Communion Town by Sam Thompson Read Free Book Online Page B

… My own songs were diffident and wary, so far. I could finish the writing quickly – on more than one occasion, half an hour of panic, strumming and scribbling with my face inches from guitar strings and notebook, gave me the whole of a song – but I was slow to begin anything new. My voice was sweet enough but I could only hold it steady over a single octave. It would surely improve with practice, and I reckoned my vocal muscles were getting stronger already. The interval of two notes could divide your heart and the tug of words against rhythm could mend it: I’d stumbled on the means to say whatever was true in this life. I only wanted the skill to do it.
    We went out to a gig, a showcase night for promising local acts that took place monthly in a Communion Town bar. We walked across the November Bridge, through the Esplanade and under the floodlit face of the Autumn Palace – the trams weren’t running, for some reason, and in the central metro plaza we glimpsed a confusion of ambulances and police cars – then continued down the Mile, across Impasto Street and into a side lane where, past a bouncer and down a flight of stairs, the music had already begun. The band, a duo, consisted of a long-haired girl who squeezed dark, complicated chords from a concertina and sang, while an older man – her raffish uncle, we speculated – waggled his eyebrows and played the clarinet. As far as this duo were concerned, a song was a melodramatic story full of ghosts, criminals, murders and revenges, told in spiky rhythms and pungent key-changes. When I went back to my songs the next day, they seemed flimsy and humdrum, and it was obvious that they could never win the cheers and foot-stamps that the duo’s rowdy ballads had drawn from the crowd. The very idea of playing in public made me ashamed: but, for all that, I knew I was not going to give up.
    In her room, late, I let her persuade me to play. She never asked if the songs were about her. Perhaps they made her shy, as nothing else did, or perhaps she understood better than me what a song really was. I had to keep myself from demanding more assurances, wanting her to guarantee that they were good enough – for what, I had no idea.
     
    After graduating she took a job raising funds for a small, well-connected development charity. Spring was waking the city up just then, opening doors and windows, warming the separate streets into a single organism. Time felt spacious. If you woke early, the day was there waiting for you, untouched. Each morning the pitched window above her bed turned a fresh card from the deck of clear skies. Even a lunch-hour was wide enough to get lost in, and a free afternoon contained all possibilities. The dusks kept lengthening and you felt that if you took the right path, up the wynds past a paper-lanterned tea garden into the Old Quarter, or along the river, towards the sky’s end-of-the-world pinkness, you could follow the evening as far as you wanted and never reach nightfall.
    I met her from work at the end of her first week in the job. The charity was based in a small city square whose limestone townhouses had been converted into solicitors’ and architects’ offices, advertising agencies and boutique business premises. She was bare-legged in a pleated dress. I had my guitar; I was seldom without it, now. We walked along Mino High Street, against a flow of young men with their suit jackets off and their ties loosened, and stopped for takeaway iced coffees.
    As we left the café, she hesitated, handed me both of the cold plastic beakers and skipped back inside to visit the lavatory. I waited on the pavement, glancing over at a torpid down-and-out who sat with his forehead resting on his knees so that only his greasy wool cap was visible. As I stood there, a rusty noise like a sigh scraped from his chest. A few copper coins lay on the ground between his feet. I thought of adding to them, but my hands were full and I wasn’t sure whether I had