Then Clipboard Man asked for another slide, which showed a close-up of a broken piece of masonry.
There would be an accident soon, he said. And if it was your house from which the offending masonry dropped, well. He shrugged. Good luck with that. Because you would be liable for damages.
The Williams brothers exchanged a nervous look and sat back down.
Now it was the turn of Sideburns. He asked for a moment more of everyone’s time.
Clearly this was a great community. No one was denying that. But there were other great communities in the city. Had anyone actually heard about the new development down by the docklands? Those properties would be real investments. Fort Development weren’t just offering to buy out the house owners on Unity Street – they could help with mortgages at the most beneficial rates. Right now they were practically giving them away.
The fact was, he had heard about what had been going on in Unity Street, and he had to admit he was alarmed. If he was a resident, he’d be worried about walking the street late at night. And now there had been the mugging—
‘Mugging?’ said Frank. ‘What mugging?’
He was not the only one. A few people exchanged confused glances.
The speaker apologized. He hadn’t meant to mention the mugging. Apparently the police were still conducting inquiries.
Despite his reassurances, people seemed uneasy. Pete shook his head behind the bar, as if this was the final straw.
‘The fact is, this is 1988. It’s not 1948. These days we have choice. You don’t have to take what you’re given. You can get more.’
At this point Baton Man flicked his remote-control switch and vast images flashed all around of the happy white people drinking their coffee, to the accompaniment of David Bowie singing ‘Ch-ch-changes’.
He started his own round of applause which Kit, by now completely baffled as to who was good at this meeting and who was not, also took up. Soon most of the people in the room were clapping.
Frank felt something with a sharp edge in his lower back and realized it was Maud’s fingernail.
She hissed, ‘Say something!’
He caught sight of Ilse Brauchmann watching him with a look of alarm.
He shouted, ‘We’re a community.’
No one heard.
‘Louder,’ hissed Maud.
He waved his arms. He said it again, ‘Hey! We’re a community.’
A few people on the back row turned and glanced at him, as if he were some kind of embarrassing disturbance.
Frank didn’t even know what he was going to say. He just thought how it was for him when he talked music with Ilse Brauchmann; he spoke slowly and from the heart. ‘Shops are like vinyl,’ he began. ‘You have to take great care of them. And communities are the same …’
Afterwards it bewildered Frank that he had no exact recollection of the words he used or where they had been hiding all those years. He remembered that people swivelled round to see who was speaking and that he spent a good while in fact not speaking, or at least not coming out with full sentences. He said something about life not always being easy. He said something else about it not being perfect. He likened community to being part of a huge broken-up family – which was especially confounding given his singular and unorthodox childhood. He gazed across the crowded pub at those dark, wide eyes that were filled with such immense stillness and quiet he thought a man would never see to the bottom of them, and he kept talking.
‘When I came here fourteen years ago, I had nothing. I was really lost. I found this street and yes, it was crap, it was falling down, and really ordinary, and someone even had a goat.’ (‘Oh, that was me!’ interrupted a woman at the front. Amused laughter.) ‘But you were kind to me. When I was trying to put my shop together, people called in every day to help. I didn’t ask for that. You just turned up. And that’s the thing about Unity Street. That’s the glue that sticks us together. Yes, we’ve got problems, but over the years we have always made it work by listening to one another and helping. If we throw all this away just because we are afraid, or because we have an idea that life could be uncomplicated, I have an awful feeling it’s a terrible mistake.’ He might have also said something like ‘You have to be careful what you lose,’ but he wasn’t entirely sure any more what he was trying to say, because his voice was wobbling with a mixture of emotion and fear, and his tongue had gone and appended itself to the roof of his mouth, and he was so hot he probably looked the colour of a panic button. If he’d said all that he hoped he had said – i.e. the above – he was bloody lucky.
Afterwards Kit led another round of enthusiastic applause. A few people gave Frank a wide berth but Mrs Roussos sobbed so much she could only cling to his shoulders, with her little dog pressed somewhere in the middle. Father Anthony shook him by the hand, and said he had never felt so proud. ‘Did I make sense?’ Frank asked; to which the old priest assured him that even if he had dried up a few times, they got the gist of what he was hoping to say. Residents came up to Frank to pat his shoulder. Good on him, they agreed. He had their full support. They would never leave Unity Street, they were a community, they loved this street and they would stick together. Even Maud managed a full-blown smile.
Everyone enjoyed Fort Development’s free beer. A few people stayed to chat things through with the team of men in grey – Kit had a conversation with Clipboard about how to use a slide projector – but the general view was that the night belonged to Unity Street, and so did the future.
Afterwards Frank and Ilse Brauchmann walked the waitress back to her café. There was a sweetness in the air; the smell of a city that has been lived in all day. The leaves blew a little in the trees and the cathedral stood square and kind against the twilit sky. He felt exhausted but happy.
The two women went arm in arm, laughing as they talked about the evening. At the door of the café, the waitress said she would just clear up the remains of the sizzling dish before she went home.
‘I fancy trying something European next week,’ she told them.
Ilse Brauchmann didn’t say anything more about her father, or going back to Germany. She just hugged the waitress and promised she was looking forward to it.
Then she turned to Frank and leaned up to break one kiss on his cheek.
‘You were brilliant tonight,’ she said. ‘Not an island at all.’
The following afternoon, Williams the undertakers came to the music shop. They asked if they might have a quiet word?
The brothers removed their hats and studied the labels inside, as if they weren’t entirely sure which was theirs.
‘We went to see the people at Fort. The new houses will have proper heating, and that. And they are a good investment, you see.’
The other one said, ‘You heard what they told us about the muggings. Everyone’s talking about them—’
‘But that wasn’t real. There haven’t been any muggings on Unity Street. You know that.’
The brothers nibbled their mouths and shook their heads. ‘We can’t do it any more, Frank. It’s time for us to go.’
And they did. Not overnight, like Mr Novak the Polish baker, and not in a double coffin either, as Frank had predicted, but in a local minicab with a pair of furry dice hanging from the rear-view mirror. They were going to stay with their sister in Scotland for a while. It was years since they’d had a holiday.
The shop was locked but there was no vigil this time. No line of chairs, or plates of food; no stories of all the kind things the brothers had done. One woman said she was glad to see the back of the undertakers. It wasn’t nice, she said, having that kind of business on your doorstep. And someone else said he wasn’t being funny or anything but he’d seen those two old men holding hands.
How quickly and easily people seemed to accept the loss of the shop; it paved the way for more loss to follow.
The building would soon be boarded with Fort Development signs, and so would the house across the street with the Italian flag at the win
dow. There was further graffiti. Sharon is a cunt! GO HOME. But also, I love Princess Diana!!!! and This way to the music shop!!!
(‘I did those two,’ said Kit.)
The tattoo parlour, Articles of Faith and Frank’s shop: only three left.
34
Protest Song
‘SOUTHERN TREES BEAR a strange fruit,’ sang Billie Holiday from the Dansette. ‘Blood on the leaves and blood at the root …’
Tick, tick. Tick, tick.
The record came to an end and for once in her life, Peg said nothing.
‘I don’t know what came over you,’ Frank managed at last. ‘You’ve wrecked my life.’
‘She couldn’t have that baby. How could she have a baby? She’s seventeen.’
‘We were going to get married.’
‘Don’t be so ridiculous. She wears ankle socks.’
He had no idea if she was even being serious. ‘Did you talk her into it?’
‘I explained the pitfalls.’
‘Of marriage?’
‘Of kids.’
‘Jesus, Peg.’
Deborah had been to a special clinic. Frank didn’t know she was going. She just rang afterwards and told him there was no baby. Her voice was slurry. ‘I don’ wanna seeee you any morrr.’
He cycled to the street where she lived and knocked at the door. ‘Deborah! Deb!’ he shouted until her mother answered. ‘Go away! Go away! Haven’t you and your wretched mother done enough damage?’ Frank wrote letters, but they were all returned. He felt desolate.
He listened to a lot of protest music after that. Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Woody Guthrie, Curtis Mayfield. If it didn’t have a political message, he wasn’t interested. He flunked his school exams and talked about joining the army, though he was only saying that to wind up Peg. Instead he got a job in a pub, with a room of his own on the top floor.
That summer Frank started sleeping with the landlord’s wife. She had a bosom like a bolster and nestling against it he could forget Deborah for a while, and the baby they never had. He got three cracked ribs for his trouble, along with the promise that if he showed his sweet face again, he would end up on the pig farm.
Nineteen years old and he was back at home, listening to records and Peg.
‘What kind of life would that have been?’ she asked once. ‘Married with a kid?’
Normal, he thought. It might have been normal.
35
Don’t Believe a Word
SAY NO TO FORT DEVELOPMENT! read Kit’s posters. UNITE FOR UNITY STREET! They were on every lamp post and every window. He even designed leaflets.
Frank had given it his best shot at the meeting, and it hadn’t been enough. He spent almost every waking hour handing out Kit’s flyers. He posted them through doors, he approached anyone who was foolish enough to catch his eye, he explained over and over about the campaign to save the houses and shops on Unity Street. Kit made a petition, which he took from one door to another, collecting signatures.
‘What about the muggings?’ people asked.
‘There haven’t been any muggings.’
But now that the idea had been planted, it took on a life of its own. Pete advised his customers to carry rape alarms. A man reported being followed by kids with knives. The more the residents of Unity Street talked about the muggings, the more certain they were that the muggings had happened. By the end of May, several more houses had been sold to Fort Development.
Ilse and Frank continued to meet for their music lessons in the Singing Teapot. She mentioned once that her father had a cold but when he asked if she was still planning to go back, she turned away and said, ‘I don’t know, Frank. I don’t seem to know very much any more.’ Another time she mentioned how tired he looked, and instead of talking he rested his head on the table and dozed, while she sat opposite him quietly watching the window. It could only have been ten minutes but it felt like the most replenishing sleep he’d had for weeks. In the shop new boxes of vinyl continued to arrive, waiting for her beside the shrink-wrap machine.
The council man called again and said there had been more complaints about the falling masonry. He insisted that unless the shopkeepers addressed the problem, the council would look into forcibly closing them. So out came the plastic ribbon, which Kit carefully looped from one street lamp to another.
One afternoon in June, Maud was helping herself to Frank’s milk while he was out leafleting. Mistaking her for an assistant, a customer asked if she knew where Frank kept his Vivaldi. Maud replied that she was buggered if she knew how the shop worked. It was a law unto itself. Nevertheless she helped him search and eventually she remembered the afternoon Frank had talked about concept albums and the ‘Four Seasons’. It wasn’t exactly a day she was going to forget. There it was, a new copy slipped between ‘The Look Of Love’ and At Folsom Prison.
‘Can you tell me anything about it?’ asked the customer.
‘Nope.’ She flipped it over and scanned the sleeve notes on the back.
Something dropped through Maud like a weight falling through air. She had to grip hold of the counter to steady herself. She took the money for the record and filled out the sales book but her hands were shaking so hard she could barely write a straight line.
‘See you again,’ said the customer. ‘Thanks for the help.’
She didn’t even reply. She marched upstairs where she found Kit sorting through a new delivery. ‘Frank’s really gone out on a limb here,’ he said. ‘Who’s going to buy this stuff?’
But Maud had no time for worrying about vinyl. She planted her feet squarely. ‘Tell me again about that basement flat where you saw Ilse Brauchmann.’
No one could take it in. The shopkeepers sat in their circle in England’s Glory; the old men stared from the bar. The woman in curlers gave up smoking altogether.
Pete the barman produced a plate of pickled eggs but they hadn’t the wherewithal to eat. Not even Kit.
‘She’s a musician,’ repeated Maud.
Confusion.
‘A violinist.’
More confusion.
‘She made records. The Berlin Philharmonic, for fuck’s sake.’
They continued to stare at Maud with mouths open like fledglings. Kit’s was so wide, he looked in danger of catching something.
‘She played on the “Four Seasons”. Look.’
One by one they passed round the record sleeve. Kit said he could only see a picture of some nice trees.
‘Look on the other side, you pillock. It’s her photo.’
There she was. A black-and-white young woman with enormous, frightened eyes and her hair half up, half down. And yet no matter how many times Maud said it, no matter how many times they stared at the record sleeve, and no matter how many times Maud pointed at Ilse Brauchmann’s name next to ‘first violinist’, Frank couldn’t take it in.
Ilse Brauchmann was a musician?
She played first violin?
She made records?
The room began to swing so wide, he felt sick.
‘I told you!’ said Kit. ‘I told you she looked famous! I said that right at the start!’
Frank was barely present, and neither was his head. People spoke and he heard bits of sentences, odd words, but he couldn’t keep up. It was like repeatedly falling down holes. Getting up, only to trip into another one.
Maud explained all over again how she had taken the bus to the backstreet described by Kit and there, sure enough, was Ilse Brauchmann’s name beside a bell, in an old block of flats. Maud had asked a neighbour. Apparently she kept herself to herself. Played her music too loud but if you banged on the wall she turned it down. Hers was the bedsit down in the basement. The woman thought she had a job as a cleaner.
Frank’s head stopped swinging and decided it would like to split open.
Father Anthony rose and stood next to him and touched him on the shoulder. ‘You all right?’ he murmured. His voice sounded swimmy.
‘So why did she lie?’ asked
Pete the barman.
Everyone looked at Frank, hoping he would know the answer. But he couldn’t think. He was like a building that has been swung at by a crane and ball. He yawned and one yawn wasn’t nearly enough; they kept coming again and again.
Kit said something about Ilse’s arthritis and another voice said of course, of course. Then people began to talk about Frank and music lessons and he didn’t want to know any of it, he just wanted to curl up in a very dark place and listen to records. But what about her fiancé? someone else asked. Where was he in all this?
‘Oh God!’ Kit’s arm shot high into the air. ‘I think I know this one!’
Before Kit could say any more, the room slopped right over. Something acidic leapt to Frank’s throat. He picked up his jacket and lumbered to the door.
‘Frank? Do you want to talk?’ called Father Antony.
‘No,’ he said. ‘This time I really don’t. Please let me be alone.’
That night he lay staring at the ceiling, studying shapes he could only just about make out in the dark. Was it minutes that passed? Hours? He had no idea. He couldn’t see how he would ever get up again. Everything moved round like the spokes of a wheel to which he had been strapped. He raked over their meetings, trying to understand. The pictures in the ‘Four Seasons’? James Brown as Muhammad Ali? What had possessed him? He tossed from one side of the bed to the next. Wherever he moved, the shock went with him.