by Rachel Joyce
Maud thought of the woman lying on the pavement. She’d seen the expression on Frank’s face as he gazed down at her, a kind of wonder mixed with barefaced terror. She had seen too the way the woman had stared up at him, as if she had found the thing she was looking for. Maud had waited years for Frank. There was no way a Kraut in a green coat was going to cock it up.
‘So?’ asked Kit, nervous now. ‘Can I count on your support?’
‘What?’
‘With my posters?’
Maud felt a little flame lick and curl beneath her breastbone.
‘Tell you what,’ she said, smiling sweetly. ‘Why don’t you give some of them to me?’
11
A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall
KIT’S POSTERS HUNG in the shop windows along Unity Street. ‘HAVE YOU LOST YOUR GREEN HANDBAG?’ He had decorated them with other green things. Leaves and some little shapes that looked like nuts but were actually hearts, along with a green hat, a green pair of boots and a green umbrella. There was also a lettuce, a sprout and a cucumber. You’d think the owner of the bag was some kind of hapless small green vegan.
Strangely Maud’s posters had not appeared on Castlegate. When questioned, she folded her arms and looked aggressive.
For the rest of the week, there was wind, there was rain, but not so much as a word from Ilse Brauchmann. Was Father Anthony right? Had she left her bag for a reason? The more time passed, the more Frank found he thought of her and yet this was madness because he knew nothing, except for the fact she very definitely had someone else.
Teenagers came to the shop, along with musicians, would-be musicians, punks, heavy metal fans, classical lovers and New Romantics. Several people enquired if Frank would be interested in buying their vinyl because they were replacing it with the new CDs. The man who only liked Chopin returned for more Aretha and asked Frank’s advice about joining a dating agency. But Ilse Brauchmann? No sign of her.
‘Well good,’ said Frank. ‘I’m glad.’
Fresh graffiti appeared on the baker’s window. Sharon loves Ian, and NF, the two letters stuck to each other like an ugly claw. Frank fetched another bucket of soapy water.
‘What does this mean, Frank? NF?’
‘It’s nothing, Mr Novak. It’s kids being stupid.’
Rain fell hard and the baker cowered at the open door. The shop smelt sweet and warm.
‘We came here before the war. I was a soldier for Mr Churchill.’
‘I know that, Mr Novak.’
‘I still talk to my wife. As I bake. And she watches me and she says, “You stupid old man, why you cry? Why you miss me?” But I am glad she never saw what those kids do to my window. It would have broken her heart.’ The baker fetched cinnamon rolls, fresh out of the oven; two each for Frank and Kit.
‘Ring me if you’re worried,’ said Frank. ‘It will be OK.’
Nevertheless, as he walked through the rain he couldn’t help thinking about the graffiti, and the baker talking to his wife at night and crying. He stared at the items beyond the yellow cellophane in the other shop windows – an urn in the funeral parlour; several bookmarks in Father Anthony’s gift shop alongside a plastic Jesus – and as if for the first time, he saw how temporary it all looked. Here they were, living together on Unity Street, trying to make a difference in the world, knowing they couldn’t, but still doing it anyway. Clearly some of the houses opposite, with their peeling paintwork and curtains that stayed closed, had seen better days. So had it been this way a while, and he just hadn’t noticed? Or was something in Frank changing? Even his jacket felt too small.
HAVE YOU LOST YOUR GREEN HANDBAG? read Kit’s posters in jumpy big letters. The last thing Frank needed was Ilse Brauchmann. He’d get Kit to take her bag to the police station. He pushed open the door of his shop.
But where was Kit? And where was the ding-dong?
‘Here I am!’
Kit was perched against the window ledge, as if he had put himself on display.
‘What are you doing? And why is the bell not working?’
‘There is nothing at all to worry about!’
‘What’s happened?’ asked Frank, feeling immediately worried.
Kit had been hoping for a random sighting of Ilse Brauchmann. He had climbed on to the window ledge for a better view but his foot must have slipped and as he fell he had pulled something out of the bell and kicked the window frame. So now there was no bell, but there was a leak. Yes: rain was coming in the bottom half of the window. The only way Kit could think of stopping the leak was to use his body as a wedge but unfortunately he had wedged himself a little too hard and now he was stuck. Also, he had made the leak worse because he had inadvertently knocked out some of the putty that held the window in place.
‘You mean, the window is loose?’
In a manner of speaking, yes. Kit did mean that. He was happy to keep it in place for the rest of the day but he would need to go home at teatime to sort his mum’s pills. His dad tended to fall asleep in front of the six o’clock news.
Frank helped Kit out of the window and fetched towels. He leant a length of hardboard against the lower part but the job needed a glazier – and that would be another twenty quid. He’d barely made a decent sale all week. He was so absorbed in doing the sums, he failed to notice a car parking up outside.
‘Oh oh!’ sang Kit. ‘I think it’s her! I think it’s Ilse Brauchmann! Oh my God! This is so exciting—’
But it wasn’t. It was Phil from EMI. He had a business proposition.
‘Hey, Frank. How’s things?’ Phil was a heavy man in his forties with a quiff like a pointy hat and vast sideburns to match. ‘Remember the old days? Remember that time you took me to see The Ruts and The Damned? Along with that other guy? What was his name?’
‘Aunty Pus.’
Phil laughed. His eyes were bloodshot and small, and he was beginning to sweat. He’d always been a drinker but recently it had got more serious. Some days he could barely walk a straight line, and this was one of them. ‘Then Malcolm Owen smashed his head with the cymbal and St John Ambulance had to take him off on a stretcher.’
Frank laughed too. There had been an issue back then with Phil’s quiff: Maud had done her best to spray it into a Mohican but Frank had spent most of the night trying to hide him. ‘Those were the days,’ said Phil, ‘when music had bollocks. Now it’s all George Michael and gay boys.’
‘I like George Michael.’
Phil threw his hands up as if he were hailing the arrival of a minor deity. ‘This is why we all come back to you, Frank. You don’t just love one thing. You love music. So listen, I’m not going to beat around the bush. It’s time to drop this crap about CDs.’
‘That’s your business proposition?’ Frank laughed.
‘You don’t want to sell cassettes? I get that. But CDs are new. They’re shiny. It’s a lifestyle thing. And they’re virtually indestructible. You can drive over them and they still won’t break—’
‘Why would I want to drive over my music, Phil?’
‘You know he’ll never sell CDs,’ piped up Kit from the counter. He was making a new poster.
‘The word from the top is this. We have to get you guys giving more floor space to CDs, otherwise we can’t supply you any more. By the end of the year, CD sales will have overtaken vinyl. So come on. You’re a big boy. You can manage one rack.’ Phil’s face was so shiny he looked varnished. ‘I’ll throw in T-shirts. Badges. I’ll even throw in ashtrays.’
‘I don’t need ashtrays.’
(‘I would like some ashtrays,’ said Kit.)
A new customer slipped in the door but no one paid any attention.
Phil said, ‘Make an order for a CD, I can sell you one and give you three. Are you hearing me, Frank? I can give you three CDs for nothing. But vinyl, it’s completely different. We’re deleting titles. In ten years, kids won’t even know what vinyl was. It’s dying, Frank. Move on.’
Frank stared at his turntable. A small
yellow thing came into focus. He picked up his pencil sharpener, neatly returned to a whole. He twisted it in his hands, over and over. Why did it unsettle him so much? ‘I can’t do it,’ he said.
Phil drew a huge breath, as if he were sucking it up through a straw. ‘It’s OK, Frank. I get it. But there’s still a way we can make this work.’ Nipping a scrap of paper out of his back pocket, he glanced round the shop. The new customer was busy searching through album sleeves, and wearing a plastic rain mac with a hood. Phil passed Frank the paper. It was a series of pencilled numbers.
‘All you’ve got to do is enter this catalogue number a couple of times an hour in your sales return machine.’
‘Without selling it?’
‘It needs some help in the charts. Do this and we can forget about CDs. It’s just a little arrangement between you and me.’
‘But that’s fraud.’
‘Come on, Frank. My job’s on the line.’
Phil looked very pale now, properly queasy. Two wet moons hung at his armpits. He stared a moment more at Frank and then a little switch seemed to flick inside him. He turned to the boxes packed with record sleeves and began to pull them out, first one, then another, chucking them to the floor. ‘After everything I’ve done for you—’ He was tugging them out in handfuls. The more he threw down, the more he seemed to hate the shop. ‘It’s only because of me the other reps keep coming.’
‘Get out,’ Frank shouted. ‘Get out of here!’
Phil swerved to avoid the customer in the rain hood and lurched through the door. After that he fell into his car, revving the engine until it screamed. They heard the shriek of Phil’s brakes as he headed for Castlegate.
‘What have you done now?’ Kit was so pale he looked sick.
Frank felt a deep burning inside him, an anger that made his head throb. ‘Phil shouldn’t even be driving.’ He turned back to his shop.
And there, crouched on the floor and picking up album sleeves, was Ilse Brauchmann.
‘I was just passing,’ she said.
12
So Long, Farewell
WHO KNEW? WHO knew that beautiful women wore plastic rain macs? But of course they did. Even strangers with long necks and eyes like vinyl had to be practical when it came to British weather.
First she was apologetic. She should have come before. It had been difficult, though: ‘I’ve been busy.’ Presumably with her fiancé, though she had the grace not to say that. She hoped she hadn’t inconvenienced anyone by leaving her bag a whole week? Two red circles sprang to her cheeks, looking remarkably like something Kit would make with scissors and crepe paper.
Frank stuck a cigarette in his mouth. He flicked so hard at the lighter, it nicked his thumb.
Ilse Brauchmann seemed nervous too. She said she would just collect her handbag and leave. Oh but she couldn’t believe it when she’d spotted all those lovely posters in Unity Street. ‘No one has ever made a poster for me before.’ She kept her eyes fixed with almost mathematical precision on a point in the floor.
‘I didn’t make the posters,’ said Frank. ‘They were nothing to do with me.’ He marched back to his turntable, stepping his great feet around album sleeves.
Kit retrieved her handbag from the counter and mopped it with the cuff of his jumper.
‘We were afraid you’d gone,’ he said.
‘Oh?’ She sent a surprised look over her shoulder. It landed right on Frank. ‘No, I’m still here.’
‘Is your fiancé here?’ Kit continued.
She looked even more perplexed and said, ‘Um.’ A little hovery noise.
‘Have you fainted any more?’
‘Fainted? No.’
Before Kit could ask anything else, she produced from her coat pocket a small parcel wrapped in purple tissue paper. ‘This is a token,’ she said. ‘To say thank you.’
‘You don’t need to give me a present,’ interrupted Frank from his turntable. He was hot and trembling – it must be the row with Phil.
‘It isn’t for you. It’s for your assistant manager.’
‘Me?’ said Kit. Pointing at himself for extra clarity.
‘It’s small. I mean, it’s nothing.’
But Kit was already ripping open the paper. He pulled out something blue, and began running in joyful circles.
‘Oh my God! Oh my God! Have you seen what this is, Frank?’
‘It’s a shirt,’ explained Ilse Brauchmann. ‘There is a blue tie as well. I could only find one with stripes. I hope you like it.’
‘It’s my own uniform, Frank! Like the shop assistants at Woolworths!’
On to the chest pocket she had stitched his name in a chain of neat red letters. Kit. Assistant Manager. Welcome. She had even given him a little pearl-stitched exclamation mark.
‘You made this for me?’ sang Kit. ‘Oh my God! Oh my God!’
He galloped upstairs to try on his new shirt and tie. They could hear him, directly above, falling over boxes as he tried to find a mirror.
There was an awkward moment that morphed into another awkward one.
Ilse Brauchmann took off her plastic mac. She was wearing a slim plain skirt and a turtleneck sweater. Nothing to write home about, though she was so cold she kept her gloves on. Her dark hair was mostly pinned over the crown of her head in a chaos of curls and a few strands dropped loose at irregular lengths around her ears. She returned to the business of rescuing album sleeves, slowly, carefully, plucking them up with her long arms, one here, one there, and studying the titles. ‘I’m sorry about what happened. Was he a rep?’
‘It’s not your fault.’
‘And what happened to your window?’
‘Kit sat in it.’
For a moment she did nothing, she just ogled. Then she did something completely sideways.
She laughed.
But not a normal laugh. It was a delicious creaky sound that seemed to shoot up without warning, and after all the tension with Phil it tackled Frank from behind and made him laugh too. A ballooning of happiness. Only, now that he had started with the laughter thing, he couldn’t stop. He’d forgotten what it was like, just to laugh and laugh. And Ilse Brauchmann was apparently the same. ‘Stop, stop,’ she kept howling, nostrils wide, wiping her eyes, clutching her sides. ‘What are we doing? This is crazy.’ Even the way she said the word made it funny. Crazeeee.
Hooo hoo hoo.
Haw haw haw.
Then, ‘I’m sorry. That’s not funny.’ She pulled on a solemn face and went back to being sensible. They both did. She picked up a few more record sleeves.
‘Mist, this one’s torn,’ she said.
She walked in her slow way over to the counter – he noticed the swing of her hips as if she were following an invisible line – and opened the drawer to pull out the broken Sellotape dispenser. She just seemed to know where things should be. He couldn’t help but watch, entranced, as she rubbed her gloved hands a moment, gave each finger a stretch, before resting the album sleeve on the counter. Drawing a length of tape, she lifted it to her mouth to bite it free, before sealing it carefully in place and smoothing both sides. She frowned as she took up the broken Sellotape dispenser and gave it her full attention. Her hands were round it like tools. She worked methodically and without fuss. He still had absolutely no idea what she needed – she was just as silent to him as before – but it was good, he thought, it was good just having her here. Even his shop seemed to like her. The blue of the Persian runner bounced out and became even bluer. Without warning, the world had snapped into sharper focus and become more interesting. Upstairs he could still hear Kit falling over boxes.
He said, ‘What did you make of the Vivaldi?’
‘Oh.’ She widened her eyes and pursed her mouth, as if she had accidentally swallowed a cherry stone. ‘I didn’t listen yet.’
She held up the album cover for him to inspect. You could barely see the join; she had repaired it beautifully. Then she lifted the Sellotape dispenser as well. ‘I fixed this. I hop
e you don’t mind.’ Opening the drawer, she slotted it carefully inside. ‘Shall we have a quick look at that window?’
He followed her to the front of the shop, where she examined the piece of hardboard propped against the glass to keep it in place. She asked if he had nails and a small hammer, and when he produced his old bag of tools, she knelt and searched through it until she found a box of tacks. He stood beside her, in helpless and grateful wonder, as she popped six of them between her teeth and then nailed them in place, one by one, with quick, steady hits, securing the hardboard against the wooden frame. It was a shame he had no putty, she said. But at least the window would be safe for the moment.
In all the time she had been with him in the shop, they had barely spoken, and yet there were so many things he wanted to say to her. He felt irresistibly drawn to her great quietness; it was a silence so deep, the possibilities were endless.
So when she said, ‘You do a lot to help other people. Don’t you ever think about yourself?’ he didn’t slope off to his turntable, as he usually did if things got personal, he just thought carefully about her question.
He said, ‘Not really. I like helping other people.’
She nodded.
Then she asked, ‘Do you remember all your customers?’
‘Yes.’
She looked at him and he looked at her and they smiled because there didn’t seem to be much else to do.
Then she said, ‘What would you do if you didn’t have your music shop?’
He thought again and then he said, ‘I’d have a music stall.’
They were silent.