Sway (3 page)
They wanted you to grow up into some helpless combination of old person and infant. They wanted you to have a house and a
family and a refrigerator and a TV, and not know how any of it worked. They wanted you to spend your life working on something
that was never concrete, never anything you could see or hold in your hands, and if you didn’t do that they wanted to put
you in jail. Cutting down forests, poisoning the earth — it was a country driven by stupid, blind impulse. It was a country
where nobody knew where their food came from or where their garbage went, they just flushed the bowl, kept eating it and throwing
it away, building bombs and computers, cars and TVs, sending people off to Vietnam so they could set it on fire. It was a
country that had turned against everyone he knew, cast them out like garbage, and all they could do was smile to themselves
at all they’d learned and wait patiently for the fires to start here at home.
He stopped walking and looked again at the houses. Sidewalks, fences, lawns. It was a dead world. There was no point in pretending
it wasn’t, or that he could go back to it and find anything there but emptiness. What was he afraid of? What was Charlie asking
him to do that he didn’t already believe in, even if he’d never had the courage to really imagine it?
He thought of the pictures on the living room wall — the woman in her cat-eye glasses, the man’s loosened tie. He saw them
coming home, turning to find the stranger sitting in their living room. It would all become a paradise then — the living room,
the kitchen, the star-shaped clock above the sofa. It would all become something precious he was about to take away, had already
taken away, just by being there.
But what did they mean to him? And what would they think if they’d seen him on the street some afternoon, driving a beat-up
pickup truck with a broken piano in the back?
To live inside Charlie’s skin. To be empowered by fear, to use it like a tool. To go back to the ranch as someone transformed,
not the pretty boy you had a crush on in high school, not a musician or another lost soul, but a harder, truer soul he had
always known was waiting there inside him.
He turned and walked up the sidewalk toward the gravel yard. The house was a living thing now, the watchful center of the
empty neighborhood. He thought of the man and woman who lived there, and he had a sense that they were all bound by something
he had never been aware of and had no name for. It made him sick to feel them inside him now, pulsing like the blood in the
veins of his throat.
IN THE SMALL ROOM,
two guitars surge in and out in chaotic alternation, an amplified noise that seems to revolve. It’s on a dilapidated street
in London, called Edith Grove, in the southernmost part of Chelsea. It is the coldest winter there in a hundred years.
The flat has mold on the walls. Its gray paint is blistered and chipped, the carpet flaked with bread crusts. For now, the
singer, Mick, can only sit and watch. The other two, Brian and Keith, are learning their parts from a record player, blankets
over their legs. Their hands are cold and they play intermittently, nodding in silence when it starts to work.
The room feels as cold as it is outside. The radiator is silent, dented, its paint scabbed. To set it pinging they have to
feed the gas meter with coins they don’t have and even then the result is only disappointment.
Brian has shiny blond hair and accusatory eyes. He is the only one who can be called handsome, though his neck is thick and
he is short, almost stocky. He is the leader — it is his band, he came up with the name. He stares at Mick and plays seven
notes on his guitar with a bent note in the middle. The message is something like
You are tolerated for now, but only tolerated
. Brian is two years older than the others, twenty-one, and he is already the father of two illegitimate children.
Mick blows smoke, and his hand travels up to the collar of his bathrobe, affecting disdain. His ugliness is eye-catching;
in his movements there is a patient strategy. He is a student at the London School of Economics, still hedging his bets. He
can leave here at any time and end up slightly better off than his father, who is a physical education teacher in Dartford.
But he is also the only one of the three who has ever performed in public, singing every Tuesday night in Ealing with another
band.
Keith raises his chin, and he and Brian start in on an American song called “Carol.” They trade leads and the two-string vamp
of the rhythm part. Keith is gangly, ridiculous. He is still a little in awe of Brian. He makes cutting remarks under his
breath, and he sometimes snaps to with a belligerent grin and grabs someone’s nipple and twists. He knows every lick from
every Chuck Berry record ever made, an indication of how much time he’s spent alone.
They have a groove going now. It’s impossible to say who is leading whom. Brian plays with his eyes closed, head bowed, his
blond bangs falling almost over his eyebrows. Keith’s style is more aggressive, more rhythmic, his crossed legs moving with
the beat. Mick is tapping his knees and bobbing his head with his eyes closed too. His chief talent for now is a lack of embarrassment.
He starts singing in a voice that is not his own, a lucky stroke of mimicry. It is part Cockney, part black American, and
though neither half is authentic, the mix is somehow a joining of strengths.
They come from quiet towns and near suburbs, terraced houses thrown up in the aftermath of German bombs. Places you don’t
see until you leave them, and why would you want to leave them, the same roses on the same trellises?
Mick is watching Brian now, whose head is still bowed, intent only on the sound he is making. The sound from his guitar has
no meaning, it is only a set of tones, but it seems to imply a range of ominous meanings. Maybe part of Mick already suspects
that in that grim flat he is in the right place at the right time.
The flat smells like vegetables and cigarettes. The ceiling is ringed with the black stains from the candles they sometimes
burn in place of lightbulbs. They put their socks on top of the radiator until they smell the wool start to burn and then
they put them back on and have a minute or two of relief before their toes are numb again. It is so cold they sleep with all
their clothes on. They sometimes have to sleep together in the same bed.
Mick is the only one who ever talks about money. For the other two, money is an abstraction, something you get in exchange
not for labor but for demeaning yourself in front of other people. Brian works in the electronics department of a large store
in Bayswater, but he will soon be fired for stealing. Keith subsists on whatever his mother sends him from home. The two of
them have only the vaguest sense of living in a physical world: a place where windows keep out rain, chairs make it more comfortable
to sit, electric lights allow one to see. When they get drunk, they break the furniture and imitate Mick’s queenly gestures,
and one night they burn his bathrobe in the sink.
They play for hours at a time, their two guitars the warp and weft of the same fabric. They weave minute variations on a single
pattern, forgetting themselves in the trance of detail. They spend days and nights in this way, almost wordless, signaling
to each other until their fingers bleed. When the pipes freeze, the toilet down the hall won’t flush and so they piss in jars.
When the water comes back on, they leave the jars in the basin. Over time the basin fills up with cigarette butts and the
newspaper wrappings from food. Mick thinks about quitting, concentrating on his economics course, but the more he has to sit
and watch, the more he needs to stay.
Italian suits and Cuban-heeled shoes. White dress shirts with tab collars. Narrow black ties that look even better when he
lets the slack end dangle free of the clasp. These are some of the clothes that Brian has managed to wangle out of his various
girlfriends, or to steal from his job at the department store in Bayswater.
A week before Christmas a girl arrives just before dark, standing behind the iron fence. Her wild hair makes her ordinary
topcoat look misplaced, somehow severe. She looks more lost than she really is, which is her odd way of deflecting the hostility
of this strange city. She has a pram with her and inside it is Brian’s infant son.
When she won’t stop ringing the bell, he goes outside to greet her. Upstairs, he and Keith have been practicing, and he knows
that Keith is mocking him now in his mind, thinking of dishrags and nappies, and so the thing to do is to act responsible
and concerned, to surprise him in this way.
“Tricia,” he says.
She looks shaken for just a moment, but then turns on him with a familiar, disappointed smile.
“I’m here for just a day or two,” she says. “I’m staying with Claire. You know, my cousin Claire, the one you used to fancy.”
He looks at the baby, touching its cheek with two fingertips. “It’s cold,” he says. “Is he all right?”
She touches his hair as he’s still bent over the pram. She brushes it back behind his ear. “The bohemian look,” she says.
“So unruly. But it suits you, though. Really.”
He stands straight and looks off down the row of identical stone buildings, his hands in his pockets. “We’ve been practicing,”
he says. “Getting some numbers down.”
She nods her head. “I just thought you’d like to see Christopher.” She bends over the pram and nuzzles the baby, her nose
and lips on his face. “London,” she says. “We’re in London.”
After a few drinks with Keith and some friends, he takes the train to Clapham to visit Tricia at her cousin Claire’s. It turns
out that Claire has a husband, Neil, a tall and chinless man with a shock of black hair who works as a pharmacist. The four
of them have a home-cooked dinner and Brian drinks some wine and finds himself relaxing into a magnanimous mood, riding a
wave of sincerity that he begins to believe in. He holds his son high in the air and makes airplane sounds. He and Claire’s
husband talk about Algeria, where there has been a revolution. As he speaks, Brian looks almost like a child. It’s clear that
his enthusiasm has less to do with politics than with enthusiasm as an end in itself.
“One more loss for Europe,” he says. “But it’s all down to America and Russia now, isn’t it? Just a matter of which side they
join up with.”
“Do you believe that?” says Neil.
“Believe what?”
“That it’s just a matter of which side they join up with. That the world is split in two like that. That there’s no chance
for real socialism in Algeria.”
Brian smiles at Tricia, then back at Neil. “I don’t know,” he says. “What do you think?”
“Well, there’s no point in
not
thinking so, is there?” says Neil. “There’s no point in not being fatalistic.”
Brian pours out another glass of wine for Neil, then tilts the bottle slightly toward him as if making a toast. He pours for
Claire, and then for Tricia and himself. The conversation turns to safer things — London, the cold weather, the cost of heating
a flat. When they’ve finished eating, Brian and Tricia do the washing up, and they splash soapsuds on each other and sing
songs the way they used to, childish songs about the people back in their hometown of Cheltenham. He is not quite insincere;
in this particular moment he sees himself as fundamentally playful, a spreader of good cheer. But when he feigns sleepiness,
it’s obviously a ruse, and Tricia does what he knows she’ll do. She lets him spend the night, leading him back into the extra
bedroom with the baby.
She feeds their son with a bottle, patiently and gravely, then bounces him on her shoulder for a while, singing to him, until
he burps. When he’s finished, she wipes his mouth with the large white napkin on her shoulder, then carefully lays him in
his crib. For a long time, she makes faces over him, mewing and speaking baby talk, as if they are the only two in the room.
Brian notices how bare it is: the half-empty bookcase with a lamp on one corner, Neil’s pharmacology diploma on the wall,
the slanted cot with its creases visible through the sheets and the thin pink quilt. The neatness of the room — its air of
a newly married couple just starting out — inspires in him a surprising resentment, then a desperate, half-convinced pride
in the mindless shambles of the flat in Edith Grove.
“Do you think there’s a chance for real socialism in Algeria?” he says, moving toward her.
She is still doting on the baby as he runs his fingers through her tangled brown curls. “I don’t know what he was on about,”
she says. “They wouldn’t let him in at Oxford. He’s never gotten over it.”
“I bet he has a stash of pinups in here somewhere. A leather mask.”
“What?”
“You know, he serves Claire a dinner in the nude, wearing just a mask. Eats his own meal from a dog dish.”
She pushes his hand away with a distant, skeptical smile. “I thought you were sleepy.”
“I’m going to thrash you, Neil. You’ve made me very upset,” he mocks.
She doesn’t seem to be hearing him. She lies down on the cot in her bathrobe, crossing her bare feet and closing her eyes.
Her arms are folded beneath her head and she smiles faintly, a girl again. He switches off the lamp and takes off his shoes.
Something about her competence with the baby has made it feel as if it were nothing more than a game they had both been playing.
He can’t see her exactly, can see only her blurred image in the near darkness. In the sepia light, he sees the curve of her
hip, the length of her body beneath her robe.
There is that moment when they finally take off their clothes and he feels her skin against his and his vision fades out almost
completely. There is only a vertiginous blur, a torrent of inexpressible messages. What binds him too closely to girls like
Tricia is this deluge of feeling. He is not very careful or skillful, but almost always he is strangely sincere, moving over
their bodies with an obsessive slowness that verges on the embarrassing.
In just a few hours he sees what’s really there. The baby is screaming. In the bald lamplight, Tricia stands over the crib
and tries to soothe him in her arms, tired and puffy-faced, sore but also somehow alert. He can see how natural this is for
her, how bound she is to their son, and he feels suddenly displaced, confused by the idea that Tricia might think that this
has anything to do with him.
Onstage, they are all awkward, all except Brian. His face is almost feminine, pale and wide-lipped, but his hands are large,
blocklike, and they handle the guitar like a shovel. He attacks the strings with wide up-and-down sweeps of the wrist, forms
the chords with wide-stretched fingers, making his playing look more difficult than it is. He does this while standing still,
not looking at the crowd, his face unaccountably stern.
They have a bass player now, and a drummer. They are basic and direct, steeped not only in blues but in jazz.
There is no stage — it is not a club, just the basement room of a pub called the Wetherby Arms, where there are thirty people
or so drinking pints and smoking cigarettes, not necessarily interested in music. What they hear now comes across as deliberately
abrasive. They’ve never encountered anything so unpolished, as if the whole point of the music is to be aggressively unmusical,
knowingly a fraud.
Mick moves with little head-bobbing steps around his microphone stand, pigeon-toed. What he doesn’t realize is that the collar
of his shirt has ridden up above his suit jacket, bringing with it the knot of his tie, which makes his neck look comically
long. The noises he makes have nothing to do with singing. But his sheer persistence is a provocation because it’s clear that
he isn’t joking.
They’re playing Muddy Waters. Their version is faster, less free. The two guitars veer in and out at different angles, never
touching. Brian moves his shoulders in a strange, fluent way, as if the music were somehow circular and he hears its center
in the space between the beats. There’s something misplaced, something feyly undergraduate, about the length of his blond
hair in combination with his somber three-button dress suit. Across the stage, Keith pounds out his chords, crouched down
by the drum riser, his thin frame hunched around his instrument. He had never bothered to put on his tie and now he has taken
off his suit jacket as well. He has no showmanship, but he is the one who is secretly guiding them forward, the drums following
the lead of his guitar.
Some of the boys in the crowd are starting to taunt them now. They can see what is starting to happen, see that these boys
with their instruments have started to believe in their own act, especially the singer, Mick.