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 was the one …’
‘Cried when I said I didn’t like him that way.’
‘Not awkward at all.’
‘He keeps sending messages saying I think about you every day. You know.’
‘Oh dear.’
‘So I’m quite glad I’ll be away in the summer. Give him a chance to maybe find someone, you know?’
‘You poor thing.’
As they talked, a new way of life revealed itself. Theirs was a complicated youth, a fine game: they were free to do as they liked yet they lived at the mercy of lawless passions. Their relationships were troubled with their fathers and mothers, their sisters and boyfriends. They knew how to trade just a kiss for a kiss. They named strange nightclubs. They were jaded and sweet-natured, in and out of love, adventuring in the contradictions of their own emotions. No love affair could last, but what beautiful, bruised hearts they had. I took it all in, stirred to find I was capable of such sophistication. They knocked their cigarettes on the rim of a saucer and poured me more coffee, which I did my best to drink.
Later the doorbell buzzed and two young men arrived, beefy types in striped scarves and good coats who walked in without breaking their conversation, their voices ringing importantly through the flat. They looked like members of the same sports team. One of them went to one of the flatmates, sliding a thumb into the waist of her jeans, and she wrapped her arms around his neck. When they caught sight of me both men stopped in their tracks just long enough to assess the situation; then they relaxed, and their eyes slid past me. I left soon after.
I would happily have spent all my time in the slovenly female warmth of her room, sitting on the bed with the guitar in my lap, working out one song after another from her collection, or lying face to face on the pillow, my hand on her hip, watching her lips form words while her music, turned down low, murmured were they in love, or only in love with a song … On mornings when I woke up in her bed, I was perfectly indifferent to any fate I might meet that day. I wouldn’t have minded if on my way home I had been mown down by a tram or shot through the heart by a vengeful rival.
One morning she sat up and gave me an appraising look.
‘It’s my cousin’s birthday tonight,’ she said. ‘I want you to come.’
While she was at class I visited a department store and bought, for a startling price, my first suit. The fabric was scratchy, the trousers too long, the shoulders far too broad, and the whole outfit hung off me, but I supposed I’d get used to it, and to the constriction of the domino-patterned polyester tie which had come packaged with the shiny charcoal shirt. I couldn’t stretch to new shoes, but maybe my plimsolls would go unnoticed.
We rode out to Rosamunda by tram, and found ourselves in a suburb full of unobtrusive mansions behind evergreen hedges. We strolled the rest of the way to a walled garden. It was a private park for residents of the district, she explained; you paid a subscription. She spoke in low tones to a guard in a kiosk, while he gazed at me, sucking his teeth and rubbing a pimple on his cheek. He took a minute to think about it, but finally the gate opened on its pneumatic