Father’s Music

THREE

WHAT WAS IT THAT made me agree to accompany Honor’s brother, Garth, to that Irish Centre off Edgware Road one Sunday evening in September? I had been his alibi, playing at being a fag-hag as he marauded down from the gay bars of Islington into uncharted territory. Roxy and Honor had rolled four joints before we left and teased him about setting off on mission impossible, claiming that he would never turn the baby-faced singer who was due to croon Irish ballads there. But Garth liked challenges and I liked him so much that I would have agreed to go anywhere.

The Irish Centre was packed when we arrived. We drank sitting at the bar. I watched the singer strut about, awkward in a white shiny suit that was as tight around the bum as a toy sailor’s. The boy wasn’t even cute. He had no technique and little sense of how to deliver a song, except with the wooden voice of an altar boy. I wondered if Garth could really have seen him peering hesitantly through the doorway of an Islington bar as if the entire clientele were about to devour him? But Garth swore that it was the same face which he had spied by chance on a poster advertising Liam Darcy, ‘Drogheda’s Own Singing Sensation’, appearing at the Irish Centre.

There had been some sort of football final across in Dublin that day, relayed on a big screen at the bar. The centre was still packed with women and men mingling together in gaudy team colours. The singer’s face jerked around like a wind-up doll, trained to make eye contact with every corner of the room. Each time he reached us Garth was waiting to catch his gaze and wink. Grannies wandered up to the stage to leave requests for him. One left a present of a heart shaped tart. The singer had become aware of Garth and now avoided our part of the bar. His head would stop rotating just before it reached us, but each time his cheeks reddened slightly as they jerked back.

‘You haven’t a hope, Garth,’ I laughed. ‘Come on, let’s get out of this dive and go to a club or something.’

Garth just laughed back. He was a handsome, well built man. I had already felt the envious glances of several women along the bar.

‘I’m having a ball,’ he replied. ‘Sure the kid was as pale as a ghost before we came in. Now look at his cheeks. Here, grab a beer mat and take a request up to him.’

‘I will not.’

‘Go on,’ Garth teased. ‘The Nolan Sisters. Weren’t they half Irish? Slip up to the stage and tell him Garth wants their old standard, Let’s pull ourselves together.’

I laughed again and began to peel the back off a beer mat. I remembered the envy I had felt for Honor on the first evening when I’d gone back to her flat and seen Garth teasing her while their mother kept putting on more toast for anyone who casually called in. He looked over my shoulder, joining in my laughter as I wrote.

‘Hey,’ he said, ‘remember that last song he dedicated to everyone present with a little bit of Irish inside them. You tell him to sing the next one for anyone who fancies another little bit of Irish inside them.’

I was drunk enough to bring it up. When I turned a tall Irishman stood right behind us at the bar. I had noticed him already with a large family group who were growing increasingly rowdy. Often men his age made fools of themselves trying to look young, but from his suit I actually thought he was far older until I looked at his face. He was obviously well known at the bar, to which he had been coming up every twenty minutes to buy another round of drinks. He seemed to pay for everything and yet he stood out from the family gathering as much as Garth and I stood out from the ordinary punters at the counter.

‘Share the joke,’ he said and I stopped laughing.

‘What’s it to you?’ I asked.

‘Maybe I could use a laugh.’

‘Well, it’s private between me and my boy-friend here.’

‘I hope your boy-friend’s boy-friend doesn’t get jealous so.’

Garth stood up. They were shoulder to shoulder, both an inch either side of six foot. If the Irishman was into his forties then he wasn’t irredeemably so. Garth would probably be a match for him alone, but not for his family. I was frightened. I had never liked Irish people anyway, because your upbringing doesn’t go away. But the stand off between them was so subtle that not even those people beside us seemed aware of it.

‘He’s cute,’ the Irishman said and Garth’s eyes flicked briefly towards the stage. ‘And you’re everything an Irish mother would love her son to bring home: black, six foot tall and male.’

Garth continued staring ever so casually into the Irishman’s eyes. There was something boyish about his face, yet also something I didn’t quite trust. His voice was so low I could hardly hear it.

‘I hear he goes walkabout, our little altar boy. He’s a bit of a night bird, inclined to roam about like he doesn’t quite know which way to go. Personally I think it’s those apple tarts he has to take back to his room. I mean could you sleep, never knowing if some granny with no teeth and a black bra was going to jump out from inside one of them?’

‘I’ve never heard nobody sing with that accent before,’ Garth said.

‘It’s pure Drogheda,’ the Irishman said. ‘A class of knacker accent. You know knackers … cream crackers … tinkers? Travellers is the term we’re meant to use now. God looks down when a knacker is born and says: “I ordained that this child be born on the side of the road in a freezing trailer that will be burnt out by the locals before Christmas is over, but just in case he survives I’ll give him a Drogheda accent as well”’.

‘And is he one?’ I nodded towards the singer who had started an embarrassing line dancing routine while the crowd cheered. The Irishman laughed and used the opportunity to place his fingers for a second on my shoulder as if I were a child.

‘They wouldn’t let him through this door if he was,’ he said. ‘If he sneaked in they’d smash the glass he drank from before anyone here would use it. He’s from a wee house in Drogheda.’ He nodded to the barman who had assembled the massive round of drinks, then looked at Garth. ‘Our singer friend always stays at the Irish Club in Eaton Square. There’s an all night coffee shop across from the tube station in Sloane Square. I’ve come across him there at three in the morning. A man passing might do the same himself.’

‘I’ll bear that in mind.’ Garth’s tone was guarded. The barman stood, waiting to be paid.

‘Bring lots of whipped cream.’ The Irishman reached for his wallet. ‘Apple tarts need a little extra something to help them go down.’

He handed a fistful of notes to the barman who began to pass the drinks across. Garth sat back. The Irishman ignored us as he relayed pints and shorts into the willing hands of family members who came forward to help. The table where his family sat was crammed with stacked glasses and crumpled cigarette packets. They were obviously the rump left over from a wedding reception. He rejoined them and bent to say something with his back to us. People laughed and some glanced in our direction. The Irishman didn’t look back but I felt nervous. Nobody talked to total strangers like that. Was he winding us up or setting us up? Garth had turned to the bar, nodding at the barman to fetch us two more drinks.

‘I hope I’m wrong,’ I said quietly, ‘but I get this feeling you’re going to walk out the door and have your head kicked in.’

‘Sweetheart, I have that feeling every morning I go to buy a newspaper,’ Garth replied. ‘I get that feeling so often that I stopped noticing years ago I ever had it. If you’re worried, Tracey, just take your coat and go.’

‘Don’t be silly. I’m not leaving you.’

‘I don’t need no babysitting from here on in. The dude seems a bit odd but all right. Still you never can tell.’ Garth tossed a fiver on to the counter. ‘It’s my round, but I’ve got to shake hands with the unemployed.’

The encounter had left me agitated, but it wasn’t just concern about Garth. The man’s words made me feel uneasy about myself. If they knew that my father had been a tinker they wouldn’t use this glass again. I hated them and their half-assed sentimental music. I’d only come for a laugh but it didn’t feel right being here. We were drinking doubles but I got the barman to put an extra vodka into my glass. The Irishman peeled off from his family. I might have been nervous but I wasn’t going to show it when he approached again.

‘Luke is my name,’ he said. ‘I’ve been watching you.

‘So?’

‘All evening just watching and sitting there thinking.’

‘Thinking what?’

‘That if pigs could fly.’

He had eyes which demanded you stare back into them. They were salesman’s eyes, I thought, and I wasn’t buying.

‘Pigs can’t,’ I said.

‘If they could,’ he replied, ‘your black friend might get an early tube to Sloane Square and leave you sitting here alone.’

‘What’s it to you if he did?’

‘I’ve been watching ever since you came in. I can’t stop. You hate this place more than I do.’

‘Why are you here then?’

‘Duty, guilt, habit.’ He glanced back. ‘You know yourself, family life is never easy.’

I followed his glance. It was obviously a rare coming together of relations, animated and yet fitting uneasily together.

‘When was the wedding?’

‘Yesterday morning,’ he said. ‘Yesterday evening was the family fight and tonight is the kiss and make up.’

‘Do they ever change their clothes?’

‘That’s tomorrow when they keel over and are carried home,’ he said. ‘To Dublin mainly, although a few have flung themselves as far as Coventry and Birmingham. The blonde girl in the blue outfit, she’s the bride. You’d think she’d feck off on her honeymoon, but there’s no fear of her letting us off the hook. She’s heading back to America on Tuesday, where she’s after getting born again. The first time was because of an accident down a lane off Camden Street. You’d think that second time around she might have got it right.’

The reference to hair wasn’t much of a guide because there seemed hardly a woman in his family not bleached blonde. But the bride stood out, beaming with zest and vitamins. She seemed as incapable of being quiet as she was oblivious to the irritation she caused around her.

‘She’s after getting hitched to some lad from Blackheath she met in Houston and nothing would do her but to be married in London so her new in-laws could meet her old out-laws.’ He laughed at his own joke. ‘I don’t think she informed them in advance that her grandfather Kevin was the biggest thug in the Animal Gang in Dublin.’

There was a family resemblance within some of them. The man who dominated the circle seemed a stockier version of Luke, like a crude police photo-fit. Squeezed into a dress suit, he looked dangerous and comic. He snapped at the bride who went quiet, as if struck. The conversation abated, then resumed as an older woman took her hand. The man who’d ferried most of the drinks passed behind the bride to ruffle her hair, coaxing a smile from her as he made peace all round. He was well into his thirties yet there was something baby-faced about him. As he passed us, heading for the gents, I knew he was another brother. He nodded.

‘All right, Luke?’

‘Hanging in there, Shane.’

He walked on with a glance at me.

‘They’re a surly-looking bunch,’ I sneered, hoping Luke would follow his brother.

‘Unpredictable too.’ He played up the insult. ‘Still you can’t swap your family after the January sales. You only get born with one, you have to love them and get on with it.’

But he showed no interest in rejoining them. I took a sip of vodka and wished Garth would return. I liked to choose my Sunday night men, not the other way round. Yet this Irishman had a come on I’d never encountered before. He seemed almost anxious to sell himself short. I revised his age to thirty eight and tried to decide if he was utterly drunk or sober.

‘Seeing as you love your family don’t let me detain you from them,’ I snorted, hoping to blow him off.

‘Like most families, you’d sooner love them from a distance.’

The way he said it made me laugh. For all his physical strength and expensive clothes, as he smiled wryly he suddenly seemed the most miserable trapped son of a bitch I’d seen in years. He looked like Burt Lancaster staring out in The Birdman of Alcatraz. The thought made me wish I was at home alone, watching some black and white video and drinking cheap wine. The Irishman looked like he wouldn’t mind being anywhere else either. I told him so and he laughed. Garth returned and ignored us. The singer finished a big number. A woman came forward to hand him a rose.

‘You don’t need to stay for your black friend’s sake,’ Luke said. ‘It’s All Ireland Final night and if anyone’s paying him any heed they’re only wondering if his granny was Irish and he fancies playing soccer for us. So, say you wanted, you could pick up your coat and walk out of here.’

‘I’m sure I could, but I don’t. Maybe I fancy the singer too.’

‘You don’t cradle-snatch.’

‘But you do, is it?’ Making men feel old normally worked but he refused to be fazed.

‘This isn’t like me,’ he said. ‘But all evening I’ve wondered what you’d do if I asked you to walk out of here with me.’

His voice was calm. I don’t know where the image came from, but I could imagine him soothing terrified animals in that tone, leading them tamely into an abattoir. I should have told him to get lost, but I didn’t just yet, because something about him intrigued me, although I didn’t like myself for responding to it.

‘I suppose you’re going to tell me you just happen to live in some flash apartment around the corner’

‘I live in a boring suburb a long way from here and, besides, my wife wouldn’t fancy three of us in the bed. I’m sorry, I was thinking more along the lines of a cheap hotel.’

It seemed the ultimate black joke. For once a single man was chatting me up by pretending to be married. Maybe Luke was bisexual and hoped to rope Garth into the bargain. How many vodkas had I had? I started laughing out loud and he had to point out his wife before I realised with a curious chill that he was serious.

‘What does she think you’re doing talking to me?’

‘Selling wall tiles,’ Luke said. ‘That’s how I make my living. Should you want wall tiles I’m definitely your man. I said to her, “That girl with the black leather queen owns three dance clubs. I’m going to tout for business. Say what you like about dykes but they always have money to burn”’.

It wasn’t funny, but Christ how I laughed. I could see some women in his family glancing over. I held the gaze of one of them, a tough-looking black haired girl around nineteen, the only female who wasn’t blonde apart from Luke’s wife. She looked away self-consciously and when she looked back I winked. I drained my glass. Garth had another round set up. Luke watched me with that half-smile. I shifted his age to forty one and suddenly wondered what he looked like naked.

‘Why don’t you fuck off before I throw this drink over you,’ I said, deciding I’d had enough of him.

He momentarily fingered a wisp of my hair. ‘That would look much nicer dyed blonde,’ he said. ‘You’re young, you’re lucky, you’ve still got time for the fairytales men tell you. But I’m being straight. I’ve watched all night and I’ve decided I’d give five years of my life for one hour with you. See if you’re big enough for a gamble or still just a little girl. There’s a doorway beside the shops across the road. I can’t leave with you, but wait five minutes and I’ll be there.’

Then he was gone before I’d time to tell him what to do with himself. I tried to pay Garth for the drinks but he shook his head, distracted now, weighing hope against disbelief. I noticed the singer glance towards us, taking in Garth’s bowed head and I knew Garth would be sitting in that cafe. But I’d no idea if the singer had ever been there. There seemed no reason to trust a word Luke said.

I wondered if I had knowingly slept with a married man. There were occasions where signs pointed to conclusions I hadn’t wished to draw. The rotten cheating bastard, I thought, looking at him sitting beside the woman he claimed was his wife, while his family argued above the strains of that country-and-western din. His older brother was locked into a serious argument. But Luke ignored it, as if he’d withdrawn into a world of his own. I knew he was acutely aware of every movement I made.

Those Sunday night men had fed me whatever lies I needed to hear. Was Luke worse for telling the truth? His need seemed raw and uncompromising. Maybe it was the vodkas mixed with the dope and wine in Honor’s flat, but suddenly I found that exciting. Just once, what was to stop me doing something truly illicit, something I knew was wrong? Luke had given me the freedom of a role and now I began to play with it, almost seeing myself as that confident, hard-edged club owner. I stared at the black-haired girl in a predatory fashion. If I had been a man she would have blown me away but I sensed her blush instead, then stare back with sudden cold hatred.

That sobered me. I was tired of these games, I wasn’t going to be manipulated into feeling emotions that weren’t there. It was time to leave if I wanted to get a tube that wasn’t crammed with annoying drunks. That was why I was leaving alone I told myself, anything else was too bizarre. I sensed Luke watching. He was clever as well as manipulative. He knew I would say nothing to his wife which might put Garth in danger. A bar full of drunken Irishmen seemed the perfect place for a queer-bashing.

Yet it was his wife I kept watching. For no reason I hated her. Sitting there, plump and content with permed hair and hick clothes that were aeons out of fashion. She was in her late thirties but dressed like someone entering a glamorous granny contest. If Luke’s family began to swipe each other with switch-blades, she would simply lift her Pimms and chat away, oblivious to them. But my hatred had nothing to do with her personally, I was uneasy around all happily married couples. If I felt I would become like her, I’d have smashed that vodka glass in the ladies and slashed my wrists.

Screw her anyway, I thought. All my life I’d had that future hammered into me, but I wasn’t living by Gran’s rules any more. Why not fuck a married man under his family’s nose? That would be one for Roxy and Honor, although, even in my drunken state, I knew I’d never tell them. If Luke hadn’t attracted me I would never have let him talk for so long. His desire attracted me too, at odds with most men’s surface pretence. I wasn’t bound by vows I’d no intention of ever getting roped into. Besides, for all his talk, he wouldn’t dare. He wanted me here to eyeball. Once I stepped off this stool I would discover him to be all bull-shit, like most men.

I tapped Garth’s shoulder and he patted my arm. I didn’t look back. Eight vodkas or was it nine? Only when I hit the cold air did I count seriously again. The street was silent before closing time. It was three minutes’ walk to the tube. I made a mental note of danger points. But I didn’t go that way. Instead I stood in the doorway beside the shuttered shops and fixed my coat, then unbuttoned it again. One minute passed, maybe two. I was going nowhere with Luke but I was curious to see if he dared appear. If he did, I could slip away into the shadows.

Four minutes passed, I couldn’t believe I was still there. He hadn’t the balls. It was cold. I buttoned my coat again. I found I was excited. How many weeks was it since I’d slept with a man? The air smelt like there would be heavy rain soon. Five minutes turned into six, twice the time it would have taken to walk to the tube. I’d have to hurry now. Luke was just another manipulator, a cheat who ran scared. You could expect no better from the Irish. I remembered Gran repeating the phrase every time there was a bomb on the news. If she saw me now her worst fears would be confirmed, standing like a cheap tart waiting for an Irishman. When would I lose this hatred every time I thought of her, or was hatred a mechanism to keep guilt at bay? In thirteen months I’d never phoned. I should write but what could I say? I had decided to put my past behind me. At that moment I felt removed from everything, consumed by an old ache which I knew neither sex or drink could fill. I felt outside myself, watching this girl who was clearly drunk because she took forever to button her coat. Why had she spent a decade being addicted to crazy notions? I willed myself to move and finally I did so. But I had only walked a dozen paces when I felt Luke take my arm.

‘That’s the problem with you dykes,’ he said quietly. ‘Hard-nosed businesswomen always demanding attention now.’

This was when I stopped pretending. The role-playing, the danger of discovery, everything about this situation made me as horny as hell. It was no big deal for a man to feel this way, so why should I be different? I was glad the hotel was only three doors down. I might have felt cheap in reception, except that it felt too much like a game. The bed hadn’t been made up, but we didn’t get that far. We never even turned the light on. We did it once for Luke, standing up, with sweat on my neck turning cold against the damp wallpaper, and then a second time, more slowly for me, with him sitting on a hard chair. I liked that better, not having to look at him, just rocking back and forth on his knee as I tried to guess at the lives behind curtained windows across the street. I heard muffled calls for an encore at the Irish Centre. Luke withdrew hurriedly before he came and I heard him finish the business with his hand. Even with a condom he was a cautious man. I pulled my dress down between his knees and my buttocks, but it was so soaked with sweat that the sensation remained of naked flesh upon flesh.

Time was against us. They would be clearing the bar in the Irish Centre. But we stayed perfectly still, like children bewitched in a fairytale. There were raised voices below, but the street seemed distant. I heard the condom slip to the floor. Some men often made a joke while others were quiet and tender. Luke did nothing until I felt his cold hands toying with my shoulders.

‘Tell me about wall tiles,’ I said.

‘They’re smooth.’ His hands moved to my neck. ‘You take your time and lay them right until even the joins are smooth. That is unless you make a mistake and they crack.’

There was no force in his hands and nothing in his voice to suggest menace, but I was suddenly scared and he knew it. The room was cheap and my unease made me feel cheap too. Luke must have been crazy to take this risk. How crazy was he and what danger had I placed myself in? I sensed him staring at my neck.

‘Shouldn’t you head back to your flabby wife?’ I wanted to break the spell and control my fear with the insult, but Luke’s voice maintained its methodical calm.

‘It so happens I love her.’

‘Is that meant to be a joke?’

‘No. But it doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy fucking other girls either.’ A hint of apology entered his tone. ‘You’re not just some girl. I don’t do this often. Seven times in twenty two years. That’s faithful enough as marriages go.’