Guest

by SJ Bradley

  ‘Make yourself useful, dickhead, and get those sleeping bags small as you can.’

  ‘Tetchy.’ Frankie reached for Romey’s bag, a blue and white diagonal striped thing that looked as though it had done fifteen round-world trips. ‘Where’d you want this, boss?’

  They’d spent a long night on a hard floor. The gig had not been one of their best – a cramped stage in a basement bar, watched by a small group of teenagers with lip rings and sharp-straightened black hair over their eyes. They had started with an audience of ten, and ended up with two.

  Afterwards, they’d come back here, to the promoter’s flat, a stamp-sized place over a takeaway with a dirty kitchen floor and nowhere else to sleep. Space had been so limited, Samhain had as good as slept in Frankie’s arms, with his feet wedged up against the cupboards. At six, they’d been woken by the dual beep of two digital alarm clocks: the promoter’s, and his room-mate’s. He had almost been glad of the excuse to get up and off the lino.

  ‘Drums in first,’ Samhain said.

  Things fit together better this second time. Starting with cymbal cases, a drum, the amp heads. Samhain got one door closed, then stood holding the other still open, looking at the tightly packed other half.

  ‘Where the hell is Lemmers? Romey!’ he shouted. ‘Romey!’

  A bad-tempered grunt in response.

  There had been no coffee that morning. Last night’s promoter, Aleks, had gone off to work in a crumpled white shirt and a black tie, apologising that he didn’t have time to make breakfast, but that there was a place to get it somewhere down the street. Romey had taken this news the worst of all. He had gone to try and find the cafe Aleks had mentioned, only to come up against a locked door. The place didn’t open until 11.

  ‘Bloody tour ruiner,’ Frankie grumbled. More loudly, he roared: ‘Come on, lad, you’re the tour manager, for Pete’s sake. Go and find out where Lemmers has got to.’

  The passenger side door opened. ‘I don’t know where the hell he could go at this time in the morning,’ Romey grumbled, ‘when everything in this shithole is closed.’

  ‘Hang on.’ Samhain counted the Swiss-roll ends of the sleeping bags they’d managed to get in. One, Romey’s zig-zag thing. Two, Stick’s professional level camping sleeper from Millet’s. Three, Frankie’s old grey war horse. Four, Lemmers’ trusty navy blue nylon thing, a sleeping bag which, he never tired of telling them, had history: it had been all over Europe, all over Scandinavia and the United States and South America; this was the sleeping bag that had been under his arm when he’d met Henry Rollins. This was the sleeping bag that had been on tour with the band Crass.

  It surprised them all that he wasn’t a bit more careful with it.

  ‘Where’s my sleeping bag?’ Samhain said.

  Romey passed, grumbling on his way to the corner: ‘Nothing’s ever simple, is it?’

  ‘Open the other door again,’ Frankie suggested. ‘I think it went in under my bass.’

  But no, it wasn’t there either, and nor was it under or behind anything else, once they’d unpacked everything back out onto the pavement again, to check. Samhain stood amongst the pile of bags and guitars, with Stick’s cymbals leaning up against his leg, and with the holdall containing all of the leads and pedals on his foot; he looked up at Aleks’ apartment window, and said: ‘It’s in Aleks’ flat. I left my sleeping bag in Aleks’ bloody flat.’

  Just then, Romey reappeared. Grinning, with Lemmers a few steps behind him, carrying four takeaway coffees in a cardboard to-go tray.

  As they came, Lemmers looked up from his coffee at the mess of guitars and drums and amps, all standing crazily out on the pavement, and said: ‘Haven’t you loaded that bloody van yet?’

  ‘We won’t take your bullshit! Uniformed bodies and uniformed thoughts! We say “no” to the lies of yours!’

  Coffee cups, empty now, rolled around the van floor as the boys in the bus sang along to a band from the first night. Nursery rhyme melodies sung by aggrieved men with sandpaper voices. Samhain’s ears hurt; he was staring out of the window at the rain. They’d been listening to this CD for days now. Nobody ever said, Put something else on.

  They didn’t make fanzines about Samhain’s situation. ‘What to do when you find out your father was an undercover cop, #1 – the first issue in an irregular series.’ Nobody had started a self-help group, because no anarchist was ever about to admit to having a shiny-buttoned father.

  If only it stuck out obviously, in a hard polyp on your neck, rather than being written in a sequence of letters in your DNA, in every single cell of your self. Samhain would have cut that part of himself out with the sharpest scalpel he could find.

  ‘We’re stopping in the next town,’ Lemmers shouted. ‘It’s worth it. You’ll all enjoy it – I promise.’

  The place was a small stone village. It was still raining, a cold soft grey, heather-coloured clouds throwing spit onto cobbles. An old lady walked up the hill carrying a wicker basket. Samhain jumped out of the van, feeling as though he had stepped into a postcard.

  ‘Just up that hill,’ announced Lemmers, ‘is the country’s largest folk and agricultural museum.’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘Yes, and it’s lucky we were out early,’ Lemmers said, ‘because it closes at midday on a Tuesday.’

  He went up the hill, Romey and Stick following.

  Someone nearby was baking bread. The wonderful smell of it, roasted almonds and cooked apple, wafted gently on the air.

  Frankie rolled a cigarette, leaning up against the van. ‘Alright, kiddo?’

  ‘Yeah.’ These streets: they took Samhain back to childhood. Low doorways and curving lintels, bowed windows and leading. He thought he might have been to this place before, or somewhere like it, as a boy. Perhaps to buy supplies for camp. ‘I could live here,’ he said. ‘Place like this – pretty – quiet. I could stay here, and never go back to Bradford.’

  Frankie’s arm around his shoulders, most of the weight towards Frankie’s body, as though he didn’t want to hold on too tight. ‘That’s tour madness talking, if ever I heard it.’

  ‘It’s not.’

  ‘It is, jizzlip. Come on. We all have that moment when we’re away, when we think – yes, I could live here. My life would be so much better.’

  ‘It would, though.’

  ‘Is this about being banned from CopWatch?’

  ‘They tried to make out I was some kind of domestic abuser, Frankie.’

  ‘I don’t know why you’re even interested in those old witches.’ Frankie’s cigarette burned down to a tingle of amber. ‘Are you into librarians now? What’s wrong – have you run out of punk girls to shag?’

  ‘It’s not just that. It’s everything else. I feel like everybody’s talking about me. They think they know me, and they don’t. I just want to get away from all the bullshit...’

  ‘Bullshit like what? Like all of your friends? Like that massive house you live in?’

  ‘Squats never last Frankie, you know that. Look how many places we’ve been in over the past few years. Christ, I can’t even keep my guitar at home, in case we have to move. It’s impossible to settle. We never know when we’ll have to move again. For all we know, that squat might be over by the time we get back off this tour. I’m so sick of it, Frankie, just so sick of it. That and finding out that everybody knows my business before I do, and they’re all talking behind my back.’

  A net curtain moved in one of the houses. A woman stared from an upstairs window.

  ‘See, if I lived somewhere like this, I’d be away from all that. Away from the people who said they were my friends but, all along, were the ones who knew about Astrid before I did, and didn’t say a word. People who were smiling and acting friendly but it was another story behind my back. Even Marta. Those aren’t friends, are they? They can’t be. Otherwise they would have said something to me.’ Samhain said: ‘I just think I’m better away from all that.’

  Frankie forced a toe betwee
n cobbles. ‘This is delayed shock, mate.’

  Samhain moaned. ‘You have no idea what it’s like.’

  Graeme Stokes was another story that would be too good for anybody to keep quiet. A thing that couldn’t be told to a single other person, not even Frankie, lest he should tell one more, and they tell one more, until the whole thing bloomed and spread like mould setting spore under a large wet log. He’d come here to get away from it, and it had followed him. It was in the faces of the lads in the van and in the places they stayed, in the music they listened to and in the gigs they played. It popped up in every squat and house and basement gig and there was no getting away from it no matter where he went.

  ‘Well, there’s me,’ Frankie said.

  ‘Do you ever wish,’ Samhain went on, ‘that you could just push a button, and reset everything in your whole life, and get a new start? Go some place where nobody knows you, and start all over again?’ He crouched down, feeling suddenly safer closer to the cobbles than he had at full height.

  ‘Listen, you’re making a big deal out of this,’ Frankie said. ‘I honestly don’t think that many people knew. Maybe they might have seen Charley with a baby. But that’s not to say that everybody thought it was yours.’

  ‘People talk, that’s the trouble.’

  ‘Are you going to sit there all day?’ Frankie said, grabbing his arm. ‘We’ve got an agricultural museum to visit.’

  Entry was €4, money taken by a bun-fed old lady whose hands were full with knitting. She gave them a long explanation in Flemish, and pointed to a room full of horse tack and softly gleaming metal, and then to another, a room with glass cases whose edges caught the dim light. Romey and Lemmers were nowhere to be seen.

  Everything had the darkness of a provincial museum trying to preserve, and all things were lit with a low, amberish light. A large case by the door in the first room was all lace. This was draped on shelves, and knitted into the fabric were images of farming boys and machinery. A perfect miniature boy in white lace overalls had a hole dotted in his chest; in the same doily, a girl pointed a rifle from behind a crocheted wall.

  The next case was all clothes, baby things, crushed velvet and smocked cotton, all with collars and ruffs of the same type of handmade lace. On the shelf sat a baby, a realistic looking doll, in a brown crushed velvet frock. It had pale cheeks, and looked glassily surprised.

  ‘Where the hell has Lemmers brought us?’ Samhain whispered.

  On the back wall, another case seemed to contain what looked like a dead silk farm. Ancient, brittle cocoons, blackening now, all laying together like eggs, in a box the size of a lizard tank. A butterfly, turning sepia with time, had been stuck with clear glue, by its abdomen, to the glass.

  Grinning, Frankie pulled a disposable camera out of his pocket. ‘This is way too good to miss. Say cheese!’

  The red light came on for the flash; a second later, the bleach of it whitened Samhain’s vision. The woman called through from the next room, in heavily accented English: ‘No photographs, please!’

  ‘Sorry.’ Frankie shoved the camera into his jacket pocket. ‘God, I hope that one comes out. You should have seen your face.’

  The back room was all furniture. Tapestry-cushioned chairs along one wall, and on an elevated dais at the end, four slightly different wooden chairs. There was a cabinet painted with men riding horses into war, and a tiny rocking chair with a highly carved wooden back.

  ‘Now then, you’re the furniture expert. You should be able to identify some of these. What’s that?’ Frankie pointed at a plastic chair, the type found in most primary school classrooms.

  ‘That,’ Sam said, ‘is a modern-day milking stool. Found in most modern farms and outhouses. It’s where the farmer sits to milk his dairy cows. Please note, the cow doesn’t get to sit down. Where is Daisy’s comfortable chair? Where is the comfortable chair for Flossie?’

  ‘Nowhere!’ Frankie was laughing, and reaching for the camera again. ‘Right then, get sat down – let’s get your picture again.’

  ‘This is easily the creepiest museum I’ve ever been to.’ Samhain sat in the chair, and waited again for the flash. ‘Not sure I’d come here again.’

  Stick appeared in the doorway, and glanced at them both. ‘There you are. Shall we get a move on? Lemmers is saying we need to get back on the road.’

  4.

  Three hours in the van.

  Legs cramped and each other’s faces imprinted into memory. There was nowhere to look except for into the face of whoever was sitting opposite, which in Samhain’s case had been Frankie.

  They arrived at the next squat to grey skies and warm air: Samhain jumped down from the van with a feeling of being in the wrong place. The night air rested against his skin the same way a cooling oven exudes heat.

  He grabbed his guitar, sleeping bag, and one of the bags, and went inside.

  The place was a large, old house, with narrow corridors and not much in the way of lights. There were people everywhere. In one of the downstairs rooms, six dreadlocked punks were drinking beer, and kicking a football around.

  Noise trickled down the stairs – guitars and drums, and something that sounded electronic. It seemed to be coming from the top of the house. Samhain stopped on the first floor, when he found the bar. An ingenious thing, punk-built. It looked as though it had been nailed together from a set of table legs and a broken-up chipboard bookcase. The girl behind it had a pint in her hand, and a glow on her face that said she wouldn’t make it to the end of the night.

  They were pouring beer direct from the barrel. It smelled good – fresh hops, and it was a wonderful honeyed colour. Samhain tasted the brewer’s care when his first gulp hit the back of his throat, and he was already friendly by the time he started looking for the gig room.

  It was up two more flights of stairs and, by the time he’d found it, everything else had already been brought in, even the amp heads.

  A band were playing. Four women scratching away at guitars and cellos, dancing around the stage in torn vests. The stage times stuck to the door table told him that they were the fifth band on, and that the gig was already running late by an hour.

  Never mind. Samhain stood at the back, watching them play, sipping his beer. It was a good gig room. A low stage, lit by strings of fairy lights dipping from the ceiling. Back and forth, a dozen lines of them, crossing one another in a sparkling, dewy web. And under them the crowd, numbering maybe fifty. It would be a great night: he could tell that already.

  ‘Samhain?’

  A familiar voice – he knew it straight away. Gruff and Northampton-tinged, with the sound of his name ending in a lean. Samhain listened to that voice a lot. He’d got two records full of it back at the Boundary Hotel.

  ‘Ned!’ he shouted.

  ‘Please tell me you haven’t played already.’ Ned grabbed him in a manly embrace; it was a hug that semaphored three days without washing. The face was two years older, mostly covered with wiry hair, and the smile turned grey eyes into twinkling boat lakes. ‘I’ve missed you guys.’

  ‘Me too, and not yet.’ Samhain raised his glass. ‘Reckon I might be in a bit of state by the time we get up there, though. I can’t stop drinking this beer. It’s the best thing we’ve had all tour.’

  ‘Tell me about it.’ Ned raised a glass of the same. ‘How great is this – playing together again?’

  ‘It’s great – high point of the tour, for me.’ He said, ‘Frankie sort of talked me down earlier.’

  ‘From what?’

  ‘Long story. Tell you later.’

  ‘Right you are. Cheers.’ They clinked glasses.

  He’d known Ned five years, ever since his band had played the Ambland Road squat. In those days, Patrick Stewart The Band had only just started out. They were still working out how to play, and sounded like a bargain basement Devo. It hadn’t mattered to Samhain: he’d still danced his way through the soles of his shoes, and bought a t-shirt, and a record. Afterwards, he’d buttonhol
ed Ned and spent hours talking to him in the kitchen.

  There was no corner, no nook of science fiction or occult literature that Ned didn’t know. Throughout the conversation Ned had kept on nodding, and starting sentences with the words: ‘Have you heard of...’ or, ‘Have you ever read...’ The man was a sort of dermal-layered encyclopaedia, and there was no major, or minor, work of science fiction, horror, fantasy, or speculative fiction, or young adult fiction before it had been called young adult fiction, or original horrors upon which classic films like The Woman in Black or Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde were based, or novelisations of derivative version of films like Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires or The Bride of Frankenstein, which Ned hadn’t read.

  Yet despite this interest in all things macabre, Ned had a musical theatre disposition. He was all smiles and enthusiasm: he always seemed just a few seconds away from opening up an umbrella and starting a dance number.

  ‘It’s good to see you, man,’ Samhain said. ‘Good to see a friendly face.’

  There was the clang and squeal of a crap guitar being plugged in onstage. Ned nodded towards it, and said a load of things that Samhain couldn’t hear for the noise. The gist of it seemed to be, this band are worth watching – let’s stick around.

  Samhain had almost forgotten how brilliant Patrick Stewart The Band were. Sharp, percussive guitars, drums that snapped and stopped, yet never ceased moving. Their music was all diagonal and hard-sided, in a way that got you on your feet and kept you there, and they’d got much better at playing it in the two years since he’d last seen them.

  He had this bottle of whisky that he’d got at the bar, and after Patrick Stewart The Band came off stage, the whole inside of the squat started to take on the look of a ship’s innards. There was a party, and it was happening all over all four floors. He and Ned settled onto a sofa in a dark corner, in a room that seemed more and more like a galley slave cabin – a small wooden thing, oppressive and dark, taken to on one of the long sailing nights. They might have been inside the Arctic Circle: Samhain felt the deck shift and lurch.