Street Song

by Wilkinson, Sheena;

  This part of Belfast on a Sunday morning was silent and grubby. There was a shortcut through the gate in the wall, which led to a long, traffic-choked road I usually avoided, even though it got me to Toni’s end of town more quickly than walking though the city centre, but today I took it. It was quieter than usual and its long uphill drag tired me out enough to give me something to focus on apart from what I was about to do. It also warmed me up – which was good, because it was the kind of day when you really needed a coat, and I didn’t have one. Well, I did. I had coats and dry shoes and a laptop and a bed I could lie in all day if I wanted, and an en suite bathroom and everything. Three hours away. And today, crushed by my first real hangover in months, I had a moment’s wobble when I walked past the bus station.

  I didn’t want to be the boy with the hangover. The boy who woke up worrying about what he’d done the night before. RyLee had had a lot of mornings like that. And despite how rough I felt right now, I knew my chances of not being that boy were a lot better up here.

  About a mile away from Toni’s I realised it was only half nine, which was too early to call on someone on a Sunday morning. I went into the nearest café – it was Kopi, where I’d been on my very first day in Belfast, and even though it was more expensive than the cafés I usually went to these days, I hoped it might be a good omen. Maybe Marysia had stayed over – maybe, just like that other day, she’d have to go to Mass, and Toni might walk her there and come in here …

  But probably not. I ordered a tea, and had a nasty twist of nausea when a waitress walked past me with a steaming plate of eggs.

  My memory of last night was in shifting fragments, but up to and including the kiss, I remembered everything. So what exactly had I done? I’d kissed a girl who hadn’t wanted me to. Who thought I was just a player. A girl I was in love with but who was never going to feel the same way, and who was in fact possibly in love with her best friend. A girl who’d given me the chance to play the best music ever. A girl who had made me feel like Cal Ryan was a decent, talented human being. A girl I’d do anything not to lose.

  26

  Queen Jane looked surprised and not that delighted to see me on her doorstep.

  ‘Toni has a lot of work to do,’ she said.

  ‘I just need to talk to her for five minutes,’ I said. I tried out RyLee’s lopsided, apologetic smile, but I might as well not have bothered. Louise always fell for that smile – even after everything I’d put her through – but Jane was made of sterner stuff. Like her daughter.

  ‘Five minutes,’ she said.

  She showed me into the kitchen, and called, ‘Toni!’ I sat at the kitchen table and remembered the first morning I’d been here. The room smelt of coffee and bacon, and Billy was crouched over his dish, lapping water with a delicate tongue.

  Toni appeared in leggings and a big jumper, her hair damp.

  ‘Oh,’ she said.

  ‘I’ve explained to Cal that you have to work today, that you can’t be giving all your time to this band,’ Queen Jane said. She poured coffee from the cafetière and set a mug down in front of me. I spooned three sugars in.

  ‘He’s not staying,’ Toni said.

  ‘We had an argument last night,’ I said to Queen Jane. ‘My fault. I just wanted to apologise.’ I didn’t even try to access RyLee’s smile repertoire.

  ‘I’ll leave you to it.’ Queen Jane took her coffee and headed for the door. ‘Tell Marysia I’ll give her a lift home after The Archers.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said the moment the kitchen door closed behind her. ‘I shouldn’t have …’ I looked down at the table. But what should I not have done? What would happen if I told her the truth – that I kissed her because I was in love with her?

  Toni blew into her mug and sat down opposite me, cupping her hands round her coffee mug.

  ‘We don’t need – complications – in the band,’ Toni said.

  ‘Is there someone else?’ I asked, which I thought was a subtle way to let her tell me if she and Marysia were more than friends.

  She made an exasperated noise. ‘Why do boys always assume that? If I don’t want you it has to be because I have somebody else? Well, I don’t. I just don’t – I don’t feel that way about you.’

  ‘You did kiss me back. From what I remember.’

  ‘I did not,’ she snapped. ‘And like you said – sometimes it’s just nothing.’

  OK, now I really wasn’t going to admit I was in love with her – I had some pride – but I didn’t want her thinking that the kiss had been nothing to me.

  ‘The music last night was brilliant,’ I said. ‘You felt it too, didn’t you?’

  She nodded.

  ‘I suppose it went to my head. I felt so – so close to you.’

  For a moment her lips relaxed into a smile, but then she said, ‘And where were you when we were talking to Matt? We’re meant to be a band. Do things together. Things like talking to journalists, I mean. Oh yes, I remember: you were getting off with Jess. Did you feel close to her too?’

  I put my hands up like a captured prisoner. ‘Look, I’m sorry about the journalist. I guess I’m – well, I’m not that comfortable with talking about myself. I just want to play the music. You and Marysia are the main men – I mean, women. Can we just pretend last night didn’t happen? And carry on the way we were? It’s not that long till the final.’

  ‘Five weeks,’ she said. ‘So can you keep your hands and your lips and – well, everything else to yourself for five weeks?’

  I gripped my mug tighter. ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Christ, you’re not that irresistible.’

  I wished that was true.

  27

  A bright, chilly October Saturday. I pulled Toni’s rainbow scarf tighter round my neck and shoved my free hand into my hoody pocket as I ran down the hostel steps into the street. I’d need to invest in some winter gear. Even my feet were starting to feel cold in my battered Converse. I thought of my clothes at home, sheepskin-lined boots and padded coats all waiting in my wardrobe. If I could spirit myself back there, grab all I needed and magic them back to my room at the Crossroads, I’d be totally sorted. But I was scared if I walked back into that house I’d never be able to walk back out again. And even if Toni was never going to feel the way I did, at least I could prove to her I wasn’t going to let her down.

  Anyway, Cal Ryan didn’t care about designer coats: there were such things as charity shops.

  The coat choices in Oxfam on Botanic Avenue weren’t extensive – I could go down the old-man’s tweed overcoat route (which had a kind of indie rock star retro chic but also smelt like the old man might actually have died in it, or at least experienced some loss of bodily control), or the puffy anorak in a fetching sludge-green. I held one coat in each hand, frowning, and in the end I paid £5.50 for the green monstrosity and left the tweed one (an inflated £8.00) for some hipster who could afford dry cleaning.

  I can’t pretend I cut a fine figure in the anorak but I was warm and anonymous as I wandered up towards the university. I’d busked in the Botanic Gardens a few times at weekends and it had been a change from the streets, with families coming out of the museum and couples walking through the park.

  ‘Don’t you get fed up busking all day and then rehearsing with us?’ Toni had asked me once when I’d turned up to rehearse with my fingers almost bleeding.

  ‘I don’t mind. It’s good practice.’

  ‘But people mostly busk for the craic,’ she had persisted. ‘It’s not a job.’

  ‘I need to earn money and this is the easiest way.’ I had sucked the sorest fingertip.

  ‘But it’s so – so hand to mouth,’ she’d said. ‘What happens if nobody gives you anything?’

  I’d shrugged, because that was one of my deepest fears, and deepest fears, whatever they tried to tell us in there, are best left unspoken. ‘It’ll be grand,’ I’d said, and it became a kind of Polly’s Tree catchphrase. ‘It’ll be grand,’ Marysia would say when Toni fretted that the
new song she was working on wouldn’t come right. ‘It’ll be grand,’ Toni said in a poor imitation of my accent when her mum refused to let her go to the Bluebell for more gig practice. ‘We’ll find a weekend gig instead.’

  And amazingly, we did – one of the teachers at their school, who’d liked us at the Malawi concert, asked Polly’s Tree to play at her daughter’s wedding when the real band all went down with salmonella. It was a tough gig, and they hadn’t wanted our original songs – though we shoved a few in when they were all too drunk to notice. But my busking experience came into its own – for the first time I had to do most of the lead vocals – and best of all we were paid £400 between us. It was the first time I’d had proper money for ages, and so that I wouldn’t be tempted to spend it on rubbish I’d given most of it to Beany to pay for the next few weeks’ B&B. I was booked in until the day after the Backlash final. After that – well, I wasn’t thinking about it. He hadn’t asked me to do any cleaning since my lapse – mainly because he wasn’t busy, but also I sensed that he regretted giving me special treatment. Once you were out of Beany’s good books it was hard to get back in.

  Today in the Botanic Gardens was rubbish. After an hour of my hands freezing – fingerless gloves were next on my winter-proofing shopping list –with 57p and a Lithuanian coin to show for it, I gave up and started on the long walk back to Crossroads.

  Beany was squinting at his computer screen, checking in a group of giggling girls with ironed hair cascading from pink Stetsons, and cheap bright pink bomber jackets with PAULA’S HEN WEEKEND embroidered on the backs. They all turned when I walked in, showing bright orange faces.

  ‘Ah, brilliant. Is the entertainment laid on?’ one of them shrieked in an English accent.

  ‘Never mind your guitar, you can play me anytime,’ said another one and they all cackled.

  ‘See you later, big boy,’ they shouted after me, as I went past down the corridor that led to the safety of my room. I guessed the place would be rowdy later. They’d be hogging the bathrooms for the next couple of hours, then they’d head out on the town in five-inch stilettos with half-bottles of vodka shoved inside their handbags. I’d wait until the place was quiet then go and watch TV in the lounge.

  So eight o’clock saw me heading for the lounge with a bowl of pasta and pesto – I was getting good at that – and a bottle of cheap beer, and expecting to have it to myself. I didn’t think there was anyone staying apart from Paula’s Hen Party, so I was surprised to push open the door and hear, above the roar of a TV talent show – for a moment I thought it was PopIcon but it was something American – voices in a foreign language. From the big old squashy sofa, two blond heads looked round, a boy and girl about my age.

  ‘Hello,’ the girl said. She had a snub nose and round glasses, and wore combat trousers, Birkenstocks and a fleece. Her boyfriend – they were holding hands – was dressed almost identically. They both looked pink and smiley and scrubbed.

  I sat down on the spare sofa and balanced my plate on my knee.

  ‘Are you staying here also?’ the boy asked.

  ‘Yeah.’ I wasn’t in the mood for chatting with strangers, but they were like puppies wanting to play.

  ‘And you are Irish?’ the girl asked as if this was something really exotic.

  I sighed. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘We’re from Germany. We’re so excited to be in Belfast! This is our first evening.’

  Then why are you wasting it sitting in a dingy hostel lounge watching shite TV? I stuck my fork into my pasta and shovelled it into my mouth.

  But Florian and Julia didn’t seem to notice that I wasn’t up for chatting. They were travelling round Ireland, starting in the north, and they loved folk music and Irish culture, and they’d driven over from Germany, yes, all the way, up through England and over from Liverpool on the ferry in their little Polo. Had I not seen it parked outside? And they were so tired! And the crossing had been rough, so they were having a rest this evening. They would have an early night. Good luck with that, I thought, imagining what Paula’s Hen Party would sound like six hours from now. And they thought the Crossroads was very – what was the word – basic, and it had looked much nicer on the Internet, but they liked places with character.

  ‘We want to see the real Ireland and the real people,’ Florian explained.

  ‘But this—’ Julia waved at the TV. ‘We have this in Germany also. It’s very popular.’

  On screen an overweight girl with obvious hair extensions and no obvious musical talent wailed through ‘I Will Always Love You’ in front of orange-tanned judges. ‘You made that your own!’ said Orange 1. Orange 2 looked at her in disbelief. ‘Well, that’s one way of putting it,’ he said, and the studio audience booed.

  I turned away and concentrated on my pasta.

  ‘Are you on holiday too?’ Julia asked.

  ‘Not really. I’ve been here a while. It’s cheap and cheerful.’ I don’t know why I said cheerful; it wasn’t, especially not in here, with its brown velvet curtains and mismatched beige sofas. You wouldn’t think shades of beige could clash, but they really can.

  ‘So where should we go?’ Julia asked. ‘We want to see the Titanic Centre, of course, and the famous murals—’

  ‘And hear some real Irish music. I have been teaching myself the Irish drum – the bodhrán,’ Florian said, only he pronounced it bod-ran so it took me a second to work out what he meant. I didn’t think walking through the streets round the Crossroads with a bodhrán, however mispronounced, was the smartest move, so I told them that. I also had a pile of leaflets in my room, from the days when Toni had appointed herself my virtual tour guide, and I said they could have them. Most of the things Toni had suggested cost money, and the Belfast I’d discovered was mostly of streets and cheap cafés.

  ‘Ah, you are so kind!’ Julia said. ‘We’re so lucky to have met you.’

  Over the next few days, she said this several more times: when I told them there was a traditional session in the Amsterdam on a Monday (and that they shouldn’t assume their bodhrán would be welcomed); when I advised them that the street outside the Crossroads wasn’t the safest place to park their car – there’d been three cars stolen in the weeks I’d been there – but that the street next to it was better; when I showed them how the radiator worked – theirs had the same eccentric ways as mine.

  They were grateful and I liked feeling I wasn’t the rookie outsider any more. Beany was pleased too, because they took to hanging round his counter when he was checking his online bets and asking him involved questions about Northern Irish politics, so the more I took them off his hands the happier he was. Not that I knew the first thing about Northern Irish politics, but I didn’t mind letting them waffle on while I zoned out.

  It wasn’t like having friends. It wasn’t like Toni and Marysia, but it was better than nothing. And when Toni phoned me, uncharacteristically squeaky with excitement, to say her mum was away for two days at a marking conference, and that there was nothing to stop us going to the open mic at the Bluebell, it seemed only fair to mention it to them.

  The crowd at the Bluebell was similar to the one that had been there the time I’d gone on my own, though I couldn’t help being relieved that The Maloners weren’t there, which meant no Olivia.

  There were several earnest songwriters with neck beards and whining songs. Marysia and I got the giggles over one, whose three songs were all about a girl called Imelda. Apart from the fact that in the first one he fancied her, in the second one he shagged her (though he didn’t put it like that), and in the third one she dumped him, they seemed identical. Certainly the chord sequences were. His rhymes were so predictable that we started guessing the end of every line. And if you think nothing rhymes with Imelda, you’re wrong. It became a game – you had to take a drink if you got it wrong. Toni, who was driving her mum’s car and kept looking out the window to check it hadn’t been nicked, got more and more disapproving. ‘The writer of “Jenny” is hardly in a pos
ition to comment on other people’s songwriting,’ she said. Her lips were tight; they didn’t look at all like the lips that I’d kissed. I tried not to think about how much I wanted to kiss them again.

  Marysia raised her eyebrows at me. ‘PMT,’ she mouthed.

  ‘TMI,’ I mouthed back.

  Toni frowned. ‘Have you tuned up?’ she asked. ‘We’re on next. At least he’ll be an easy act to follow.’

  I saluted. ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  Florian and Julia looked from one to the other of us in bemusement.

  ‘Did you get new strings?’ Toni went on. ‘They sounded really dead on Friday.’

  ‘Not yet.’ I would have to make a trip to Frets for the first time since I met Shania in there. Playing for hours every day meant I went through strings pretty quickly, and all I had left were the six on the guitar. This week it had been a choice between the coat and new strings and the coat had won. But who knew, maybe I’d make a fortune tomorrow.

  ‘Don’t let her boss you so much,’ Marysia said, wrinkling her nose at Toni.

  ‘She knows I love it really,’ I said.

  I didn’t love it. I’d never liked bossy girls and I’d had years of being controlled by Ricky. But two things made it all bearable: the fact that, even though she could be an uptight cow who talked to me like I was five, Toni was also the sparkiest girl I’d ever met and when she smiled at me something gave way inside me. And – probably more importantly – the moment we played the first chord onstage, and our voices and guitars blended – all three of us – I was happy in a way I’d never been.

  A few people in the audience recognised us now, because of Backlash, though thank God we weren’t as well known as Toni had hoped. Despite her best efforts, Matt’s article hadn’t gone viral. We need our music out there online, she kept saying, but she was too busy with her schoolwork to do anything about it, which suited me fine. Busking was OK; playing in a low-key local competition was OK. Being all over the Internet – no way.