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 tinny microphones. Most people were ignoring them or pausing for half a song and moving on, but I stayed an hour, listening with envious delight. A grey-haired woman and a small boy stopped in front of the bandstand, her arm around his shoulders and his fist bunching her coat; she gave me a sharp look, but then seemed to decide I was permissible. A gang of teenagers around a park bench whooped half-sarcastically after each song. As the band packed up, I left, wanting to approach them but not knowing what to say.
I went through all the music she had in her room, listening to the same songs over and over and shadowing them on my guitar, chord by chord, until I knew them by heart. For a while I was preoccupied with a dead singer who had a trick of double-tracking his voice on his recordings. His eloquent, subdued melodies were so distinctive they must have been coded deep down in his cells. Daylight from your bedroom window, That was what we wore … My own songs were diffident and wary, so far. I could finish the writing quickly – on more than one occasion, half an hour of panic, strumming and scribbling with my face inches from guitar strings and notebook, gave me the whole of a song – but I was slow to begin anything new. My voice was sweet enough but I could only hold it steady over a single octave. It would surely improve with practice, and I reckoned my vocal muscles were getting stronger already. The interval of two notes could divide your heart and the tug of words against rhythm could mend it: I’d stumbled on the means to say whatever was true in this life. I only wanted the skill to do it.
We went out to a gig, a showcase night for promising local acts that took place monthly in a Communion Town bar. We walked across the November Bridge, through the Esplanade and under the floodlit face of the Autumn Palace – the trams weren’t running, for some reason, and in the central metro plaza we glimpsed a confusion of ambulances and police cars – then continued down the Mile, across Impasto Street and into a side lane where, past a bouncer and down a flight of stairs, the music had already begun. The band, a duo, consisted of a long-haired girl who squeezed dark, complicated chords from a concertina and sang, while an older man – her raffish uncle, we speculated – waggled his eyebrows and played the clarinet. As far as this duo were concerned, a song was a melodramatic story full of ghosts, criminals, murders and revenges, told in spiky rhythms and pungent key-changes. When I went back to my songs the next day, they seemed flimsy and humdrum, and it was obvious that they could never win the cheers and foot-stamps that the duo’s rowdy ballads had drawn from the crowd. The very idea of playing in public made me ashamed: but, for all that, I knew I was not going to give up.
In her room, late, I let her persuade me to play. She never asked if the songs were about her. Perhaps they made her shy, as nothing else did, or perhaps she understood better than me what a song really was. I had to keep myself from demanding more assurances, wanting her to guarantee that they were good enough – for what, I had no idea.
After graduating she took a job raising funds for a small, well-connected development charity. Spring was waking the city up just then, opening doors and windows, warming the separate streets into a single organism. Time felt spacious. If you woke early, the day was there waiting for you, untouched. Each morning the pitched window above her bed turned a fresh card from the deck of clear skies. Even a lunch-hour was wide enough to get lost in, and a free afternoon contained all possibilities. The dusks kept lengthening and you felt that if you took the right path, up the wynds past a paper-lanterned tea garden into the Old Quarter, or along the river, towards the sky’s end-of-the-world pinkness, you could follow the evening as far as you wanted and never reach nightfall.
I met her from work at the end of her first week in the job. The charity was based in a small city square whose limestone townhouses had been converted into solicitors’ and architects’ offices, advertising agencies and boutique business premises. She was bare-legged in a pleated dress. I had my guitar; I was seldom without it, now. We walked along Mino High Street, against a flow of young men with their suit jackets off and their ties loosened, and stopped for takeaway iced coffees.
As we left the café, she hesitated, handed me both of the cold plastic beakers and skipped back inside to visit the lavatory. I waited on the pavement, glancing over at a torpid down-and-out who sat with his forehead resting on his knees so that only his greasy wool cap was visible. As I stood there, a rusty noise like a sigh scraped from his chest. A few copper coins lay on the ground between his feet. I thought of adding to them, but my hands were full and I wasn’t sure whether I had any change. I closed my eyes to feel the sun