack still found her saying ‘work’ with inverted commas around it where he was concerned, even after all these years.
‘Oh, two minutes of pretty good stuff. Non-orchestrated, of course. Out of the blue. Maybe that’s a good title. I’ve dropped the timps, the bombs going off. It was holding up the whole thing. What Roger would call your little darlings. Get rid of your little darlings,’ Jack added, imitating Roger Grove-Carey’
s teacherly growl.
‘Wallace and Gromit,’ said Milly, ‘is even slower. I think about five seconds a day.’
‘Slight difference,’ said Jack, rather stung. He sat down next to her with a grunt, but not touching. ‘I mean, I don’t work in plasticine.’
‘Watch it.’
‘Watch what?’
‘You grunted as you sat.’
‘So?’
‘That’s what our dads do. Sign of age.’
‘Oh, it’s been quite a while now,’ said Jack, not wanting to hear this.
They took a sip accidentally in unison, so Jack let his glass hover at his lips for a bit or it would look comic. The Scotch bayed in his throat and buzzed in his head. Perfect pitch. Mélophone. He was wondering when he could check the final score. He’d watch the highlights tonight.
‘I wasn’t judging,’ Milly said. ‘About your productivity. It’s even better, two minutes.’
‘Yeah, and after all that pain and effort it’ll be played to about thirty people, four of whom will be listening enough to pick up all the subtleties. Two of those four will be academics and hate it and the third will think it’s fairly darn good.’
‘What about the fourth?’
‘That’s me, and I’ll have my head in my hands and I’ll be thinking: God, did I actually write this junk?’
Milly sighed, instead of smiling. ‘Well, at least one person’ll appreciate it.’
‘Great.’
Neither of them said anything for a few moments. Jack thought he could sense the movement of Milly’s journey – the trains, the taxis – in the air around her, in the heat of her form next to his.