Charles De Lint - Dreams Underfoot

He was still watching the sky for signs when the police finally arrived.

“Let me go, boys, let me go ....”

The new Pogues album If I Should Fall From Grace With God was on the turntable. The title cut leaked from the sound system’s speakers, one of which sat on a crate crowded with halfused paint tubes and tins of turpentine, the other perched on the windowsill, commanding a view of rainswept Yoors Street one floor below. The song was jauntier than one might expect from its subject matter while Shane MacGowan’s voice was as rough as ever, chewing the words and spitting them out, rather than singing them.

It was an angry voice, Jilly decided as she hummed softly along with the chorus. Even when it sang a tender song. But what could you expect from a group that had originally named itself Pogue Mahone—Irish Gaelic for “Kiss my ass”?

Angry and brash and vulgar. The band was all of that. But they were honest, too—painfully so, at times—and that was what brought Jilly back to their music, time and again. Because sometimes things just had to be said.

“I don’t get this stuff,” Sue remarked.

She’d been frowning over the lyrics that were printed on the album’s inner sleeve. Leaning her head against the patched backrest of one of Dilly’s two old sofas, she set the sleeve aside.

“I mean, music’s supposed to make you feel good, isn’t it?” she went on.

Jilly shook her head. “It’s supposed to make you feel something— happy, sad, angry, whatever—just so long as it doesn’t leave you braindead the way most Top Forty does. For me, music needs meaning to be worth my time—preferably something more than ‘I want your body, babe,’ if you know what I mean.”

“You’re beginning to develop a snooty attitude, Jilly.”

“ Me? To laugh, dahling.”

Susan Ashworth was Jilly’s uptown friend, as urbane as Jilly was scruffy. Sue’s blonde hair was straight, hanging to just below her shoulders, where Jilly’s was a riot of brown curls, made manageable tonight only by a clip that drew it all up to the top of her head before letting it fall free in the shape of something that resembled nothing so much as a disenchanted Mohawk. They were both in their twenties, slender and blueeyed—the latter expected in a blonde; the electric blue ofJilly’s eyes gave her, with her darker skin, a look of continual startlement. Where’ Sue wore just the right amount of makeup, Jilly could usually be counted on having a smudge of charcoal somewhere on her face and dried oil paint under her nails.

Sue worked for the city as an architect; she lived uptown and her parents were from the Beaches, where it seemed you needed a permit just to be out on the sidewalks after eight in the evening—or at least that was the impression that the police patrols left when they stopped strangers to check their ID.

She always had that upscale look of one who was just about to step out to a restaurant for cocktails and dinner.

Jilly’s first love was art of a freer style than designing municipal necessities, but she usually paid her rent by waitressing and other odd jobs. She tended to wear baggy clothes—like the oversized white Tshirt and blue poplin lacefront pants she had on tonight—and always had a sketchbook close at hand.

Tonight it was on her lap as she sat propped up on her Murphy bed, toes in their ballet slippers tapping against one another in time to the music. The Pogues were playing an instrumental now-“Metropolis”—which sounded like a cross between a Celtic fiddle tune and the old “Dragnet”

theme.

“They’re really not for me,” Sue went on. “I mean if the guy could sing, maybe, but—”

“It’s the feeling that he puts into his voice that’s important,” Jilly said. “But this is an instrumental.

He’s not even—”

“Supposed to be singing. I know. Only—”

“If you’d just—”

The jangling of the phone sliced through their discussion. Because she was closer—and knew that Jilly would claim some old war wound or any excuse not to get up, now that she was lying down—Sue answered it. She listened for a long moment, an odd expression on her face, then slowly cradled the receiver.

“Wrong number?”

Sue shook her head. “No. It was someone named ... uh, Zinc? He said that he’s been captured by two Elvis Presleys disguised as police officers and would you please come and explain to them that he wasn’t stealing bikes, he was just setting them free. Then he hung up.”

“Oh, shit!” filly stuffed her sketchbook into her shoulderbag and got up.

“This makes sense to you?”

“Zinc’s one of the street kids.”

Sue rolled her eyes, but she got up as well. “Want me to bring my checkbook?”

“What for?”

“Bail. It’s what you have to put up to spring somebody from jail. Don’t you ever watch TV?”

Jilly shook her head. “What? Arid let the aliens monitor my brainwaves?”

“What scares me,” Sue muttered as they left the loft and started down the stairs, “is that sometimes I don’t think you’re kidding.”

“Who says I am?” Jilly said.

Sue shook her head. “I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that.”

Jilly knew people from all over the city, in all walks of life. Socialites and bag ladies. Street kids and university profs. Nobody was too poor, or conversely, too rich for her to strike up a conversation with, no matter where they happened to meet, or under what circumstances. She’d met Detective Lou Fucceri, now of the Crowsea Precinct’s General Investigations squad, when he was still a patrolman, walking the Stanton Street Combat Zone beat. He was the reason she’d survived the streets to become an artist instead ofjust one more statistic to add to all those others who hadn’t been so lucky.

“Is it true?” Sue wanted to know as soon as the desk sergeant showed them into Lou’s office. “The way you guys met?” Jilly had told her that she’d tried to take his picture one night and he’d arrested her for soliciting.

“You mean UFOspotting in Butler U. Park?” he replied.

Sue sighed. “I should’ve known. I must be the only person who’s maintained her sanity after meeting Jilly.”

She sat down on one of the two wooden chairs that faced Lou’s desk in the small cubicle that passed for his office. There was room for a bookcase behind him, crowded with law books and file folders, and a brass coat rack from which hung a lightweight sports jacket. Lou sat at the desk, white shirt sleeves rolled halfway up to his elbows, top collar undone, black tie hanging loose.

His Italian heritage was very much present in the Mediterranean cast to his complexion, his dark brooding eyes and darker hair. As Jilly sat down in the chair Sue had left for her, he shook a cigarette free from a crumpled pack that he dug out from under the litter of files on his desk. He offered the cigarettes around, tossing the pack back down on the desk and lighting his own when there were no takers.

Jilly pulled her chair closer to the desk. “What did he do, Lou? Sue took the call, but I don’t know if she got the message right.”

“I can take a message,” Sue began, but Jilly waved a hand in her direction. She wasn’t in the mood for banter just now.

Lou blew a stream of bluegrey smoke towards the ceiling. “We’ve been having a lot of trouble with a bicycle theft ring operating in the city,” he said. “They’ve hit the Beaches, which was bad enough, though with all the Mercedes and BMWs out there, I doubt they’re going to miss their bikes a lot. But rich people like to complain, and now the gang’s moved their operations into Crowsea.”

Jilly nodded. “Where for a lot of people, a bicycle’s the only way they can get around.”