9. Brian

1.9 Cosi disse ‘l maestro; ed elli stessi

 

Sometimes it’s hard to know where to start. Some days just picking up an instrument and trying to magically produce something doesn’t work. That’s when I get panicky. Sometimes there are so many layers of thoughts and fog and shit that even the most instinctual bit of music in the world can’t find a way out. Of course it’s always there. There’s a very effective way of blocking it, that’s all.

Today, for example. It shouldn’t be that hard today: I just need to write six bars as a transition. But the dog has to go to the vet, and the dog cries and looks at me like he doesn’t trust me when I take him to the vet. And moving mum and dad this weekend, and mum can’t cope with the slightest bit of stress these days (and moving is obviously a pretty big stress) and the blood vessels in dad’s brain can’t cope with the stress of mum’s stress, so that’s going to be a tough weekend. Then there’s Joan next week. I don’t know what evidence they’ve got on her but things would be a lot easier for her if we hadn’t fallen out the way we did just before she lost it.

I haven’t written anything decent since. Ironic then; malicious damage by who to who? What comes around. Maybe that’s why I can’t write.

8. Nadia

1.8 Dopo cio poco vid’io quello strazio

‘Let he who is without sin cast the first stone’; that’s what my granddad always said to me. I never really understood what it meant before. I always thought it was about sinning, and a warning not to sin; that you could never commit any action in life because it would somehow expose you as a sinner.

Now I think I understand better what he meant by it. I think he meant, ‘don’t judge.’ The sinning is irrelevant – everyone sins. What makes a person nice or kind or good to be around is if they aren’t judgmental of people. We have judges to be judgmental. I learnt that with this whole affair with Sam. I could have saved myself an awful lot of trouble if I’d just let the judges and the magistrates get on with it rather than trying to sort him out myself. Hand him over, that’s what I should have done. I’m only his parent; what do I know about anything? If they do something wrong, or if you judge it to be wrong, don’t try and sort it out yourself. Tell on them, report them to the police. Let the justice system swing into action.

You see, it’s even stupider than it sounds. I can’t sit here and not make a judgment about the way my kid acts when he takes drugs then goes and slashes the neck of a thirteen year old girl and then comes home and tells me to put a wash on even though it’s half one in the morning and the neighbours are all asleep. But that’s how God would have it, isn’t it? Or Tony Blair? Or whoever it is who’s in charge these days. You just let them all run wild and pay a fortune in taxes to hand the problem over to some institution. I don’t get it. I don’t.

7. Kate

Inf. 7. Mal dare e mal tener lo mondo pulcro

Kate:

Lovely soft peak.

His undivided attention at Shibden Mill, telling me technical stuff about photography.

“That was very nice,” he said over dinner, referencing early that morning, wanting me to know he’d enjoyed it. Reached over in the car for another go.

Laughing all the time, especially at the Greek Turkish/Turkish Greek; with the bar manager at the Inn on the Bridge; with Georgie.

But horrible when he was drunk later that first night.

He didn’t open up much.

How fragile he looked, coming down the stone steps.

Wonder if him feeling so ill was a coincidence, or him needing a bit of love. Or keeping me distant.

Snoring. Baby talk: cup of tea.

Stroking his hand as he fell asleep.

He slept so much: that makes me feel he trusts me.

That he packed in loads of work before so he could come.

That he came at all.

I feel totally in love with him today. Feel like a tornado has gone and I want it back.

“See ya, Toots,” he said, launching himself up the hill in a rocket.

Jesus. I don’t remember it sending me insane like this.

He came, he came. I can’t believe he came.

6. Robert

Inf. 1.6 Io li rispuosi: “Ciacco, il tuo affanno

Robert: (for my dad):

They sit around all day, everyday, as thought they’re quite used to it. Maybe they are, on the surface. Maybe their bodies have stopped bothering to have any reactions to things any more other than the barest functions necessary to stay alive, if that’s what you can call it.

There’s a new one turning up today, from Blackburn. Come from a street that was white when she moved in fifty years ago but now she’s the only one left, all the other houses Asian. It’s easy to say she shouldn’t mind about that but she’s ninety-two and the world changes much more quickly than we do. We evolve at the speed of a bloody snail.

She’s here. She’s hilarious. She walked in to the lounge and she picked on Jack straight away. ‘What’s your name?’ she said, pointing at him with her stick. They all started to turn their heads. ‘Jack,’ I said, to try and help things along. ‘Shhht!’ she said to me, quick as a whistle, sticking her stick in my face. ‘I didn’t ask you. He can still speak, can’t he?’ She turned back to the others. ‘It’s a slippery slope,’ she said. ‘Have you given up speaking for yourselves? That’s a major concession of power into the hands of the authorities.’ She roused herself beyond her five foot nothing, or whatever she was. To my astonishment, the collection of old dears seemed to do the same, sitting up straighter in their chairs, looking interested. Jack even took out the comb he’d always carried in his shirt pocket from day one, and never used, and very slowly, with shaking hands, reached up and combed his hair. He put it away again. ‘Yes sir,’ he said, nodding his head at her. From the corner of my vision I saw her wink. Or was it a twitch? Does it matter?

5. Lucy

Inf. 1.5 Ell’e Semiramis, di cui si legge

Lucy:

Semmy, they called her, her mum and dad, but we all thought of her as Semi because that was the easier spelling to turn into jokes. Semi-quaver, Semi-detached, Semi-automatic. She didn’t seem to mind what name you gave her as long as you spoke to her. I suspect that was the problem at home. They’d given her a stupid name in the first place because they didn’t really want a person, not someone they’d have to interact with. They wanted half a person, a cipher, a shadow: a canvas for themselves. It worked. Semmy never seemed like she was all there, or a complete person, somehow.

It made me wonder about my own mum and dad and why they’d had children. My dad hardly ever came home from work before eight o’clock, and quite often he worked the weekends, so we didn’t really see him, but neither did Mum. For kids, although it’s really hard, at least you’ve got the blood bond so the love keeps going. But for mum, hardly seeing him, doing all the hard work of bringing us up on her own, it must have been really hard to stay in love with him. She told me once that she fell out of love with him in 2001 but I was so shocked at the thought that she’d stayed in love with him that long, based on how she seemed to feel about him and act towards him, I mean, that I didn’t know what to say to her. I just gave her a hug but she didn’t seem to want it particularly.

4. Jasmina

Inf. 1.4 Abraàm patriarca e Davìd re

It’s the only thing we’ve really fallen out about, the name. I don’t like any of the names he’s come up with. He’s such a traditionalist: he started me off with Nicholas and Martin and then we went through David and Edward, and now we’ve ended up at Ezekiel and Abraham. Sounds like something out of the Bible, I said, and he said ‘Old or New Testament?’ in a way that made me think he was trying to catch me out for some reason. I don’t see why he’d want to, and I don’t want to think that about him because he’s my husband and of course I love him, but it made me think. It pulled me up sharp, you know.

Angela asked me the other day if he was all right. I said, what do you mean, all right, and she said just that she’d noticed he seemed a bit woolly. Woolly, what a lovely word, but it made me feel a bit scared. I know it’s selfish but when you’re about to have twins the last thing you want is your husband going a bit woolly on you, even if he is twenty one years older and has done it all before. Maybe that’s the thing: maybe he could do it blindfold so there’s no need to worry anyway. Maybe I should make sure I ask him lots of questions now while he’s still in one piece.

Talk about talking someone into the grave! I don’t mean to do that. I’m just a bit worried.

I don’t want twins.

I don’t want two boys called David and Abraham. I don’t know what I’ll do with them. One in each arm I suppose. But maybe what I’m really scared of is what they’ll do to me. When they’re grown up. They’ll end up bossing me about and treating me like a stupid old bat who doesn’t know anything about anything and because they’re my sons I won’t be allowed to hate them. But what if I do?

 

3. Barnesy

Inf. 3.58 Poscia ch’io v’ebbi alcun riconosciuto

Barnesy: 

I can hear voices, much better than before, I mean. I never really listened to what a voice sounded like before but now it’s all I’ve got to go on I’m much more quick to judge based on what someone sounds like.

I don’t like to go down to the wine bar on my own but there are only so many nights in listening to the radio that you can tolerate. God, I used to go out every bloody night before I got moved up here. For my own good, of course. For my safety; they have to say that. It’s just one more thing to add insult to injury. Literally. Anyway, when I was back down there, I was in a miniscule flat just across from a petrol station right off the centre of Islington and I loved it. I knew hundreds of people then. By their faces, I mean. Starting off at nodding acquaintanceship, that’s the easiest way, and then it becomes natural, inevitable that one day you say hello, and then after that you chat. When you’re blind, you don’t know who’s around you so you never get to make the first move to make friends.

Anyway, I decided I’d go down to the wine bar, for a drink, for a sit with some voices. The problem with the radio is that more often than not it’s just the one line of audio; you never get the sense of being in a group. Anyway, I could hear Peg roaring with laughter as I made my way down the stairs and that cheered me up – she’s got one of the best laughs I’ve ever heard, deep and fat, and it doesn’t go on too long. It made me smile as I opened the door. But then I thought I heard something else. I stopped, and pretended to feel my way across the fliers they always stack up on the table by the bottom of the steps. There’s no way I was going in if it was him. I listened. Nothing. Then Peg laughed again, and then I heard her call, ‘Barnesy! Here you go dear, look, here’s your table,’ and so it was too late, I was in.

2. Merryn

Inf. 2.58 “O anima cortese mantoana”

Merryn: Sometimes the sun glints off the quartz in the rock upon which the city sits. It never glints gold but always a cool pearlish silver, soft grey rather than a yellow solar glow. Maybe it’s the time of day that I see it, always when I’m on my way out of the city early in the morning, driving fast along the bridge that connects the vast rock of the city to the rest of the world. Driving east, driving into the sun, catching the sparkle of my city in the rear view mirror.

I work at the sea. At the docks, I suppose they would have been, before all the industry finally went. In the early days of my work, when the dockside was a wall of container ships stacked three or four deep out into the sea, I would sit at the side and try to imagine what lay beyond the ships. I never saw the dockside empty. I was pretty then, they said, in all sorts of languages I didn’t understand, but I could see in their eyes what they meant, and I hoped that being pretty might prove some sort of solution to life, might reveal itself to be the place where happiness was to be found in life. But I would shake my hair and turn away. There were always more, always saying or doing the same thing. Sometimes they told me words that made them cry, and pointed out over the sea, pointing to where they had come from, where they would go back to.

Twenty years on and I’m still at the sea but I’ve lost my looks and every night I return alone to my flat stacked above and beside and under sixty two other flats. I know how those young men felt, stacked in their container ships four deep, ten long, numerous beyond counting, I know how insignificant they must have felt in relation to their gargantuan ship, and I regret that I shook my hair, I regret that I didn’t learn to say the names of their cities back to them.

1. Jordy

Inf.1. 58: “tal mi fece la bestia sanza pace”

Jordy: I just went down there to see what was going on. I wasn’t planning anything at all; I never do plan anything. There’s no point. Every day’s the same. They just roll on, as if we’re on some kind of giant industrial conveyor belt suspended in mid-air, the rollers grinding and shaking underneath so you’re constantly reminded how uncomfortable it is and how you’d much rather be someone else, but there’s nothing you can do. You can’t stop it. You can’t get off.

So there was a mob meet at half ten at the carpet shop. Janine tried to follow me down the steps from the flat but I heard her, even though she was in her bare feet and she’s still only five stone or something, even though she’s meant to be better and she’s nearly fourteen now, God, how did that happen? I told her I’d blow her head off if she didn’t get back. I don’t want her getting involved in this sort of thing. I want it different for Janine.

I could hear stuff kicking off even before I got to the high road. There was shouting and bottles smashing but I thought it was weird there was no sirens. No police, that was fucking not right. No traffic either, like when you go out on Christmas Day and there’s no one else out, no cars, just miserable bastards and their dogs. I could smell smoke, weird rank smoke, not like a barbecue or the fires we’d light in the woods when we was younger. It felt edgy, the whole place, like there was something up, something everyone knew about but then didn’t, too, something everybody felt and had been feeling more and more, but something it was impossible to put into words, even to yourself. Like an earthquake rumbling away about to erupt. Like something massive was about to go off, but not just one person, not like an Anders Breivik or Raoul Moat, but like the whole fucking town was going to go. Like everyone, even the old dears, even the kids, even the pregnant women, were all just about to go off like a bomb, everyone. It really freaked me out.

I thought about just going back. That way I could make sure Janine was in and OK. It’s not like anyone else was going to, is it? Not sober, not straight anyway. Then I heard a massive shattering rattle behind me and I jumped nearly out of my skin but it was just a bloke, come running up behind me pushing a shopping trolley, empty, don’t know if he was scared or what but something about him suddenly gave me a bit of a hit. I started running after him.

Then just as I was following him across the road at the lights and turning into the high road, there was a massive explosion, a huge boof then a whole series of bangs, like skimming a stone across water, a fucking brilliant skim where it all comes together. A massive crowd of lads, all masked up so you couldn’t see who was who, all going mental, smashing windows, pushing through the glass, nicking everything they could lay their hands on. My heart was going mental; the rush was amazing. Stuff! Stuff everywhere! Stuff you could just take. Everyone just taking it. Taking it and shoving it in anywhere, anywhere they could, just stuffing themselves.