Laughing Boy's Shadow
By Steven Savile

 

The Road to Redemption 

one

 

Not quite three a.m. and already I had Saturday chalked up as one more in a long line of miserable experiences eager to come my way.

You know how some days have their own smells? Well, Saturday was mothballed in that rancid, mouldered smell of the meat markets.

Outside, it was raining hard. Sports cars aren’t made for rain. The Midget's soft-top was leaking and her heater had given up the ghost the week before. To add insult to injury, crossing the bridge into Gateshead, the DJ slipped into that monotony of love songs aimed at helping loners through the worst of the night. Keeping my eyes open was struggle enough. I was in no mood to suffer another bout of that emotional bullshit, so I switched radio for tape, and coming up Split Crow Road, The Surfing Brides were happily informing me that Everything's Fine (If The World Was Going To End).

A nice, cheerful little number; its selection was a pretty good indication of my state of mind right then, but I had a car full of music and not a single word about love anywhere to be heard.

I wanted to be at home, in bed, curled up around Aimee's soft crescent, not cramped behind the wheel, driving through Newcastle's own grim parody of Hell's Kitchen; backstreets, bridges and graffiti. The entire side of a tower block had been painted with the silhouette of a bird, wings rising in a thirty foot vee that scraped the roof of the tower. Each detail of the shadow was immaculate, though God alone knew how the artist had accomplished his art. I had wondered the same thing nearly every day for the thirteen weeks since the bird's manifestation, but like everyone else I was no closer to an answer for all that wondering.

The lights on the roundabout up ahead were changing to red. I thought about running them for as long as it took me to yawn and my foot to ease down on the brake. There were no cars coming either way, so I let the lights run through their cycle again while I groped around on the backseat for the pockets of my jacket and, deeper into the puzzle, my tobacco tin and lighter. The roll-ups were one last throw back to the good old days I wasted as a student, scruffing about Liverpool Poly. There's something soothing about the whole process of rolling your own, drawing on the smoke, letting it leak out in a veil that rafts up in front of your eyes. It's still the cheapest form of therapy I know. That said, I'm not an idiot. I live with my addiction, call the home rolled coffin-nails my pocket shrinks, and tell anyone stupid enough to ask: 'They're helping me to quit.'

Maybe they are, and maybe they aren't; that's immaterial. I enjoy my occasional drag, and that's healthy enough for me right now. When the doctors tell me I'm riddled with lung cancer and have three months to live, well by then it'll be too late anyway, so I'll probably start chain-smoking my home-rolled Virginia leaf and taking nicotine intravenously.

Stifling another yawn, I knuckled the ache out of the bones in the base of my back and stretched, rolling the muscles of my shoulders. I was exhausted, and it felt as if the last week had been an endless series of to-ing and fro-ing between Gateshead and the pianos of the civilised world. London and back twice in the space of three days, and all aches twelve hundred miles could inflict centred on the two-inch square of vertebrae above my belt. Two times over. Once to Golden Square to lay down six tracks worth of free fall backing piano for Tachyon Web's Live And Unplugged session on Virgin 1215 though what a Tech-Metal band wanted with a jazz pianist I shudder to think and then again to Charlotte Street to audition for the resident piano slot on one of those night-time chat shows The Channel 4 Gurus have been rehashing ever since The Last Resort went its own sweet way.

This marathon was served up with a Jazz Club chaser, backing a band called Poetic Justice, and a late night poker session with the boys after the performance.

Still, to misuse a cliché; mine is not to reason why, mine is just to grab the money with both hands and make like one little Linford. If they are prepared to pay me to play, I'll play. I'm all for prostituting what little talent God gave me.

The lights changed again. This time I went with them.

Indicating left, I swung out onto the Old Durham Road.

I hate cities. I always have.

Gateshead at night is a dying animal. The streets have emptied. The gangs of kids have gone home to bed, and the older, more dangerous ones have risen from their pits to prowl, attracted by the danger-pheromones drifting off lonely car stereos. The bag ladies and the old soaks have crawled back under their shopping trolleys and park benches, taking their bottles and bad breath with them. Women walk in pairs because one in three streetlights don't work. Every avenue has its own boarded up windows. They've even built a garage on Lover's Lane. One more strut from the scaffold supporting my childhood that has been dismantled by greed. A second-hand fix-it workshop cut into the arches beneath the Railway Bridge, its rust-buckets spilling out and down the alley where the good kids and I was one of them were supposed to emerge winking and wisecracking when they had: 'Been there, and done that.'

Cats and dogs, all slack skin and stuck-out bones, run wild, scavenging after whatever scraps the bins have to offer. The litter looks more at home on the road than the cars do. More common, too.

As a place, it reeks of abuse, filth and decay, and I have to call it home.

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