2. The Alley
Thirteen. A portentous number, bloated with meaning, hung round with superstitions like bells on a shrine.
"We've been together for thirteen years!" George shouted over the opening act's assault on trumpets. "Thirteen! And," he held up two fingers, "this drummer Hamish dug up at the last minute, he's our thirteenth."
David shook a can of hairspray and fought his way through backstage equipment and bins, kitchen staff and waitresses in easy-to-spot black, searching for a mirror and a respite from George the Doomsayer.
"And you know what day it is today?" George called after him, pushing a barista aside. "It's bloody Friday the ruddy thirteenth, that's wot!"
"George, please. I am dying in my boots here, and I haven't even stepped out there."
The face in the mirror David found was dotted with sweat, hair a fine train wreck somewhere between spikes, waves and limp rags. He raked his fingers through it.
"Witches," George said. David pushed him away with his elbow, reaching up to tease his bangs. The move had no effect, neither on the bangs nor on George. He gave David a solemn look, as if he was lecturing at Oxford and his ever-loving main thesis was being uttered. "Witches come out at the thirteenth hour. The Witching Hour."
"Well it's a good thing there's no such thing as witches, isn't there?"
The number thirteen kept rattling like loose change in a tin within David's head as they took to the stage. Superstition was nonsense, but one word clung to the back of his mind even as song lyrics and stage mannerisms jockeyed for a primary position: years. Thirteen years. They hurtled past David like cars on a freight train, trailing out into a triangular vanishing point he could never reach again.
Hamish was no longer on much of a fence as far as Jonesing for Change went. Their profit margin was shrinking. The equipment and the clothes were their own business (and David had been wearing the same shabby leather coat for weeks now), but he still had to book club space and watch as club owners pocketed all of the alcohol money and a good portion of the door takings.
He was this close to calling out the day George had been so worried about a week ago.
Newspapers came out more readily now, as George and David and Tom and, sometimes, Mick the new drummer sat around a corner booth at The Pig's Snout Pub. Years ago, they had scoured for gig reviews, their blood alive with the thrill of the weekend venues breakdown and the words Jonesing for Change listed with the date and month of the gig beside it. "Have they put an asterisk next to us yet?" Tom said. Asterisk, as in highly recommended, as in can't miss, as in local gods. The answer was invariably, "No," and so the newspapers stopped coming out.
George was never without one now. He slapped it onto the pub table and thumbed straight toward the help wanted ads. He would circle anything promising with a DayGlo yellow marker. Tom, when he was safely alone in his own flat, would rip out calls for guitarists or bassists or both. David read the comics and avoided George's looks.
Mick either still believed in the band or, being as he was a session musician, did not care a rat's arse either way.
"You reckon that was our last gig last night?" Tom said.
"Bloody 'ell," George said, smacking his paper, "this is a Kent newspaper, the bloody local rag! Would it kill 'em to list Kent jobs? Does everyone work in London?"
"Do they train you to carry trays?" David said. "Waiters, I mean. Do they get lessons on how flat to make their palm?"
"I reckon that was our last gig last night," Tom said.
"Any wanker can be a waiter, Davey," George said. "And what in 'ell does Kent need so many fuckin' bricklayers for?"
"Some waiters sing the menu," David said. "I've heard that."
"Last one," Tom said.
They feared a slow and painful death. They got a quick and painful one instead.
Hamish phoned George one Wednesday morning to say, "I'm dropping the act. Sorry, George." He had debated adding condolences, reasons, drawing up a chart of some sort showing clear, diminishing returns. But his heart had not been it. The line cut off seconds after a plaintive, "Tell the others."
Before the day was out Tom had dropped by The Pig's Snout, eyes averted and an awkward sway to his stance. "Um, listen, guys, I, uh…" He drew the palm of his hand back and forth across his Adam's apple. "I'm leaving the band. Got an offer from a group up at Glastonbury. So… aye. Good luck."
David waved goodbye, half leaning out of his booth, as George sat stony faced.
"That bastard," George said. "Could've waited one more day. A week. Would it 'ave killed him?" He picked up his pot of pale ale and dropped it in like a shot. "Bastard." He thudded the pot back on the table, threw David's shoulder a sideways glance. "Wanna find another guitarist?"
"We're off Hamish's roster, George. I think we may have just lost the session drummer as well. We'd need a brand new band."
"So…"
David threaded his fingers together, rubbing the thumbs against one another. "So." George sat to his left like a neon sign. David ran his eyes across a knot in the wood of the table. It looked like an owl, and he followed the ever tightening circles of its body to their end, until his gaze slid off the table and dropped to the floor. Wood. Black pockets of dirt around thick iron nails. "So," he said. "I'll see you around."
"And the band?"
"There is no band right now, George." He unhooked his jacket from the back of his chair. "I'll see you in the morning. We'll catch breakfast. Or something."
In his head, David was already flinching, already hearing George's voice saying, "David, come back!" or, "Yeah? Well fuck you!" or anything, anything at all. George said nothing. David merely walked out of the pub. He wrestled his arms into the coat's sleeves, buttoned it up as he made his way back to his room above the butcher's shoppe.
"That's it, then," he said. The words hummed inside his brain for a while, then slid sideways into nothing. That was it, after all. Thirteen years. Good enough. There would still be the occasional dinners with George and Sandra and Baby Blob hogging everyone's attention and that was all right, in the end. Something of a relief.
He passed under an arch, boots clump thud clump thudding in the tight spaces within a branching network of back alleys. Rusted fire escapes and sagging clothes lines hung above his head, blotting out what little remained of the moonlight. The familiar cobblestones and brick tenements around him sank into pockets of black and grey and, as store fronts and street lamps peeked in through haphazard openings, a smattering of pink and red and neon blue.
He had walked these back alleys for nearly five years now. If the gig had been good (not great, just good) (if a gig was great he walked different streets with different people to different flats), he would gaze up at the tenement roof corners as he walked, the moon and stars and silver tinted clouds bouncing along with each step. If the gig had been so-so he would trail his eyes across huge green rubbish bins like tanks pushed up against chipped, graffitied brick walls, smell the stench of days old piss, think it was all rather tragic and poetic. If the gig had been bad he would follow the tired scuff of his boots, notice every darting rat, every puddle of scum and crusted fungi wedged between broken cobblestones. If the gig had been really bad…
Well, he did not remember much about what happened afterwards if a gig had blown up in his face.
On this night he kept his eyes on the cobblestones. Black, grey, neon pink glimmer, blue shimmer, neon green spread out like a fan at the corner of a stoop. That last one slowed his pace. Spread out like a fan at the corner of a stoop was not something reflected light did. That was more the sort of thing a light source did. He doubled back. No green light. He wondered if he had doubled back to the right stoop, so he retraced his steps a bit further back. Still no green light.
"Davey?" he said. He nodded at himself. "Yeah?" He—the he that sounded very logical and kind of tired—shook his head. "What are you doing?" He replied that he was trying to track down a green light, some sort of odd glow. There had been something off about it, hadn't there? His Logical Self sighed. "You're tired. Go home."
"Wasn't that the stoop I saw? Over there?"
"Why do you insist on doing this?"
"Yes, it is. That's the very same stoop."
His Logical Self groaned, but allowed him to move his body closer to the stoop. "Nothing there, is there?" His Logical Self said.
There was something, as it happened. There was a thick clump of some sort of fuzzy moss, with three or four flowering stalks pushing upwards. The flowers had not yet bloomed, and lay within tight buds. Nothing about it was even remotely glowing or emitting any kind of light, let alone a green light.
David straightened. He placed his hand at the crown of his head and then brought it down, slowly, over his face. He pinched his lips, stood like that until his eyes finally caught on something (a brick with a crooked nail sticking out of it) and he pulled himself back together.
Green glows. Logical Selves. What a parcel of ludicrous nonsense.
He made it home at a brisk pace, did not bother with undressing, and curled up on his bed, thumping a pillow into a lump beneath his left cheek. His Logical Self murmured something about, "This is the sensible thing to do," but David cut it off with a groan that bared his teeth and soon everything—George, the band, the alley—fell away.