re-emerged from the coffee shop, took her drink and slipped something into my hand. It was a scrap of cotton, still warm. ‘Look after those for me,’ she said, and held my eye for a few seconds.
A few streets away we found a bridge, and, beside it, the top of a narrow brick staircase. I followed her down. The city’s canals were a sunken world, dank and green, hanging below street level like a reflection. Bright algae lay just under the surface of the water, clumped around the remnants of shopping trolleys and rotten planks, while above the waterline vegetation flourished on worn structures of brick. We walked the towpath, pushing through curtains of weeping willow and stooping along the tunnels. On the other side of the canal the unkempt ends of back gardens sloped down to the water. She kept just ahead of me, twitching away from my hands and hurrying us down the dozing watercourse until we found a place where you could leave the path to enter a strip of undisturbed woodland. Beyond it was a meadow, a place to learn about bark’s texture, damp earth and the taste of grass. Later I strummed my guitar.
One Sunday afternoon she sat curled on her sofa, reading Under the Net and threading the fingers of one hand in and out of my hair. I was cross-legged on the floor beside her, running through my finished songs. By now I had six or seven I was more or less happy with. As the city sailed towards summer, half the pubs in the central district were advertising folk-club nights, photocopied fliers for local gigs were pasted on every hoarding and bus shelter, and most coffee shops I passed seemed to contain a boy or a girl perched on a stool with an acoustic guitar. This evening I would play at my first open mic.
The one I’d chosen took place in the upper room of a pub on the Part Bridge. I’d gone last week, just to listen. As I practised, now, with my back against the sofa and her fingertips at my nape, I held in my mind the image of that dingy room with its low stools and tables and its corner stage one step up from the floor, under walls and ceiling papered with old theatre posters. Tonight the place would be packed with musicians pulling on pints and beer bottles, each waiting for a chance to perform. Some would be old hands who turned up every week, but others would be new. If you wanted to play you had to arrive early and sign up for your ten-minute slot with the pair of middle-aged men who ran the night.
Last week they had taken the first slot themselves, performing raucous, straightforward folk-pop with harmonica and twelve-string guitar, to the delight of the crowd. A mixture of acts had followed: shy singer-songwriters mumbled their private codes into their chests, picking sparingly at their guitars, while others, more extroverted, bashed at their instruments with no aim beyond getting everyone clapping along. One young man specialised in extended, string-snapping solos like a stadium rock star, and as he stepped down from the stage he held his guitar up at shoulder height to receive its due applause. A woman draped in green taffeta spent her allotted time with her eyes shut, using a wooden pestle to draw one continuous, weird note from a brass singing-bowl, and improvising in a high-pitched wail.
As I watched all this, it became clear that the stage was a bubble of delusions, and that these people had come here in pursuit of some mistaken idea of themselves. But then, halfway through the night, a mournful-looking, deep-voiced girl played a single song, honest and catchy and personal without a trace of self-absorption. While she sang I felt the presence of the whole city, live and real outside the beery room. Colours and textures opened in my head. Her lyrics were casual phrases, ordinary rhythms of speech with everyday flashes of anger, emphasis and silliness, as though she was just throwing together fragments of a conversation; but the words fell into patterns. Her playing riffled through me.
That was what I wanted, I knew, without articulating it to myself or really understanding why. I’d practised all I could. I’d borrowed her laptop to make demos, layering strumming underneath fingerpicking and working out harmonies to sing with myself. I had listened endlessly to these recordings, alert to their flaws and frailties, correcting and polishing. What did I want with the offhand approval of strangers? I didn’t know, but communing in secret with a laptop wasn’t enough. Two songs were ready to perform but I was hesitating over a third. Was it tender and truthful, or would it make that upstairs room fall uncomfortably silent? I uncrossed my legs, stretched my socked feet across the carpet, and began to play through the intro again.
She laid her book down. I looked around to find her glaring at me, and the words of the first verse faltered on my tongue. She let her breath out in a disbelieving snort.
‘You keep on playing that,’ she said. ‘I’m right here! What are you trying to tell me?’
I opened my mouth to explain that I had to practise for tonight, that I needed to work out whether it was ready to perform –
‘Yes, the damn open mic night, I know all about it,’ she said. ‘So what? You think you can keep on playing that song, over and over, and I’ll just sit here and listen?’
She had raised herself up against the arm of the sofa. I twisted around to face her, the guitar slipping from my lap with a soft discord.
‘Don’t interrupt me,’ she said, ‘I’m getting going now. Are you actually trying to torment me, is that it? Have I done something to deserve this?’ Her eyes were bright with frustration and, I noticed with a shock, also with tears. One brimmed over, then the other, brushing trails down her cheeks.
‘You just keep on playing those damn songs – and yes, they’re fine, they’re beautiful – you keep on playing until I start to think they’re all just words and they don’t mean anything. Or maybe you’re doing it on purpose, seeing how long I’ll smile nicely and keep waiting. Were you ever actually going to say it? It’s nothing strange, you know! It’s not difficult!’
She rose and crossed the room to steady herself against the mantelpiece, sniffed loudly and rubbed her face with the heels of her hands. She let out a big sigh. ‘Sooz and Ceelie are leaving at the end of the month,’ she said. ‘I wanted you to move in, can you believe that? I thought you could move in here and it’d be just us. How stupid am I? I mean, how was I supposed to ask, when you couldn’t – when you wouldn’t even say? Never mind. Forget it.’
I was on my feet, the guitar still in my hand. I took a hesitant step towards her, but she turned away. My skin stung, my head pulsed with pressure, my vision darkened. Sunlight fell through the window and her novel still lay open on the sofa, but the room had been pumped full of cold water. I couldn’t speak. Her eyes were hidden behind her forelock. My guitar, brushing against my leg, gave another gentle, tuneless twang, an isolated syllable of sound.
‘You’d better go,’ she said.
I didn’t play at the open mic that night. After leaving her flat, I crossed the street and hailed a tram, but when I felt in my pockets I found I’d brought no money with me. I had to apologise and climb back down to the street. The driver swore as the doors slapped shut and the rubber wheels sneered away.
I set off on foot instead, and walked a long way, not noticing where I was heading but not wanting to stop moving. Eventually the daylight failed and drizzle began to mist down. No more trams went past.
I passed through negative spaces, beside railway sidings, under archways clogged with litter and past industrial lots where the floodlights blinded me with after-images of concrete and wire. All was darkness and halogen. I didn’t know where I was. A long way off I could hear a major road roaring like the lip of a waterfall. Soon, I thought, I would surely merge into the limits of the city itself. But instead I began to hear sounds ahead, yelps and bellows, the coughs of machines, sirens, infra-bass noise beating away in cellars deep under the pavement. Around me the streets came to a comfortless kind of life, warmed by exhaust fumes, lit by pornography shops and nightclubs that had not redecorated in twenty years.
I negotiated a grille in the pavement belching steam that stank of fish and starch. A woman in a shredded anorak observed me, while beside her on the doorstep her companion tugged at his dreadlocks and, in time with the faltering ditty of his innards, croaked for help, unless he was saying some other word. In the gutter a slow trickle of fluid found its way around rotting fruit, broken glass and the remains of a dog. Kerbstones and railings took their definition from pink