Anna used to have this lousy job at a boys’ private school cold-calling alumni and asking them for money. It wasn’t commission-only though, she got paid a wage, so when she said she had quit and was now volunteering at the zoo I really did think she was kidding.
We argued about this and the reasons she had not warned me of her intention but it was not why we fell out. We had been at odds for a couple of weeks; sullen silences, sulks, every question you had to ask twice because she pretended she didn’t hear you. What it was all about really I honestly couldn’t say. It would have been something I would classify as meaningless. The breed of arguments that are real killers. You can forget them, sort of, but you can’t resolve them. We returned to the zoo thing often but it was a pretext, what we could talk about. The real business was unavailable to us.
At some point she told me that I had changed, pointing a witchy little finger at me with tears in her eyes. I couldn’t stop myself from saying,
– Change is good. Change is life.
This was part of a serious discussion, because I had bought two tickets for the Williamson gig and now she was saying that she didn’t want to go. Anna and I had seen Williamson lots of times but this was his first show for ages. He would sometimes have a residency at a little club and play every night for three weeks but then he would be gone no one knew where for years. These gigs were special.
– You’ve changed, I told her. You used to love Williamson.
– I never did. I never even liked him. I always lied about that.
I walked away at this point. I think I was afraid of what she might say next.
August 23
The place was a dump, I thought. More like a rock venue. No seating, packed out. It was too dark to mill around, see who else was there, but I made a few trips to the bar and I started to get used to the place again. I had been here before. It was a bit like the Academy where I had seen Wayne Shorter with Anna and Mike. That must have been more than five years earlier.
The music began bang on time as always. The band appeared in a sombre mood, almost somnolent, and the man himself was prowling around near the back of the stage only putting his horn to his lips from time to time and not always playing anything. I wasn’t really getting it at first, this new music. It can be like that with Williamson. He was keeping it very repetitive and ugly. It was one of his challenges, one of what he was known to call his difficult conversations in the sporadic interviews he gave. You push at the boundaries, deliberately behave badly to see how people will react. He always said he didn’t really mean anything by it. I was just thinking that that was what Mike could be like on occasion, perhaps in imitation, when I saw Mike himself, making his way through the crowd holding three plastic pints of lager.
He pushed through under the lights and the glimpse I caught was so characteristic that I knew it had to be him even after all of this time. He looked terrible though, I could see that straightaway. I knew I had to talk to him.
One thing of which I felt almost certain was that all three of those pints that Mike was carrying were for himself alone, a familiar strategy of his. He didn’t seem surprised to see me and he did give me one of the drinks, thus passing a test I had quite consciously set him. He was wearing a tight white polo shirt such as Williamson had been wearing at his last residency. He was now wearing some kind of boxer’s dressing gown/kimono robe affair, possibly inside out, that looked absurd and would definitely catch on, but not with me.
– Still drinking this, Mike asked? Proffering a lager, unsteadily but not reluctantly.
– Cheers, I said.
– Still seeing Anna? In the exact same tone.
– Cheers, I said.
It was hopeless trying to talk over the music and we didn’t want to anyway, we wanted to listen, so we arranged to meet in the pub around the corner, The Bunch of Grapes, which is where we used to drink whenever we had come to this place. I took one of Mike’s lagers and I even moved away from him. It was pointless being together in a place like this. That was OK, that was understood.
But having met Mike again made a difference to the music. I wondered what he would be making of it, hearing it through his ears and I think Williamson started to move on from that combative stance of the first twenty minutes. The music was lighter, not merely technical. I thought of great curls of butter being creamed off with a fork. It started seeming significant to me again, full of ideas. I regretted that Anna was not there because I would never be able to say, let alone explain, any of this to her. Could it really be true that she wouldn’t care? Then Williamson started to play one of the tunes from his early Fickle album that I really liked and that he very rarely performed these days and I forgot all about Anna.
After the gig, I stood in the lobby and in the street outside and there was no sign of Mike. There was an edgy feel to this space that didn’t encourage hanging around. The venue attracted a lot of affluent punters and some of the more predatory locals gathered at the end of gigs to pick off the weaklings, like big cats around a watering-hole. If I had been with Anna I would have been left alone. I had not forgotten the pub but I was unsure that the arrangement to meet Mike there was not a conversation that had only happened in my head, something that I had planned to say. Well, he wasn’t here and I had already been asked twice for a cigarette so I went to the pub.
Mike was in there alright, sitting at the bar, almost lying down on it if truth be told. He looked even worse in this light. Strung out, very thin, panda eyes and his complexion had gone to rot, like an acne-ravaged teenager’s who had just had a catastrophic shave.
– I waited for you outside the gig, I said.
– I thought we arranged to meet in here.
I had this weird feeling where I was certain that that was what he was going to say and I knew it wasn’t right.
He had two drinks in front of him and one must have been for me because he didn’t buy multiple drinks when he could actually sit at the bar.
– Still seeing Anna then?
– I already told you.
Mike looked at me as though I had said something philosophically complex or in a foreign language and then said,
– Well, are you?
– Yes I am. Just about.
– I see. Let’s have another round.
We exchanged the usual information about jobs and such. Mike mumbled about being off work or possibly out of work but it was clear that he didn’t want to pursue that. He certainly had money for beer and the two of us tucked into quite a session. We talked about the gig of course and we both said we had loved it, especially the second half.
– Not many women at these gigs, offered Mike.
– There used to be. More, anyway.
– That’s changed.
Mike told me the latest from the Williamson blog, which I had already read, about how our man kept losing musicians during rehearsals for this mini-tour. Apparently, every time they had a track down so that they could play it really well and they were all happy with it, he would say he didn’t want to do it any more. Couldn’t see the point. Or he would unilaterally change something about it so fundamentally that the rest of the group couldn’t recognise it. Williamson fans ate this kind of thing up but you could see how working with him was impossible.
Another one was that he would stop rehearsals in full flow when everyone was grooving along with smiles on their faces and gather them all together and ask them,
– Yeah, man, but what does it mean?
It was rumoured that this was going to be the title of the next album.
All this time Mike was drinking two to my one and he kept running his finger under the collar of his shirt, embarrassed about it because he could see that I noticed, but he couldn’t help himself.
And he kept returning to Anna, asking why she hadn’t come and what she was doing. He thought the job at the zoo was hilarious. He said he would go there and find her.
– Start with the monkey house, I said.
I wondered later what his real interest in Anna was, why he wanted to be sure if we were really still together or not. It’s obvious now, but it wasn’t for a while.
When we got outside I had to more or less carry Mike to his cab. We had our arms around one another. I had drunk less than him but a lot more than I was used to. Something happened in a kind of clinch, he nuzzled his face under my chin and in a rough almost violent way I think he kissed me there. A kiss on the cheek would have been acceptable between such as us. Compadres. But this was oddly intimate. I think I may have kissed him on the cheek in return and pushed him into the car without us making any plans to meet again.
August 24
Did I feel ill the next day? I had slept in the spare room and hid until I heard Anna leave for work, as we had agreed to call it, so she didn’t get the chance to show me no sympathy. I phoned the office and told them I would be late, but I still went in. I had never missed a day and that was part of my identity, how I felt about and recognised myself. Work was one massive and utterly predictable meaningless bore but it paid the bills. Unlike volunteering at the zoo where I imagined Anna playing with the animals all day. Work was more than that to me, more than putting food on the table, which I only appreciate now that I no longer have a job.
I liked the people I worked with though they were not the sort I befriended and I didn’t feel that I knew them all that well. Work was a root and a structure for me and the fact that it was boring, that it did not challenge or engage me intellectually at all was a plus. It was a monotonous rhythm I could build on. You could lay your other interests over it. Work sustained those interests, or helped to do so.
The first person I bumped into that morning was Julie. Lovely, red-headed, tightly black-clad Julie. The object of a great deal of certainly purposeless randiness on my part. She made no bones about how I looked this morning.
– Well well. She laughed at me. You’ve surpassed yourself this time.
– I made a bit of a night of it.
– Looks like you made a fortnight of it. You should be in bed.
I bit my tongue and went into the kitchen with the idea of making a cup of tea, but I found Big Dave in there preparing his snack. He had piled a Vesuvius of molten cheese onto a toasted slice of Mother’s Pride and only he could not see that his shirt and tie had Pompeii written all over them. And it was only half past ten. Two or three people had gathered to watch. It was pretty funny, that pivot when his contented self-assurance turned to panic and the inevitable became apparent even to him, but I couldn’t bear it in my current state. I retreated tea-less.
I logged on, opened my emails and also the Williamson blog, to see if there was anything about last night. I half expected to see something about me. About me and Mike. There was nothing new, just the usual confusing rumours that were the stuff of the Williamson legend. Someone had suggested that he had recorded a session for an album by a keyboard player who had worked with Led Zeppelin, or at least Robert Plant. That sounded lucrative, but another poster said he had seen him in a park eating blackberries straight from the bush like a man who hadn’t had a square meal that week.
I could see Julie from where I was sitting, which was good and bad. She was so unlike Anna. Anna was young executive and Julie was rock’n’roll. She was popular and friendly but you couldn’t really get to know her because her boyfriend picked her up at five on the dot every day at the office door in his clapped-out Vauxhall. He was a strange one. No job, dyed black hair and make-up, not particularly discreetly applied. As pale as a bone and as thin. Lou, one of our drivers and another Julie fan, had never got over seeing what her boyfriend looked like. He despised him, thought he was a freak. As he said to me though,
– He’s bonking Julie, so who’s the fool?
I remembered Anna back from tennis the week before running up the three steps to our room and holding the hem of her little skirt down behind her because she thought I was looking at her knickers. As if I would, which I was. That was prissy and ridiculous.
Now my neck was hurting and I ran a finger around my collar. I knew all this had to do with Mike but I didn’t see how exactly.
I wondered if, for a change, Julie could go for me, someone a bit straighter than Ziggy fucking Stardust or whatever his name was. She could get tired of that, surely. Something completely meaningless and without consequence that would nonetheless turn everything upside down. Alex actually. His name was Alex.
August 31
The venue for the next gig was way more upmarket than the last one, more of a Jazz Café kind of place. It was lighter and you could sit down. Some people were even eating. I felt like I had given up eating it was such a time since my guts had been right.
I hadn’t arranged to see Mike but I knew he would be there, unless his health had deteriorated even further. It hadn’t. He looked much better. I noticed him giving me the once over but he didn’t say anything.
He asked after Anna, which was natural enough, and at least acted surprised that she wasn’t with me. In fact, I hadn’t asked her to come. There was an opening here to talk to Mike about it all and I felt that he was inviting that but I didn’t trust him. I thought anything I said might be used against me. I certainly wasn’t going to tell him the truth. And we were embarrassed by one another. I wondered if he had been too drunk to remember our last farewell. He was drinking much more moderately now.
Williamson was surprisingly friendly when he came on. No one could understand anything he said as usual but he did appear to be making some effort to introduce the set. He was relaxed. He had lost his constantly worried look. He stared out into the audience, made contact, seemed to be relating, but perhaps not to the audience that was actually there, more likely to an ideal one in his head.
But this was the kind of gig that it was. This was happy music, almost funny music. Not light-hearted and not meaningless, but enjoyable. Occasionally it came close to tipping over into hilarity. The musicians smiled at one another, sharing the limelight, passing the baton. I had this vision of Dave at work just at that moment when his cheese would slip out of control. Williamson kept running up to the edge then swerving clear. This was sunshine, blue skies and careless youth. Mike and I were actually laughing. We all knew what was going on. I couldn’t recall when Anna and I had last laughed together.
Then it was one of those Williamson things. I noticed this guy a few tables away and there was something odd about how he reached for his glass. He had a false hand. One of his hands was a cosmetic dummy. It looked just like a hand, but it wasn’t one. I thought I would tell someone about this later. Maybe Anna. The guy was beating time, uncertainly, with the hand, about all it was good for, almost.
I felt Mike touch and then take my hand. I think he was trying to draw my attention to what he had also noticed. I nodded and smiled at him but then I removed my hand from his to pick up my drink.
September 20
I know that some people, after a fashion, like it when their relationship crashes and burns because they relish the intensity which that brings and which allows them to believe that they are leading meaningful lives. Before Anna and I decided to say this is the end, we did have a row, but we were just playing through a routine that had gone on in our house more than once. This would have happened earlier if she hadn’t seen I was so sick and taken pity on me. I had been off work.
I felt as though I was standing on the edge of a cliff in the pitch black throwing a rope into the void over and over, hoping that it would anchor on the other side that might not even be there only to have it come clattering back below my feet each time.
I became pompous.
– I am sorry you find me so unpleasant.
– No, no. That’s not it, she said. You are unpleasant. That’s like saying I’m sorry you find I’m five foot ten. You are unpleasant, it’s not just me.
We talked about it as we walked in the park, such a relief to get out of the house, and as I picked at my scabby hands I looked up at random clouds. One of them resembled the head of a dog about to bite a ball. Another, a trumpet. Foolishly I thought that if Anna would suddenly see what I was seeing, then everything would be alright. The only thing that suddenly happened was that I was overcome by the conviction that my life was not only now absurd but that it always had been.
We began dividing our belongings. She took several of the Williamson CDs, some quite rare, including a bootleg of the never released It’s More Complicated Than That. She might have been trying to spite me.
I couldn’t go to work any more. I don’t know whether Anna had been a consolation that had helped me endure the burden of work, or a counter-irritant, but I stopped going and began drifting round alternative record shops hoping to replace the CDs she had taken from me. I thought I might even find the actual same CDs there after she had sold them.
I didn’t find the discs, but I did meet Mike. We always seemed to meet as though by chance. I told him what had happened. To my own surprise I also told him of a dream I had had twice in which a great stack of CDs had turned into a wall and that this had begun to fall on me brick by meaningless brick. The bricks didn’t hurt me but they did inflict terrible injuries.
Mike nodded wearily, as though he had to listen to this kind of thing all of the time, and then asked me how Anna was.
October 31
Of course I expected Mike at the next Williamson gig but when I did catch sight of him standing in his favourite spot to the left of the stage I thought it couldn’t be him because he wasn’t alone. Mike was always alone. Now he was with Anna.
I knew I would have to speak to them. To her. I said to her straightaway,
– I thought you hated Williamson. You said you had only ever pretended to like him.
I looked at Mike while I said this, hoping to disconcert him as much as her.
She had no shame. She said she had been listening to the third album again and really digging it.
Digging? Had she actually said digging?
– Well we’ll have to go into that in some depth, I said, trying to make it sound like a joke. We’ll meet around the corner after the gig, in The Bunch of Grapes.
The unspoken ending of this sentence was,
– …like we always used to when you and I were in love and Mike was the sad sack tagging along.
My invitation had sounded like an order, I knew that. They gave no indication that they would obey it.
As I sat in the pub, hanging over the bar and feeling terrible for all sorts of reasons, I wasn’t even sure that I had issued an invitation of any kind. Had that happened only in my head? I wasn’t even certain now that I had seen them. It doesn’t matter. If they weren’t there I will see them at the next gig. I need only to get Anna on her own for five minutes. I need to tell her something. I need to tell her about Mike and I need to explain that I don’t think music means anything.
*****
Robert Stone was born in Wolverhampton in the UK. He works in a press cuttings agency in London. Before that he was a teacher and then foreman of a London Underground station. He has two children and lives with his partner in Ipswich. He has had stories published in numerous British, American, Asian and Canadian magazines, including Stand, 3:AM, The Write Launch, Confingo, The Decadent Review, The Westchester Review and Lunate. More details can be found on his website. He has had three stories published in Nicholas Royle’s Nightjar chapbook series. A story appeared in Salt’s Best British Stories 2020 volume.
