Charles De Lint - Dreams Underfoot

Maybe Katrina will be the one, Amy thought.

Once she got past her own feelings, that was what she usually found herself hoping. Although Matt could be insensitive once he stepped off the stage, she still believed that all he really needed was someone to care about to turn him around. Nobody who put such heart into his music, could be completely empty inside. She was sure that he just needed someone—the right someone. It hadn’t been her, fine. But somewhere there had to be a woman for him—a catalyst to take down the walls though which only his music dared forth to touch the world.

The way he’d been so attentive towards Katrina all night, Amy was sure he was going to take her home with him, but all he did was ask her out tomorrow.

Okay, she thought standing beside Lucia while Matt and Katrina “talked.” That’s a start and maybe a good one.

Katrina’s hands moved in response to Matt’s question.

“What’s she saying?” Amy asked, leaning close to whisper to Lucia.

“Yes,” Lucia translated. “Now she’s asking him if they can ride the ferry.”

“The one to Wolf Island?” Amy said. “That’s where you found her.”

“Whisht,” Lucia told her.

“We’ll do whatever you want,” Matt was saying.

And then Katrina was gone, trailing after Lucia with a last lingering wave before the world outside the club swallowed her and the door closed behind the pair of them.

Matt and Amy returned to the stage to pack up their instruments.

“I was thinking of heading up to The Harp to see if there’s a session on,” Matt said. He looked around at the other three. “Anyone feel like coming?”

If there were enough musicians up for the music, Joe Breen, the proprietor of The Harp, would lock the doors to the public after closing hours and just let the music flow until the last musician packed it in, acting no different on this side of the Atlantic than he had with the pub he’d run back home in Ireland.

Johnny shook his head. “I’m beat. It’s straight to bed for me tonight.”

“It’s been a long night,” Nicky agreed.

Nicky looked a little sullen, but Amy doubted that Matt even noticed. He just shrugged, then looked to her.

Well, and why not? she thought.

“I’ll give it a go,” she told him.

Saying their goodbyes to the other two outside the club, she and Matt walked north to the Rosses where The Harp stood in the shadow of the Kelly Street Bridge.

“Katrina seemed nice,” Amy said after a few blocks.

“I suppose,” he said. “A little intense, maybe.”

“I think she’s a little taken with you.”

Matt nodded unselfconsciously. “Maybe too much. But she sure can dance, can’t she?”

“Like an angel,” Amy agreed.

Conversation fell flat then, just as it always did.

“I got a new tune from Geordie this afternoon,” Amy said finally. “He doesn’t remember where he picked it up, but it fits onto the end of ‘The Kilavel Jig’ like it was born to it.”

Matt’s eyes brightened with interest. “What’s it called?”

“He didn’t know. It had some Gaelic title that he’d forgotten, but it’s a lovely piece. In Gmajor, but the first part has a kind of a modal flavor so that it almost feels as though it’s being played out of C. It’d be just lovely on the bouzouki.”

The talk stayed on tunes the rest of the way to The Harp—safe ground. At one point Amy found herself remembering a gig they’d played a few months ago and the story that Matt had used to introduce a song called “Sure, All He Did Was Go” that they’d played that night.

“He couldn’t help himself,” Matt had said, speaking of the fiddler in the song who gave up everything he had to follow a tune. “Music can be a severe mistress, demanding and jealous, and don’t you doubt it.

Do her bidding and isn’t it just like royalty that she’ll be treating you, but turn your back on her and she can take back her gift as easily as it was given. Your man could find himself holding only the tattered ribbons of a tune and song ashes and that’s the God’s own truth. I’ve seen it happen.”

And then he’d laughed, as though he’d been having the audience on, and they’d launched into the song, but Amy had seen more than laughter in Matt’s eyes as he started to sing. She wondered then, as she wondered now, if he didn’t half believe that little bit of superstition, picked up somewhere on his travels, God knew where.

Maybe that was the answer to the riddle that was Matt Casey: he thought he’d lose his gift of music if he gave his heart to another. Maybe he’d even written that song himself, for she’d surely never heard it before. Picked it up in Morocco, he’d told her once, from one of the Wild Geese, the many Irishin-exile, but she wasn’t so sure.

Did you write it? She was ready to ask him right now, but then they were at The Harp and there was old Joe Breen flinging open the door to welcome them in and the opportunity was gone.

Lucia put on a pot of tea when she and Katrina returned to the apartment. While they waited for it to steep, they sat on the legless sofa pushed up against one wall of the long open loft that took up the majority of the apartment’s floor space.

There was a small bedroom and a smaller bathroom off this main room. The kitchen area was in one corner—a battered fridge, its paint peeling, a sink and a counter with a hot plate on it and storage cupboards underneath and a small wooden kitchen table with five mismatching chairs set around it.

A low coffee table made of a plank of wood set on two apple crates crouched before the couch, laden with magazines and ashtrays. Along a far wall, three tall old mirrors had been fastened to the wall with a twelvefoot long support bar set out in front of them. The other walls were adorned with posters of the various shows in which Lucia had performed. In two she had headlined—one a traditional ballet, while the other had been a very outre multimedia event written and choreographed by a friend of hers.

When the tea was ready, Lucia brought the pot and two cups over to the sofa and set them on a stack of magazines. She poured Katrina a cup, then another for herself.

“So you found him,” Lucia said as she returned to her seat on the sofa.

Katrina nodded happily.

He’s just the way I remember him, she signed.

“Where did you meet him?” Lucia asked.

Katrina gave a shy smile in response, then added, Near my home.

He was playing music.

The bright blue fire of her eyes grew unfocused as she looked across the room, seeing not plaster walls and the dance posters upon them, but the rough rocky shore of a coastline that lay east of the city by the mouth of the Dulfer River. She went into the past, and the past was like a dream.

She’d been underlake when the sound of his voice drew her up from the cold and the dark, neither of which she felt except as a kind of malaise in her spirit; up into the moonlight, bobbing in the whitecapped waves; listening, swallowing that golden sound of strings and voice, and he so handsome and all alone on the shore. And sad. She could hear it in his song, feel the timbre of his loneliness in his voice.

Always intrigued with the strange folk who moved on the shore with their odd stumpy legs, this time she was utterly smitten. She swam closer and laid her arms on a stone by the shore, her head on her arms, to watch and listen.

It was his music that initially won her, for music had been her first love. Each of her four sisters was prettier than the next, and each had a voice that could charm moonlight from a stone, milk from a virgin, a ghost from the cold dark depths below, but her voice was better still, as golden as her hair and as rich and pure as the first larksong at dawn.