by Jonathan Coe
No it wasn’t. I looked up and saw, above the row of shops on the opposite side of the road, an open window. One of those shops had a sign which said ‘Videos – For Sale Or For Hire’. A memory clicked into place and I rose quickly to my feet: Karla. Of course. This tune was Scottish, you could tell that just by listening to it, and the words, although I couldn’t understand them, sounded as though they might have been Gaelic. Many months later, in fact, I discovered the words to this song, which is called ‘The Sailor’s Longing’. They included these lines:
Nuair chì mi eun a’falbh air sgiath,
Bu mhiann leam bhith ’na chuideachd:
Gu’n deanainn cùrs’ air tìr mo rùin,
Far bheil an sluagh ri fuireach.
Translating them into English would give you something like this:
When I see a bird taking to wing,
I long to fly off with it:
I’d set my course to the land I love,
The land my people dwell in.
I stood and listened to her voice for I don’t know how long. It seemed the most beautiful thing I had ever heard. The tune spoke of such certainty and fitness, the voice was so pure, that I forgot, in a moment, everything. I even forgot that I was drunk. It spoke to me, and what it told me was exactly what I had wanted to hear. And when it was over, leaving nothing but that strange busy stillness, I no longer wanted or needed to speak to Karla. Not then. Not now.
I had heard her sing.
Turnaround
you left your girlfriend on the platform
with this really ragged notion that you’d return
but she knows that when he goes
he really goes
MORRISSEY,
London
‘I’d set my course to the land I love, The land my people dwell in.’ Well, I still wasn’t ready for that: I wasn’t going to let London defeat me, yet. But my thoughts did turn back towards home the next day, and I was reminded, with a clarity I hadn’t counted on, of some scenes from my past life which I had been doing my best to ignore. The reason for this was the arrival, sooner than I had expected, of a letter from Derek.
It wasn’t just a letter, in fact, but a parcel; and the first thing I found when I opened it was a record – a seven-inch single. The A-side was called ‘Violent Life’; the B-side was ‘Insomnia’. It was credited to a band called The Dwarves of Death.
A letter was folded up inside the picture sleeve; I took it out and started reading.
Dear Bill,
Nice to hear from you – at long last. What with nobody getting a peep out of you up here, and seeing as how you haven’t cropped up on Top of the Pops yet, rumours have been flying around the homestead that you must have fallen into the Thames and floated off to that great recording studio in the sky. But it turns out that you’re alive and well and living in Bohemian squalor. We’re all very relieved, I can tell you.
Well, you’re probably wondering about the contents of this parcel. It’s just another example of the astonishing efficiency of the Derek Tooley Musical Information Service Inc. All Your Pop Questions Answered. ‘Name That Tune’ Contestants Briefed. Fast, Reliable and Germ-Free. Your friend is absolutely right. There was indeed a band called The Dwarves of Death – one of those hundreds of forgotten little bands who sprang up during the punk era, made a couple of cheap indie singles, and disappeared without trace. Forgotten, that is, to all but a handful of memorabilia maniacs like myself. I don’t have a copy of the record your friend mentioned, ‘Black and Blue’, but I do remember it. The one you hold in your sweaty little hand at the moment (assuming it hasn’t got lost in the post, in which case the Post Office are in for a good hiding) is even rarer. It was their second (and last) single, put out on a label which even I’ve never come across anywhere else – probably their own. It must have been a pressing of about 100, and they may well have sold at least 6 or 7.
When you listen to this record you will find that the Dwarves tended to shun the finer feelings of the human spirit and were not given to subtlety or delicate shades of expression. ‘Violent Life’ offers a two-minute vision of Glasgow as urban hell: rape, mugging, gang-fights and drug abuse seem to be its main points of reference. It seems, however, like a gentle pastoral idyll beside the B-side, ‘Insomnia’, which, insofar as the lyrics can be made out, seems to consist of a woman screaming into the microphone at her ex-lover about how she hopes he’ll never have a proper night’s sleep again. It’s a bit like listening to chalk being scraped across a blackboard.
Incidentally, your friend’s memory is playing tricks if he thinks that the band had any bona fide dwarves in it. I can’t remember the exact line-up but this seems to me highly unlikely. As for those weird hooded figures on the cover of the single, it must have been a publicity shot. They got their name (aren’t you lucky to have a friend who can remember things like this?) from a newspaper headline in the Glasgow Herald which became quite a legend at the time. Apparently these two men – brothers – had just been arrested on charges of breaking and entering and armed robbery: they had gone into a warehouse at night and tied up the security guard and tried to shoot him but the gun had backfired and wounded one of them in the arm. They were both only about 3′6″ and were known in the area for a string of burglary offences which involved climbing through tiny windows, but they were pretty bad at it and were always getting caught. Vicious but incompetent, in other words. Anyway, they were convicted on the evidence of this security guard, and would probably have been forgotten altogether if that sarcastic headline hadn’t stuck. Even now I can’t remember their real names or how long they were sent down for.
OK, that’s enough pages from the scrapbook of musical history to be going on with. Show the record to your friend, just to settle the argument, and bring it home with you next time you come back up to Sheffield.
There was more to the letter but time was getting on and I was going to be late for work. I put the single on to my turntable, though, and turned up the volume so I could hear it from the kitchen while I was boiling the kettle. The record sleeve consisted of a rather grainy photograph showing this androgynous-looking figure – you could just about tell from her shape that it was a woman – standing with her back to the camera looking out over a river. Standing on either side of her, at the water’s edge, were two little people dressed in matching cloaks, with hoods shielding their faces. The overall effect was decidedly sinister, but the dwarves could easily have been superimposed on to the picture, I thought.
The music turned out to be a routine blast of low-grade punk, with a particularly nasty vocal over the top. That sort of thing sets my teeth on edge, I must say. The B-side was even worse, because there wasn’t even any accompaniment apart from a drumbeat. I half expected Tina to come out from her room and tell me to turn it down; but, as usual, my only communication with Tina that morning was via a note:
Dear W, I may see you this evening because I feel awful and won’t be going into work. Sorry about the bathroom I’ll clean it up. I’ve pulled the plug on the answering machine if that’s all right because I don’t want any messages. Please be quiet in the morning. Love T.
This note, so different in tone from her usual cheerful messages, left me very unsettled. Even the handwriting seemed shaky and untidy. I read it through a couple of times but couldn’t concentrate very well because of the awful screeching that was coming from my bedroom; so I ran inside and turned the record off. In the ensuing silence, I re-read the note and it seemed more disturbing than ever. Was Tina all right? Should I go into her room and see? No, surely not. Perhaps I would get a chance to find out if I spoke to her that evening: but I didn’t want to stay in that evening. I wanted to meet Harry and go to The White Goat, so I could show him the record, and (of course) see Karla. Should I put this visit off, and stay in with Tina instead?
I decided against it and set off for work, taking the single with me in a plastic carrier-bag. As an afterthought, I plugged the answering machine in again. I w
asn’t going to let Tina’s whims spoil my chances of getting a job.
*
At lunchtime I phoned Harry and arranged to meet him for a drink that evening; and I read the rest of Derek’s letter.
Nothing much has happened up here that will appear exciting to a big-city dweller like yourself. I’m still working down at Harper’s and there’s talk of me becoming deputy shop-steward next year. The job is fairly safe but you have to keep your ear to the ground round here as you never know who is going to get the chop next. Meanwhile I’m always on the look-out for jobs with bigger firms, and I even had an interview in Manchester a couple of months ago, but it didn’t come to anything. Too many people chasing too few jobs, as usual.
The music business seems to be in as shocking a state as ever, with accountants and stock-brokers holding sway and post-modernist pirates rifling through old record collections looking for anything half-way decent from the sixties that can be plundered and decked out in 1980s fashions. I trust this will all be put to rights when the biscuit factory or whatever you’re called gets its act together and takes the charts by storm. My only advice is this: for God’s sake find yourselves a good hairdresser.
That’s it for now and I hope maybe to hear from you sometime in the next ten years. Keep on rocking, and all that, and look after yourself.
Regards,
Derek.
P.S. I’ve seen Stacey a few times recently and she’s looking happy and as well as ever. In fact I saw her last night and told her I’d had your letter and asked if there was any message. She said, ‘Don’t forget the phone, Bill.’ – D.
I smiled at this message, which I recognized as being at once a rebuke and a coded intimacy. It was one of those not particularly witty or original jokes which you will always find in the private language of lovers. I couldn’t even remember when we first started using it. It must have been after I had become a student, I suppose: when I was at Leeds.
The funny thing about me and Stacey, it seems to me now, is that we never really split up. We broke off the engagement, yes, but we didn’t actually stop seeing each other. My memory of the order in which things happened starts to get very confused here. Feelings ran deep between Stacey and me but they were never overt. Decisions were taken, often quite major decisions, without either of us realizing it, sometimes, and certainly without a lot of discussion or heart-searching. I can remember telling her that I had decided to leave Boots and go to university in Leeds, and she accepted the idea without a murmur of disagreement. I suppose it wasn’t as if I was going to be far away. Perhaps that was the first time, round about then, that she said, ‘Don’t forget the phone, Bill.’
If I were to call Stacey down to earth, it wouldn’t be because she was unglamorous. On the contrary, with her cropped but slightly curly black hair, her wide shoulders and slender hips, she was always attracting attention from men. And if I were to call her uncomplaining, I wouldn’t want it to sound as though she was weak, or had no mind of her own. Maybe a better word would be ‘unflappable’. A slightly worrying theory occurs to me, which is that she saw right into the heart of me from day one, knew me through and through, knew exactly what to expect from me and so was never surprised when I behaved badly or put a difficult decision before her. In all my floundering, all my efforts to carve out a life for myself up there, she was always one step ahead of me. I dare say she’d already worked out for herself that it would be a good idea if I went to university, and was just waiting for me to realize it too.
We were engaged by then, but perhaps even so she saw it as the beginning of the end of our relationship, and accepted the fact, as readily as she accepted the prospect of my frequent absences. We continued to see each other, most weekends – sometimes in Leeds but more usually in Sheffield, where we would stay either with her family or mine, taking pleasure in being under the same roof even though provincial proprieties would not allow us to share a bed. Every Sunday, if it was a reasonable day, we would go walking up on the dales. Our favourite was to take a bus out to The Fox House, and then walk down the valley to Grindleford railway station, just by the Totley tunnel. It was a walk which could change dramatically with every season, and we did it in deep snow and bright sunshine; the leaves brilliant with the colours of spring or turning to copper against blue, autumnal skies.
That was how things were for the first couple of terms, anyway. When did it start to go wrong? When did we realize – long after the event, presumably – that we had become no more than a habit to one another, that the freshness and the admiration which we had taken for granted had faded into mere tolerance? To a sort of lazy familiarity, in fact, which was worse than indifference. I can’t even remember which of us suggested breaking off the engagement; what I can remember (and it seems peculiar, at this distance) is that we were more affectionate towards each other, that evening, than we had been for months. After that, there was a gradual drifting apart. Maybe she was seeing somebody else, or maybe she thought I was. I went back to Leeds to start my second year, continued to write to her occasionally, even saw her once or twice at weekends. We weren’t in each other’s thoughts much, for a while.
The last time I really spoke to her was the weekend I came down to Sheffield to say goodbye to my parents. We went on the same walk again, even though it was a grey and misty morning, and as we sat beside the edge of the stream, eating the sandwiches which Stacey’s mother had made for us, I told her:
‘I’ve decided to give up my degree.’
‘I know,’ she said.
‘Who told you?’
‘Derek. You’re going to go down to London, and become a musician.’
‘Are you surprised?’
‘No. I thought you might.’
I turned to her and said, earnestly, as she munched an egg mayonnaise sandwich, ‘I just think that if I don’t try now, I may be leaving it too late. I mean, chemistry’s something I can always come back to, and – ’
She interrupted me.
‘You don’t have to justify yourself to me, Bill. I know the kind of person you are. I think it’s good.’
I smiled, thankful, and didn’t try to explain further.
‘Have you got somewhere to stay?’
‘Tony – my piano teacher – he’s down there now. His sister-in-law’s got a flat and that’ll do to be going on with.’
‘When are you going?’
‘Soon. Next week some time.’
Stacey said, ‘Let me know when. Will you, please? Will you be going from here?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ll take some time off work. I’ll come and see you off at the station.’
‘Don’t be silly, you don’t have to do that.’
‘I want to, though. I think it’s important.’
And so she was there at the station that morning, along with my mother. We didn’t get a chance to talk properly – you never do, on these occasions – and I can’t remember much that we said; but I’d be surprised if she didn’t find time to take me aside at some point and say – smiling, of course – ‘Don’t forget the phone, Bill.’
I hadn’t contacted her once since coming down to London.
*
Stacey had been eclipsed by Madeline; and that seems strange, in a way. Stranger still, though, is the thought that, temporarily at least, both of them had been eclipsed by Karla, and by that single, crystalline image I had of her voice cutting through the half-silence of a London night. I could hardly wait to get up to The White Goat that evening to tell her about it. I stopped off at a hamburger place on the way, bolted down some food, and arrived at the pub shortly after six o’clock.
Unfortunately I had forgotten how crowded it would be, this being Friday evening. She was being kept busy behind the bar, with a whole row of men’s faces lined up in front of her, waving money and barking orders, and although she nodded a friendly ‘Hello’ to me as I asked for my first drink, it wasn’t until I came back for my second that we managed to get talking. Even then, the
re was a crowd of people around, and I only had half her attention.
‘Can we talk?’ I said in a loud whisper.
‘Sure,’ she answered.
‘I mean – there’s something I want to tell you.’
‘Can’t it wait?’
‘Well… maybe when things have quietened down a bit.’
She shook her head.
‘Fridays are like this all night. What’s the matter, is it something personal?’
‘Well yes, in a manner of – ’
Just then some bloke in a suit with a wad of ten-pound notes in his hand cut across me and started ordering about fifteen lagers. While Karla was pulling them, I followed her up the bar and said:
‘It’s about something that happened last night.’
‘Oh yes?’
I paused, and announced, in a low voice: ‘I heard you.’
‘What do you mean?’ she said, not looking up from her work.
‘I mean I was there. Outside your window, last night.’
She stared at me.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘It was absolutely beautiful. I’ve never heard anything like it.’
‘A few packets of dry roasted, too, while you’re at it, love,’ the customer shouted. ‘And a box of Hamlets.’
‘Are you some kind of pervert or something?’ she said.
‘Don’t be silly. I wasn’t following you, or anything like that. It’s just that I wanted a word with you last night, but after I’d heard you singing I didn’t have to. I just listened and then went away again.’
‘Listen.’ She left the pumps and faced me squarely across the bar. ‘For your information – and not that it’s any of your business – I didn’t get back till two in the morning last night. I was round at a friend’s place. So I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.’ She turned to her customer. ‘How many packets was it?’