Sam Thompson - Communion Town

The master leered in my direction, I thought, and winked.

‘When the sun was up, the fine lady said to him, take this and go to the baths, and come to me again this evening. The poor sweep did as he was told. He made haste to his hovel on the other side of town, and then looked at what she had given him. It was a silver-stitched handkerchief in which five gold coins were wrapped. Not knowing what to do with such riches, he buried them in the ground, and sat on the stoop of his house for the rest of the day, wondering what it might all mean. Evening was drawing in when one of the servant girls appeared, and said to him, come along, my mistress is waiting for you.

‘Well, friends, what would you have done? The sweep went along with the servant and everything happened just as it had the night before. He dined with the fine lady and spent the night in her fragrant bed. It seemed to him that each hour lasted forever and that the night was over in heartbeat. Time is strange indeed for a sweep in a lady’s room. You might think he’d have trouble believing it was real, but you’d be wrong. Through that secret night, he knew very well this bedchamber was real. What struck him as unlikely was that anything else might be — that he had ever led his mule through the streets, that dawn was going to come, that there was a city beyond the curtain.

‘And in the morning, just as before, she gave him a handkerchief full of coins and ordered him to come back to her in the evening.

‘But on that third night, when the sweep, with more swagger in his stride than usual, walked up to the mansion, something was different. The gate beside the house was open, and he thought he could hear the sound of horses from the courtyard, and from an upper window the intimate laughter of a man and a woman. Still, he went up to the door boldly enough and knocked. He was answered not by the pretty servants, but by a couple of eunuchs who asked him brusquely what he meant by coming to the front of the house. When he could give no reply, they beat him and drove him away. He fled back to his own hovel, and there he nursed his bruises and sobbed the night through.

‘Many days later, in the marketplace, who should he see in the distance, once more, but the fine lady and her entourage? Of course, he dared not approach her. That was the last he ever saw of any of that household.’

The actor playing the sweep was left alone in the middle of the platform, fixed motionless in a pose of comical longing and despair, his mouth turned down at the corners and his arm extended after the lady. The master paused with one eyebrow flexed until the giggles quietened. The crowd became more attentive.

‘And do you know why all of this happened to this little sweep?’

He looked around.

‘No?’

He looked from face to face.

‘None of you know?’

They waited.

‘Then you never will!’

Mirth surged back more loudly than before. The master gave a perfunctory bow, swished his cane through the air, and grinned around at his crowd. For a heartbeat his attention settled on me, and his moustache twitched as if to enquire why I was not laughing along with everyone else. But then the children reappeared to dance a faultless polka to the strains of flute and mandolin, all except for two of them, who threaded through the crowd with velvet bags held open. She dropped in a handful of coins, tousled the boy’s head and led me away.

That night I sat in the guest room with my guitar beside me on the cot, listening through the house to the muffled sounds of her having a row with her father. My eyes and nose were not streaming so badly since I had taken one of the tablets Leo had given me this morning. A chemical stink had surrounded the complex of concrete outbuildings they called the sheds, and from somewhere inside I had heard groans, the abandoned sounds of sickness or despair. Leo had not invited us into his workshop. As we had walked away she had explained to me that visitors from towns and cities were sometimes disconcerted when they came out here, but that this was just ignorance and sentimentalism.

I couldn’t make out her words or her father’s, only their voices drumming through the house. Tomorrow we would be back in the city.

The next few weeks passed quickly for me, and soon I was living in her flat. I never thought to mourn my bachelor freedom. I took to the routine right away, seeing her off in the morning and greeting her when she arrived home in the evening, and felt no qualms about domestication. She was going through a busy time at work, so I bought groceries and made the dinner every night.

One morning she was dashing out the door of the flat, late for her tram; but as I kissed her goodbye, she paused, and reminded me she couldn’t wait to hear my new material. We had agreed that from now on I’d concentrate on writing songs. Finally I could get down to work. For too long I had been full of possible songs, nestled deep down, frail seedlings which would stay for a while and grow if given the chance, or shrink away again if they were ignored. Now I could attend to them all.

I shut the door after her and turned to face the empty flat, tightening my dressing-gown cord. I had the place to myself all day, with nothing to keep me from my guitar and notebook and the multi-track program on her laptop. First, though, I got dressed and cleared away the breakfast things. I tidied the flat — I was positively house-proud these days — then sat on the sofa and eyed my guitar. Eventually I picked it up, tuned it, and strummed for a while. But nothing was happening, and the prospect of settling down to a day’s songwriting filled me with dismay. I was becoming alarmed. The fact was that since we’d moved in together I had written nothing at all.

My old songs, when I played them through, sounded transparent, ill-made, full of clichés and dishonesties. ‘Serelight Fair’ was still the best I’d written, and it was wearing thinner every time I played it: what had been unbearably true seemed now like cheap theatrics. But when I tried anything new, the jotted lyrics and sketchy chord sequences crumbled to pieces on my guitar strings. I told myself I only had to hold my nerve and keep going, but I found that I didn’t know how. My attention lapsed and whole days drained away, wasted. I was getting nowhere. The suspicion was creeping in that I had already written my songs, that I had no more left to write. I put the guitar down. Mid-morning already. What I needed to do, I decided, was go for a walk.

My daily errands had been growing longer and longer. Often I walked for miles all over the city, through somnolent avenues and deserted municipal parks with empty flowerbeds, or through the main streets where I was surrounded by office workers hurrying to and from their lunches. I told myself it was all part of the process: you couldn’t write songs by sitting in a flat, you had to go outside, keep on looking at the world, find out what it was like. Once, in Communion Town, I had heard a shred of melody, and seen a tangle-headed figure whistling for unresponsive afternoon shoppers. I had taken a different street instead.

Now I pulled the latch shut behind me and headed for the river, to join the tourists and students who would be out on the boardwalk, watching the human statues and browsing the tables of second-hand books. I began to hum a song I’d heard not long ago, but I found myself repeating the same line over and over. A thousand black umbrellas and a thousand hungry dreams …

An hour later I paused to lean against the parapet beside an open quadrangle, edged by brightly graffitoed walls, where skateboarders were showing off among brutalist concrete sculptures. A short way off, a spindly pedestrian bridge spanned the river. The water crawled far below.