I turned the corner into a broader street, but, before I could take another step, a man burst from a doorway in front of me, knocking me aside as he went sprawling full length in the road. Catcalls and laughter pursued him from inside the bar. The man cursed, rolled on his side and retrieved his hat. He hauled himself to his feet with the aid of a lamp post, peering redly out of a mess of cuts and bruises, one hand fumbling to straighten his ruined tie. Someone told him to sleep it off.
I gripped my guitar case. The street swarmed with citizens of the late night, jostling their way from one den to another in search of whatever it was that they needed. As they pushed past they moved me out of the way with cordial roughness, so that I found myself manhandled along the street by the crowd, smeared with its perspiration, smelling its armpits and breathing its alcohol breath. It was easier to accept the embrace than resist it, easier to go where I was guided. I felt that if I chose I could simply let myself be carried forward forever as a particle in the city’s bloodstream, dissolving. I tasted hot fat marbled through the air around a cluster of stalls selling sausages, sweating pies and whelks. I was hungry but my pockets were empty.
Up ahead, somebody was whistling tunelessly. Surprised at how the cracked melody pierced the din, I craned to see where it was coming from. The whistler was pestering people, jinking back and forth to obstruct them, conducting his own performance with his forefingers. He was an emaciated creature with a long, bony face and a shock of pale hair which in the glow of mercury vapour could have been peroxide blond or prematurely white. He kept on repeating the same jingle, a few shrill notes forced between his front teeth.
Periodically he paused, grinned and held out an open hand to the crowd. No one responded, but he didn’t seem to mind. He would caper lopsidedly along the street and whistle his phrase again. Drawing closer, he gave me a hostile glare.
‘Keep moving,’ he said. ‘These ones are mine.’
His skin had a damp, unwholesome texture, as if its pores were clogged with powder, and his eyes were the hard and sunken eyes of an insomniac. I thought he might be suffering from some serious illness.
‘This is my street. Get your own.’
Taken aback, I said nothing. Then I noticed that his eyes were darting to the guitar case in my hand, and I understood what he meant: what he thought I was and what he was telling me would happen. If I were to do as he told me, I would keep moving until I found a street of my own; there I’d find a place to sit and play, people would give me pennies and soon I’d be able to buy myself something to eat. At this vision of the future, sweat prickled inside my clothes and I felt an irresistible need to get away from this whistling scarecrow. I turned and walked.
‘Hey, you.’
He was limping along after me. He walked painfully, pressing a hand to his groin and pitching sideways at every other step, but he could still move at speed.
‘You!’
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