of the cherry-blossom branches against her window: my dark father secretly making music for the daughter whose existence he had never bothered to acknowledge.
THAT SUMMER BEFORE I had met Luke it seemed to be raining incessantly almost every Sunday when I woke. Drab light pervaded my bedsit as I lay on until noon, stranded between dreams and wakening, before dragging myself under the shower down the hallway.
Later, as winter came in, I would resent Luke for becoming the focus of my Sundays. Before I met him they never dragged in that way. I had taken a slovenly delight in them, only bothering to cook myself a leisurely dinner and eat it in my dressing gown before the television when daylight was already teetering in the sky. The payphone on the landing rarely rang on Sundays and I made certain it never rang for me. I lived my real life away from that house of cheap flats in Islington and I recognised the other tenants only by the tread of their footsteps past my door.
Since moving into that flat after my mother’s death, Sunday was the evening when, once a month or so, I allowed men to chat me up. I liked Sunday nights for that and I liked to hunt alone. The weekend was effectively over, with men less on the prowl and less in love with themselves and, on Monday morning, if they were lucky enough (few were and fewer deserved to be) I’d enjoy their predicament in trying to manoeuvre me from their beds in time to make a dash for work. Sometimes, with the more nervous types, I’d sleepily turn over, letting them stew with visions of a ransacked flat on their return and messages scrawled in lipstick for neighbours to read. Once or twice I even stayed on alone, wrapping myself in their bath robes and fingering the details of their lives after they had gone.
I always made sure they had somewhere to go, with proper jobs and nice apartments. I preferred my casual lays to be conventional. Accountants who bleated as they came and grinned uncomfortably when asked if their pure wool pullovers were purchased in Harrods or sheared off their backs by their mammies. Bitch, I heard them mutter in their minds. But they were hooked, calculating the odds and afraid to blow it. They’d rush to the bar to buy stronger drinks, hoping to catch their friends’ eyes and be rewarded with a wink.
Sex seemed easier with people I’d nothing in common with. Their dull lives were exotic really. Ordered men swallowed any lie you threw at them. They scampered off when I finally allowed them to, desperate to brag confidentially about the former nun from Bishop’s Stortford or the Leamington Spa zoologist they had picked up. Perhaps I judged some too harshly. A decent one or two probably bothered to phone the number I gave them and were hurt to find themselves speaking to the answering machine at the Battersea Dogs’ Home.
But if I reserved one life for Sundays, it was on Saturdays that I really had my fun back then, with Roxy and Honor. We toured the clubs, trying to stay together as the E took hold and we threw ourselves into the joyous wave of bodies skewed about in the strobe lights and found each other again when we were washed out the other side. Sometimes there were vans that sped for hours along motorways, crammed full of underdressed girls and lank youths with dandruff and socks that could walk home by themselves.
We always had to stop to allow someone to get sick and stood about, arguing with the spaced out driver who swore blind that he wasn’t lost. When we finally arrived, the raves were never as good as the expectations built up on those journeys. We would find ourselves in a field at dawn with damp grass and sheep shite trampled underfoot. There was a manic blankness in people’s eyes as they danced like their movements were a nervous twitch they couldn’t shake off. Even when their eyes closed as if asleep, their legs wouldn’t stop moving. Music pulsed inside them like an orgasm they couldn’t be released from, the pleasure of which paled and pained but continued on. Finally, when legs shuffled to a halt by themselves, a thirst remained like a purgatory which no Christ in no desert ever endured. By the time the local police arrived, the vans that had brought us there were gone. I hated the journeys where they herded us back to London and I’d finally unlock my flat door, too tired to open a window and release the odour of trapped heat and sour milk.
Those burnt out evenings were to be avoided. That was why Roxy and Honor and I fell out from those dance clubs most Saturday nights before the temptations of vague location maps and offers of lifts were passed around. Sometimes, giggling and swaying about the after-hours streets, we would stumble across a gig in some fire-trap basement club. If the band were inexcusably chronic we’d push our way up to the stage, dancing and screaming our adoration at the acne-scarred singer, puffing him up to more ludicrous posing. We’d cluster at his feet, shouting between songs that we would wait outside for him to take all three of us in the one bed later that night. Rather than fight among ourselves we had decided to share his body.
If the bouncers hadn’t already cottoned on to us, we’d point towards the exit and blow kisses at him, before staggering out to laugh and fall against the shop windows, imagining him rushing to finish the gig. We’d play our favourite game of trying to out-stare the mannequins, shrieking over which shop dummy had winked back first. Then we’d order kebabs in some dingy restaurant, taking turns to trip down to the ladies and put our mouths under the tap. We’d sit, trying to cajole a smile from the sullen waitresses. I was happy there, loved by my friends and loving them back. Nothing could ever come between us. My life in Harrow had vanished and my future would have to wait because the present seemed so immaculate.
But eventually, when chairs were being piled onto the formica tables, we were forced on to the streets again. It would be nearly dawn and we’d stumble into Tower Records where serious night owls with horn-rimmed glasses scoured through the back catalogues of Gerry’s Left Testicle or other punk bands from Papua New Guinea. We never lasted long there before we were thrown out. But sometimes, as the first ache of sobriety turned my stomach sour, I’d find myself flicking through the Irish section. The foreign names were unpronounceable, crammed with Os and Macs and crooked accents. I’d stare at the high cheekbones and bony elongated fingers of old pipers on sepia covers. There was even a tiny section reserved for sean-nós singing: a solitary, indecipherable wailing without any musical backing at all.
My mother once told me that my father, Frank Sweeney, sang as well as played the fiddle. He had reined in his wanderlust long enough to witness my birth before deserting us to return to Ireland. That was all I knew. I rarely thought about him or cared if he might still be alive. But sometimes during those raids on Tower Records I was glad that Roxy and Honor were goading a nerd as I searched in vain for what my mother once told me was his favourite tune, Last Night’s Joy. I’d take the earphones from a listening post and select a disc at random. A grainy dawn would have broken with traffic easing off, leaving only black taxis speeding to catch the lights. I’d close my eyes, listening to the ebb of that impenetrable music and think of my mother dying in Northwick Park Hospital a year before. I didn’t know what those tunes meant, each one sounding the same, only faster. Even their names gave no clue: The Frost is All Over, Jenny Picking Cockles, The Pigeon on the Gate.
They should have conjured up images of hillsides of barley shaken by the wind, or hares bounding through the winter dark as boots crunched ice on potholes along a lane. Instead I saw my mother’s face on a hospital pillow and thought of how I had never heard her listen to that music which, Grandad told me, my father had played in the back bedroom. My father’s music and my mother’s pain. Their daughter’s futile regrets after the bird had flown. The music gave way to white static and suddenly it was Bessie Smith I wanted to hear, her pain resonating in the heavy pausing as she sang, Sometimes I feel like a motherless child.
I should be over her death by now, but too much guilt seemed involved to properly mourn her. I’d listen to the clamour as another reel began, knowing that two hysterical girls were about to grab the headphones and shriek with laughter at what was playing. ‘Now that’s what I call jungle music,’ Honor would mock in her London accent laced with a Jamaican twang. What could I do, except pretend to share their mirth as the guard threw us out and we walked the streets until a taxi was found?
That