CC 115: Schubert

Before the taxi arrived, I snuck in a wee question to see if it would win me anything to sleep comfortably with.  I knew it wouldn’t by then, but I’d been chancing my arm long enough already to chance it just a little bit longer.  The question I asked was:  ‘Will I be seeing you?’

‘Again?’ she asked.

‘Of course.’

‘Well, unless you decide to flee this miserable town and take a job somewhere else, it’s a possibility we’ll run into each other.’

‘Right.  Miserable town?’

‘Well, you know what I mean.  A miserable of sorts.’

‘Yes, it is sort of miserable, you’re right.  But not all the time.’

‘Not all the time.  Okay.  But it makes me miserable most of the time.’

‘I’m sorry if I caused that.’

‘Fuck no.  People get miserable for all kinds of things in all kinds of miserable places.  You didn’t cause it.’

‘Glad to know that.’

‘You’re full of yourself, Pascal.  You didn’t cause the misery.  There is no cause for it.  It just exists.  Like you.’

‘Thanks. I’m at the centre of your misery.’

‘Yep.’

We both laughed.  Then both of our heads went down.

‘Look, here’s your taxi coming.’

A black Ford with the blue and yellow Taxi sign on its roof was slowly crawling towards us, and it looked like a miserable thing, and it felt really miserable to see it.

‘Right, get yourself off home,’ said Emer.

‘Right so.’

She opened her arms wide for a hug, and I joined her in the embrace, and enjoyed the smell of her dry frosty hair, and also took in for the first time what remained of the perfume she’d put on the day before.  There was a hint of it still there, and it was like no scent she’d ever worn with me.  Not one of the ones I’d got for her, and not one of the million ones she’d got for herself.  It was a nice perfume all the same. 

As I opened the door of the taxi, I called back to her ‘Emer, I promise I won’t flee this miserable town.’

‘Me neither,’ she laughed back.

I jumped into the front seat of the taxi.  The driver had classical music playing which I didn’t expect.  It reminded me of a Schubert symphony I’d heard a number of times in my life, but I wasn’t entirely sure.  I thought to ask the driver if I was right, but instead chose just to say ‘Hello.’

‘Hello,’ he responded.

‘Nice morning,’ I said.

‘Ah, it’s grand, you know.’

I looked back and in the misty rear window watched Emer’s head bobbing off in the other direction.  Back to Francie Pollard’s house.  As the car moved, and the image of her shrunk, it seemed like the rear window was an old cloth wiping her figure from existence because she soon disappeared from the road.

‘Cuchullain Terrace?’ the taxi driver asked.

‘Ah, wherever,’ I said to him, apathetically.

‘Wherever doesn’t suit me, son.  You’re either going somewhere or you aren’t.’

And now, in the taxi, I find myself wondering.  Loudly wondering in my own brain, but thankfully, not loud enough for the taxi driver to hear, but I feel he is wondering with me, probably not about the same things.  I wonder about the poems now as we drive down Castletown with the classical music playing.  The words on the kerbstones and walls by the dead poet who nobody cared about but everyone talks about.  I wonder which little poems of his we missed.  Coming down the hill along the old graveyard, I suddenly imagine there must be tons of poems in there that nobody ever found.  I must go in someday and have a wee look on the gravestones.    

Passing the Mullen’s chip shop, I think about the chips, and how good they tasted if you had the odds on you to buy some during school lunchtimes.  That was a special day in your life, that was.  It hasn’t changed.  They still have the same sign at the front, and they still do the same chips with their secret recipe.  Every town should develop its own secret recipes.  It doesn’t matter what the thing is, that secret recipe sees it through the ages, gives it legs.  Good for them.  In some of the takeaways, the food they give you literally has legs.

Though some, like Mullen’s, live on, others, I see now, have changed.  ‘What happened to Toner’s?’ I ask the taxi driver.  ‘They closed ages ago,’ he tells me.  ‘No need for pen and paper these days, pal.’  Toner’s, the stationery store, where we used to buy our copybooks before school, and steal the rubbers and staplers, the bits and bobs that were easy to get out of the place, was now an electronics shop called Electronics Shop; I feel sorry for the kids nowadays trying to stick those Canon printers up their jumpers.

Mullen’s, Electronics Shop, and now the old garage which hasn’t changed one bit in all those years, and probably never will.  It’s hard to get rid of an old garage these days, or to convince it to change.  People like their cars too much.  So the garages have the upperhand, and can do what they want.  Stay where they are, don’t have to clean up so much, they’ll call the shots until cars are no more, and you’d be foolish to bet on when that might happen. 

And the houses along this road – Schubert seemed to know them as much as the rest of us did, for his music now hosed them in a mercurial light as though composed to intentionally highlight their simplicity and innocence.  I’m sure Schubert wasn’t thinking about the houses on the Castletown Road when he wrote this music.  He was probably thinking about something much more serious, but even the taxi driver’s face as he watches the terraces roll by with the music in his ears would make you think some fellowship existed.

 And Schubert might be playing inside these houses now.   Playing as the old women come back with their morning scratchcards and furiously scratch them out on the kitchentable.  Playing as Young Elvis eats his porridge and beats his chest, and as Terry Kennedy  counts his millions in the upstairs bedroom and sobs for his dead wife who can’t count it wih him, and as young poets strain to find meaning in myths, and to make myths out of memories, and bang their heads off walls with the frustration of being imprisoned wherever it is they find themselves imprisoned.  And playing as others relaxed in their utopias of everydayness. Or maybe Mozart.

And if there wasn’t music playing in these houses, I’d be surprised.  It didn’t have to be Schubert or Mozart, but I always had these houses filled with music.  Or music itself had them that way; it found its own means of existing within them.  Perhaps even if it wasn’t a form of music you might tap your feet to.  A mother screaming at her kids to get up when they wouldn’t get up and then to shut up when they wouldn’t shut up.  This is music.  Music to some ears, those ears that wander from silent homes to noisy ones every day.  But in most cases you could hear the tapping of feet.  In the evenings, the fiddles and guitars and the social rituals, and maybe even the drone of a dark mass in one of them, but you might want to have those ears to the ground, or pressed hard against the oldest town walls,    

‘Can I roll the window down a wee bit?’

‘Roll away.’

I need a little air.  And the taxi driver does too, it appears, as he rolls his own one down slightly, and breathes it in, alleviated.  I figure he’s been out all night, driving from one end of the bay to the other; Halloween’s a busy night for the taxi’s, and this man has probably seen a plethora of headcases before meeting me.  The headcases are lined up most nights, but some nights, like last night, make headlines of queues.  I can only imagine what the headcases made of his Schubert.