Ben Aaronovitch - Moon Over Soho

It was only then that it occurred to me that less than two weeks ago she’d been the grieving lover of Cyrus Wilkinson, late of the very band my dad was rehearsing with that afternoon. All the more reason, I thought, for not inviting her along.

JUST ABOUT every council estate I know has a set of communal rooms. There’s something about stacking people up in egg boxes that makes architects and town planners believe that having a set of communal rooms will compensate for not having a garden or, in some designs, enough room to swing a cat. Perhaps they fondly imagine that the denizens of the estate will spontaneously gather for colorful proletarian festivals and cat-swinging contests. In truth, the rooms generally get used for two things, children’s parties and tenant meetings, but that afternoon we were going to shake things up and have a jazz rehearsal instead.

Since James was the drummer he was the one with a van, a suitably decrepit transit that we could have left unlocked, with the keys in the ignition and a sign on the front windshield saying TAKE ME, I’M YOURS, and have no fears about it still being there when we came back out again. As I helped him carry his drum kit from the van to the rehearsal room he told me that it was totally deliberate.

“I’m from Glasgow,” he said. “So there’s bugger-all London’s got to teach me about personal safety.”

We had to do three more trips for the amps and the speakers and it being school-home time we soon collected an audience of wannabe street urchins. Presumably the street urchins in Glasgow are bigger and tougher than the ones in London, because James paid them no mind. But I could see Daniel and Max were uncomfortable. Nobody does hostile curiosity like a bunch of thirteen-year-olds who are putting off doing their homework. One skinny mixed-race girl cocked her head and asked whether we were in a band.

“What’s it look like?” I asked

“What kind of music do you play?” she asked. She had an entourage of little friends who giggled on cue. I’d gone to school with their elder brothers and sisters. They knew me but I was still fair game.

“Jazz,” I said. “You wouldn’t like it.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Swing, Latin, or fusion?”

The entourage duly laughed and pointed. I gave her the eye but she ignored me.

“We did jazz last term in music,” she said.

“I bet your mum’s looking for you,” I said.

“No,” she said. “Can we come and watch?”

“No,” I said.

“We’ll be quiet,” she said.

“No you won’t.”

“How do you know?”

“I can see into the future,” I said.

“No you can’t,” she said.

“Why not?”

“ ’Cause that would be a violation of causticity,” she said.

“I blame Doctor Who ,” said James.

“Causality,” I said.

“Whatever,” she said. “Can we watch?”

So I let them watch and they lasted two minutes into “Airegin” — which was longer than I’d expected them to.

“That’s your dad, innit,” she said helpfully when my dad put in an appearance. “I didn’t know he could play.”

It was weird watching my dad sit down and play keyboard with a bunch of musicians. I’d never seen him play live but my memories are full of black-and-white photographs and in those he always had his trumpet in his hand. Trying to hold it in the same way as Miles Davis had, like a weapon, like a rifle at parade rest. He could play the keyboard, though. Even I could tell that. But it still felt like the wrong instrument to me.

It bothered me for the rest of the session, but I couldn’t figure out why.

AFTER THE rehearsal I’d expected us to troop up Leverton Street for a pint at The Pineapple but my mum invited everyone back to the flat. As we headed up the stairs the mouthy girl from the rehearsal stopped me in the stairwell. This time without her posse.

“I heard you can do magic,” she said.

“Where did you hear that?”

“I got my sources,” she said. “Is it true?”

“Yeah,” I said, because sometimes the truth shuts up kids faster than a clip around the ear and has the added advantage of not being an assault on a minor in the eyes of the law. “I can do magic. What about it?”

“Real magic,” she said. “Not like tricks and stuff.”

“Real magic,” I said.

“Teach me,” she said.

“I’ll tell you what,” I said. “You get a GCSE in Latin and I’ll teach you magic.”

“Deal,” she said and stuck out her hand.

I shook, her palm small and dry in mine.

“You promise on your mum’s life,” she said.

I hesitated and she squeezed my hand as hard as she could.

“On your mum’s life,” she said.

“I don’t swear on my mum’s life,” I said.

“Okay,” she said. “But a deal’s a deal — right?”

“Right,” I said. But I was suspicious by that point. “Who are you?”

“I’m Abigail,” she said. “I live up the road.”

“You really going to learn Latin?”

“Am now,” she said. “Laters.” And she went skipping up the road.

I counted my fingers to make sure they were all there and I didn’t need Nightingale to tell me that I’d handled that one wrong. One thing for certain, Abigail who lived up the road was going on my watch list. In fact I was going to create a watch list just so I could put Abigail at the top of it.

By the time I got upstairs to the flat, the musicians had gravitated into the bedroom where they were cooing over my dad’s record collection. My mum had obviously hit the snack freezer at Iceland pretty hard and there were bowls of mini sausage rolls, mini pizzas, and Hula Hoops on the coffee table. Coke, tea, coffee, and orange juice were available on demand. My mum was looking very pleased with herself.

“Do you know Abigail?” I asked.

“Of course,” she said. “Her father is Adam Kamara.”

I vaguely recognized the name as being one of several dozen relations loosely defined as cousins — a relationship that could range from being the offspring of one of my uncles to the white guy from the Peace Corps who wandered into my granddad’s compound in 1977 and never left.

“Did you tell her I could do magic?”

She shrugged. “She was here with her father, she may have heard things.”

“So you talk about me when I’m not here?”

“You’d be surprised,” she said.

Yes I would, I thought, and helped myself to a handful of Hula Hoops.

At my mother’s command I stuck my head around the bedroom door to ask the irregulars whether they wanted any snacks. My dad said they’d be out in a minute, no snacks allowed near the collection obviously, and continued his discussion with Daniel and Max about the transition from Stan Kenton to the Third Stream. James was sitting on the bed with an LP in his hands, and he was caught in the terrible dilemma of the serious vinyl aficionado — he wanted to borrow it, but he knew that if it was his he’d never let it out of the house. He really was close to tears.

“I know it’s unfashionable,” said James, after going on about Don Cherry for a while. “But I’ve always had a soft spot for the cornet.” Which was when, had I been a cartoon character, a little lightbulb would have gone ding over my head.

I borrowed my dad’s iPod and thumbed through his selections looking for the track I wanted. I took it through the kitchen and out onto the balcony with its unparalleled vista of the flats opposite. I found it — “Body and Soul” off Blitzkrieg Babies and Bands — Snakehips Johnson giving the tune such a danceable swing that Coleman Hawkins had to invent an entire new branch of jazz just to get it out of his head. It was also the version I’d heard in the Café de Paris while dancing with Simone.