The Music Shop

‘Why?’ he asked. ‘What about you?’

  ‘What about me?’ The happiness had gone from her face. She was all shining eyes.

  ‘What do you do?’

  ‘Oh. Me. I’m really not very interesting.’

  She blinked with such sadness he had no idea how to keep his hands from reaching out to hold her.

  But hang on, STOP RIGHT THERE, what was he doing? What was he thinking? She was engaged. Remember? She had someone else. Someone really good-looking, no doubt, and successful. A city boy. A hotshot. He could picture him. (Yes, really picture him, he thought. You know this kind of man. Smart, good haircut, tanned skin, expensive suit. He saw them more and more these days, driving smart cars that were so low to the ground he could only assume you had to roll to get inside them.) Look at yourself, he thought. Your battered suede jacket, your broken shoes. Your shop doesn’t even have proper units.

  She stooped to pick up another record sleeve from the floor. ‘Do you know this one? Concerto for Two Violins in D Minor by J. S. Bach. Can you tell me something about it?’

  Gazing at her, so beautiful and irregular, so still and unknown, so here and yet so temporary, something inside Frank gave a shift. It was like a ship sinking in his stomach. He wanted her to leave. He couldn’t explain. He didn’t even want to explain. What was there to explain, beyond the fact she was unavailable and he was a write-off? He was turning into someone he didn’t even recognize. He needed her gone. Out. Now. He never wanted to see her again. He lurched back to his turntable.

  ‘Actually I’m closed.’

  ‘Closed?’

  ‘Yes.’ He reached for his door keys and got her cactus plant.

  ‘I was trying to help, Frank.’

  What was she doing now? Using his name? As if she were reaching a hand through his skin and squeezing his insides? And yet the way she said his name made it sound so whole and new in the world. If only she would say it again and again. Oh and one more time, please—

  ‘Did I ask you to help me?’

  ‘No.’ She looked confused. Taken aback.

  ‘I don’t need it. I don’t need help.’

  She picked up her mac, her bag. Straightened her spine. ‘Of course you don’t.’

  He wanted to rush to her side. He wanted to put his arms out to her and apologize. He wanted to say, Who are you? How can I help? Instead he watched her struggle to thread her long arms inside the sleeves, and then doing up her buttons, one by one, before pulling a hard knot in her tie belt. He watched her doing all this and there was a version of the scene, he somehow knew, it was out there somewhere, where Frank sat opposite Ilse Brauchmann and told her everything about the Concerto for Two Violins by J. S. Bach, but instead he stood behind his turntable, arms folded, hurt and angry and alone, and he let her leave without another word. They didn’t even say goodbye.

  ‘Look, Frank. Look at me.’ Kit swung open the door to the flat and stood proud in his new blue shirt and tie. He had also wet his hair and smoothed it to one side. Seeing the empty shop, his face fell like a half-baked soufflé. ‘Oh but where is Ilse Brauchmann? Did she say why she left her bag? Did she tell you why she fainted?’

  ‘No,’ said Frank. ‘She didn’t, and we’ll never find out. We won’t be seeing her again.’

  13

  Bach’s Eyes

  ‘NOTHING IS WHAT it seems. Did I ever tell you about Bach’s eyes, Frank?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Would you like me to?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  Peg was up a ladder with a sheet of wallpaper. She had paste in one hand and a Sobranie cocktail cigarette in the other. Peg had told Frank about Bach – she was often telling him about Bach – but so far she had not displayed any interest in home improvements. So here she was, a substantial woman on top of a small ladder. The best way to keep her up there was by letting her talk about something she understood.

  ‘Bach was a genius,’ she said, sploshing her bedroom wall happily with paste. ‘He was the bee’s knees. He could take a simple little tune and improvise. He’d put it here, he’d put it there, he’d put it back to front, upside down, and then bingo. He didn’t even have to write it. This was all just going on in his head. He was jazz, Frank. He was jazz in fucking Baroque fucking Germany.’

  She wobbled in excitement. The boy gripped her ladder for dear life.

  ‘He had twenty kids. Did I say that before?’

  Frank said yes. She often said that. Peg was thirty when she met Frank’s father – or rather, fathers – it stood to reason he had one, but she had no idea who it might be. She also had no intention of making the same mistake twice. Frank could never work out what she meant by that – especially since everything else about her life came in multiples. Boyfriends especially. She had lots of those, and mostly married ones. For a while he scanned them for similarities to himself, looking for little clues like eye colour or ear shape. He even took to smiling at them in meaningful ways before he went to bed, until one of them asked Peg if her son had some kind of remedial problem.

  But for now she was up a ladder. She was wearing a blue kimono with a pink turban. She was swearing like a trooper and talking Bach. She was also hanging wallpaper.

  ‘In Bach’s time, the point of music was to praise God. But he had suffered. He was an orphan by the time he was eleven. Then he had all those kids and over half of them died. His wife, she died young too. He knew about loss and despair. Just as he knew about getting pissed and into trouble. So his music is halfway between man and God. It’s how man becomes divine. It’s like tripping.’

  Peg posted the end of the paste brush between her teeth, along with her cigarette, so that the brush seemed to fume of its own accord. She lifted the paper into place. It was an extravagance of grapes and flowers. They all seemed very blue. ‘Is it straight?’

  Frank cocked his head to the left. ‘Yes.’

  ‘It doesn’t look straight.’

  He couldn’t imagine there was much of a difference between straight and tilted, as far as this wallpaper was concerned.

  ‘Is it too much?’

  ‘It’s beautiful.’

  ‘Terrible eyesight.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Bach. Cataracts. He had an operation, but the doctor – I mean, this man, Frank, he was not a surgeon, he was a con man. He performed operations in front of a crowd in the market square. Bach went blind as a bat and after that he had a stroke. He was dead in four months. And then of course Handel went to the same man for the same operation and he went blind too. It’s tragic.’

  Frank gazed up at her wallpaper – it was lopsided, there was no denying it. But he couldn’t help feeling it was the happiest thing he had ever seen.

  Later he switched on the Dansette and she played the Concerto for Two Violins in D minor. She explained how the music worked like a conversation. Sometimes the violins were telling the same story, and sometimes they were having an argument; first one led the way, then the other. They might be so close they were like a piece of braid, or so far apart they had to call for one another across the dark. This wasn’t like Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons’ when one instrument took centre stage and became (in Peg’s words) a right fucking show-off. Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins was about learning to be two halves of a whole.

  As the record came to an end, Frank felt so happy he was sad, and so sad he was happy. He wondered if it was the same for other boys? No one at school mentioned Bach or cataracts. Mostly they flipped him with pencils and left small dead things in his school bag. Not that he told anyone.

  Peg never got further than that one strip of wallpaper. A few months later she was seeing a man with a passion for DIY and he painted the entire room a useful shade of brown. It was everywhere. Brown walls. Brown doors. Brown cupboards and drawers. DIY Man topped it off with a nice brown carpet. It was like being inside a mushroom. Not a trippy one. Just a plain brown cap.

  But when the sun hit it, you could still see those grapes. The big blue flowers. DIY Man s
lapped on another coat of paint but it was the same; no matter how much brown he used, the vivid past would not go away.

  Like music, said Peg. Even when it was over, it kept living inside you.

  14

  Bye, Bye, Baker (Baker Goodbye)

  THE BAKERY WENT overnight. On Friday it had been business as usual. Cinnamon rolls in the window, the sweet warm smell of Polish bread, a blue light in the kitchen at the back. Saturday morning, the shop was locked and dark. Even at lunchtime, there was no sign of the baker. Frank, Kit, Maud and Father Anthony tried the door. They rapped on the glass; they shouted his name. Father Anthony went back to his gift shop and tried ringing. No answer.

  ‘Do you think it would be a good idea if I broke in?’ asked Kit.

  Everyone agreed that it would be a very good idea if Kit did not break in. The safest thing all round would be for Kit to remain exactly where he was on the pavement, preferably without touching anything, or indeed moving, while Frank fetched a stepladder.

  A van turned into Unity Street. It parked up right over the kerb, and three men in boots, jeans and bomber jackets swung out. They were carrying hacksaws, axes and crowbars. So everyone forgot about the stepladder. Or rather, in the face of bigger things, the idea politely lost itself.

  The men had keys. They unlocked the baker’s door and worked fast. They dismantled and carried out the glass display counters, the serving counter, the tables and chairs.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Maud stepped in their path.

  ‘What does it look like?’

  ‘Our fucking job.’

  ‘So fuck off. Fucking freak.’

  And Maud, who might have been expected to eat men like that for breakfast, merely nodded and knelt like a child and tied a terribly careful bow on her Doc Martens.

  For the rest of the morning the men worked. Sounds of drilling and hacking echoed on Unity Street. They took in a handcart and re-emerged with the baker’s oven strapped to it like a sick person on a stretcher. They did the same with the fridge. Proof boxes. An old workbench. After that they brought out tea chests into which they’d thrown bowls, plates and glasses. They’d even hacked off electrical wire and gathered it in coils. Sheets of hardboard were nailed against the window and door, along with a printed sign. Purchased by Fort Development. Trespassers will be prosecuted. It was the same with the florist’s, and an empty house across the street. The men erected wire fencing all around the old bombsite, along with more Fort Development signs. Finally they erected a billboard with a large image of a lot of white people drinking coffee and looking very happy, though quite what that had to do with an old bombsite, or even Unity Street, was hard to understand. It was mid-afternoon by the time they were finished.

  ‘Where’s Mr Novak?’ asked Frank.

  ‘Search me,’ said one of the men. His neck was lined with fat. ‘I guess he went home.’

  ‘The bakery was home. And what’s Fort Development?’

  ‘The new landlord.’

  Maud, Kit and Father Anthony gathered on the pavement, staring at the new boards on the bakery. They felt the loss of the shop and short of laying flowers they had no idea what else to do, but they needed to honour the moment somehow. Then Williams the Undertakers came out, the two brothers holding their hats. Still no one spoke. Kit carried out chairs and Maud fetched blankets and they sat in a line on the pavement, smoking and looking up at the parade they all loved so much, with its falling-down masonry and two boarded-up shops, like a rot growing from both sides, along with the newly fenced-in bombsite at the end.

  ‘Why didn’t Mr Novak tell us he needed help?’ said Frank.

  Something of day remained in the sky – a thin blue ribbon – and it was not too cold. The light was that dim kind, falling like a filter, so that everything on Unity Street looked both separate and also made of the same substance. Even the houses opposite were blue, and so was the pavement. Light shone from the four remaining shops on the parade, and their windows were yellow pictures in the dusk. A funeral parlour, a religious gift store, a music shop and a tattoo salon …

  ‘All life is here,’ said Father Anthony, as if reading Frank’s thoughts and also answering them.

  Old Mrs Roussos appeared with her chihuahua in one hand and a flask of tea in the other. The Williams brothers fetched biscuits. Kit offered his chair to Mrs Roussos. Maud brought another blanket.

  ‘You’re not going to sell up too?’ asked the old lady. She looked shaken.

  Everyone promised they had no intention of going. ‘We were born in this shop,’ said one of the Williams brothers. ‘The only way we’re leaving is in a coffin.’ Frank asked if it would be a double coffin and at last people laughed.

  ‘Would you say something for us, Father?’ asked Mrs Roussos.

  Father Anthony reminded her, as he often did, that he was no longer a priest but she merely made a tsk tsk noise, as if that kind of detail was irrelevant. So he pressed his palms together and lowered his head. ‘Dear Lord. Please help us to understand what we don’t know. It is our differences that make us richer. All will be well.’

  Was that it? They bowed their heads to say something shuffly, halfway between ‘All will be well’ and the more traditional ‘Amen’. Mrs Roussos began to weep and when Maud passed her a Kleenex the old lady took hold of the tattooist’s hand. Then somehow Kit grabbed Frank’s hand, Father Anthony reached out for the Williams brothers and here they all were on Unity Street, this small line of shopkeepers, clutching hold of one another in a chain, while in other parts of the city more small stores were probably being boarded up, and police sirens wailed.

  More residents came out. They brought chairs and hot food – a curry, a dish of dumplings, garlic bread – and they told stories about the baker. A woman spoke about a time she had rung from work and he kept his shop open so that she could have a loaf. Another man said Mr Novak had stayed up all night once to make a birthday cake with a red iced bird for his daughter. They lingered in front of the bakery, sharing food and talking about the kind things he had done for them. Pete the barman carried out beers, Frank played music from his shop, and by the end it was more of an impromptu street party.

  They just had to look after one another. They would be OK, so long as they stuck together.

  15

  I Will Survive

  MOONLIGHT FILLED THE shop like water. Frank sat at his turntable, thinking about a customer he’d helped once. A little boy.

  He used to come to the shop every Wednesday. He couldn’t always reach the records, so he asked Frank once if he might have something to step on, such as a wooden box. There was something very earnest about this child. Blond hair; almost white. Eyes so blue they could pierce holes in you. He was seven or eight.

  When Frank looked at him and listened, he met a kind of echoeyness, the way there is in a house that has no furniture. Frank introduced him to Haydn, then Glenn Miller, the O’Jays and ELO; the boy liked big, happy music to fill all those spaces inside him. He said little, but once he mentioned his mother didn’t go out much and another time he said he had two big brothers and that his father worked away, so Frank got the impression his parents were separated.

  ‘It’s my fault,’ he said another time.

  ‘What’s your fault?’

  That was when the boy showed Frank his arms. The skin was covered in bruises, like terrible flowers. Who had done that? The boy wouldn’t say. It was as though he needed Frank to know this was how life was for him; that was enough. He never bought anything, of course. Once or twice Frank tried to give him a record until the boy confessed he had no record player. It was the first time he cried; his tears were huge fat drops on his cheeks. Like lozenges.

  ‘Are you going to ban me now?’ he said.

  No, Frank told him; ‘You can come whenever you like. Even if it’s the middle of the night. I am always here for you. You’re a good kid. I want you to know that.’

  And the boy did come back, for several years. Other kids got spots and oil
y hair but this boy seemed to shine, and Frank wondered whether it was because of what happened to him, whether something like that made a person stand out and be luminous, even when the thing that happened was a terrible one.

  ‘You OK, chief?’ Frank would say.

  ‘I’m OK, chief.’

  Then one week he just stopped coming. Frank asked a few people but no one knew anything about a child with blond-white hair who felt safe when he listened to big music. God knows, the world was probably full of them.

  ‘But you made a safe place for him,’ Father Anthony reassured him. ‘You helped until he didn’t need you any more and then he moved on.’

  Sitting in the dark, Frank pressed his head in his hands. He wondered if the boy was genuinely happy, or if things had got so bad he couldn’t even face music. Who knew where he was now? Who knew what he used in order to get by? It wasn’t enough, caring from the sidelines. After all, Frank understood what it was like to be out of step with the world. He should have done more for that boy.

  Hours moved slowly, and it always was the same: ‘Do you think Ilse Brauchmann will come back?’

  ‘No, Kit.’

  ‘Do you think she has gone for good?’

  ‘I do.’

  The questions loosened Frank’s resolve. Why, why had he let her go like that? Why was he so afraid, when all she had asked was for him to tell her about Bach? Even though he had tried to shake himself free of her, she seemed to keep holding on. Twice he took a walk to the end of the street, searching for a smart green coat, and wondering if she happened to be just passing.

  The two closed shops were sprayed with fresh graffiti, and beards and horns were painted all over the happy faces on the billboard next to the bombsite. Then a representative called by from the council to report that there had been complaints about the falling masonry. He was a stoop-shouldered man, dressed in a suit the colour of a filing cabinet, and holding a clipboard. He informed the shopkeepers that until external repair work had been done, they would have to alert passers-by to the danger of falling masonry by cordoning off the pavement with plastic ribbon. They would also need to put up official council signs saying Beware of falling masonry.