Jonathan Coe - The Dwarves of Death

Now and then

I wonder if I should have come here

Real men

Who’s going to ask me what I’ve done here?

I search for buried treasure

Precious gifts from out of Araby

I know it’s now or never

And when I’m down, will you carry me?

I shook my head sadly as he sang these lines. I’ve always found it hard to write lyrics, and as Harry struggled to get the top B at the beginning of each phrase, these ones sounded more lame than ever. Then there was the chorus:

And then I went away

And I left behind the times

And the place where she stayed

Often lingers in my mind

Wish I knew what you planned

Feel your fingers in my hand

I just hope I can stand –

Stranger in a foreign land

By five o’clock the recording was finished. We took an hour off to have some tea, then came back to do the mix-down. We listened to the finished version a couple of times and tried to feel good about it.

‘There you are, boys,’ said Vincent, presenting us with a reel of one-inch tape in a white cardboard box. ‘Your passport to success.’

‘Sarcastic bastard,’ said Harry, when he’d gone out of the room. He opened the box and looked at the tape. ‘I suppose we’d better get a few cassettes and make some copies of this, had we?’

‘Perhaps we’d better leave it a few days,’ I said, ‘and listen to it again.’

Harry must have sensed the pessimism that this implied. He nodded understandingly.

‘I believe you,’ I added. ‘About that band.’

He shrugged.

‘Doesn’t matter really, does it?’

‘Look, I’ve got this friend, back in Sheffield. He knows everything about music. He’s a walking encyclopaedia. I’ll write and ask him — he’ll know.’

‘It’s no big deal. Really.’

But I could see that it mattered to him, and I decided to do something about it that evening. Besides, I had been out of touch with Derek for far too long.

*

The tune of ‘Stranger in a Foreign Land’ was still dancing around my head as I waited for Madeline outside the Swiss Centre in Leicester Square on Thursday evening. I suppose when I wrote those words, ‘Wish I knew what you planned, Feel your fingers in my hand’, she had been at the back of my mind — where she always was, when she wasn’t at the front. The chords I had used were meant to have a bitter-sweet feel — alternating minor sevenths, a whole tone apart, a favourite mannerism of mine — but on the whole the piece was designed to sound optimistic and forward-looking, which was still how I tried to feel about the relationship: in the face, it has to be said, of much discouraging evidence.

And that evening, the evidence started to pile up. It started with her being late. This in itself was unusual: she had never kept me waiting for more than about five minutes before, but this time she was more than half an hour late, and it was past nine o’clock by the time I spotted her threading through the crowds from Piccadilly Circus.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘My watch must be slow.’

‘You aren’t wearing a watch,’ I pointed out.

Madeline pulled her coat tightly around herself.

‘Don’t snap at me when I’ve just arrived,’ she said. ‘What are we going to do, anyway?’

‘I thought we could go to a film, but it’s too late now, they’ve all started.’ I expected her to apologize again at this point, but she didn’t. ‘So, I don’t know… I suppose we might as well get something to eat.’

‘Don’t sound so enthusiastic.’

‘It’s just that I’ve hardly got any money.’

The sheer predictability of my feelings for Madeline never ceased to surprise me. Ebb and flow, ebb and flow. In her absence, a simple longing; as soon as we were together again, irritation, petulance, angry devotion. Whenever I saw her I was immediately struck by how beautiful she was, and then immediately devastated by the thought that I had known her for six months and still not even come close to making love to her. And yet, just when I was dying to give vent to my emotion, I was expected to be cool and level-headed, to look around me and to choose, from the hundreds of restaurants on offer in the Leicester Square area, the one where we were to go and have dinner. French? Italian? Greek? Indian? Chinese? Thai? Vietnamese? Indonesian? Malaysian? Vegetarian? Nepalese?

‘How about going to McDonald’s?’ I said.

‘Fine,’ she said.

We went to the one on the Haymarket, and sat upstairs. I had a quarterpounder with cheese, regular fries and a large coke. All Madeline would have was a cheeseburger. We ate in silence for a while. She was clearly depressed about something and her moroseness didn’t take long to spread in my direction. I thought of all the evenings we had spent together in the last six months, all the hope and excitement I had felt at the start of the relationship, and it seemed cruel and pathetic that we should be sitting there, not even talking, just picking at junk food in these bland surroundings on a freezing winter’s night. When I finally dared to speak, it seemed to require enormous effort.

‘So,’ I said, ‘what have you been up to, the last few days?’

‘Nothing much. You know me.’

I pointed at her cheeseburger.

‘Is that all you’re going to eat?’

‘I’m not very hungry. Anyway, I hate this food.’

I must have made some gesture of frustration, because she took pity and said: ‘I’m sorry, William. We’re both in a bad mood, that’s all.’

I could have pointed out that I hadn’t been in a bad mood, until she kept me waiting for half an hour, but it seemed more constructive to take her up on her attempt at friendliness.

‘We recorded a new song on Tuesday,’ I said.

‘Oh?’ Naturally, she sounded bored.

‘Took us all day, in fact. Six hours’ studio time.’

‘This is turning into quite an expensive hobby, isn’t it?’

‘You know perfectly well it isn’t a hobby.’

She took one of my fries and said, absently, ‘You still think you’re going to make a career out of this, do you?’

‘I don’t know. I really don’t think of it in those terms.’

‘Why do you do it then, this music? What’s the point?’

‘I do it because I have to.’

Her stare was blank, uncomprehending.

‘I do it because I’ve got all this music, locked up inside me, and I have to let it out. It’s… what I do. It’s what I’ve always done.’

‘Sounds most inconvenient: like a bowel problem or something. I’m glad I don’t have it.’

‘No, it’s not like that at all. It’s a gift. It’s a way of expressing feelings — putting them into permanent form — preserving them. Feelings which would otherwise just be dead and forgotten.’

‘What sort of feelings?’

Bravely, I said: ‘Feelings about you, for instance.’

‘You’ve written songs about me?’

‘Yes.’

‘How embarrassing.’

There was a short silence, during which I wondered whether she realized how wounding this had sounded. Then I said, ‘Thanks.’

‘What do you mean?’ she asked — picking up on my sarcasm, for once.

‘You know something that really pisses me off?’

‘If you’re just going to be rude to me tonight,’ she said, ‘I don’t have to sit here and listen.’

‘I’ll tell you what pisses me off. It’s how nice you are.’

‘What?’

‘How nice you are to everybody but me. God, you’re so polite, and gentle, and considerate, and generous, you’re so brimming over with good feelings for everyone: and not a scrap of it comes my way. Not a bloody trickle.’

‘I think you’re being unfair. Very unfair.’

‘No I’m not. Why should you treat me differently from anyone else? Just because I’m your boyfriend, that doesn’t mean I’m not entitled to a bit of courtesy now and again. Jesus, you keep me waiting for half an hour, you’re sulky, you won’t talk to me. You won’t even tell me what’s wrong.’