by Jonathan Coe
At first you are the only person at the bus-stop. You have allowed several hours for your journey and you feel stupidly optimistic. You whistle a tune. Twenty minutes go by, and then a bus comes, but it’s out of service. Never mind, these are early days yet. An old man joins you at the bus-stop, and asks you if you have been waiting long. You say, about twenty minutes. He nods and lights up a cigarette. You begin to make anagrams out of the words in the advertisements posted up on the other side of the road. You count all the windows in the block of flats to your right. Another twenty minutes go by, and you are beginning to grow impatient. Your foot has started tapping. The old man has finished his cigarette, given up and disappeared. Your legs are beginning to ache, and you shift your weight from one to the other restlessly. Just behind you is a little shop, and the owner, a Cypriot, is standing in the doorway looking at you with this infuriating beatific, knowing smile on his face. He is smiling because he knows – and so do you, although you dare not articulate it to yourself – that your ordeal has barely started yet.
More time passes. You have stopped whistling and you’ve run out of anagrams. You keep looking at your watch: so often, that you know the time it is going to tell you almost to the very second. More people join you at the bus-stop. Some of them give up after a few minutes, and walk on. By now, however hard you try to fight against it, hollow, tearful despair is beginning to well up inside you. An old, old woman goes past, muttering to herself and pulling a little trolley full of dirty washing. You hate her. You hate her because you know that you will be seeing her again. Even though she is walking at the rate of a mile a century, you know that she will have time to go down to the launderette, do three loads of washing, call in on her sister for Sunday lunch, eat the whole meal, wash up, watch the omnibus edition of EastEnders and walk all the way back before the next bus comes. You start thinking of all the things you could have done in the time you have been waiting for this bus. You start adding up all the hours in your life spent waiting for buses that never came. The whole, sorry history of mankind, the entire catalogue of human suffering and misery, seems suddenly crystallized in this futile activity. It makes you want to cry.
By now quite a crowd has gathered at the bus-stop. People are sitting on the pavement, shivering, with their heads in their hands; women are breast-feeding their babies; small children are wailing and moaning and running around in distracted circles. It’s like a scene from a refugee camp. And you are also incredibly hungry. The little Cypriot shop behind you is still open, and you wonder whether you should perform an act of charity, because it is within your power to put all these people out of their misery. Because you know that if you step inside that shop, just for thirty seconds, to buy a bar of chocolate, a bus will immediately come around the corner, and it will have gone again by the time you get outside. There is absolutely no doubt in your mind about this. But at the same time you can’t help wondering if it might be worth taking the risk: given that the bus will appear, not immediately when you enter the shop, but at the precise moment when you hand over your money to the shopkeeper – mightn’t there still be time for you to collect the change, run outside and leap on the bus? It’s worth a try. So you go inside, and you choose a bar of chocolate, and the Cypriot shopkeeper has gone to lunch and left his eight-year-old son to look after the till, and you hand over a fifty-pence piece, and glance anxiously out of the window, and the bus has come, and the little Cypriot boy is scratching his head because he doesn’t have the faintest idea how to subtract twenty-four from fifty, and you shout ‘Twenty-six! Twenty-six!’, and he opens the till but there are no ten - or twenty-pence pieces, and he slowly begins counting the whole thing out in coppers, and you look out of the window and see that the last person is just getting on to the bus, and you shout, ‘Forget it, kid, forget it!’, and run outside just as the bus is pulling away, and the driver sees you but he doesn’t stop for you, because he’s a complete and utter bastard.
What follows is a short burst of hysterical laughter, and then the descent of a strange, immutable calm. It seems deathly quiet after the crowd of people has got on the bus, and there is no longer any traffic of any description on the roads. You look at your watch but it means nothing to you because you have now entered upon a different plane of temporal consciousness in which normal earthly time has no meaning. You feel serene and content. You begin to feel that the arrival of another bus would be unwelcome, because it would break the spell of this new and lovely euphoria. The thought of spending the rest of your life at this bus-stop fills you with benign indifference. Waiting here now seems to have been a rich and fulfilling experience because it has taught you a philosophical detachment which many greater men would envy. You are now master of an heroic fortitude which makes Sir Thomas More on the day of his execution look pathetic and petulant. Your Stoical composure makes Socrates, with the hemlock poised at his lips, look like some neurotic cry-baby. It feels as though nothing on earth has the power to harm you any more.
Just then, something comes around the corner, heading in your direction. It is a taxi, with its yellow light on. Not even bothering to check whether you can afford the fare, you hail it, and jump inside.
*
‘Sorry I’m late,’ I said, nodding apologetically to Chester. ‘I had a bit of trouble catching a bus.’
Harry, Martin, Jake and Chester were all sitting around a small table near the bar. Nobody looked particularly cheerful. Jake had a book open on his lap.
‘That’s all right,’ said Chester. ‘No harm done.’ He smiled at me, straightened his cap, and sipped his beer.
‘I’ll just go and get something to drink,’ I said, ‘since you’ve all got one.’
I was served at the bar by this woman who was fairly new to The White Goat. I’d only seen her two or three times before, and although on one of these occasions we’d had a bit of a chat, I wasn’t sure that she’d remember me. She did, though. She had long, thick auburn hair and a Scottish accent, and her voice was gentle and quiet, like her eyes. I didn’t like to admit it to myself, but I was very attracted to her. I couldn’t work out what she was doing in a place like this, pulling drinks. She seemed abstracted half of the time, her mind on something completely different, and she didn’t talk to most of the customers, which made it twice as odd that she had talked to me. Today I was determined to find out her name.
‘It’s me again,’ I said, unable to think of a witty opening line.
‘Oh, hello. Becks, isn’t it?’
‘That’s right.’ She fetched a bottle from the cold tray. ‘Is there no band today, then?’
‘You missed them. They only played for about forty minutes. They weren’t very good.’
The White Goat had a policy of showcasing new bands on Sunday lunchtimes. The Alaska Factory had played there once, in fact. We had only played for forty minutes and we hadn’t been very good. I was glad that this had been before her time.
‘Are you a friend of Chester’s?’ she asked.
‘That’s right. Do you know him?’
‘I’m getting to know him. He comes in here all the time. Very strange company he keeps, sometimes. All sorts of shady-looking characters.’
‘Chester’s our manager.’
‘Oh? You’re a musician, too?’
‘Yes, I’m a pianist really.’ I jerked my thumb in the direction of the others. ‘We just do this for a laugh.’
‘They don’t seem to be laughing much,’ she said, looking over at them.
‘Well, we’re going through a bit of a crisis right now. You know, stagnating, that sort of thing.’
‘That’s a shame.’
I shrugged. ‘It’s nothing that a few minor personnel changes wouldn’t put right. We need a new guitarist, and a new drummer.’ She handed me my drink. ‘And probably a new singer, too.’
‘Uh-huh.’ Then she said, in an off-hand way, ‘I sing a bit.’
‘Really?’
‘Well, I used to. I still do, now and again.’
‘All sorts of things.’
‘I see.’ I watched her, increasingly fascinated, as she counted out my change. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Karla. Karla with a K.’
‘I’m William.’
‘Hello, William.’ She pressed the change into my hand.
‘Are you singing with anyone at the moment? A band or anything?’
‘No, nothing like that.’
I tried to imagine her singing. Perhaps she would have a breathy voice, redolent of smoke-filled cafés and sad, sensual ballads from the thirties and forties. Perhaps her voice would be bright and clear, like a Scottish stream, and she would sing folk songs and good, strong tunes from her native country.
‘Where are you from?’ I asked.
‘I’m from Mull,’ she said. ‘Originally. We moved to the mainland when I was quite small, though. Haven’t been back to the island in years.’
I took a breath and said, ‘Look – maybe we should get together and do some songs some time.’ These words sounded tacky even as I spoke them. ‘I could accompany you.’
‘I think your friends are getting impatient,’ said Karla.
I followed her gaze and saw that they were all staring at us. Harry made a ‘come here’ gesture with his eyes. I went over to join them and Karla started serving another customer.
Chester said, ‘Do you think you can spare us some of your time, or are you too busy chatting up women?’
‘I was only getting myself a drink.’
‘We’ve got some serious talking to do,’ said Martin. He was the only person in the pub that afternoon to be wearing a tie.
‘What about?’
‘The band.’
‘There seems to be a general consensus,’ said Harry, ‘that we’ve got ourselves into a bit of a rut.’
The whole business of sitting around a table and discussing something so trivial seemed suddenly ludicrous. There was an upright piano standing against one of the walls and I was seized by a powerful urge to go over and play something on it, just to get away from them all. But I stayed where I was.
‘Chester’s been saying,’ Harry continued, ‘that we need to do two things. One, we need to break on to vinyl. We’ve got to get a record company interested, so it’s essential that we record a good demo on Tuesday.’
‘Fine,’ I said, yawning. I was thinking of how nice it would be to accompany Karla on a version of ‘My Funny Valentine’, leaving her to take care of the tune while I filled it out with rich harmonies, constantly surprising and pleasing her with unexpected changes and variations.
‘Two,’ said Harry, ‘we’ve got to improve our stage act. The reason the audience was so aggressive last time is that we didn’t have any authority. We didn’t impose ourselves on them.’
‘Come off it,’ I said. ‘The problem with last time was that we were playing to a crowd of psychos and drillerkillers. Hitler would have had trouble establishing authority with that lot.’
‘All Harry’s trying to say,’ said Chester, ‘is that you’ve got to think harder about how you present yourselves.’
There was a pause.
‘And what does that mean, exactly?’ I asked.
‘Harry and I have been thinking,’ said Martin, ‘and we think you ought to stand up on stage.’
‘What?’
‘That stool you sit on when you’re playing the keyboard,’ said Harry. ‘It’s got to go.’
‘I don’t believe this,’ I said. ‘Our audience consists of the London branch of the Myra Hindley fan club and you think they’re going to be stunned into submission by the sight of me getting up from my chair?’
‘We’re not just talking about last time. It’s a question of the whole… concept of the band.’
‘It’s about attitude,’ said Martin, ‘and dynamics.’
‘Well forgive my naivety,’ I said, ‘but I always thought it was about music.’
‘The music’s fine,’ said Martin. ‘There’s nothing wrong with the music. We’re talking eye-levels here.’
‘If I stand up, I can’t use my pedals.’
‘We both stand up,’ said Harry, ‘and we manage to use our pedals.’
‘I’m sorry, this is just incredible to me. I mean, next you’re going to be asking me to wear one of those keyboards around my neck, like I was selling ice-cream.’
‘We just want you to stand up, that’s all.’
‘You think Vladimir Ashkenazy has to stand up when he’s playing the Moonlight Sonata? To establish his authority?’
‘That’s different,’ said Jake. ‘A classical pianist establishes authority through a set of quite distinctive signs, such as the suit he wears, and the way he walks on to the stage and sits down. It’s a question of semiotics.’
‘Whose side are you on?’ I asked.
‘Yours, actually.’
The others looked at him in surprise.
‘I think Bill should carry on sitting down. Otherwise it upsets the balance. At the moment we’ve got two people standing up and two people sitting down. That communicates poise, and equilibrium.’
‘Fuck equilibrium,’ said Martin. ‘Think feet and inches.’
I stood up.
‘This is completely ridiculous.’
‘William, will you for God’s sake sit down!’ shouted Harry.
‘I thought you wanted me to stand up.’
‘I want you to stand up now and sit down on stage. I mean, I want you to sit down now and stand up on stage!’
‘Cool it boys, will you?’ said Chester. ‘There’s no point in losing our tempers.’
‘Why don’t you just get yourselves a taller keyboard player and be done with it?’
‘We’re not getting personal about this, Bill. We value your contribution to the band. You know that.’
I sighed. ‘Does anybody want another drink?’
It turned out that everybody wanted another drink, except me: I had only asked because I wanted to go up to the bar and talk to Karla again. I wasn’t even able to do that, because Chester and Harry insisted on sharing the next round. While they were away, rather than talking to the other two, I sat down at the piano. Much to my surprise, it was unlocked. There was no jukebox in the pub and the level of conversation was high enough for me to be able to play softly without anybody noticing.
I played through the first eight bars of ‘Tower Hill’ twice, and my finger rested on the last note, the high E flat. I still hadn’t managed to get any further. But now some part of me remembered a harmony I had heard once – a minor seventh chord, with the melody starting a fourth above the root. In which case, E flat would give… B flat minor seven. I tried it. It sounded nice. A melodic figure came quite readily:
Harmonizing this was easy. All it needed in the second half of the bar was to flatten the fifth. It never ceases to delight me that you can alter a chord by just one semitone and produce a completely different effect like that. This figure would come to rest, of course, on a C natural, with an A flat major seven being held for the whole bar. That C natural also gave me the clue for the next development – a repeat of the previous two bars, only a minor third lower, and with a C seven substituted for the second chord. The pattern of the melody stayed broadly the same, too, so that the whole four-bar sequence now played like this:
I was beginning to feel pleased with this piece – not because it was in any way original, or because it was anything special technically, but because it was coming to express my feelings towards Madeline very clearly. I wondered if I should play it to her when it was finished, and explain that it was written with her in mind. Perhaps then she would understand the dissatisfactions I felt, the frustration and the longing to get closer.
But it was a long time since I had played the piano to Madeline. After our first meeting, when it had been music which brought us together, I had assumed that it would always be like that – that it would always be an area of shared understanding between
us. As it turned out, I was being naive. When I started playing the piano at Mrs Gordon’s house, the first time that Madeline allowed me to visit her there, she came running into the room and told me to stop in case it woke the old lady up. It was a lovely old Bechstein grand, too.
‘What’s the matter?’ I said. ‘Didn’t you like what I was playing?’
‘She’s asleep. You’ll wake her.’
It was early evening: the beginning of the end of a bright summer’s day. I had come straight over from the record shop and the smell of the City was just starting to wash off. I couldn’t believe my luck, to be spending the evening in such a nice part of town, with such a lovely woman, in such a beautiful house. There were huge oil paintings on the walls in every room – family portraits, Madeline told me – and heavy red velvet curtains and Regency furniture, and splendid marble fireplaces topped with gilt-framed mirrors. I had seen nothing like it since the days when my parents used to take me around stately homes.
‘I’ve made some tea,’ she said. ‘Shall we go upstairs?’
She had a large, sunny room on the second floor, as well as a bathroom and a small kitchen all to herself. She served Earl Grey tea in bone china cups and didn’t offer me milk or sugar. There was a television, a telephone, a hi-fi, a large single bed, a writing desk, a dressing-table and two high-backed but comfortable armchairs. The walls were decorated with nineteenth-century landscapes. It was a warm and friendly room but it said nothing about Madeline herself, except that she was obviously happy not to impose her own personality on to it. One slightly unexpected feature was that a small crucifix had been placed on top of the dressing-table.