He grabbed hold of my sleeve. Although his clothes were wrecked, he wore a fresh carnation in his lapel, its tight green bud barely showing the white furled inside.
‘Where are you going?’ he said. ‘What’s the hurry?’
He grinned the ingratiating grin he used on his patrons, and whistled a couple of notes.
‘Wait a minute. Listen. Listen, I had some songs.’
He was close enough for me to smell decay on his breath and see the clots of grime in the tangled white mop. His fingertips brushed my guitar case.
‘They call me idle,’ he said. ‘They call me good for nothing. But I don’t believe them. They don’t know our calling, you and me. They don’t know what we are.’
He nodded, showing me the gaps in his teeth.
‘You see? I’m just like you. A flâneur. I walk through the city. I hear its songs and I sing them back, and all I ask in return …’
I wanted to walk away, but there was something needy in his face, something desperate, that would not let me.
‘I was a guitar man once, too,’ he said. ‘I made songs in my time. Such songs. Set them on their feet, they’d fly. You know what I’m saying?’
He tapped the back of my hand.
‘I can tell you know. There’s nothing like making a true song, a real one. It might take a lifetime but it doesn’t matter. It costs you everything but you never think twice about paying. But then it stopped. I lost it. Something went wrong, and all the songs left me. It was a long time ago. I can’t remember.’
His fingers rested on my hand that was gripping the guitar case. His eyes were fixed on the instrument.
‘I wish,’ he said, ‘I only wish I could try once more to play my songs.’
I held tighter.
‘I only want to borrow it,’ he said. ‘I think maybe it’ll come back. Maybe I’ll play like I used to. I only want to play one song.’
He was staring at me in what looked like dire need. I pictured the two of us sitting down on the kerb and opening the case, and then his ragged voice lifting and his fingers rippling over the strings to release unforeseeable music. I imagined him restoring the guitar to my arms, and rising with a new ease, relieved of his pain.
‘One song,’ he said. ‘Give me one song.’
I pulled away, grimacing in apology, and started walking again. Behind me the whistler began to shout.
‘Who are you?’ he bawled. ‘Where are your songs?’
He was still following me, dragging along with his broken gait, and before I could get away he made a grab for the guitar. We tusselled, and as I wrested the case away from him he stumbled backwards and fell. Sitting up, he coughed and wiped snot across his face with the back of his hand.
‘They’re not your songs, boy,’ he said. ‘They’re mine. You’ll see.’
He looked up at me with the same sly surmise I had seen on his face to begin with.
‘A mirror,’ he called after me. ‘It’s like looking into a mirror!’
But I heard no more from him, because as I turned another corner I realised where I was. This was Serelight Fair. The night’s journey fell into place: I’d been here often enough pulling rickshaws for stag parties, and tonight I had only failed to recognise the district’s drunken thoroughfares because I’d come by a roundabout route. I was fifteen minutes’ walk from Three Liberties and my own bedsit.
As I set off in the right direction, the past night already seemed less than real.
* * *
It was close to dawn by the time I got back to the bedsit, exhausted from walking. Looking around, I saw that I hadn’t been back here in days. Heaps of dirty clothes lay on the floor and the dishes in the sink showed spots of mould. I looked in the fridge but there was nothing to eat. Outside my window, the glass tube of a streetlamp glowed against the beginnings of first light.
I snapped open the guitar case, lifted out the instrument and settled on my bed with my back against the wall, wide awake. I strummed aimlessly for a while, and then wrote a new song. It took twenty minutes and was the best I had ever written. It was still built around those same few favourite chords, more or less, but inside them and between them I discovered new kinds of longing, new kinds of sweet and bitter regret, not having to dig but finding them in plain view as you might find precious flotsam after a flood.
As I sang, my sinuses seemed to fill with a clean liquid. My voice grew thick. I could feel something twisting and tightening in my chest, and as I played – feeling for the shape of the song, making sure of the rhythm, trying out a pattern of fingerpicking, tracing the melody of verse and chorus, locating the bridge, piecing together the lyrics – the sensation grew deeper until I could have sworn that the twisting had levered my chest wide open and whatever it contained had been plundered, that she’d plunged her hands in up to the shoulders and ransacked me hollow, leaving nothing behind.
The title came last. Everything that had happened between us, I realised, had folded itself down into a single night’s walk through the city, sleepless and heartsore, and so the song must be named accordingly. It was called ‘Serelight Fair’. I played until it was perfect and broad daylight was coming in at the window. Eventually I fell asleep.
* * *
She liked to walk through the park after work, so I waited all afternoon near the gate, leaning against the railings where the joggers and dog-walkers passed. I watched for a long time, occasionally thinking that I must have missed her, or imagining that she had walked right past but I had somehow failed to recognise her. Mostly I thought about nothing at all.
But when she appeared there was no mistaking her. She was in one of the short knitted dresses she wore with coloured tights, and she looked serious, gripping her shoulder bag close against her, with eyes forward, forehead creased and mouth pursed. I could never have missed her. She was the more strikingly herself for being a stranger again, another pedestrian on her way home to a life you could only guess at.
I hurried after her, calling her name. Heads turned, and she paused and waited, but her face gave nothing away. Other homebound workers stopped to watch me approach, and a couple of the males, seemingly by instinct, moved forward a step or two as if they might need to put themselves in between us: but they weren’t sure of what they were seeing, and as we came together they turned dubiously away.
We stood still in the flow of passers-by, chilly among bright flowerbeds. She looked drawn and polite, but then all the distance drained from her face and left only a question behind. In my head I heard an old country song from her record collection. I swear that I won’t make your exit slow, But won’t you break my heart before you go … I reached for her hand and she let me take it. She gave me a tired, convalescent smile, as though she knew what it was that I wanted to say.
