Backgrounds

by Mike Fox

THE TICK OF THAT CLOCK, a brass-plated marble wind-up, takes me straight back to the room. Strangely, I don’t remember being conscious of it while I was living there, even when I replayed each fragment of music, which I would have done many times. Perhaps, then, it was too much part of the ambience of my life to be noticed. Now it makes me wonder who that kid was, the teenager who sat recording himself, playing the same tune over and over, listening for imperfections, missing what was around him.

I stop the cassette, rewind, then press “play” again. Once more, synaesthesia, like octaves rising from a single note. I remember the floorboards that had been treated for rot and left uncarpeted. I remember the walls, papered in torn woodchip. I remember the unheated chill, and the small heap of paperbacks and vinyl albums, in the absence of shelves stacked along the floor like statements of identity. I remember, as though I was lying in it, the single bed made up with rough blankets and pressed to the wall beneath the draft from rotting sash windows.

I rewind again, press “play” again. The same tune, the same mistakes in the same places, the tick of the clock, the white background noise of a time and place long gone. Ultimately, the space around you becomes a manifestation of your habits. That room was the person I then amounted to, but not who I hoped to become.

I hear the upstairs doorbell, then footsteps followed by muffled conversation—doubtless Paula entertaining another customer. I feel my spirit contract into my present circumstances, an untended bedsit in Camden. Two not dissimilar rooms, separated by three decades, and the life lived between.

Instead of rewinding the cassette I let it run on. No-one could say I didn’t try: if practice is repetition, I certainly practiced. There wasn’t much help around for guitarists then, at least for the stuff I wanted to play. You just listened and when possible watched, then tried to replicate. 

Suddenly, though, in amongst the dowdy folk-blues, there’s a pause followed by a short moment of simple beauty, a few lines of something almost classical, the tone clear, the melody quiet and well-constructed. Could that also have been me? The clock was ticking in the background, so I suppose it must have been. Perhaps it was the vestige that gave me hope to carry on.

I hear the slats on Paula’s bed start to creak, and know what to expect. The rhythm will get progressively faster, then stop abruptly. Soon after I will hear her door opening and closing, then the front door to the house, which always needs to be slammed. Such things I hardly notice now: they too are just part of my life.

*

‘Davy.’

The following morning Paula’s voice wakes me. I slip on some clothes and let her in as she balances two mugs of coffee. She lowers herself onto my sofa without spilling anything. She is smiling, listless, amiable. You’d think she’d seen enough of men, but sometimes she likes to chat. Her eye settles on the cassette recorder.

‘Didn’t think anyone still used those.’

I take a sip of coffee.

‘I found it clearing out my uncle’s place. There were some old tapes there too. Of me.’

Paula has a way of looking at you as if she’s working you out. Probably a habit.

‘You?’

‘Yes, me. When I was a kid I thought I was going to be a musician. How wrong can you get?’

‘What stopped you, then?’

‘Hard to say exactly. I read somewhere that a musician needs five things to get by—patience, resilience, a poet’s soul, a rhino’s hide, and on top of that a small amount of talent.’

‘That’s a lot to ask.’

Paula regards me kindly, as if human fallibility is a given and not a reason to be held accountable. 

‘The thing is I think there’s some truth in it. And they all intertwine—if you lack one the others just leak away.’

‘And which one did you lack?’

I sip some more coffee—it’s a bit early in the day to be dredging this up.

‘I can’t really be sure, but it seems to me I had them all—a bit of each anyway —and then I lost them all.’

‘Perhaps someone took them?’

Not for the first time it occurs to me that, in another time and place, Paula would have made a great therapist. I say nothing, so she continues.

‘A girl?’

‘Yes, a girl.’

‘In love?’

I hesitate, but the temptation to answer is too strong.

‘We call some strange things “love”, don’t we? But I suppose I was—if the test of what you feel is what you’re willing to do.’

Paula picks up her mug. She always leaves her coffee till it cools.

‘Men fall in love very easily,’ she says, quietly.

‘I suppose you’re in a position to know.’

‘I knew it before I got into all this.’ 

She makes a lateral gesture with her palm. I’ve never been up to her flat, and she has never invited me. In the way that can sometimes happen we understood each other very quickly.

‘Why were you clearing out your uncle’s place? Has he died? You didn’t say.’

‘I only found out last week.’

‘I’m sorry, love.’ 

‘I’m sorry too. He was the nearest thing I had to a parent. I should have gone to see him more once he got ill. It bothers me that I didn’t.’

‘We don’t expect people to die, do we? You’d think we would but we don’t.’

We are quiet for a few moments, and I wonder who Paula has lost to make her say that.

‘Tell me about your uncle,’ she says eventually.

‘He worked in the city for a firm of cabinet makers, before all the industrial lock-ups were sold off. He was single, and as a kid I often used to go round to his flat. As far as I could see he spent his weekends whittling offcuts into furniture parts for doll’s houses that he gave to children’s homes. I stayed with him for a few months once.’

‘He sounds creative—maybe that’s where you got it from.’

‘I’ve never thought, really. I doubt if he did either. Making things seemed to come naturally to him.’

Paula has a way of affirming what you say with a smile. She smiles now, then rises, stretches, and reaches for our mugs.

‘I need to get my legs waxed, then see the hygienist at my dentist’s. Not sure which is worst.’ 

I smile too.

‘Good luck. Thanks for the coffee.’

‘Any time, love.’

She opens the door with her free hand and is gone.

I should continue to sort my uncle’s things. He’s left what there are of them to me, along with the flat, something I can’t quite take in at the moment. Instead I spend an aimless day wandering the city backstreets. I think of Paula. I think of what we talked about. Then at some point, perhaps because my circumstances are about to change, another thought arises. What if she and I had met earlier, before life had sculpted us in the way it has? Images flick through my mind then drift into the bright London air.

I remember the girl I admitted to, disarmed by Paula’s easy manner. I hadn’t mentioned there’d been a child too. It would be easy to talk about choices, but were there? At the time it seemed like they were meant for somewhere else and someone else, and my choice was to learn to accept that.

A passer-by brushes against me, and I realise my feet are leading me to the hospital where I work as a cleaner, even though my next shift is two nights away. I adjust and head north towards Kings Cross, but now I can see the hospital corridors, smell them. There’s something about their anonymity that fits with my existence as it has become. I’m unnoticeable, without identity, in a place where the flotsam of humanity converges. I recognise their unease, their confusion in a time of crisis. I find my own refuge amongst them. It suits me to be on the edge of things.

As the autumn evening darkens, I turn and make my way back to the rented room I’ve never called home, and will soon leave. I rest, make food, experience the tiredness of a day without purpose.

Sometime between eight and nine I hear Paula admitting her first customer, and soon after the rhythm of her bed. Always the same. She says she only does straight sex, that most of the men she sees are older, lonely. 

I wash up, brew some tea, then sit for a while, a habit I somehow feel prepares me for the night. But suddenly there’s a sharp sound from above my head, a slapping noise, the percussion of flesh on flesh. I hear Paula cry out, surprised, angry. I rush upstairs barefooted, following the noise to Paula’s bedroom. She is on her feet, naked, grappling with a man who’s semi-dressed, not young. I join her, and between us we manhandle him out the door, then push him to stumble down the stairs. Paula hurls some clothes and shoes after him, screaming ‘Fuck off and don’t come back!’ I realise, even in that moment, I’ve never heard her swear before. There are some shuffling sounds, the door slams downstairs. When I turn, Paula has pulled on her nightgown. There’s a red mark on her cheek and her hair is disordered.

‘Sorry, Davy.’ 

Her hands are trembling. She’s tough but she’s shaken. We both are.

‘No need, Paula.’ 

I scan her as though she might be broken, and am somehow reassured by the shine of her newly waxed calves. I feel self-consciously male, apologetic. 

‘Has he hurt you?’

She takes a breath, manages to smile.

‘Not as much as the hygienist.’

We look at one another for a moment. I feel as though I’m on her territory, shouldn’t really be standing where I am.

‘There aren’t any others coming tonight,’ she says, as if I’m the one who needs reassurance. Now it’s all over I can see she wants be left alone. She touches my arm and I turn and go downstairs, placing my feet carefully on the uncarpeted treads.

Lying in bed, I can’t sleep and don’t expect to. I hear Paula turning every few minutes. It occurs to me that my uncle’s flat is a conversion too. Nothing there will be private either. Then I hear sobbing, the sort of muted sobs someone makes when they hope not to be heard. I rise, dress quickly, and climb the stairs again. At the edges of the door to Paula’s room I can see a light is on. I turn the handle carefully and look in. The make-up Paula has not removed is smudged with her tears. She looks at me and says nothing, then lifts a corner of her duvet.

I enter her bed, fully clothed, and we lie, not in each other’s arms but shoulders touching, side by side, both rescuers, both in need of rescue.

oOo

Mike Fox’s stories have been nominated for Best of Net and the Pushcart Prize, listed in Best British and Irish Flash Fiction (BIFFY50), and included in Best British Stories 2018 (Salt), His story, The Violet Eye, was published by Nightjar Press as a limited edition chapbook. His new collection, Things Grown Distant, featuring photographic illustrations by Nicholas Royle, is available for pre-order from Confingo Publishing www.polyscribe.uk.