Zachary Lazar: Sway

He sneers in his weird drawl, Well I could never be-e-e-e satisfied and I jus-s-s-t can’t ke-e-e-p on crying . He looks sideways at Keith, pursing his lips. There is a jostle of guitars. He twitches his head, chin raised, marching in a slight crouch or stoop.

Their hair is long and they look both ugly and vain. They look like women, that’s what people will say, but in fact they don’t look like women at all, it’s just that they’re sexual, aware of their bodies. If anything, their hair makes them look like very careless transvestites, with something devious and brittle beneath their outer resolve. The music is making them move in ways that might be embarrassing, but they’re trying to master that embarrassment by seeming not to care. This sense of fakery has something vaguely to do with being English and playing the music of black Americans. They’re trying to be serious and sarcastic at the same time, emotional but also cool. All the helpful commonsense distinctions are being made pointless by their grating, persistent music.

The crowd breaks the tables and one of the bass player’s amplifiers. They smash a few pint glasses on the floor. Brian is set upon by six boys who claw at his long blond hair and tumble after him in a scrum up the broken stairs.

After that, the gigs start to draw crowds. It’s the violence that draws them, the violence in the music, and the violence that ensues. They play every Wednesday at a new pub in Ealing, weekends at a hotel bar in Richmond. Almost all the shows end in some sort of confrontation: a skirmish in the crowd, a verbal brawl between the band and some heckler, a fistfight broken up by bouncers and then continued on the pavement outside. There is always a tension in the rooms, the darkness and heat accentuated by the tight jostle of too many people in too small a space. The anticipation of what might go wrong becomes central to the music, which gets louder and more jagged in response.

One night when they’re onstage Mick notices the way that Brian rattles his tambourine. He smirks at the crowd and gives it a single hard shake, as if he’s cracking a small whip. The next night Mick taunts the audience along these same lines, turning his face in profile between phrases, laughing at some private joke, then sneering and pointing his finger. All the lights seem to be on him. He pushes it further and further but not too far.

In February, Brian meets a girl at a pub in Soho. He’s trying to get another booking for the band, and he’s brought some money — he’s borrowed it from the band’s common fund without telling them — so that he can make an impression on the bartender. But he forgets this mission as soon as the girl comes in out of the rain with her group of friends. From the bar he can see her hair falling in wet strands over her narrow face. She’s tall and thin and she wears a shiny black raincoat, a coat that seems to be made of some rare, expensive kind of plastic.

Within a minute or two, he has become the center of attention at their table. He’s wearing a tweed jacket and a narrow black tie whose ends dangle free of the clasp. He buys a bottle of champagne and has it brought over to the girl and her friends. The girl in the black raincoat regards him at first with a comic skepticism, a feigned hostility, but he pours her a glass of the champagne nonetheless. Before long she is speaking in a way that almost mirrors the way he speaks, sarcastic and deliberately peculiar, as if they are in together on some secret.

He asks about her raincoat. He says he had a dream once about a girl in a raincoat just like hers. He asks her if by any chance she speaks German, or if she’s ever been to Germany. Her raincoat looks German to him.

She looks down at the lapel of her coat as if she’s never noticed it before. When she looks back up at him with the same suspicious smile, he notices the little gap between her front teeth, the faint groove on the underside of her nose, between the nostrils. When she asks him for a cigarette, he tells her that she will have to fight him for it, and after a confused pause she raises her two fists to the level of her cheeks and pretends to stare him down.

That same evening, Tricia arrives at Edith Grove, this time having left the baby with her cousin Claire in Clapham. Her hair has been cut shorter, curled at the ends like Jackie Kennedy’s. She’s in high spirits, planning to meet Brian on his own terms, but it turns out that he isn’t even home; he’s somewhere in the West End at a jazz club, looking for gigs.

It’s Mick who tells her this, after he’s invited her inside. He’s loafing around the flat in a new bathrobe and a worn pair of pajamas that look as if they’ve been twisted in tight knots and left for a year in a damp trunk. A textbook is spread out on the sofa beside a parcel of fried potatoes wrapped in newspaper. As he sits down on the sofa, he indicates a chair for her to sit in with a wave of his hand.

He puts his feet up on the table and lifts a martini glass filled with something tepid and brown. He has a long strand of dried toothpaste on the lapel of his robe.

“Didn’t he know you were coming?” he says.

The chair he’s offered her is piled with dirty clothes, which she picks up in a clump and places on top of one of the amplifiers. In recent weeks, her disappointment over Brian has reached an apex and turned into something resembling exuberance, a desperate, unashamed yearning.

“Do you think I would have come all this way if I hadn’t told him?” she says.

She sits down and lights herself a cigarette, breathing out with closed eyes. She’s wearing mascara and a new green dress beneath her topcoat.

“That’s our little till,” Mick says. He points to a cigar box on the floor, lying sideways with its lid agape. “We keep our savings in there, to make the payments on the instruments? As you can see, there’s not much in it now. Nothing at all, in fact. Keith just ran off a little while ago to try to find him.”

She leans forward with her elbows on her knees, her feet splayed out dejectedly in front of her. Mick raises his glass awkwardly and sips some of the strange liquid.

“Beef tea,” he says. “Would you like some?”

She stands up and starts to appraise the clutter in the room. On the wall near the kitchen is a long Bakelite-covered table stacked with dirty plates, ashtrays, newspapers stained different shades of bright yellow and beige.

“Are you sure?” she says.

“Sure of what?”

“Are you sure that it was Brian who took the money?”

Mick stands up. He yawns, stretching his arms by clasping his hands in a bridge behind his waist.

“It’s his band,” he says. “You know that. He needs that money to keep himself in shampoo, I suppose. Shampoo for that lovely hair of his.”

He is standing right behind her now. She can feel him pausing there, watching her with a kind of scorn. She closes her eyes and feels a warm swelling inside her, not anger or guilt but some fusion of these that brings with it a tinge of her earlier anticipation, her excitement over seeing Brian.

She imagines him making one of his funny faces, jabbing two fingers up his nostrils and sticking out his tongue. She sees him doing this in a circle of girls whose faces she can’t see, wearing the dark suit she gave him as a present when they lived back in Cheltenham.

“I’m sure he’ll be back soon,” says Mick. “Why don’t you come sit down?”

When she feels his hands on her shoulders, she stands very still for a moment. Then she turns and stares at him. Their kissing is a way to avoid having to look at each other any longer.

If anything, she tries too hard. Her breath is stale and she keeps thrusting her chest out at him. He moves her clumsily back toward the couch. When he sees her eyes roll back blankly in the vagueness of succumbing, he realizes how determined she is, how little this has to do with him.