The End of Music Read online

  Joyce used her break to make herself throw up, but her thick papery tongue wouldn’t let anything past. She was sweating cold when Den called her in and said there was a complaint about her language from a couple transferring from KLM.

  “They didn’t even know English,” said Joyce.

  “They knew enough, apparently.”

  “The men swear all the time.”

  “Not in front of passengers,” said Den. “By the book I ought to suspend you a day. But never mind. Just a little more patience next time, yes? KLM doesn’t service Toronto. That might have been your first hint. Anyway, let’s get on with it. There’s weather in the Maritimes.”

  Joyce felt her insides turn, and rushed for the toilet.

  Anything routed through Halifax or Moncton was grounded, so she spent the afternoon dealing with that crowd. Mike Devine next to her, in his usual panic, sweating through his shirt and barking at her. Den raging into the phone because the rooms weren’t nearly ready, and Gert cursing Heathrow for the illegible baggage tags.

  She finished the shift in tears, wishing Den had suspended her so she wouldn’t have to show her face again in eight hours. The rain let up and the cool air felt good, so she opened her coat to it, walked for a bit, and stopped at the Goodyear’s Canteen. It was empty, save for a boy and girl occupying the first booth, hands linked across the table. When Joyce took a booth at the back, the girl stood and shooed the boy out the door. Joyce asked for tea, and said, “Sorry to interrupt you and your fellow.”

  “I’m trying to break up with him,” the girl said, laying out a cup and saucer. “But I have to see him at school every day. Anyway, the train’ll be along any minute.”

  Joyce couldn’t imagine what it must be like to grow up here. The girl was only a few years behind her, but she could make a bit of money at the canteen, have a boy visit, and break it off with him. Rejecting a half-sensible boy might stain a girl for life in a place like Cape St. Rose.

  The booths filled as people gathered for the five-forty train, which boarded just up the road. Most of them looked to be heading home after seeing a doctor. Many of the adults moved slowly, gasping with the effort or leaning on arms. It was impossible to tell which children might be sick, as they could barely contain their vitality.

  A woman with a plate of chips asked to share Joyce’s booth. “Are you just off shift?” she asked.

  “Back at midnight,” said Joyce. “Are you a stewardess?”

  “How did you know?”

  Joyce indicated the TCA blue of the woman’s uniform collar, peeking out where she unbuttoned her raincoat. But it was everything about her, really. The hair bun; the eyebrows, black as oil slicks; her slender form, as pale and long-limbed as a newborn goat. She introduced herself as Katie, stranded overnight by the system in the Maritimes. The rest of her crew was already into a bottle back at whichever hotel it was. But she wasn’t in the mood. She sized up Joyce and said, “Hard shift?”

  Joyce described the last two days.

  “When did you eat last?” asked Katie.

  Joyce shook her head. She was too tired to eat. Rarely hungry at meal times, ravenous at odd hours.

  “Eat,” Katie said, pushing her plate to the centre of the table. “Go on. Put ketchup on. Anything helps. You don’t want a big meal when you’re on a quick turnaround,” she continued, as Joyce picked at the chips. “It’ll leave you logy. Just a little something to set you up for a nap. Then a little something after the nap to send you back to work. You have a kettle? You want a kettle in your room, and tea, and biscuits.”

  There’s a few other tricks, she explained. Simple things to ease the day. You’re better off sleeping in snatches. Save your big sleeps for the end of the shift cycle. Keep your hair in a tight bun, like so. Same bun every day, don’t even think about it. Sprinkle baking soda in your hose to keep them fresh for an extra shift. Keep an extra deodorant at work, and apply a new layer when you’re on break.

  “What does your husband make of it?” asked Joyce. “Wouldn’t he rather you were home?”

  “Husband? Oh!” Katie laughed and turned the golden band on her finger. “This is only for keeping the dogs at bay. It works on some of them, anyway.”

  //////

  Two days later a man stopped her outside the chapel. “Well, Joyce, I wonder if we’ll have that drink soon.”

  “We’ll have that drink directly,” said Joyce, trying to place him.

  “No time to lose, I’d say. But you got home alright after?”

  There was a touch of gallantry in how he rushed the conversation along and dashed as soon as they set a date. He knew her humiliation from the night at the Officers’ Mess and was at pains to relieve it.

  “Well done,” said Rachel, after watching the encounter from respectable distance. “He was with that band. Remember?”

  “No. God only knows what I said.”

  They met the next day after work. The Big Dipper was crowded, but there weren’t many she knew. They found a table next to a Chinaman, who turned away when they sat down, and started taking hasty bites of his sandwich, as if fearing they had come to take it from him.

  Jules—he worked his name into the conversation early—worked at American Overseas, and had been assigned to Gander four weeks ago. He was back and forth to Argentia a good deal, coordinating fuel and other supplies. He kept a room at Mrs. Pinsent’s.

  “No drinking, no women, no singing, that’s her motto,” he said. “She manages to keep a damper on the singing, at least.”

  Joyce laughed. She could see he expected laughter.

  His last name was Walser and he came from somewhere in the States, somewhere she had never heard of, and planned to settle there in time. A shadow of black stubble went down into his collar and nearly up to his eyes. His round, rolling accent was new to her.

  She sipped her whiskey, her first since the Officers’ Mess, and listened for hints of what she might have said that night.

  “You said I should talk to the man running that band,” he said.

  “Gordon. Gord Delaney.”

  “To see if they need a clarinet.”

  Joyce unbuttoned her TCA jacket and pushed the flaps aside.

  “You don’t travel overnight with them, do you?”

  “Who?”

  “That band.”

  “I’ve only done a couple of dances around here.”

  Jules nodded and sipped his drink. “I’m sure you’re careful with your reputation.”

  They played crib and he won two games handily, so there was no need of a rubber. Jules asked if there was a good poker game to be had around town. Not penny ante. A real game. “You don’t know what kind of town you got until you know how the men play poker,” he said.

  //////

  The man who took the beating from Roy Briscoe wasn’t the Vice Chair of British Overseas. But he was the Vice Chair’s son-in-law, close enough to cost Briscoe his job. Mike Devine said a toffee-nosed limey should know better than to get between a man and his wife. Gert said it was bad news for the wife, as losing the job wouldn’t do much to improve Roy’s mood. By this time, Joyce recalled Roy Briscoe as one of the horn players in the band. A big, shoe-leather face surrounded by curls of black hair. A rumour got about that he was part Jack-a-tar, but Mary said it was nonsense.

  “Sure the Briscoes don’t even have children,” she whispered. “The Jack-a-tars are always at it, you know. Back in school I had a friend was sneaking around with a Jack-a-tar. She was off with the nuns in no time.”

  With Briscoe out of the band, they might need Jules. Joyce didn’t welcome the prospect. She wanted to see him on her own terms.

  //////

  She was singing the second verse, an abject lover begging for pity, when Gordon cut her off.

  “Don’t be going after it so hard, Joyce.” He paced the floor in
front of the stage. “You want to string it along a bit. Hold back a little. A girl needn’t spread her legs as soon as she gets a nod and a wink.”

  He could have said, “A girl needn’t drop her skirt” or “needn’t bed down.” But he chose to be vulgar. Still, Joyce took his point about the singing. She retreated from the microphone, placed her hands in the small of her back and arched.

  “Are you thinking about anything when you sing?” Gordon sat at a table and reached into a bowl of last night’s peanuts.

  “What do you mean?”

  “When you sing the words? Do you think about an old boyfriend, something like that?”

  “No.” Joyce thought the suggestion odd. Her life was no match for the brilliant visions brought on by the songs, with their romantic picnics on the beach, heartsick nights on lonely city streets, and new love always turning up in Paris, or on the Isle of Capri. “Sometimes I picture the things in the song.”

  “As long as you don’t try to make them about real things.”

  It hadn’t occurred to her to think about real things. She didn’t even know whether Capri was a real island. What did it matter?

  Gordon tossed peanuts in his mouth and chewed, his entire fleshy face in motion. “People don’t want that, to be reminded of anything real. This is a show we’re putting on. A lark. A fancy dress-up ball, in its own little way.”

  Eric hunched at the piano bench. Despite the chill of an empty nightclub at eleven o’clock in the morning, he was down to a yellowed undershirt, his faded leather bomber jacket crumpled on the floor behind him. “So what happened with the hospital party?” he asked.

  “I told them we can’t do it,” said Gordon. “Not with Mike Healey gone to Fox Harbour.”

  “Again?”

  “Says the wife makes him go. She misses the ocean.”

  “What about Ivany?”

  “Working.”

  “Buddy in Grand Falls? He could use Mike’s drums.”

  “Never again. Plays like a bricklayer.”

  “Bloody Healey.”

  The scrape of a door, and the janitor emerged from the kitchen with his mop and pail. Wheels of the bucket squeaking as he crossed the dance floor, through another swinging door and behind the bar.

  “Church Lads are in here at noon,” he said, gathering empty bottles and lining them up on the bar.

  “Somebody likes their gin,” said Gordon.

  “Crowd of Frenchies come through last night.” The janitor tipped an empty gin bottle bottom up. “Drank every drop. I don’t imagine they were fit to fly this morning.”

  “Another go?” Eric asked.

  “Let’s try the up-tempo number,” said Gordon, snapping his fingers. “Get the party going.”

  “Sure thing, boss.” Eric rolled his hands up the keyboard in an exaggerated flourish, fingernails rimmed black with grease.

  Joyce cleared her throat and sipped from her glass. Gordon had convinced the janitor to unlock the bar and pour them drinks. But the whiskey scalded her throat without warming it. She waited for Eric to start and tucked her hair behind her ears. Breathed in and out.

  I’ll take you on, you might regret it.

  I’ll take you on, you won’t forget it.

  You never know what you’re in for with a girl like me.

  Gordon was right. Songs turned the world into a dream place. What could a song say about Roy Briscoe and his wife, or the strange man cornering girls in his shop? Or about Joyce being courted by a man who had already seen her at her worst?

  The janitor’s stringy mop slapped the floor. His tattered railway shirt suggested a son or daughter working with CN. They were the only old folks in town, the ones who came to be with family, to watch their grandkids and pick up a bit of work. Gert Power’s mother had come for the electric lights and flush toilets. Though the toilets gave her a fright.

  Joyce had thought it might be easier, rehearsing with just the piano. Without the whole band looking at her and waiting for the next mistake. She listened for Eric’s timing and watched his fingers hit the keys, but every line seemed to snag on the wrong end of his chords.

  She pushed on to the safe harbour of the chorus, and was ready to try another verse. But Eric stopped and reached for his cigarettes. Gordon was sitting again, hands folded over his belly and chin lowered like he might be sleeping.

  “Anything big this afternoon?” Eric looked at his watch and pulled the lid over the keyboard.

  “Military charters. The usual,” said Gordon. “You?”

  “Maintenance. Snow gear. Should have been done in the summer and now there’s a big panic, of course. One of the ploughs seized up altogether.”

  “That’s Healey’s job,” said Gordon. “You got ground operations always in a snarl because he won’t do his job. His wife leading him around by the nose.”

  “Some fellas can’t hack it,” said Eric. “And Healey’s one of them.”

  5

  Carter and Isabelle had talked about his first marriage. He wanted to be honest with her. But he wasn’t.

  He should have told her about the dog off its leash, running circles in the rain. The circles expanding and the dog soaked, yellow-white fur plastered to its sunken ribcage. Starving and not caring. Leah in his boxer shorts, oatmeal sticking to the pot and the stale refrigerator smell, the Irish boyfriend and the girl who didn’t exist, the dead mailman’s guitar and all the old furniture shrouded in bed sheets.

  Isabelle wouldn’t like that tale. But there was nothing else worth telling. So he hadn’t been honest.

  It would soon be twenty-five years since he found the Telecaster.

  The old mailman had died in his bed on the second floor of a red brick house. The room was narrow and sweltering. There was a patch of carpet still flattened from the oxygen tank, and a bedside table patterned with rings made by glasses or mugs. A tree branch tapped the window, and leaves poked through where it was wedged open.

  The listing had said “electric guitar, good condition.” Not much to go on for a trip across town and the thirty-minute walk from Runnymede. But Carter badly needed a guitar because Leah had said, “You need a real fucking guitar.”

  When he arrived at the house, the door was blocked by two men carrying a couch.

  One of them said, “We made our deal, lady.”

  “I’m watching you.” A woman’s voice from inside. “This paint job. Out of my pocket.”

  They were big men with scalps shaved to stubble. They moved as if the couch was no weight at all in their thick hands, down the steps and across the front lawn to a pickup truck. Carter guessed they were professional movers, hardly breaking a sweat on a July morning.

  An enormous black woman emerged and stood next to Carter on the porch. She shouted something about the men leaving footsteps in the grass. They ignored her and drove away.

  She turned to Carter. Tugged at a knee-length orange cardigan and touched a patterned headscarf. Lifted her chest and sighed, looked to the sky.

  “Yes?”

  “There was a guitar?” He had the newspaper in one hand, the ad circled. She took it and studied the ad, as if to remind herself what she was selling. Her long blue fingernails were like beetle shells and made scratching noises on the paper.

  “Upstairs,” she said, pointing overhead. “In the room where my brother died. He delivered the mail all his life.”

  The bed was precise, with a stiff white sheet and grey blanket tucked into the metal frame. The instrument was laid out in an open case on the floor, right where the mailman would have placed his feet every morning.

  Carter was in love with Leah, and they were making music. Nonsense, most of it, meandering ideas pursued in the living room of a rented bungalow in Yorkdale. Scratchy guitars and stuttering synthesizers. Cheap percussion programs they didn’t know how to use. Leah sang in the bathroom
and the bedroom. She sang in every room. She wrote lyrics and discarded them, making up words as she went or reading from books opened at random. The neighbour’s dog yapping outside all day. They threw food scraps over the fence, and Leah said they should steal the dog because the neighbour was starving it. Once they hung a mic out the back door, recorded the barking and tried to build a rhythm track from it.

  They recorded everything, and often didn’t bother listening back to what they had done. It was all forward motion, a snowplough bashing through each idea, clearing a path to the next one. The smell of the fridge was all over the house. There was something wrong with the fridge.

  He had first seen her at the music shop on Queen, where she was often the only one working. Not a popular shop. Dim and musty, with condensation obscuring the front window. A few battered guitars and horns hung on display. But the walls were mostly bare, patches of it scored with hooks, showing faded outlines where instruments used to be.

  Leah was in a band with her Irish boyfriend, Kevin. But that band was finished because they were moving away to take teaching jobs. He was already in North Bay. Leah was moving up in August. They would get married and teach at the same high school. It was all in place. But she was wavering. Carter could tell from the way her eyes wandered when she talked about North Bay.

  Her band had made a few demos, and Carter asked to hear them. She handed him the headphones, and when the tape was finished he told her she was so lucky to have all that music.

  She went to North Bay, and when she came back for Christmas break Carter called her. Don’t come here, she said. But he went anyway and stood at the door of the bungalow until she relented and opened the door a crack and said, please go away. If you keep all this music inside it’ll kill you, he said. She told him to mind his own business and tried to close the door. But he got his foot in, pushed against her and said he just wanted to talk, and she let him in.