fell silent, although neither moved. At my other elbow, a young man in blue-tinted spectacles was leaning on the bar, smoking a cigarette. When he glanced in my direction I pulled a neighbourly face. He considered me without hurry, then looked away.
The room darkened and swam and I realised that the party was a sort of paranoid conspiracy. These ruthless creatures were watching each other in perfect mistrust. They smiled little incredulous smiles. Was something wrong with my suit? Had I overlooked some social nicety? I was the only living thing in a place full of cunningly animated mannequins. I had no idea how long I’d been in here, but I needed to get away. I pushed off from the bar and began to sidle back across the room. I couldn’t see her anywhere. I caught sight of myself in a mirror, a waxy face sprouting from an ill-fitting collar. Behind me a french window was open, and without further thought I escaped into the dark outside.
I took a breath, letting cool air flow into me, and crossed the terrace to sit on a wall. Twilight had submerged the garden, but evening was still bright above the skyline. A few partygoers were dallying out here in pairs and threes, but none paid me any mind. Seen from outside, the party appeared benign. I exhaled.
‘You haven’t spoken to me all evening.’
She sat down beside me.
‘I’m glad you’ve been enjoying yourself,’ she said in a pointed undertone. She was glaring at me. ‘I was watching, you know. You should have seen yourself. I should have known better than to bring you. Oh, don’t even try. You’ll only make it worse.’
As she spoke, it dawned on me that I had never seen her so angry. Dumbly I understood that I’d got the evening wrong. All at once it was obvious: I’d got it all wrong, somehow, from the beginning.
I said nothing.
‘It was so blatant,’ she hissed. ‘Don’t you care what anyone thinks?’
I wondered what I had expected if not this. It occurred to me there were probably certain words I could say, now, that would change what was happening, but I could not begin to guess what they were. I stared down at my ragged plimsolls and wondered how I would get home tonight.
‘Don’t you dare ignore me!’ She shook my arm. I looked up, and her eyes searched my face.
‘Did you think for an instant about the position you’ve put me in? No, you couldn’t care less, could you. It wouldn’t even cross your mind. Don’t you have any shame?’
She paused, slightly out of breath. Then her fingernails were in my scalp and our mouths jammed together. Her weight laid into me so that we tipped backwards and rolled off the wall into a flowerbed. After a frantic minute I struggled up and hauled her to her feet. I pinned her wrists in my hands and led her deeper into the park, to find privacy among the hedges.
New experience made me bold, and I began to frequent parts of the city I would never have dared before. I found myself walking at a slower pace, happy to get lost in the spacious maze of all these flower tubs and iron railings, these stained white pavements, locked restaurants, fire escapes and commercial accessways, these airy canyons whose windowsills were crowded with geraniums, these deep arcades where shopfronts glinted: chocolatiers and milliners and dealers in delightful bits of junk. One afternoon near the November Bridge I discovered a secluded square dominated by a grand café. I decided to go inside and spend a while writing in the notebook I had bought myself earlier that day. I thought I had an idea for a song.
Inside, the café was a single high-roofed space, full of wood and brass and potted palms, the customers in pairs or alone. Two or three figures moved among them with silver pots. As I sat, a waiter appeared and took my order: moments later a tiny cup of black coffee stood in front of me and the waiter was melting away again even as he answered my thanks with a bow. His ceruse-white face paint was flawless. The tinkling music-box phrase that accompanied his movements stepped continually from major to minor and back. An overweight customer, sweating into a double-breasted wool suit, watched him narrowly as he crossed the room.
I sipped my coffee and opened my notebook at the first page. The words, which had seemed to fit so well in my head as I walked along, were harder to get hold of now that the tip of my pencil was resting on unmarked paper.
The fat man drained a bulbous glass of some viscid, dark-brown liqueur, and signalled to the waiter for more and quick about it. His small features, which were dwarfed by the swags of his cheeks and chins, wore a congested expression. His pointed patent shoes rested wide apart under the table and his short thighs lay puddled over the seat of his chair.
As the bottle was brought to his table, the customer glowered stolid-faced in the other direction. From my vantage point, though, I could see his hand settling on the back of the waiter’s thigh, and sliding upwards. There was a clatter: the sticky brown fluid had slopped across the table, and a couple of spots were spreading on the customer’s shirt. The waiter pulled a napkin from his apron and pressed it to the tabletop.
The customer, chins quivering, slapped the bottle from the waiter’s hand so that it bounced across the tiled floor, splashing gouts of liqueur. As the waiter stooped to retrieve it, he was jabbed in the behind by a pointed, polished toecap, hard enough to send him sprawling in the mess. The fat man resumed his seat with a righteous twitch of his trouser legs, his eyes darting around the other patrons of the café. My cup rattled in its saucer. No one moved. Conversations continued; the other waiters went about their business. I swallowed the last of my coffee, and hesitated. The waiter rose to his knees, his white shirt blotted with syrup and grime.
The door at the back of the café banged and a young man appeared, his feet clicking fast on the tiles. His tie was slung over his shoulder and his hair neatly gelled. He saw the urgency of the situation: he caught the waiter a ringing slap across the back of the head, then took hold of his ear, dragged him to his feet and propelled him through the rear door. Returning to the customer’s table, bobbing and bowing, he began what promised to be a virtuosic apology. Another waiter brought a mop for the floor.
The espresso machine rasped, and on the other side of the café a pair of ladies exclaimed their agreement about something or other. I closed my notebook and stood up.
One afternoon she brought me to a grimy street behind Festal Place, to a shop whose window was full of fiddles, mandolins, ukuleles and banjos: glossy wood in every autumn shade. Inside, guitars dangled overhead like extraordinary fruit. The myopic, dandruffed shopkeeper seemed as doubtful of my business here as I was myself, but both of us went along with what she wanted. Hopelessly conscious of my ignorance, I pointed to instruments which he lifted down for me, and, sitting on a tall stool, I ran my hands over the strings, strumming and picking the most impressive-sounding figures I had so far managed to invent. Right away I realised how flimsy and ill-made the guitar in her bedroom was. These were real instruments, sound and responsive, sweet and resonant. They had no end of music in them if I could find it.
I chose a traditional guitar with an unusually small body, a maple veneer and an inlay of darker wood around the sound hole. Every joint and curve, every detail, was flawless. In my hands it had the strange feel of future intimacy. It seemed heavy for its size, but the lightest touch pinned the strings neatly to the fretboard. I hung back, holding the instrument in both hands, while she paid. I never learnt how much it cost.
The city had music wherever you went, I discovered. Walking home from work through Belltown Park, I heard a tuneful racket from the old bandstand, where two bearded youths and a pale girl were playing amplified folk tunes, singing close harmonies through
