Jed was looking for a voice. He had the music, he knew he had, stuff he’d squirreled away over the years, most of which he’d never even shown to whatever band he’d been in, fearing the lumpen reality they’d make of them.
But he’d never met anyone with the voice he could hear in his head inhabiting the ghostly chords and harmonies of his secret music, the spark that would bring his sketchy compositions to life, and give words to the truths at the heart of them. In his room late at night, he strummed the secret shapes as quietly as he could on his acoustic guitar, the air barely reverberating in the sound-box, images unfolding in his mind.
The music was the hidden parts of him, his unvoiced thoughts, brightest and darkest moments made sound, but always lacking the voice to bring it to life, to take it from behind a door of a room in a shared old terraced house and stamp it on the world. His moment was passing and he knew however much he played his music to himself late at night, soon it’d wither and die.
Home, on a street where drifts of litter and leaves silted up the front gates, Jed stowed his guitar in the corner of his room and thought about the evening ahead. He’d taken to scouring the city on his own, these last few months, visiting anywhere where musicians could be found, with a growing quiet desperation at the back of his mind, from pub backroom folk sessions, to bands rattling the windows of live music bars populated by distressingly youthful students and depressingly awful people with ironic hair and glasses. Looking for the voice, feeling stabs of dreadful jealousy at the musicians up there doing it like he used to.
Before long he was out again, heading into town, feeling decidedly anachronistic with his overly-long hair and very overly-long coat, among the Friday night boys and girls heading for the bars.
Halfway down the grand old Georgian walk, someone called his name.
***
Rob and Dan were two old school friends of Jed’s, who, the town centre being below a certain critical mass, he inevitably ran into regularly, if with decreasing frequency as time moved on. Both had been in Jed’s last band-but-two, bass and drums respectively. Neither of them an awful egoistical tosser like some of the musos he’d dealt with, the band had just died of natural causes as interest waned. The town was becoming populated by my ex-bandmates, he thought. Some people have a group of friends where they’ve all slept together in every combination. I’ve got friends who’ve all had to sit through the same drum sound checks.
The Red Lion commanded a main junction, and outside Jed could see the steady townwards flow of people, neon shirts and the kind of dresses you could die of exposure in, even though the autumn night was mild. The pub was full of the harsh chemistry of cigarette smoke, and an edge of violence to the laughter and talk.
They’d got a table by the window, Jed’s scouting expedition put off for another night. Rob was married now, to Emma, a girl from their old school. Jed hadn’t seen her for a few years. Rob and Dan both worked in the office block by the station, and had been out since they left work a few hours earlier, their ties loosened schoolboy-fashion. Dan still lived with his parents in a village just outside the ring road, and occasionally talked about going to teach English abroad.
They were pacing themselves well for a Friday night session, already well down the road to being cheerfully pissed. Jed was working hard to catch up. They’d been over all the old names from school, updating all the histories, measuring their lives against each other. Now, they were onto their gigging misadventures in the last band Jed had been in with them.
“Do you remember that guy who looked like the bloke from Judas Priest, only in a wheelchair? Full leathers and all, parked at the front of the stage giving us the devil horns every time we finished a song? There was only him and the sound engineer in the whole damn place. And what was that place called? Fucking dive wasn’t it?”
“The Swan or something,” laughed Dan, taking a swig from his pint.
“Tell you what though mate. It weren’t as bad as that one in Middlesbrough.”
“Fucking nothing is as bad as anything in Middlesbrough.”
“Tell you what though, I sold my bass the other day on eBay. Someone must have been desperate.”
“Do you remember that guy at the uni when we played there? That 18-year-old student twat with the Manc accent who thought he was like Mr Big Shot promoter, because obviously him being from Manchester made him on first name terms with bloody Noel Gallagher. Bet he were actually from some posh village in Cheshire.”
Jed felt detached. The conversation kept sliding along its well-worn grooves, like watching a film for the hundredth time, where every line of dialogue was endlessly quotable, and keyed to a multitude of personal memories and references.
But the law of diminishing returns had gradually taken its toll, sucking all the life from it. Endlessly replaying these incidents was the only thing holding them together as time moved on in its tidal path. An eternity of bloody reminiscence about old times that were only great because you were a kid and it was all new.
I’m not even thirty and my life is becoming a TV nostalgia show, thought Jed, a sick, dull anger growing inside him. Everything’s in the past tense. Streets and stories and songs. Sometimes you want someone to drive a bulldozer through the whole lot and start over again. But you can’t escape the weight of the rubble of your past, because you are just the weight of the rubble of your past.
Jed made the trip to the bar, got the pints in and deposited them heavily on the table with some spillage. He visited the gents and, as he turned away from the urinal, suddenly knew he had to leave.
***
Making his escape, Jed, half-pissed, plunged into a faux-Irish boozer called Finnegans Wake, that looked as though the industrial unit in Indonesia where it had been assembled in kit form was the nearest it had ever come to Dublin.
It was heaving, as everywhere on this stretch was on a Friday, a hen party three deep and braying with laughter at the bar, bottles clutched like weapons. He needed to lie low in case Rob and Dan came looking, so braved the odd lewd suggestion from the decidedly non-spring-chicken-hens long enough to get a nasty pint of Guinness in.
He worked through the crowd away from the bar, feeling as awkward as only someone on their own in a crowded pub can, when there’s no place to find a space of your own. There was a side bar off the main one, and a ripple of applause drew him to it.
As he entered the side room, elbowing his way through in an apologetic, fight-avoiding way, he saw the words Live Music! Every Friday! chalked on a board, and realised the crowd in there were facing the same way, watching something, rather, half of them were half- interested, the rest talking about where else to go, and drinking up at speed.
The music started up again. Next door, the jukebox was still up full, so the guy with the guitar, sitting on a stool with a microphone stand in front of him, was only audible close up, through a tiny portable PA rig, his face partly hidden by his thick curly hair. He was accompanying himself fairly amateurishly on guitar, and then he started to sing.
Jed stood rooted. It wasn’t the words, he could barely make them out in the background pub racket. It was something in the tone of the voice, the play of the melodies, the cryptic flashes of decipherable lyric that had you straining for more fragments. It was like a void opening in the sky above the houses, the way he was singing Jed’s life, determinedly and quietly against the buzz of conversation, the laughter of the hens, the thud of the jukebox and the desperate air of his being totally out of place here.
“Cheer up, love,” yelled someone, to a peal of laughter from her friends. But the guy was in his own world.
At the end of the song, there was an even briefer ripple of applause, dissolving swiftly into the pub background din.
The singer smiled faintly, muttered “thanks” into the microphone and got up. He went to put his guitar back in his case.
Another man, presumably the wannabe promoter who’d decided putting an acoustic showcase gig on in here on a
Friday night was a wise career move, spoke to him, his apologetic body language clearly suggesting the singer wasn’t getting paid tonight.
But they were all oblivious to what had just happened; Jed’s revelation. He knew instantly the singer had the voice, the one that knew and felt everything he did, and could express it just by the warmth and sadness of its tone.
It could drag Jed’s music out of the bedroom and into the world. It would set it in stone and drag it into the cold light of day for people to pick apart, or ignore, or fall in love with. It could make it real.
The young man with the guitar case was getting up to leave. His eyes met Jed’s as he walked away from the stool and the microphone stand.
He smiled apologetically at Jed, who was standing in his way, but Jed felt no words forming behind his lips.
He returned the young man’s smile feebly, evading his eye as soon as he could, as he stepped out of the way.
The young man threaded his way out through the crowd. He was gone.
Jed finished his pint slowly. He waited for the next singer to take the microphone. He was bloody awful.
Jed put the foam-flecked glass down and stepped out into the street. He set off for home, through the maze of terraces, back to the comforting familiarity of his room and his music.
Erased
You took up residence on the dark side of things, a bolthole in a wind-flayed right angle of a tower block where pigeons and suicides tumbled blackly on the air currents. You set about drifting off from who you were on a tide of cheap booze and bad poetry, graduating to recreational chemistry and the rhythms of pirate radio; ghost voices in the night which lead anywhere a sweaty mechanism of moving bodies can be summoned by beats and the burden of being a self surrendered to a ritual encoded in bass frequencies. You dissolve in the music as though someone has sawn off the top of your skull and let the universe flood in. But surfing the grey breakers of morning, you realise you’re back in your head, stuck in a bony jar like a dried-out specimen flinching from the light, a metallic residue on your tongue, toxic and digital. The day stretches out ahead like threadbare carpets, the world worn thin. One of those desperate mornings you even cracked and rang her number, but no-one answered.
An Ending
The cursor blinks steadily, beating out non-human time without mercy. I break its gaze to look out of the grimy first-floor window. Above the parade of shops, the winter sky hardens and darkens with the presence of the snowstorm it’s trying to hide. A metal sheet stamped with the imprint of a cold sun, braced like a bell for the hammer.
I return to the screen. I swallow. It is an effort to type your name, it feels wrong and it looks out of place sitting in the search field. I realise why; I don’t think I’ve ever typed it before, then or since, it’s a remnant from a pre-internet age, strange as that seems. I hit enter.
I deliberately look away, though I’m aware the search engine has reacted in only a fraction of a second and already has results waiting in my peripheral vision. I concentrate on the sky, looking for any rainbow cast to the light up there betraying that darkness as its true self, a dancing chaos of ice crystals. I imagine a storm of ones and zeros plucked from servers across the world vortexing down to my screen. Then I look. And there you are. Almost at the top of the list, right date and place, a simple register of a death, a shocking number of years ago now. The rest of the results are just variations on your names, people bound to you only by coincidence, chattering about their lives on social networks that didn’t exist when you were alive, in a way that didn’t exist when you were alive.
But there’s one out of place. An address listing on the far side of town, near where we used to live. Seems to be recent, but no further details. I wonder what your imposter is like.
Stalking the dead, or the electronic traces of the namesakes of the dead. The ghost of a ghost of a ghost. There must be better ways to waste time.
It’s easy to convince myself that I’m not going to do this, while contriving a chain of coincidences to ensure I do. It’s not like my day has any structure other than the few rules I half-heartedly impose to ensure I at least get out of bed, maintain a basic standard of hygiene and spend a few hours sat at my desk trying to distract myself from the work I’m supposed to be doing to sustain this whole less-than-lavish lifestyle in the flat over the off-license.
I decide I need a walk before the snowstorm hits, or perhaps to better enjoy it when it does hit, either excuse is good, and anyway I should replenish my coffee supplies at a shop I remember exists on the fringe of the district where we used to live, which just happens to be near the address that mysterious search result pointed to. As I walk I’m fully aware that there are many, many closer shops, but at each corner, I convince myself that I’m letting my feet, or chance, dictate which way I turn.
The sky remains steel grey, expectant, but the snow continues to resist the inevitable. The cold deepens, seeps through clothes, I breathe in invisible feathers and needles of ice. It’s been years since I’ve been to this part of town. I catch a glimpse of myself in a shop window. Beneath the nondescript winter coat, I look like I feel, a sack of grey lard slung on a fragile armature of bone. I have no idea why I am doing this.
Beyond the shops, I find myself turning off the main road into the mouth of a cobbled alley that yesterday I wouldn’t even have noticed, waiting between the houses. It emerges into a warren of terraces. And as soon as I step out into that streetscape, I realise.
I know these streets intimately but I’d deliberately forgotten them. All the other places you and I used to go have been scoured clean of their associations by passing time, drained of magic by the everyday; they no longer belong to us. But here, as I set eyes on these roads for the first time in so long, every angle and junction awakens some anaesthetised memory. It’s as though you’re everywhere. Moments of ours rise up from old stone and new brickwork, each accompanied by its silent double, the absence of you. It’s too much. I press onwards, unable to do anything but feel this rush of lost, broken time.
Eventually I regain some idea of my surroundings. I don’t know how much real time has passed but I’m leaving behind the web of close-packed terraces, Victorian factory workers’ homes opening straight on to the street. I’m on a residential road that starts to border an expanse of grass, the houses growing grander, wealthier, deliberately uncurtained to better show off the warm, money-cushioned family life within to any unfortunates passing in the cold evening. Years ago these were all flats and bedsits, slumbering through the last recession with a cargo of students, crusties and professional dole-ites.
I’m wondering what became of them all, when something remarkable catches my eye on the far limit of the grass. I stop to try and make sense of it. A pattern has appeared against the sky, regular geometric lines and shapes in the air, traced by moving black dots.
The dots settle briefly then shift into new configurations, they seem both alive and artificial, analogue and digital, constantly exploring some pattern the whole of which can never be seen. A flock of birds, assembling on the telephone wires invisible against the sky. Their restless bodies partially reveal the outlines of the cables, leaping between them like filings drawn to the force lines of magnets, spelling out an ever-shifting code. With a rush, the entire flock rises as one, and passes overhead, the code collapsing into a swirl of noise and wings, whatever message it carried lost on the air.
And then I realise where I am, what happened here years ago.
The last time I saw you alive was an accidental meeting in the town centre. We’d had a brief natter, both on lunch breaks from whatever crap jobs we were killing time in. I remember no profundities, nothing I could later hang significance on. It was one of those conversations people have when they have very little left to say except for the motions that need to be gone through to maintain a connection. The fact was our lives were already heading apart in the usual way. Maybe we would never have seen each other again anyway.
&n
bsp; But I do remember a real feeling of dread the night before I got the phone call. Not something I’ve retrospectively imagined. I remember cycling home across town after spending the weekend with a girl I was seeing, and I felt genuinely scared of something, something set all my alarms jangling as I rode back through the airless evening of an oppressive summer day and spent a sleepless night before I got the call in those distant pre-mobile days. And even in the bitter cold of this winter, I can still feel exactly how the sweat ran down my back, soaking my cheap plastic shirt, at the funeral a week or so later. I remember an almost crudely theatrical crack of thunder afterwards as the weather finally broke, my head muzzy from us all hitting the booze and spliffs till late the previous night. I remember your mum, I don’t think I’ll ever forget the look on her face as she struggled to keep it together, as she tried to thank us all for coming and her voice broke up. And the coffin, I think just seeing the blunt, heavy, awful reality of that thing, that obscenity of polished wood, was when it really hit me in the guts.
And I remember this bit of road is where I saw you again a few days later.
I saw you from a distance, heading towards me on the far side of the street. Your height, your build and clothes. That way you can pick out someone you know or someone you love from a crowd or from a long way off, something about their silhouette or their walk, long before you see a face. You didn’t seem to have noticed me yet, but you were walking purposefully, you knew where you were going.