Nowhere Near Milkwood (2 page)

This spanking had a slow calculated rhythm. Darren waved his arms, swung his hips, wobbled his knees.

“That’s the funky dance,” I said bitterly.

“He won’t stop until he gets to the bottom,” murmured June. “He’s done this before. It’s a habit.”

“Impossible. If the pit goes down forever, he can only skate into it once. You contradict yourself.”

“It’s just a model,” she hissed.

“Will he set up in business down there?”

“He might,” she snorted.

I licked my lips and asked: “What did you think of my performance? Be honest. What was it
like
?”

June remained silent, so I turned and appealed to the gathering as a whole. There was a brief pause. “What was it like?” they echoed. “What was it like?” Then they all leaned forward together and whispered their verdict. It was the same verdict from every mouth. It was very honest. Because they whispered it at the same time, the result was a deafening wind that knocked me back. I fell and crushed my banjo. Then I regained my feet and ran out of the house.

It was the worst verdict I’d ever been given.

What had I done to deserve it? As I pounded the slabs of Habershon Street, I realised my mistake. The girl I’d taken to the party was named Selene. That’s the word in an old language for
moon
. And I had sat with her in the gutter. So the gutter hadn’t been entirely moonless! The idea which controlled my song was false. These revelations shuddered me right into town. I felt awful. I wandered aimlessly, peering in at the windows of clubs and cafés, not with envy but with shame. I wanted to be just a dark shape outside bright glass.

At one window, the window of a restaurant, I stopped. I recognised the people who were seated around a table. The table was laden with food but they weren’t eating. It was the Cussmothers, the band entire, devoid only of me, who was a nullity. Without me, they seemed to have increased in number. They made strange gestures with their hands, never smiling. I realised two things at the same instant. The first was that they had won a recording contract and were celebrating. The second was that all bands who win recording contracts are inducted into a secret society which may one day control the whole world.

They were learning how to shrug, wave and point like members of the Illuminati. I didn’t resent this. I left them to it and resumed my walk. Having dozens, maybe hundreds, of feet makes even the loneliest walk too fast to be anything other than comical. That’s my punishment. But I felt sick for a different reason. My last performance had been rated with the worst of all possible metaphors.

So what
was
it like?

The torn ear of an old teddy in a box.

Here’s one regular bill you weren’t expecting. It’s me, Disability Bill, fresh from the Cussmothers, that crew of stale traitors and secret agents. I’d just started my solo career, not strictly through choice, and I was looking for gigs in various places. Trouble is, the Cardiff scene is largely sewn up, like old pajamas worn by a lusty girl over a very long history of loving. Talking of such women, I met one eventually, but not just yet. That’s later. I worked for her in one sense; waited for her in another, a more foreboding type of sense. That isn’t my favourite type, but I’ll take what I can. Senseless not to.

Tramping the Cardiff streets was demoralising business, all in all, not to mention none in none, which is the number of gigs I secured in my selected venues. I shuffled down to the Docks, but they didn’t want me in the TALL STORY. It was an Open Mike Night, the first he’d played since his botched operation. Lengths of intestine like real organ pipes. Back along City Road, the INDIGO CASBAH was throbbing to its own booked bands, several hundred of them by the din of it, all playing unconnected things in different sections of the enormously complex interior. I didn’t bother to lose myself in that maze.

I tried the BIG BIRD GULP, but found it exceedingly seedy. Nor did the COGITO & DOUBT fill me with confidence. They had a tubthumping band and the subsequent leaks were serious. I hunched far past. Get the picture? Something was happening in the HERMETIC TRADITION, but I never learned what, because that venue has no windows or doors and the people inside are forever sealed, and maybe by now they’ve regressed into a species which doesn’t want to come out, and I had no pressing need to go in once I thought about what I’ve just said, though I won’t denigrate all cannibals, because I knew one who lived under a bridge, played a mean sax and gave me good advice.

What he told me came into my memory now. There was a place where anyone could find a gig, but it wasn’t a pub. It was a completely different city, some fifty miles west of Cardiff as the crow flies, gibbon swings, puppet dreams (stiff not sweet). A brutal place with monstrous citizens who dwelled in houses erected on the slopes of hills. They ate seaweed, not frequently, but often enough for it to be a smell as well as a rumour. The waters which lapped the shores gave up its plants reluctantly and the tension on the beach was unbearable. So almost nobody ever went there. But gigs really were abundant.

It was my last chance. I was broke and had lots of little mouths to feed, all my own. I couldn’t even afford to travel to this other city. I had to hitch a ride. Think it easy to hitch when you have extra thumbs? It’s not. Cars don’t stop for you. Even when the drivers aren’t scared of my shape, they’re overwhelmed by the number of parallel requests for a lift, and so unconfident of carrying such an apparently immense number of passengers at once, they forget to brake. It almost made amputation seem profitable. On the other hand, I’m squeamish about blades, so cancel that thought. Don’t mind chopping and changing my mind on this subject, but not my thumbs. I needed a plan.

I soon had one. I walked out of the centre of Cardiff, through the outer suburbs of the north, and stood on the side of the motorway sliproad. In a pocket I keep a sentimental stocking. It wasn’t given to me by a girlfriend but by a shop mannequin. In fact, I’d taken it without permission, but the expression in the dummy’s eyes seemed to say, ‘Go ahead, I just want you to be happy,’ and I obliged. I was chased out by security. Now at last it would serve a useful purpose. I rolled up one trouser leg and drew the silk thing on. It tickled. Then I secured it with a garter I’d snatched from the same shop. It sure looked pretty.

All my other legs took one step backward into the bushes. I was inside the bushes, but my alluring leg, just the one, remained outside on view. So I hid and waited for results. Now the motorists sounded their horns as they passed. The wind whipped the top of my thigh, which was creamy and exposed. I lacked the high-heeled shoe for a perfect display, but it turned out mine was good enough, for a car pulled up and waited for me to get in. I rushed out and yanked the door before the driver could lock it. Then I jumped into the seat beside him. His disappointment was vast, but it was too late to speed away.

“Where to?” he grumbled.

“Swansea,” I replied. “It’s my destination.”

He glanced at my abundance of legs. “Why not run there? I reckon you could make it in about an hour.”

“That would use up my spare energy.”

“So what’s in the case?”

“My banjo,” I said, and I lifted it out and played him a few bars of an obscure Kentucky number, ‘I Feel Like Turkey Dressed Up As Chicken Tonight’, from the oven archives.

He whistled low. “Bluegrass?”

“Yes, but what images does it evoke?”

“An old pigdog walking round and round on an unmown lawn, prior to curling up to sleep,” he answered.

“What manner of pigdog?”

He pondered carefully. “Doomed.”

“Does he flatten the vegetation under his body?”

“Of necessity, he does.”

I smirked. “That’s because my banjo has been crushed. I sat on it. The song was supposed to be a straight scratch-’n’-peck tune, but the stalks of the crotchets have been trampled flat. Those notes should wave above the rhythm majestically. Doggone it!”

“No, he’s still there,” he said.

And that’s how the rest of the journey proceeded. Puns, innuendoes, all meaningless, but anything to stave off the subject which drivers and hitchers always talk about, or rather which drivers lecture on and hitchers are forced to listen to, namely how they (the drivers) used to be hitchers in their youth
before they became businessmen
and how great it is to be free on the road, but let them reveal how successful they are at business, they’re THIS successful, made their first million just before they were a millionaire, made their second after, but have nothing to show for it, due to a mysterious force called exaggeration, which always gets in the way, but observe the suit and dental work!

Outside, there was nothing much to look at...

In a field to our right we passed a mansion which my driver claimed was an asylum for people who believed they could change into animals. It was run by a German inventor.

“I bet he has a name,” I asserted.

“Don’t know, don’t care neither, just making small talk, trying to help you avoid certain other themes.”

“It might be Karl,” I suggested.

He nodded. The mansion receded behind us. He didn’t like my game, so we reverted to facile banter.

But as we turned off the motorway and wove through the outskirts of Swansea, he grinned at me.

“Why do you want to be here?”

I said, “I’m looking for gigs. I’m a professional. I need to find work or else I’m finished. I’m starving.”

His grin became a laugh. Air passed between it in both directions and sounds of mirth arose, which my ears drank, but I have too many for all to be properly satisfied. The ones on my head sipped the most; those on my hips the least. He explained:

“I’m a music reviewer and I’m going to review music.”

“Is that a tautology?” I wondered.

“No, but I know of a place, the place I’m driving to, which has a big gap in its lineup for tonight.”

“I’d love to play there!” I cried.

“Then come all the way with me,” he said.

I mumbled: “So you’re not a businessman after all? Our avoidance of commercial talk was wasted effort.”

“Yes, because we could have ignored the topic without trying. But it’s pointless to fret about that. Worry instead about the frets on your spoiled banjo. Do they still operate?”

“After a fashion,” I admitted.

“Which one precisely?”

“Pigdog,” I said, and clarified the point when he frowned: “Everything I play will be a grunting howler.”

“Can you inflate the object?”

“It’s an instrument, not an ego,” I pointed out.

“Don’t fiddle with it, then.”

“Can’t. I have an oily curtsey, but no waxed bow. I won’t scrape along. I’ll pick it like a boxer’s nose.”

Yes, that’s what it was, flattened eternally, unlike my ambitions which still yearned to swell, to rise and parade and demand a single pat on each one of my shoulders, which is equivalent to the greatest praise accorded to anyone in the whole of reality. As we drove through the streets of this city which wasn’t Cardiff, I saw that the scene here could never be sewn up. It should have flapped open like a worn curtain, thin and agitated, in bluster and sigh, but rusting things weighed it down. These stood on the horizon, metal tanks and towers which sprouted pipes. A place of ancient industry, but I felt a curious elation. I didn’t yet appreciate the difference between sewn and stitched.

My driver, the music reviewer, told me his name was Goodbut, a name which had destined him for that job from his birth, for reviews always contained his name somewhere in their text, even if written by someone else, as in ‘...this tune is very good, but...’ It was essential, he revealed, to keep a tight rein on his enthusiasm, in case he was proved wrong later by the opinion of posterity. I believed him, nearly. We rattled down many streets and more streets, and the complicated layout of Swansea wasn’t shy. It demonstrated itself openly, behind closed terraces, and the cobbles hurt my buttocks. But something’s always doing that somewhere, I have such a surplus, and I don’t mind.

We stopped in a region of the city called The Uplands, where the local bohemians like to cavort, and Goodbut indicated the venue which had a gap, the UPLANDS TAVERN, and I agreed to examine it more carefully. I got out and he followed me through the entranceway. It was dark inside, cold, muted, matted and rough, with a circular bar in the centre of the big main room around which one could stroll or prance at varying speeds, if one had the inclination, and a few recesses and little rooms and booths on the edges which were bare but strangely smelled of carpets. I think it was the breath of drunkards passing over hairy tongues. The stage wasn’t very spacious, but it would serve.

The publican stepped forward and greeted my companion. He tickled me under a random chin.

“Is this your pet monster?”

“No,” said Goodbut. “He’s an act.”

“Used to front the Cussmothers,” I confirmed.

“Well, I’m sorry for you,” the publican said, and he seemed at a loss, not knowing whether or how to comfort me, and the ensuing silence was awkward, so I broke it fast:

“I need a gig. Bottom of the bill will suit me.”

They both rolled their eyes. “That’s impossible! There’s only one space left and it’s at the very top.”

I blinked twenty eyelids. “What?”

“The support acts have already been arranged. It’s a great lineup down there, each one leaning on the one directly below, the base one hoping to curve right round and lean on the top one, which hasn’t been secured yet, though we hope it’ll be you.”

“That’s an unusual setup,” I said.

“Sure it is, but we’re not in Cardiff now. Take a look at this poster for the evening. Read the names. There’s a space above Toni Trumpet, isn’t there? That’s what you have to fill.”

I studied the sheet. It was laminated and printed in a nice selection of coloured inks, a different hue for each name. Beneath Toni Trumpet was an act called The Rag Foundation; below them Grampa Chaff; under him  Satori, a bunch of progressive rockers; beneath them a singer-songwriter by the name of Bridget Wells. Including me, five acts, one for each finger of a standard hand, or for each one of other things with five elements, the cool minutes of a
take
, west coast, difficult timings, or the outer moons of Uranus, or strained similes in a single too clever sentence like this one, or the lovers you deserve tonight, no more nor less, and the regrets which just happen at weekday noons.

The publican was talking to Goodbut behind my back, or behind one of my backs, unaware that another section of me was directly facing them and in a position to hear everything they said. It wasn’t polite. It wasn’t uncommon. The publican asked my driver why he had given me a lift in the first place, bearing in mind the extreme foulness of my shape, its lack of redeeming qualities, its horror.

I leaned into the conversation and said, “He didn’t mean to help me. I tricked him. I hedged my butts.”

“Unfair enough!” the publican returned.