Today’s my birthday. It’s also my guitar’s birthday. It’s everyone’s birthday. It’s even our resident shanty man’s birthday and he’s planning to sing a song about a strike with al the bairns dying, just to cheer you al up. But before that I’m going to play you something. When the lads are ready, that is. Wil you wait while Malc puts more gaffer tape on his accordion? Now, I wrote this tune on the ferry from Mul . Such a beautiful journey. I was on deck, the boys were in the bar. I wrote it for a friend’s wedding and if it makes you want to dance I suggest you keep it to yourselves. Ready now?
Ready, boys? Two, three—’
And then it began. Amy had been to concerts and gigs al her life, to Wembley and Brixton Academy and the Wigmore Hal , to jam sessions in pubs and people’s back bedrooms, to theatres and hotel bal rooms to hear her father perform in his polished, relaxed, almost casual way. She had heard music of every kind, she had heard it in the company of her family, her friends and alone in her bedroom, picking over melodies as her father had urged her to do until, he said, the flute could say something for her in a better way than she could say it in words. But for al that, sitting here in an institutional arts centre surrounded by people older than her own mother, people of tastes and habits that had never, ever occurred to her before, she felt a sense of something enormous flooding through her: not exactly excitement or an exhilaration, but more a sense of relief, of recognition, of comprehension, a sense of coming home to something that she had never been able to acknowledge before as there.
The group with the guitarist played a forty-minute set. Several times, the guitarist slung his guitar sideways, and leaned into the microphone and sang. Then they left the stage and the shanty man appeared, holding a harmonica.
‘It’s one hundred and thirty-three years since Joe Wilson died. I’m going to sing one of his songs, in his memory. And then I’l give you Tommy Armstrong’s “Durham Jail” because my father was a miner, though he never was nicked for stealing a pair of stockings, as Tommy was.’
Scott leaned towards Amy.
‘OK?’
She nodded, her eyes fixed on the stage.
‘Next act,’ Scott whispered. ‘Wait for the next act—’
‘“Oh, lass, don’t clash the door so,”’ the shanty man sang.
‘“You’re young and as thoughtless as can be.
‘“But your mother’s turning old
‘“And you know she’s very bad
‘“And she doesn’t like to hear you clash the door.”’
Scott watched Amy covertly. He’d thought she might be intrigued, might quite like it, might be curious to hear the music Richie had grown up with, the music of the mines and the ships, but he had not thought that she would love it, that she would sit enthral ed while a little old man with a mouth organ sang a comic song from a nineteenth-century music hal , a lament from an oakum-picking prisoner in Durham Jail. She looked, in that cheerful, warm-hearted, unambitious room, as out of place as if she had fal en from another planet, but she was as absorbed as any of them, and when the shanty man had finished, and gone hobbling off the stage, to be replaced by a second group, two fiddlers, an accordionist and a slender girl carrying a flute, he thought she was hardly breathing.
The girl stepped up to the microphone. She was perhaps in her mid-twenties, with hair as long and dark as Amy’s own, dressed in deep green, to the floor, and wearing no jewel ery except for long glimmering silver chains in her ears.
‘Good evening,’ she said softly. Her accent was Scottish. ‘We’re so happy to be back. This is the twenty-ninth gig of our epic tour round England, Wales and Scotland. But we love coming here. We love coming back to the UK’s home for music and musical discovery.’
She paused for the cheering, standing quiet and stil and smiling. Then she bent towards the microphone again.
‘Sometimes, as you may remember, I want to jazz things up a little, give them a bluesy twist. But not tonight. Tonight, you get it sweet and straight, played the way it was written.’ She raised her flute and inclined her head to meet it.
‘Ladies and gentleman. Brothers and sisters. “The Rose Of Al andale”.’
They bought burgers on their way home, and carried the hot polystyrene boxes in the lift up to Scott’s flat. The flat was dim, lit only by the summertime night glow from the city coming through the huge window, and Scott didn’t switch any lights on, just let Amy walk in, and drop her bag on the floor randomly, just the way he dropped his work bag, and wander down the room, running her hand over the piano as she passed it, to stand, as he so often did, and stare out at the lights and the shining dark river far below and the great gleaming bulk of the Sage on the further shore.
She’d hardly spoken on the way home. He’d rung for a taxi while she was buying the CDs of the groups they’d heard, and she’d climbed in beside him in a silence he was perfectly happy to accommodate. In fact, he respected it, was gratified by it, and when, as they were crossing the river, almost home, and Scott had asked the driver to drop them off so that they could pick up something to eat, she had said suddenly, ‘Oh, I want to be her!’, he had had to restrain himself from putting his arms round in her in a heartfelt gesture of understanding and pleasure. Instead, with an effort, he’d asked her if she wanted a burger or a kebab, and when she didn’t answer, when it became plain that she had hardly heard him, he almost laughed out loud.
‘D’you want to eat standing there?’
She turned, very slowly.
‘Where – where are you going to eat?’
He gestured.
‘Where I usual y do. On the sofa.’
She came away from the window.
‘Wil you play for me?’
‘What, the piano?’
‘What else?’
‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Maybe tomorrow. Maybe we’l both play tomorrow.’
She sat down on the sofa. He handed her a box.
‘Want a plate?’
‘No.’
‘Good girl. Eat up. What have you had today – coffee and crisps?’
‘My favourite,’ Amy said.
She opened the box and looked at her burger. She sighed.
‘I want to be her.’
‘I know.’
‘I want—’
‘Wait,’ Scott said, ‘wait. You’ve work to do first.’
She glanced up.
‘What work?’
‘Exploring.’
She lifted the burger out and inspected it.
‘What are we going to do tomorrow?’
‘What are you going to do tomorrow.’
‘What?’
‘I’m sending you off,’ Scott said. ‘I’m sending you on a little journey of discovery.’
Amy stared at him. He winked at her.
‘You’l see,’ he said, and wedged his burger in his mouth.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Chrissie had never felt quite at home in Sue’s kitchen. It wasn’t the disorder realy, or the noise – the television never seemed to be switched off –
but more a sense that Sue’s children and Kevin were so intent upon their own robust and random lives that her presence there meant no more than if a new chair or saucepan had been added to the mix.
Sue herself seemed oblivious. The muddle of people and purposes, of washing-up and lunch boxes, of newspapers and flyers and scribbled notes, wasn’t something she strove for, but rather something she simply didn’t notice. She had absently moved a footbal boot, a magazine and an empty crisp packet from a chair in order that Chrissie could sit down, in a manner that suggested that sitting down wasn’t necessarily a chair’s function in the first place.
‘Can I turn that off?’
‘What?’ Sue said. She was polishing a wine glass with a shirt lying on top of a pile in a laundry basket.
‘The TV,’ Chrissie said.
‘Course. I’ve stopped hearing it. I’ve stopped hearing most things, especial y anybody under sixteen asking for money.’