cost?’
His breath fogged my glasses.
‘Is it unreasonable to expect that you should be capable of doing your job without destroying my property? Do you think that’s unfair? More to the point, are you intending to compensate me for the damage?’
I didn’t reply, but I had a notion I wouldn’t be getting paid for this run.
‘I thought not,’ he said. I could tell that this conversation wearied him very much. ‘Hold out your hand. The right one. Palm upwards. Come on, get on with it.’
Without knowing why, I found myself obeying. I watched my right hand reach out to offer him my palm. He took off his belt, wrapped half its length around his fist, and tugged, testing its strength. Then he stopped. She had climbed out as well, and was finding her footing on the treacherous pavement.
‘Wait a mo,’ he said, his tone changing. ‘Where are you going, we’re nowhere –’
She ignored him and picked her way around the mired rickshaw. As she went past, she leaned close to me and said: ‘You shouldn’t let him speak to you like that.’
The crystals fell in behind her as she walked away.
Ten days later at the Institute of Humane Sciences, a lecture had just ended and the central hall was blocked with students, their voices flooding the barrel-vault roof which had previously echoed only the squeaks of my rubber soles. My daytime job was for an agency which supplied me with dark green overalls and sent me to the university, where I worked my way around the corridors, lecture theatres and seminar rooms, wielding long-handled pincers and pushing a cart stocked with cleaning products and refuse bags.
The students drank coffee from tall paper cups and had a lot to say. The girls’ hands flashed and the boys squared up to each other jokily with their chins raised. I trundled along the edge of the hall. This, I had realised, was where I had seen her before, and since that snowy night I had glimpsed her almost every day, arguing eagerly with other students, carrying books out of the library or, often, quarrelling in public with one tall youth or another – it pleased her to embarrass her admirers. As I caught sight of her now, though, she was glancing around, fiddling with an unlit cigarette, not quite listening to her friends.
Without warning she turned her back on them and strode towards me. I fumbled hastily in my cart.
‘You can’t keep staring,’ she said, ‘and then have nothing to say to me.’
Her friends, their circle still open from where she had broken away, watched us. I was at a loss and said nothing. Her eyes looked sore, as if she’d been out late somewhere smoky, but they remained fixed on me, insisting on an answer.
‘What are you going to do, then?’
* * *
Her bedroom was up in the roof of one of the grand old Cento Hill tenements. Lying tangled in a sheet, watching the snow dot the pane above my face, I thought about the daft bounty of the universe. This warm, shambolic nest, with her paperbacks heaped on the mantelpiece, photos of her family tacked to the walls, her guitar leaning in the corner, drawings her friends had made for her and postcards they’d sent, many-coloured underthings trailing from the dresser drawer: yesterday I couldn’t have begun to imagine it. A stray hair on the pillow tickled my cheek: it was crimson with a dark inch at the root. The toothpaste-streaked sink was lined with lipsticks, mascara tubes and contact lens paraphernalia. Her eyes troubled her, I had learnt, but she refused to wear her glasses.
I struggled among the sheets until I was propped up on my elbows, and let my laughter pass as a silent shudder. A wave of sleepiness followed, and I considered giving into it. I breathed in the spicy fug. The city lay outside like a vast gift for which I had always only needed to ask. A song was playing. I’d never heard anything like it, but the twangling music was just another miracle of the afternoon, and I let it run through me, the singer drawling about silver saxophones, the Queen of Spades and a dancing child with a flute.
Bitter smoke had been on her breath. My mouth had never tasted like this before, so sugary and rank. My head never ached so dashingly. The sight of her buttoning an oversized old shirt, five minutes ago, standing on tiptoe to see across the rooftops, had rinsed my memory clean. She was making tea and I had no idea what would happen when she came back.
* * *
Up in her room, we listened to more old songs. A woman made her acoustic guitar buzz and thrum, and sang in a warbling contralto about romantics and idealists, poets and artists. Silvertongue, you have placed your plans In your sweet, sweet nature and your hard hands …
When the album had finished, I lay in silence, lingering at the edge of that world. It was late. She was dozing, her face hidden by her hair. The only light came from a decorative jar of red glass in which she had lit a candle-stub. Soft shadows pitched on the wall. My glasses lay on her bedside table, my jeans on the floor.
Without much thought I sat up and leant over for her guitar. I had never held one before now, and its lightness surprised me. Cross-legged on the bed, I tried how its curve lay in my lap and how I needed to support the neck. I touched the strings, one by one, then together. It hadn’t been played in a while, I thought. I turned the screws, as I’d seen the buskers do at the galleria, until the notes sounded right. I fitted my fingers to the fretboard and let the strings speak softly, then strummed, as quiet as I could, with the pad of my thumb. I didn’t know how to play, but my fingertips began to move up and down the frets, exploring.
After some experiment I found a clean chord, and then another. I adjusted a finger and the chord opened up, suspending itself; then I lifted the finger entirely and discovered the minor.
Still quietly, very slowly, cautious not to damage the delicate find, I strummed a sequence of shapes. A tune was buried there. I hummed along with the chords, picking it out. It was a simple song, one I must have heard recently – I didn’t know where or when. I felt my way through, learning how its simple phrases went around, and how they changed in the middle, then changed back. I played it again, and instead of humming, I sang, letting the small sound vibrate in my sinuses and the top of my throat. I didn’t really know the words but I sang the syllables that seemed to fit. My tongue had never stepped so well around my teeth and palate.
My palm stilled the strings. She shifted drowsily.
‘Keep playing.’
The next time I stayed over she went out early and left me sleeping. Later in the morning I found myself in her kitchen with the two girls who shared the flat, old friends from back home. They brewed coffee and insisted on cooking me pancakes, then swapped indulgent smiles as they watched me eat. The flat smelled of cigarettes and perfume. They lolled on the kitchen chairs, clasping their bare feet in their hands to touch up the polish on their toenails, and tugging their fingers through their tangled hair. They didn’t seem to mind discussing their private lives in my company.
‘… still in love with me.’
‘Oh, yuck.’
‘So that’s … fun. Yeah.’
‘And this
