It is the park that hits hardest. The bandstand is surrounded by fencing and pictures of a nasty dog. (KEEP OUT.) All around it, the grass is littered with butts and cans and needles. There is no sign of the pleasure boats on the lake. The water is clogged with old rubbish – a mattress, black carrier bags floating like bodies, bottles, car parts. She sits alone on a broken bench, looking and looking. People talk about a stone in your throat, but this is like swallowing them one after another. When she finally makes her way back through the park, the dusk is already making flat, dangerous shapes of the bare trees.
There were coloured lights here once.
Back at the hotel, the person staying in the next room has the television so loud, Ilse can hear every word. She washes and undresses with a strange apathy. Now that she is here again, a sort of dullness steals through her, and the part of her that began the journey excited, keyed to a high pitch, exists no longer. She barely has the strength or inclination to take off her shoes.
What did she imagine would happen? That she could hurry back and everything would be the same? How could she have been so naïve? Or so full of hope? A day has gone, and what has she found? That no one knows anything about Frank or any of the other shops on the parade. That things change and move on, and often – it would seem – get worse. Over twenty-one years she has grown used to missing Frank. It’s a thing she carries about with her, so familiar, so worn to fit the shape of her, it’s like a little strap around her wrist; she can go months without noticing it. Now she feels his absence with a kind of hollowing panic that makes her weak. She should pack up in the morning. Go home. Do something useful with her life before it’s too late—
Home? Where is that now? Her mother’s apartment? She pictures a glass shelf in an old mahogany cabinet, lined with little porcelain boys and girls that her mother spent a lifetime collecting – shepherdesses in skirts and their amours in frock coats. So is this what life is? The steady amassing of little things, trinkets, small prettinesses, that we save for and plan for, and which make the passing of time more meaningful, and yet which – come the end – will be wrapped in newspaper and driven to the charity shop?
She lies with her head against the radio and listens to a woman’s voice, which is sometimes lost but emerges again, speaking Russian maybe, and then blends with two hands playing a piano. Chopin? Bill Evans? She never catches enough of it to know. When she wakes in the morning, only a faint crackle comes from the loudspeaker and she imagines to herself that the voice she heard has a life of its own which she can catch but never keep. She tries to find the same station, moving the dial so slowly she barely moves it at all, but there is no trace of the Russian woman and her friend the piano player. Like the shops on Unity Street, like the people who ran them, like their customers and all those people who loved vinyl, who loved talking about this and that, nothing in particular, they are ghosts—
Well, that’s no excuse.
There are fifteen salons listed on the receptionist’s computer. She scrolls through them one by one. In 1988, Ilse thought the only people with tattoos were bikers, prison inmates, men who liked heavy metal – and Maud. Now, it turns out, everyone wants them.
‘Are you sure she’s still here?’ asks the receptionist. ‘A lot of shops have gone, you know.’
No, Ilse is not sure. But if anyone was going to survive from that little bunch of shopkeepers, she has a hunch it would be Maud.
She drives all over the city, with the printed list of tattoo salons on the passenger seat. She meets young men and women, with colourful arms like sleeves. She speaks to several with shaved heads and beautiful symbols of love and peace tattooed where other people would just do something ordinary and grow hair. One old man shows how, when he flexes his pectoral muscles, two bluebirds on his chest flap their wings. She ends up buying coffee for a woman inked all over with hearts and words like Pax and Happy, who is, without a shadow of a doubt, the saddest person she has ever met. But no one has heard of a tattooist in her fifties called Maud.
‘There was a woman,’ pipes up a young blue man. ‘She ran a salon in the nineties. Down a dead-end street. I don’t know what I did to upset her but she told me once to fuck off. She runs a flower shop, near Castlegate. It’s real posh—’
Ilse is already running for her car.
‘You?’
Maud appears to be speechless. She stands with a bunch of chrysanthemums in one hand, and a dangerous knife in the other.
Her shop is cold, the interior more like a warehouse; a contemporary mix of glass, exposed brickwork, grey and steel. It’s the last kind of shop Ilse would expect to find in this city. There are notices on slate boards – Flowers of the day – and bouquets arranged in stark, unusual ways which somehow make the blooms more spectacular, as if you have not seen things like roses and lilies before. A bouquet of olive branches and rust-brown dahlias; pink peonies with blooms like tissue paper held in a cone of willow twigs. From the walls hang wreaths made with scarlet chillies, twists of paper, apple rings. One sprouts fine wisps of blue wire like a Catherine wheel. ‘You?’ she repeats. ‘What do you want?’
For reasons she cannot begin to explain, what Ilse would most like is to hug Maud.
Instead she explains all over again. About her career as a violin teacher, about moving into her mother’s apartment to nurse her, and then selling her own when her mother died. About hearing Vivaldi in Lidl and deciding to come back. About looking for Frank—
All the while, three shopgirls with smart aprons watch Maud and Ilse with a look of utter confusion.
‘Don’t just stand there,’ snaps Maud. ‘Go and do something useful.’
They scarper out the back.
Maud has changed. Her Mohican mane is now a geometric brown bob, greying above the ears and around the temples. She no longer dresses as a bad fairy. Instead she wears a charcoal-grey linen tabard over jeans, and brown lace-up boots. Patches of skin are still blue, though it is pink around her neck and hands.
‘I had some of them removed,’ says Maud, noticing Ilse’s confusion. ‘It was getting to the point where everyone had a tattoo.’
She seems to have focused her attention on her nails instead. They are long, filed to a point, and painted with swirls and stripes. Maud flashes her fingers a lot, like someone with a new engagement ring. She clearly likes those nails.
No engagement ring, though.
Maud explains everything she knows about Frank, and that is very little. ‘Basically, he lost everything and refused help.’ She hasn’t heard about him since the mid-nineties. Maud finally sold her salon in 2000. Went away to college to learn floristry and then invested her money in this shop. She runs an online business. Deliveries. Big weddings. Corporate stuff.
‘I saw Frank’s shop. What happened?’
Maud softens a little, or at least she puts down her knife. She tells Ilse about the blaze that started the day the shrink-wrap machine caught fire. Ilse has not thought of the thing in years, but now that it is back in her mind, it is so real she feels she could reach out a hand and touch it. Smell it.
Maud sighs. ‘Kit was badly burnt. Frank felt awful about that. I don’t know what happened to Kit afterwards. I thought I saw his photo once in the paper but I guess I was wrong.’
And so Ilse learns what happened the day Frank walked away from her. She learns that he lost everything and tried to keep going for a while and then gave up. ‘He’d got it all wrong about CDs. He hated the way everyone kept buying them. It seems so crazy now; no one wants CDs. But at the time it made him difficult. I heard he got involved with some dodgy people. The last time I saw him he was down in the park.’
‘Did he say anything?’
‘No.’
Ilse listens in a kind of dream. None of this holds reality. She realizes she has not taken a proper new breath in minutes.
‘It’s a long time ago now. He could be dead.’
After everything else, it’s a punch to the stomach. Ilse gasps.
&n
bsp; ‘No,’ she murmurs. ‘No. I can’t believe that. No.’
Maud’s voice jolts her back to the present. She asks if Ilse would like to see inside the shop? She’s got a spare key.
By the time they’re in Unity Street, it’s getting dark again.
The music shop stinks of mould and cold and piss. Maud moves the white cone of light from her mobile phone, showing Ilse the damage. The turntable that crossed the back wall is a charred plank on the floor. The booths have gone. The counter too. The floor shifts beneath her feet; a dense wad of broken vinyl, dust, plaster, ash and glass. The walls are black. Someone has been using it as a shelter; in the corner there are bottles, cans, takeaway food boxes, an old sleeping bag. There is even an upturned shopping trolley, stuffed with a blanket and a baseball bat.
‘You see?’ says Maud. ‘There’s really nothing here. You see?’
Ilse feels so cold, she begins to shake. She clenches her fists to keep from crying. She tells herself it will pass, this feeling, it is only another moment, she need not stay with it, and briefly she succeeds, she thinks I am not hurt, I have money, I have food. But then the sorrow grips her again and it is like being occupied from the inside out. She has no idea how she will ever get over it.
In yet another café, Maud fetches mugs of tea. She seems uneasy. A blend of formal and kind. She snatches a packet of cigarettes from her pocket, swears and puts it away again. ‘I bloody hate the new laws about smoking.’ She searches for Nicorettes. ‘Do you still—?’
‘No. I never really did. I just smoked when I was with Frank.’
Maud shows Ilse a photograph on her phone of the thatched cottage where she lives. It takes her forty minutes to drive in. She strokes the image on her screen, like something she loves.
‘Is there anyone else?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘The Williams brothers? Father Anthony? Mrs Roussos?’
The Williams brothers died a few months after moving out of Unity Street. Within a fortnight of each other. It was probably as well. Fort Development went bust and the people who had invested in them lost everything. Frank had been right; the whole thing was a scam. As for Mrs Roussos? Maud does something uncharacteristic; she laughs. The old lady kept going for years. Died in ’99. ‘You wouldn’t believe how many people turned up for her funeral. The last I heard, Father Anthony was in a home but if he’s still alive he’d be in his eighties. I’m the only one left.’ She checks the time on her phone. She needs to get back to her shop.
At the door of the café Maud briefly holds Ilse. It’s an odd sensation. Not comforting as such; more like meeting a piece of armour. ‘Safe journey home. Sometimes it’s best if you move on. This city always was a dead end.’
As Ilse walks away, she has to take deep breaths in order not to cry. A man in a doorway asks her for money and – thinking of Frank – she empties her purse.
‘God bless you,’ he shouts. ‘God bless you.’
His voice follows her the length of the street, like a piece of rope, pulling her back.
It occurs to her she has been searching for Frank in all the wrong places.
She visits pubs down by the docks, she approaches people selling the Big Issue. She stops people at bus stops, she asks at a refuge centre and an all-night kitchen. By 8 p.m., she has been to the cash point and emptied her purse all over again. She has listened to a woman telling her about the day her husband simply disappeared. She has been laughed at, shouted at, followed, ignored, passed by, bumped into. On more than two occasions she has felt pure white terror. Smoke lifts from the chimneys of the food factory. Her feet hurt like stings.
No one knows anything about Frank, or even a man who wanted to help other people find music.
‘Sounds like a guy in a film,’ someone laughs.
It is as though he never existed.
42
Last Night a DJ Saved My Life
ILSE LIES FULLY clothed on her bed at the hotel. She has no idea what time it is. She just lies watching the black square of window, lit up by thousands of tiny lights. Thoughts come to her and they are not so much words as things. Shapes. The air is so still, it seems as if everything has been taken away and there is only this unsettling feeling of something mislaid that shouldn’t be. This absence.
It is already her third night in England. All day, she has lost Frank, only to find him and lose him all over again. There is no guarantee that just because you are ready to go back and claim something, it will be there. She tries to tune the radio into the woman’s voice that she heard the night before, and her friend at the piano, but even they have abandoned her. Instead she ends up with the local radio station. She listens to a phone-in chat show (‘Late Night Surger-y!’ the jingle sings every fifteen minutes) where ordinary people ring and talk about their problems and a DJ suggests ways to deal with them. Something about the programme is familiar and she listens with the volume turned very low so that she has to keep really still in order to hear. It is as if she already knows these stories – a man who can’t sleep at night, a woman who can’t make up her mind whether to leave her husband. The DJ makes zippy ‘Mm mm’ noises as he listens and then he gives unlikely advice to his callers like ‘Try sleeping on the other side of the bed,’ and ‘Listen, lady, that man of yours sounds like bad nooooze.’ He has a phoney American accent and a lot of enthusiasm. He plays records that affirm his message. Ilse thinks she will find him irritating but actually she finds herself more and more enchanted. There is something irrepressibly good-natured about him. He keeps repeating the phone number of the radio station and reminding his listeners to call the Late Night Surgery about whatever they like. Then out of the blue there’s a terrible clunk – a direct assault to her ear – and he says, ‘Oh shit,’ only not in his American accent but in another one that she knows instantly.
She grabs the phone.
‘How did you realize it was me?’
They sit opposite one another in the hotel bar. Ilse and Kit are the only customers. It’s one in the morning and he has come straight from the radio station. He’s still wearing his bicycle clips. His thick black hair is flecked with grey but his face is round and smooth and very pink. Unlike Maud, Kit has slimmed with age. He is dressed head to foot in Lycra and zips, and his cycling helmet sits on his lap like a plastic pet.
‘I didn’t know at first. Then you dropped something.’
Kit laughs into his fruit cider. The waiter has served it in a long glass with a cherry on a cocktail stick. It’s a small piece of kindness but it touches Ilse; the only drawback being that every time Kit takes a sip, she worries he will lose his left eye.
She says, ‘I found Maud.’
‘I avoid Maud.’
At the bar, the waiter is alternately watching Kit and flipping through his newspaper, as if he thinks he might recognize Kit’s voice and is a bit shy.
Kit tells her about himself. He has been doing his Late Night Surgery on the radio for years. He gets letters every week and he has a big following on social media. When he yawns, she can still see the teenager in him. She apologizes. ‘I shouldn’t have asked you to come. But as soon as I heard your voice—It’s been a terrible day. Are you hungry?’
Of course he is hungry. This is Kit. He orders a BLT sandwich from the all-night menu. When the waiter brings it, it is served with a garnish of crisps and two pickled onions. The waiter asks if Kit is really KIT. From the radio? Kit says he is. ‘Oh shit, no way,’ says the waiter. ‘I’d know your voice anywhere.’ He asks Kit to sign a napkin, a beermat and his shirtsleeve. ‘My mum loves you,’ he says. And from the way he keeps blushing, it seems possible the waiter likes Kit too.
Over the course of another cider (and two more cherries), Ilse learns more. Kit was badly burnt in the fire. He still has the scars on his legs and upper arms. Frank sat with him in hospital every day. Afterwards he introduced Kit to a friend who was a DJ, and that was how things began for Kit at the radio station. But within about a year, Frank was going dow
nhill. He spent a lot of time alone. Kit wonders if Frank pushed people away on purpose – or maybe he stopped caring.
For a while he stayed friendly with his old bank manager but he refused financial help. Then the bank manager took early retirement so that he and his wife could take the kids travelling. Frank’s old customers would try giving him money or help if they ever bumped into him on the streets, but he could be unpredictable. He might agree to meet, and then not turn up. Or he might say he’d found the record you needed, but then decide to give it to someone else.
‘After that it just seemed he’d had enough of music altogether.’
Of all the things she has heard in the last few days, this is the one that throws her most, as if a new cavity has opened inside her filled with nothing but sorrow.
‘Frank gave up on music? But music was Frank.’
‘I saw him around ’98. I was leaving a nightclub. It was a shock. He looked terrible. I was with friends and he kept falling all over the place. I remember he said his head hurt a lot, it was clear he’d been drinking. I tried to help him, but he went away. I think he wanted to give up, you see, and he just couldn’t do it.’
Ilse listens with her handkerchief to her face. But when she asks quietly, ‘He is alive, isn’t he?’ it’s Kit whose eyes bud with tears.
‘Oh God, I hope so. I can’t imagine the world without Frank. It would be a really terrible place.’