Sandlands (9 page)

Still I sing bonny boys, bonny mad
boys,

Bedlam boys are bonny,

for they all go bare
and they live by the air,

and they want no
drink nor money.

Behind her, at the end of the ledge beside the Toby jug, stands the picture of the bearded man with his crook and pint, and on the ledge behind him no doubt, although too small to see, are the striped shirts of the football team. There rushes over me a sense of the sucking whirlpool of time, as each image folds in on the next, smaller and smaller, ever more distant, until I'm engulfed and anchorless, toppling towards the void. It's the same sensation, almost of nausea, I remember from when I was small, angling the three-panelled mirror on my grandmother's dressing table to see endless repetitions of myself, receding away to nothing. Too much beer tonight, before I turned in; that last pint was a mistake. I refocus my eyes away from the pale illumination of the screen and onto the solid wall of the pub's guest room, the squat jug kettle with its pair of upturned cups and, by the window, my coat on the back of the chair.

She has come to the end of her song now, and back on the laptop a stout man in corduroy trousers has taken possession of the fluted piano stool. He picks up a tune which is known to his audience and is soon joined with enthusiasm around the bar:
and the
larks they sang melodious...
But at this point the picture freezes and the slowly rotating circle appears, buffering. When it resumes the film flickers and jumps, so I suppose it must have been damaged, and the soundtrack, too, because there's nothing but a fuzz of white noise. Then, suddenly bright and unblurred, the woman's voice breaks through again.

Still I sing bonny boys, bonny mad boys
...

Has the tape been reconnected wrongly, or is she really reprising the song? But the portly man still sits at the piano; his fingers still scamper over the keys. There seems no logic to it.

 

I sit back to uncrick my neck, and unfold from under me a leg that has gone to sleep. Which is what I should do, really, instead of befuddling my brain with these imprisoned versions of reality, these overlayered electronic pasts. But there's a strange magnetism about them that makes me want to keep on looking.

It's stupid to be perching on the bed like this, but there's no desk or table in the room. I think longingly of the bar, but it's late, and the landlord, Raymond, will have called time long ago and be cleaning out the pumps. A lugubrious type whose chief delight, from what I've seen, is in flooding, crop failure and the hope of bird flu, he's unlikely to be pleased to interrupt his bottling up to serve an after-hours drink, even to an overnight resident. Moving to the head of the bed, I raise the pillows to an upright position and settle myself against them with the laptop on my thighs.

I quit the Suffolk folk archive website which houses the two historic films and drag the cursor to the desktop file where I've uploaded my own video of today's floor session. It's funny, when I click to start it running, to see my own life of nine hours ago replayed on screen. There's an unsettling awareness of my divided self, of being both there in the video, the participant observer, and simultaneously here in the pub bedroom, watching from the outside. Timeframes, places, selves, with the walls between them dissolving... I shake myself. I'm not normally prone to these vertiginous fancies – it must be the effect of looking at the old film clips, and of course I'm tired, and there's the effect of the beer. I'd be better under the duvet, and with the bedside light switched off. The screen's low gleam will be enough.

On the laptop screen, my afternoon starts to rerun itself, sharper than my memory of it, precise in every detail. There is Raymond, greeting new arrivals from behind the bar with a ‘Town lost again on Sat'day, then,' before pulling their pints in gloomy satisfaction. There, side by side at the wooden settle beside the bar, are the two regulars, the ones I met later over a supper of Raymond's pie and chips, with Jim – or was it George? – telling some grumbling story punctuated by jabs of the forefinger at an imaginary antagonist while George – or was it Jim? – nursed his half of Guinness and shook his head sorrowfully. I must go back in a minute and see if I can spot them, youthful and floral-collared, in 1979. Then the music begins. Proceedings open with what must be a Ship standard, as from the velvet-seated stool a pianist, younger and slimmer than the 1979 model, leads the room in a hearty if somewhat ragged rendition of ‘The larks they sang melodious'.

Behind the piano, the ledge and the photographs are all where they should be: the football team, the man and dog. The me behind the lens, like the other cameramen before me, pans right towards the end of the ledge, past the Toby jug, the man with the beard... and suddenly the me that's here in the room sits up straighter against the pillows. The corner seat is empty. She isn't there.

Perhaps she only arrived later. But even as I think it, I know it isn't true. Well then, she must just have slipped out to the ladies at this point and will be back in a minute or two. I pause the clip, slide the dot a centimetre to the right and release it to restart. But the focus here is on a younger woman at a table at the opposite side of the bar, near the window, singing ‘Aweigh Santy Ano' and playing the melodeon. Impatient, I slide the dot further to the right, release it again. A white-haired man is on his feet and midway through lamenting his wand'rings in the woods so wild – and behind him, clearly visible, is the high-backed corner seat. Still empty.

When did she do her spot? ‘Tom o' Bedlam' – when did she sing it? It was towards the end of the session, I'm pretty sure of that. I pull the dot a good way right this time, and yes, there are the three long-haired teenage girls with their unaccompanied harmonies. ‘Tom o' Bedlam' came straight after them, I'm certain of it. I let the tape roll on. But as the teenagers linger on their final major chord, modulating to a plaintive minor, and applause stutters around the bar, the scraping chairs and rumbling voices are interrupted not by my woman with the cleft chin but by the piano again, and the final item of the afternoon, a rousing general chorus of ‘New York Girls'. I must have missed it. Rewind, play. Twice more I watch back through the final section of the video, stopping and restarting, and still she isn't there. Did I stop filming for a while, and I've managed to forget it? But I have the clearest recollection of standing there hearing her sing with the Sony in my hand – of watching her through the viewfinder, checking her image on the little screen. A malfunction? But there's no jump in the action, no hiatus, no join.

Frustrated, I close the file. My fingers are clumsy on the trackpad: why are they trembling like that? I return to the Suffolk folk website and the archived film clips. 1979: I'll find her there – or her mother, rather. Searching through, I locate quite quickly the three melodeon players winding out their Morris tune. I let them play; she comes next.

Damn it
. Just as the music dies away and the low between-songs hubbub starts up, the picture freezes. Bloody buffering – though the pub's Wi-Fi connection isn't bad on the whole, and you can hardly expect superfast broadband out here in the sticks. I wait, watching the rotating circle, impatience mounting. Still buffering: it must be jammed. I exit then click back on, starting the video from a little way back, with the melodeonists still in full swing. They play their final bars, the last chord ebbs, conversation resumes— and the blasted screen freezes again.

Give up
, I tell myself, aware that my left hand is tightly balled, the nails digging into my palm. It's just a glitch. Leave it alone, come back to it later. Closing the link, I go back instead to the earliest clip, back to 1954 and the smoky black-and-white. I start it at the beginning. At least this picture is moving, but for some reason now there's no sound, only mummers acting out silently the scene in the bar. The spry little fiddle player, fingers scampering, taps his foot to a noiseless jig. Then his bowing slows, and the man in the cloth cap opens his mouth and mimes the first verse of ‘Fathom the Bowl'. The camera swings round, and my stomach lurches. The corner chair is no longer empty.

Her chin is the same, and the hair, and even the dress: dark, long-sleeved and austere. Her face is angled down, partly shadowed, but I can see her lips moving, and as I watch there's a pop and the soundtrack crackles to life.

So drink to Tom
o' Bedlam,

he'll fill the seas in barrels.

I
'll drink it all, all brewed with gall,

with Mad
Maudlin I will travel.

To the left and forwards of her I can see the fiddler, still plainly fiddling, although no sound of a violin can be heard. It's all wrong, all nonsensical. She shouldn't be there, not in 1954; she should only be there as a photograph. She's like some sombre Russian doll: remove the layers one by one but her face still reappears. The shot moves back towards the left and there at the side bench is the cloth-capped singer, his lips still wordlessly moving, while instead of his song there is only the woman's soft, insistent voice.

Still I sing bonny boys
, bonny mad boys
...

Computers can play stupid tricks. The other video must have re-started, and that is the soundtrack I'm hearing. That'll be it. But when I quit full screen and check the other link, it's still locked, still buffering. Yet her voice twines on.

Spirits
white as lightning

shall on my travels guide me...

I click on the double bar to halt the video and the violinist's arm is arrested in mid-motion, but not the woman's song.

The moon would quake and
the stars would shake,

whenever they espied me...

With sudden urgency I click to close the whole page, leave the archive website, shut down the browser. I'm back to my familiar desktop wallpaper, but still the crooning voice won't stop. I go to the main menu, drag the cursor to ‘shut down'. Yet something makes my hand hesitate, arrested above the keyboard. Perspiration slicks the creases of my palm, and my finger joints are stiff, incompliant. The sense floods back over me of the self that's inside the machine, the recorder recorded, contained within my own past. The notion is more powerful now, more urgent, almost engulfing. It's as though I'm trapped. I am the disappearing image, shuttled to infinity between two mirrors. I am the smallest Russian doll, enclosed inside my earlier self, and I can't break out. More than that, there's a tightening conviction that if I shut down now I will somehow be extinguished, will somehow cease to be. If I shut down now... if I shut down...

No gypsy
, slut or doxy

Shall take my mad Tom from me
...

There's no choice, no other way out. I have to stop the voice. I steel myself, select ‘Shut Down', and press.

Nothing happens. Again I press, twice, three times, jabbing savagely at the trackpad, until an error message appears. It's the browser that's failed to quit.
She
won't go. Why won't she go?

Wresting my eyes from the screen, I glance across to the far wall, where the Wi-Fi booster winks at me, two green lights and a red. Around it, after the brightness of the computer screen, the blackout is almost complete.

Almost, but not quite. From the shrouded oblong of the window comes a faint greyness, and as my eyes adjust I see it there, above my coat where it hangs on the back of the chair, the pool of deeper black, the shadow where no shadow should be. I mustn't look. Whatever I do, I mustn't look.

My hand shakes. Reopen or force quit?

I'll weep all night
, with stars I'll fight
...

The room pitches. Force quit. It's one of us or the other. The woman, or me.
Force quit
.

I close my eyes and press.

 

Still I sing bonny boys, bonny mad boys,

Bedlam
boys are bonny,

For they all go bare and they
live by the air...

Two hours sitting folded like a grasshopper on the aircraft and several more waiting at the terminal on those wretched moulded plastic seats, plus three trains and two taxis at either end of his day, had left a niggling soreness in Flavio's lumbar vertebrae. Or maybe it was the forty years before that with insufficient regular stretching, spent behind a desk at the
sede del Municipio
, because his knees were also stiffer than they had any right to be. Sixty-four was no age at all these days; the old cashier at the Banco Popolare who must be five years his senior had run the Ravenna marathon last year. But that man was short, with the compact springiness of a Piemontese while Flavio was tall, and height was nothing but a curse as you grew older. He could almost feel the protesting grind of cartilage discs unaccustomed to any greater exercise than the short walk to the office and back, with a regular detour on the way home to Maurizio's sports bar on the corner for a grappa and to catch the news headlines. Not that the news was ever anything but grim these days, but a man had a duty to keep on terms with the world he lived in. No – he'd been stuck in the same triangular groove for far too long, stretching to an elongated quadrilateral on a Saturday for his regular treats: a trip to the barber's for a proper wet shave or to the Trattoria dall'Oste for
braciole di maiale
and a carafe of house red. This trip to England was just the shake-up he needed.

Perhaps walking would dispel the stiffness. It was too late to change his mind now in any case, as the taxi driver he had paid off and sent ahead to the inn with his suitcase had already pulled away and disappeared from view between the convergent banks of cow parsley, which marked the curve of the lane ahead. He hoped he could trust the man, who had volunteered precious few words on the short ride from the station, offering in particular no account for why the little halt should call itself ‘Wickham Market' when it was at a place called Campsea Ashe. Flavio's father, Salvatore, had always spoken warmly of the people of these parts, as being straightforward, honest folk. ‘
Veri contadini,
' he'd called them; guarded, it was true, but flintily fair-minded, even towards a man who was their enemy. But the world had changed in seventy years. Who was to say they might not take the opportunity now to rob an ageing foreigner with a bad back and halting, schoolroom English?