Jim Crace - All That Follows

Tonight he’s gigging in Brighton at a pacifist benefit, for free. Back in the Factory once again. It’s no big deal, he reminds himself. But it’s not nothing either. He drives off early, takes the van down the country route, and arrives with enough spare time to walk along the promenade in the dark and practice embouchures and breaths. It won’t be long before he’s on the stage, all brass and fingertips and bulging throat. The audience will not know what to make of him. He doesn’t care. It’s Francine that he’s performing for again. He’s bound to think of her as she was on the night they met, damp, storm-tossed, and slightly drunk in her red coat, sitting in the third row of the gallery.

It’s almost time to play. He turns and heads back to the Factory. The tide is dragging shingle off the beach. The saxman cometh and his head is bursting now with jazz.

JIM CRACE is the author of nine previous novels, including, most recently, The Pesthouse. Being Dead was short-listed for the 1999 Whitbread Fiction Prize and won the U.S. National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 2000. In 1997, Quarantine was named the Whitbread Novel of the Year and was short-listed for the Booker Prize. Jim Crace has also received the Whitbread First Novel Prize, the E. M. Forster Award, and the Guardian Fiction Prize. He lives in Birmingham, England.