Colum McCann - Songdogs

‘I brought you some flowers.’

‘Aren’t you just lovely?’

‘Do you have a vase?’

She didn’t reply. She looked at the ceiling: ‘How’s your mother?’

‘She’s fine.’

‘Oh lovely, lovely, lovely.’

‘Have you heard from her?’ I asked.

She looked at me curiously. ‘No.’ She closed her eyes. ‘Say, that’s a heavy bag you’ve got there.’

‘Been travelling a while.’

‘Hey, why don’t you just stay here with me forever?’

‘Pardon me?’

‘Forever and an extra day.’

‘Yeah, okay.’ I nodded. ‘She never writes to you, no?’

‘Never. Haven’t seen a Christmas card in — oh…’ Her voice fell away. ‘I really don’t know how long.’

‘I see.’

‘Say, what’s your name again?’

‘Conor.’

‘Ah, yes, how could I forget that? You look just like her, you know.’

The television set was covered with a sheet of white crêpe paper — Cici liked watching it with the sound turned down, a magical box producing a weird flare-out of colour. You could see the fibres in the paper and the fuzzy static lifting it away from the screen. She had taped the crêpe paper to the top of the television set so that if she wanted to watch something on television she could just lift the paper up.

She moved over to the sofa, stretched out, lay back and laughed, a loud cackle that rang its way around the apartment, the shelves lined with amulets, a strange foot-long marijuana bong on the coffee table, the mantelpiece full of candles, a few paintings on the wall, some O’Keefe prints, a Warhol imitation. She wore a white nightdress, hair tumbling down to her shoulders. She might as well have stepped off the stage of a Tennessee Williams play. It seemed that she had scattered herself all over the country for years, came back to Castro Street, where people flowed in and out of her apartment. She entertained them with syllogisms. Women swanned in, and she chattered with them about how to keep your gums, your fingernails, your virginity — maybe all three at once. She told stories of beat writers who had taken all three from her. Hollow-faced men knocked on the door, looking to talk about how their body cells were being destroyed, beaten down. They brought her flowers — her place was a riot of flowers. Cici rattled on about movement and politics, about stasis and love, about the romantic muckheap of the sixties, about men who’d gone down in Vietnam — ‘occidental death,’ she called it. She was a shaman of sorts, a holy rage lived in her. And she always prefaced her stories with a single phrase, ‘Lord, I remember.’

That first night, when her apartment was quiet, Cici’s face dropped when I told her what had actually happened with Mam.

‘Jesus,’ she said, ‘I had no idea.’

She rolled her eyes sadly and jabbed in under her fingernails with a toothpick when I asked her again: ‘No, no, I haven’t heard a single thing, imagine that. She just left?’

‘Upped and left,’ I said. ‘Without so much as a note.’

‘Where did she go?’

I shook my head.

‘Did you try Mexico?’

‘Of course.’

‘Nothing?’

‘Nothing.’

She went to the kitchen and came back with a bottle of vodka and some ice cubes, poured two glasses, stared at the wall.

‘Tell me about the fires, Cici.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘I just want to know.’

‘Why?’

‘She used to talk about them. My old man, too.’

‘Ah yes, your father. How is your father?’

‘Haven’t seen him in a while. He’s home in Mayo.’

She pursed her lips and shrugged.

I sipped at the vodka. ‘So tell me about the fires.’

‘Oh, everyone around here talks about old times,’ she said. ‘Day in, day out, I talk about old times.’

I nodded.

‘I mean, that’s all anybody ever talks about. What it was like back twenty, thirty, a million years ago.’ She moved a little on the sofa. ‘You know what I think?’ she said. ‘I think memory is three-quarters imagination.’

I sat back.

‘And all the rest is pure lies,’ she said.

‘Yes, yeah, I know what you mean.’ I mashed my hands together.

I knew what she meant, yet she sang to me like a wren, on and on, memories of startling lucidity, incidents pouring from her, a threnody of nostalgia, nightdress billowing in the breeze from a fan. And Cici remembered that look on my mother’s face, in the broken mirror — ‘Lord, I remember’ — as if it had happened just yesterday.

A smile hung permanently at the edge of her mouth. At any moment I expected some sort of clap to sound out around the theatre of herself, and she’d draw her hand to her lips and cock her head sideways and say, chuckling, to an enraptured audience: ‘God, I was good.’ Then she might look up again from the rim of her nightdress, questioning: ‘Wasn’t I?’

I saw her late that first evening, moving a needle around her legs. The tracks stood out on the inside of her thighs, which I suppose were one of the few hidden places left she could inject. I stirred in my bed, on the floor. She caught my eye. The needle flickered momentarily.

‘Oh God,’ she said. ‘Did we put sugar in the flower water?’

The needle sunk in.

‘I always forget about the sugar in the water,’ she said.

She pushed the top of the needle.

‘Are you all right, dear?’ she said to me.

‘Yeah, I’m fine.’ I sat on the floor, curled my feet into my stomach. ‘Why do you do that?’

‘Makes the flowers last longer.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘That.’

‘Oh.’ She looked at the needle, twirled it in her fingers. ‘It’s just a little something.’ The sofa gathered her in and she sat back, eyes closed, sat up suddenly, looked at me: ‘Did you know that Morpheus was the god of dreams?’

She had finagled a permanent supply from a local doctor in return for four first-edition books by minor beat poets. She wasn’t addicted, she said, just an occasional habit that she’d developed recently. She sat on the side of the sofa, leaned across to me. ‘No more stupid poems,’ she said, ‘I don’t do stupid poems anymore, poetry isn’t worth a damn. I’d much rather sit here and talk. There’s a grace in doing nothing, don’t you think?’

There was a roll of butcher’s paper in the corner of her flat, but no typewriter around. At times she picked up the bong from the table and twirled it in her fingers. It was draped with a bear’s claw. Somehow Cici ended up with it after it had been confiscated from another tower by a forest ranger in the sixties. She had given up dope, stuck entirely to morphine, but she had a few dime bags hidden in the bottom of her underwear drawer. The grass was old and dried-out, but I smoked some of it anyway, letting the bear’s claw scratch my lips, letting her world drip around me.

I stayed with Cici for three weeks. She took to calling me ‘babe.’ At times she was frantic with energy, moving up and down the apartment, opening the door, letting people in. Sometimes she moved to the balcony and conducted conversations with people down on the street, dropping words from on high. The traffic roared and men linked hands, waved up at her, wrapped into each other. A woman was pulled along by a wolfhound, her anaemic overcoat flapping behind her. Sirens rang out, the street in full throat. The barbershop pole swirled in red and white and blue — a sign outside mentioned clean razors for a shave. A man with a sandwich board advertised the street as Sodom and Gomorrah — he was like Moses out there, a sea of people parting around him, a pillar of salt.

One evening, when Cici was sleeping, I stepped out on to the fire escape. A man on the opposite side of the street was standing on his balcony, gyrating his heavy hips, singing malevolently into a hairbrush. He saw me, but he didn’t flinch, kept on singing. He was middle-aged and wore a necktie, but no shirt. A few words from old Cole Porter songs filtered across, over the traffic. He sang with an ineffable longing, the hairbrush moving like a swinging trapeze around his lips. Sometimes he twirled the brush around in his fingers, picked clumps of hair from around the teeth. Cici stepped out on the fire escape with me, put her hand on my shoulder.