Sam Thompson - Communion Town

At the bottom of the box was a bundle of data cartridges, labelled only with codes scrawled in soft pencil. Part of each number seemed to be a date, the earliest corresponding to last spring, the latest just over a month ago. I chose one at random; the old console on the desk had a slot the right size, so I clicked the cartridge into place and pressed the button. Then I nearly leapt out of my skin as the monitor and the player piano both came to life simultaneously.

It took me a minute to realise that the clonky old piano was playing one of my songs. It was exactly as I had written it, but it sounded oddly unfamiliar, perhaps because I had never heard it performed on anything other than the guitar. The monitor screen was split into several parts, one showing a horizontal line fuzzing out into jagged peaks and valleys in time with the sound from the piano, while a second showed staves full of black and white spots; I don’t know how to read musical notation. In the third, my lyrics scrolled up the screen. I listened through to the end of the song, took out the cartridge, and tried another. The song that played was one of my very earliest attempts: I had never dared perform it to anyone, had all but forgotten it, but here it was, exactly written out and reproduced.

There weren’t very many cartridges. One of them, I noticed, didn’t have a code at all: the label was marked only with a circle, or perhaps a figure zero. I turned it over in my hands, wondering if I’d ever get rid of the feeling that all of this had happened already.

I was distantly aware, as I clicked the cartridge into the console, that the front door of the house had opened and feet were climbing the stairs, but by the time she burst into the room with Leo at her heels, the music was already playing.

The tune from the pianola consisted of several neatly overlapping, tinkling phrases — jaunty, sentimental and melancholy all at once. We stood facing each other as we listened. After half a minute it finished and immediately began over again. I knew the song well. It was the music that had always been pulsing through me, marked by each spasm of my heart, and all my other songs were only variations on the theme. I breathed in and out to the pulse of that tune, tapped my fingers to it in idle moments and dreamt it whenever I slept. I could hear it, now, in the ripple of my gut. Its harmonics were the vibrations of my blood pressing its way through the tissues of my brain. Its banal melody described the limits of my emotions, and its prosaic structure was the absolute framework for my thoughts. It had been jingling away inside my body, in my heart, ingrained so deeply that I had not been able to recognise it until it was played back to me by an automatic music-box. I had never before heard it: its cheapness, its small, comprehensible ingenuity, its limited charm.

Watching me carefully, she moved over to the console and pulled out the cartridge. The player piano ran down to silence, but the tune tinkled on inside me. For the first time I could hear it, and I knew I’d never stop hearing it now. Shivers ran through me; my fingers twitched. Neither of them had taken their eyes off me. I lifted my hand and she flinched. I clutched at my ribs as if I could keep the noise from spilling out. Leo edged forward with his palms raised in placation, but I was too ashamed even to try apologising for what I had done. I knew she couldn’t excuse me this.

I understood that she was the single person I wanted and the only one I could ever want, the love of my life. Without looking at her, I walked out.

I remember all of this, and I remember how for the rest of the night I walked, not minding where I was going. For a while, my uppermost regret was that I hadn’t taken my guitar when I left: I could have pawned it for breakfast and a place to stay and still had change left over. As it turned out I had enough in my pockets to rent a rickshaw for a few hours’ work around dawn, and after that, life soon enough returned to the way it always was. The only difference is that I often think about the time we were together. Sometimes I remember it so deeply that I even forget the tune jingling away in my heart. This morning, I watched her disappear and then carried on just as before: but I was thinking of a certain time in our first few weeks, when I had returned to her flat dog-tired and aching after a long shift at work, wanting nothing so badly as to sleep, and she had helped me lie down, loosened my clothing and brushed strands of hair out of my face, tutting at the state of me. But as I began to sink with infinite gratitude into sleep, hands strayed over me, fluttering at my breastbone and throat, soft hair tickled my eyelids, fractional, insistent movements touched me, teeth grazed my skin, refusing to let me alone. And something happened that a moment before I had not been able to imagine. Strength ran into my limbs, my body was glad, my mind cleared, wide awake, and the taste of salts on my tongue opened into hot, liquid softness that plunged into me and drew me into itself, and at that very moment the first phrase of a new song dropped into my head. I caught her waist and rolled her over and drank until I had to gasp for breath. I tangled my hands in her hair and gazed into her face until we both breathed together. We moved together. A warm chord sounded. I filled my lungs. We were making a discovery, and it grew ever more remarkable, this disclosure of what each of us had at heart. All I needed to know was the way it unfolded, the song.

In from the street, through the hall and down, one palm making a squeak on the bannister, his feet pattering softly on the stairs, he can go at such a speed and still be so quiet. As he enters the dim corridor his eyes crowd with blocks of a colour that doesn’t have a name, a colour that no one else has discovered.

He steals past the open kitchen door, as quiet and quick as he can, past his grandmother who is standing at the sink cleaning a chicken and listening to the radio news. In his cupped hands he hides what he has stolen. He wonders what the canal man will do. He would take it back if he could, but he knows he’ll never be rid of it now.

The blocks of colour pulsate: they take their shapes from the doors and the walls, but get detached and drift free across his vision. The kitchen window is open, and in the distance the city murmurs its invitation. The autumn is laced with leftover summer. Without turning from the sink, his grandmother puts her sharp knife down on the counter. That is not a toy.

She has a straight back, a handsome nose bent like a knuckle and hair dark as lead soldiers. She wears wool stockings and lace-up shoes. When they go out into the city, she haggles with market traders while he stands with his fingers twisted into her skirts. She knows all the people in the district. She chats to the greengrocer who sells them string bags filled with apples, and she jokes with the large, straw-haired woman who checks out books for them at the library. Whenever she takes him to the open-air swimming bath she greets the old ladies on the benches, and when they hear music from the bandstand in the park they can stop and listen for as long as they want. She rides the buses as though she owns them. She likes to press his face with her cool palm. Where she first came from, he has no way of imagining: he has never considered what she is like in herself.

He passes the kitchen and continues down the corridor, which runs the length of the basement flat. Her room faces him from the far end behind a door with a scrollworked brass handle. It is full of water-damaged books, boxes of ancient letters, clothes from long ago, significant jewellery. Once, late at night, he took himself down to wake her because he had stomach pains, and found her sitting upright in bed, awake. The green-shaded lamp on her bedside table shed light on the book open in her lap. The clock pronounced a slow nocturnal tutting. From this, he formed the impression that she does not sleep. She is always there in that room, upright in that bed, at all times of the night.