Colum McCann - Songdogs

‘Babe,’ she said.

She stood beside me and sang ‘You’re the Top’ with the man, a doppelgänger of voices, out of synch with each other, drifting over the traffic. She winked at the man, who tucked the hairbrush in his back pocket and smiled, put her arm around my waist, guided me back inside, put some hot milk on the stove to help us sleep. In the morning a skin had developed over the milk, which hadn’t been touched. Cici scooped it off with a spoon. ‘You’re the top,’ she said, laughing, as the skin of the milk was thrown down into the drain.

It was a vibrant and eclectic place, and Cici fitted in perfectly, a living cornice, among the bits of white bricks, pieces of old wood, crumbling cement around her. In the afternoons she was thankful to have someone who would cook. I made a stir-fry and concocted a chocolate dessert which she left sitting on her plate. ‘It just looks too nice to eat,’ she said, ‘don’t you think so, babe?’ With her fork she made another happy face in the chocolate pudding. Behind her the crêpe paper was swimming in colour. She tried desperately to remember my name every day, but couldn’t, yet she recalled things that had happened years ago as if they had just occurred, an irrepressible want to live them again, a misery that she never would, a pilgrimage into desire. Cici no longer saw me as a visitor. She left the door of the bathroom open when she went to the toilet. The nightdress hitched up on her legs when she sat on the sofa. I turned my back when she got out her needles, filled the bowl of the bear’s-claw pipe, floated away.

The Haight, she said, had been momentary, sexual, magical to her. The mid-sixties — a decade after the Wyoming fires — had seen her swinging her hair around, strung out on LSD, bracelets around her neck, hard skin on the bottoms of her bare feet. I went down there to check it out, stood on the corner of Haight and Ashbury, found myself swamped in old bearded men begging for money, and a fresh sourdough smell hovering through the air. Its re-creation was its sadness — ponytails, nose-rings, compact discs, expensive beads, a shirt with a peace sign drawn into the badge of a Mercedes-Benz.

In the park a juggler threw oranges. She was wearing a short tank top, and every now and then would push her hand across her breast, to wipe away sweat. She noticed the small tricolour I had sewn on the outside pocket of my daypack. ‘Advertising,’ she joked, ‘everyone loves the Irish.’ She was from Galway, but not a trace of accent was left. We walked to City Lights bookstore and I looked for Cici’s poems among the rows of beat poets, but they weren’t there, and we went on to a bar, played pool — she juggled Guinness bottles in the air. ‘I’m a tosser,’ she said, and all of a sudden the Irish accent was back. ‘Ah go on, give us a goozer.’ She leaned into me, kissed me, and I put my arms around her, but then she whispered that I looked like someone she’d once known. I left, hailed a cab.

I sat back and watched San Francisco move by. The whole world was looking for someone who was gone.

Night birds flew over Castro and, down the sidestreet, Cici was awake under them.

‘I like Frisco,’ I said to her, still a bit drunk.

‘Oh, don’t call it Frisco, babe, only tourists call it Frisco, call it, let me see, call it the whitewhite city.’

‘Okay.’

‘I met someone tonight.’

‘That’s nice, just don’t fall in love.’

‘I won’t.’

‘Oh go ahead, for crying out loud.’

‘Go ahead what?’

‘Fall in love, lose your heels, fall in love with a million of them.’ She rubbed her eyeballs. ‘And let me tell you something — all at once is best.’

‘Fair enough.’

All at once in love with a million women from the whitewhite city — it could have been Cici’s epitaph.

A man came and collected two months of bills. He shoved his foot in the door to keep it open, waving the bills in our faces, threatening court action. I paid the bills for Cici. She was astounded: ‘Don’t do that, babe, oh God, you don’t have to do that.’ It wasn’t charity, I just wanted to lose something of myself in that room. It was pathetic, but money was all I could think of. Guilt assailed me — Cici was exhausted, I had dredged up things in her that maybe would have been better forgotten. In the deli I stocked up on food and wine. I cooked up a meal of beans and tacos, and we drank a little white wine, toasted my mother. Cici said, simply: ‘To Juanita.’

A taxi beeped for me underneath the apartment next morning. I could just about hear it above the noise.

‘You really can stay if you want to.’

‘I’m on my way to fall in love with a million women.’

‘What a great idea, take me with you.’

‘Okay, come on.’

She laughed and shook her head.

‘See you,’ I said.

I kissed her on the cheek.

She drew herself back, pouted comically, wrinkles puckering into her cheeks, pointed at her lips, pursed them again. We laughed. She held the back of my hair, and ran one hand along my back as our lips touched. I wanted to kiss her again, but didn’t.

‘Where to now?’ she asked, letting go of my hair.

‘I have a bus ticket to Wyoming.’

‘Say hello to it for me.’

‘Can I call it Wyoming?’

‘You can call it whatever you like, babe.’

‘Okay.’

‘And say hello to Juanita when you see her. Tell her she owes me a letter.’

The taxi took me past the whiteness of San Francisco. Cici’s face came with me, all cratered. She had promised me that she would give up the morphine but just before I left I saw her, ferreting down her thighs with another small needle, looking for a place without a bruise. ‘Just one more,’ she said, chuckling, the euphoria already washing its way over her. ‘You know, babe, you have to go slow with these things.’

* * *

One morning, when dawn had finished its rumour, and the old man was gone for the day, she and Mam were languishing together down near the camp.

Mam wore a magenta dress that buttoned at the front. The row of white buttons ran all the way to the hem. Her brown legs emerged, twigs. She was lying back in the grass, shielding her eyes from the sun. Cici was beside her, her head propped on her hand. ‘It’ll rain one of these days,’ said Cici. She moved slightly, in a disguise of nonchalance. The shadow over my mother’s eyes lengthened infinitesimally. Cici held a blade of grass between the gap in her front teeth. An insect landed on Mam’s stomach, and Cici moved to brush it away. Her hand hovered over Mam’s body for a moment, fell slowly and laid itself on her belly. Nothing was said. The insect flew off. The shadow was held. Cici’s fingers made little circles around one of the buttons. Traced the outlines. Only the very tip of her fingers touched their way inside the gap between the buttons, moved against Mam’s skin. It was a tiny demesne of stomach that Cici wandered over with her fingertips, and maybe my mother moved her head in some sort of ecstasy, maybe her black hair scrunched itself into the ground, maybe her back arched itself up to make a bridge of air beneath her, maybe she waited for the fingers to explore further, maybe she thought there would never be any rain, but Cici pulled her hand away and began to laugh.

She rose and went bounding away to the tower. Mam found her later, enmeshed in maps, talking on the radio to one of the rangers. The two of them held hands for a moment as a voice hacked through the radio: ‘Have you two gone barmy up there yet?’

They went back down to the water trough, and Mam slipped in, wearing the magenta dress, to see how it felt. The water wasn’t cold anymore. They had swept the larvae from the surface. She slapped the water out around her with her hands, put her head fully under, came up with her hair tangled. Cici sat down beside her at the edge of the trough and scribbled in a notebook — doodles and squiggles that later formed a lyric. It was a fabulous moment, Mam and Cici together — or so Cici told me — letting the sky drift past, saying nothing. Later the dress was hung out on the line to billow. My mother went back down to the camp and made some sandwiches for my father’s dinner.