Peter Robinson - Not Safe After Dark

Anyway, after a few minutes of this and a chat about the order of songs, Emily returns and we’re ready to face the chanting crowds.

‘They’ve been looking forward to this all week, you know,’ she says, with a tight, Morningside smile. ‘A lot of them were in the war, with the Canadian armed forces, or with the RAF. It’ll mean a lot to them, hearing those old songs played again.’

Well, there are about twenty people in the recreation room, which is quite a crowd for this sort of gig. I remember one RD apologizing – I think it was in Swift Current or Red Deer – that there would have been more people in the audience only two of them croaked during the night. That seemed a bit excessive to me. I mean, one, maybe, you might expect, but two ?

There they sit, a pathetic bunch of losers waiting to die. It gives me the shivers just to look at them. Empty husks. Nothing left except bodily functions. Even those who have arses left probably need someone to wipe them. Most sit in wheelchairs, reptilian talons plucking at the tartan blankets spread over their knees. Some have the head shakes, some drool and twitch every now and then.

Still, I suppose I’ve seen worse audiences in Toronto jazz clubs.

A quick count, and we’re off: ‘Tennessee Waltz’, always a nice easy swinger to start with. Intro done, Taffy comes in with the vocals, sounding more like Tiny Tim than Sporty Spice today. One, two, three, here we go… Hey up, there’s one bloke on the nod already.

‘I was dancing with my darling…’

I was the best dancer. That’s why she chose me. I was the best dancer. She wasn’t Carl’s to start with. Wasn’t anyone’s. Just another girl at a forces dance on a Saturday night. Carl was the handsomest; he always got the pick of the girls. But not this time. I was the best dancer. Just put his nose out of joint a little, that’s all. I didn’t steal her from anyone. She melted in my arms, her shape moulded against me; we were missing halves of a whole and the purpose the music had been waiting for; we completed it, carried it away from its airy pointlessness to something more profound; we gave the music meaning.

Bullshit, O’Farrell. You stole your best friend’s sweetheart, pure and simple. And all the rest, all this about profundity and meaning, is bullshit. Lust, that’s all it was. Lust. And revenge for all those times when Carl got the girl. And look what happened. A two-week honeymoon, then you took her thousands of miles away from her family and friends, spent the next fifty years in and out of the bottle and drove the poor bitch to an early grave.

No… no… it wasn’t like that. I’m tired, so tired of arguing with myself…

On the nod, just as we’re going into ‘Cheek to Cheek’. Christ, how stimulating we must be, what fucking exciting memories we must invoke. Still, he’s twitching a bit in his wheelchair, so I suppose he must still be alive. His mouth seems to be moving. Maybe he’s trying to sing along. Sometimes they do. But no, this one looks more as if he’s having a conversation with himself, only half-mouthing the words, hardly daring to give them full breath. A little string of drool hangs from his chin. Shit, I hate this job. Solo time, man. Remember what Geoff told you, ‘Stick real close to the melody line, Dex. You’re not Coltrane playing “My Favourite Things”, you know.’ Thanks a lot, Geoff. And fuck you…

Heaven. I’m in heaven. Dancing cheek to cheek. A hot night in late July 1943. A little dance hall in a small town near the base, maybe used to be the church hall or the Women’s Institute. A few rickety tables, a makeshift bar selling warm beer and weak scotch, weak beer and warm scotch, whatever. Dim air thick with smoke hanging in the lights: blue straight from the cigarette, grey when it comes out of the lungs. Everyone smoked then. All of us. It was the least of our worries. ‘Cheek to Cheek’ was the first song we danced to, the first time the magic hit.

But why does my memory smell of burning rubber and leather instead of her perfume? Why do flames and smoke blossom when I close my eyes and lean into her? I’m holding her close enough that she could almost be a part of me and I’m smelling hot metal and engine oil .

Bombenbrandschrumpfleichen.

My God, Carl, where did that come from? Not now. Not yet. That was later. Back to the dance. Holding her. Some of her face powder rubbed off when my lips brushed her cheek. It tasted like chalk. Carl was pissed, I could tell, but I was flying that night (funny, I was flying the night before, too) and it was my turn for once. They’d only been out together a couple of times. It wasn’t serious. Besides, how was I to know that Mary and I would fall in love? It was just another dance, for crying out loud. We’d been to hundreds of them and Carl always got the best-looking women. But I was the best dancer and Carl had no chance this time when she and I were dancing cheek to cheek, me tasting chalk (or was it stardust?), smelling rubber burn and hearing those crackling noises arcing in my brain from ear to ear .

Christ, just look at them, will you? Half of them are asleep, about a third are deaf and three-quarters have no faculties left at all. What does that make? Is anyone out there listening at all? And that hunchbacked bastard Geoff gives me the evil eye for wandering too far on the ‘Stardust’ solo. As if anyone notices. Poor bastard’s piano is so out of tune it sounds like a warped LP. Funny, all of a sudden I’m thinking of that bitch Andrea. Was ‘Stardust’ playing when we met, on our first date? I’m damned if I remember. ‘Stairway to Heaven’, more likely, or maybe ‘Bitches Brew’. All I remember is ripping her panties off and fucking her hard up against the apartment door the minute we got back from the gig. Play it, Dex. ‘All the Things You Are.’ Bird, Trane, lead the way. And to hell with Geoff’s evil eye…

Carl wouldn’t talk to me. All the next day. And the next. He’d really wanted Mary the way a boy wants candy and he was jealous as hell. I didn’t tell him anything. Didn’t tell him about the softness of her body as we made love in the warm field that July night, the taste of the beet juice on her lips, the smooth warm skin, nipples hard as berries on my tongue, between her legs like warm, wet silk and how she cried out my name when she came. Not his. Mine. And clung to me afterwards for dear life as we lay against the drystone wall and watched squadron after squadron of Lancasters pass over the half-moon, blotting out its light like the plague of locusts, armadas from hell. Held me tighter as the roar of the bombers filled the sky .

Bombenbrandschrumpfleichen.

No. That wasn’t till later. We didn’t know then, the same way we didn’t know smoking was killing us. We didn’t know. But does that really make it any different in the end?

Another evil look from Geoff. Well, to hell with him. Let the miserable bastard fire me. I’ve had it with this, anyway. ‘In the Middle of a Kiss.’ Taffy always does a good job on this one. You just don’t expect that alto voice to come out of someone so fat. Look at that guy, the way his head’s swaying. If it’s the shakes, at least he’s in time with the music. Maybe some of them are capable of getting a little simple pleasure out of us, after all. Christ, if Andrea could see me now. She’d laugh until she pissed herself and tell me I’d found my true destiny. Here we go, man, ‘Blowing Up a Storm’.

Firestorm. They had to invent new names for the way people died .