Between Each Breath Read online

  She came back inside, animated by her encounter. I had considered growing a ponytail, like the telly Crusoe of my childhood, but Milly had said no way. The slap bass of the new lounge track made me think, as it happened, of the slap of her groin against mine as she rode bronco on top, facing my flat feet and saying, over and over, ‘Seed bearer, seed bearer, seed bearer …’ Which I’d heard at first as ‘Syd Barrett’: original, if off-putting. Deborah Willetts-Nanda had told her to say it, apparently. A psychosomatic aid to fertility – which had definitely put me off. Anyway, it hadn’t worked, so far.

  One night I asked her who the seed bearer was, exactly.

  ‘I’m not sure. I’d supposed it was me, but maybe it’s you. It’s all about fulfilment.’

  ‘Could be both of us.’

  ‘Probably. Night night.’

  ‘Um, Mill, don’t you think we should at least check ourselves over with a normal doctor?’

  But she was already asleep. At that moment I felt about as fulfilled as a hole in the wall.

  The waitress was taking out a cake and a coffee to Ponytail. As she returned, her tongue lying on her lower lip, she glanced over my side of the room – a just-checking, all-in-the-job look. I was in the way of it. Her tongue retracted and she smiled again with her whole face. Just a flicker. As a kid I’d look at the goldfish in Hayes Park’s dark pond and they’d kiss the surface and the surface would change just the way her face changed when she smiled. To my surprise and embarrassment, I blushed. The blush made me blush even more. I opened my book and pretended to be swallowed up in it. I hadn’t blushed since the fifth form. I’m not fair, so it’s barely detectable, but I still felt like a ripe tomato.

  I waited until the waitress was in the kitchen before going up to the bar, not waiting for the change. The barman was young with a shaven head and a big Roman nose pierced with gold beads on each flange. The piercings made his nose look like the head of a praying mantis. I was removing myself by force from the café, hand firm on my own shoulder. It had to be done.

  As I was passing through the door, I heard someone call out goodbye.

  I steeled myself not to reply, pretty sure the voice was hers and in a provocative register. It was a small victory.

  Afterwards, of course, I felt stupid and English and rude.

  * * *

  I’d left my mate Tolstoy behind. This wouldn’t have bothered me, if the book hadn’t had some notes tucked into it.

  I’d made them as I was examining the old cannon by the medieval wall, and they were technically complex, to do with an emerging melisma. I had decided to keep the five oboes and harp but to enlarge the voice to three sopranos, realising that Estonian was all long vowels and that was perhaps why Arvo Pärt sustained his notes to the extent that he did; stretching syllables in his Miserere, for instance, in a way that might not have been so unusual to his ear. I’d sketched the shape of the whole piece, leaning the paper on the cannon, and felt it was the melting of the ice.

  Three days, and I was already thawing out.

  I reckoned I might as well buy a new copy of Anna Karenina – there was an English section in the bookshop near the apartment. I imagined the waitress picking up my dog-eared copy and the thirty-page portion slipping out onto the floor. And perhaps my folded sheet of notes she would puzzle over in the privacy of her tiny but very cosy garret room. She would have posters on the walls – interesting posters. Experimental plays in Estonian, films by Tarkovsky. Or Marlon Brando playing pool, maybe. A photo of her family. Their farm, their horses. No man in her life right now.

  I was sitting on a bench opposite the gold-domed Alexander Nevsky Cathedral. There was a nip in the air, it being October and on about the same latitude as St Petersburg or the Orkneys. It was really quiet and peaceful. I could see the palatial eighteenth-century parliament buildings to my left and the medieval city wall sloping down to my right. My hands were half hidden inside my duffel coat and my scarf was about my throat, making it itch. I wondered what the point of life was. Benches do this to you. Or maybe the date: 1999. The sustained syllables of wild flowers were sounding their melismata in my head: hound’s tongue, henbane, bugle, cross-leaved heath, marsh andromeda. That was the entire libretto of my piece. I had taken the names from my old Observer’s Book of Wild Flowers.

  ‘But it’s about Estonia,’ Milly had pointed out. ‘Why British flowers?’

  This was a pleasant surprise: she was usually too busy with her own planet-saving work to comment on mine.

  ‘They’re also found in Estonia.’

  ‘Shouldn’t you check?’

  ‘How do you know I haven’t?’

  ‘The way you said it.’

  ‘The whole point,’ I went on, irritated, ‘is the relation. The relation between the two countries. It’s not just a hymn in praise of Estonia. They’re flowers in dramatic decline,’ I added, eventually, hoping to impress her. But she was already on the phone.

  The score was writing itself behind my eyes, second by second. I’m never quite sure whether the music writes the score or the score writes the music. Sometimes I feel I’m sight-reading a score that someone else has planted there. On the other hand, it remains completely my own, inasmuch as anything is one’s own. I don’t bother to write it down straight away, since I have excellent recall. This is not so much genius as the way my brain is made. Other living composers of like repute don’t necessarily have this knack, they have to work harder, they have to toil and lick their pencils. But they end up in the same place, to be acclaimed or stamped on.

  When I was seven, I wrote a score that featured cymbals and a bass drum. I’d only heard these on the radio (my parents would usually listen to Radio 2), but in this score they became something that sounded Tibetan. There was no discernible rhythm. Remarkably close, someone pointed out two decades later, to Arvo Pärt’s use of the three notes of the triad. This was, presumably, why I was on a bench by the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in the capital city of Pärt’s native land, staring glassily into space: it wasn’t just the commission – potentially a mega one, in terms of my ‘career’ – it was the arc of one’s life, the patterns and the ripples, the ripples that hit the grassy bank and start to return.

  For instance, I had left a book in a Tallinn café and could not go back to get that book because I’d gone lush on a pretty waitress. I started grinning, and shaking my head, and a woman in a fur coat walking a cocker spaniel on a red lead glanced at me anxiously. Her high heels were getting a weirdly hollowed tone out of the slabbed square that reminded me of a log drum. Maybe it was the open side door in the cathedral, like that ancient quarry cave in Syracuse, throwing the sound about. Then there was a man in a long woollen scarf and floppy woollen hat that ought to have belonged to his teenage daughter, if he’d been a bit older; he was holding a tiny grey tranny emitting pop so badly it was white noise. And after him came a couple of Japanese male tourists, one in a pair of thigh-length boots and an expertly washed white cotton jacket; they looked very cheery, as if they had been born that way and would die that way, their digital cameras playing jingles after every snap, gnawing wormholes in my brain.

  When it comes down to it, there is no one who is not weird.

  I tried to conjure the face of the waitress, but failed. My visual memory is as bad as my aural is good, although I had a strong impression of her dimples, the way the right-hand corner of her mouth tucked in for a smile.

  I played her voice several times to my inner ear. Slightly hoarse, from shouting out customers’ orders.

  I could leave Milly and stay in Estonia for the rest of my life. With this girl.

  I gave a little self-satisfied grunt. The Finnish drunks aside, I found this city very civilised. I liked the idea of it hunkering down for winter. A real Estonian winter would clear the streets of everyone but the natives, who were hardened to it all, not even slipping about on the iced cobbles.

  ‘Do you think you’re depressed?’

  Milly had asked me this a few m
onths earlier.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You look it. Even Daddy’s noticed.’

  ‘I’m going through a creative slough.’

  We were at her parents’ in Hampshire, seated on the lower lawn by the lake, where the swans glide about on hidden runners. The grounds of Wadhampton Hall are so big that bits keep getting discovered: years ago, someone illegally jerry-built a cottage on the outer fringes, lived in it, died in it, and no one knew. The ground staff came across the cottage while brush-clearing a wood; there was a skeleton in the rotting bed.

  ‘Isn’t that depressing, a creative trough?’

  ‘A slough. Not really.’

  ‘OK.’

  I loved her. She was experimenting with a bindi on her forehead. Her dad had been very rude about it, and about Asians, over lunch.

  ‘Anyway it’s not really a creative slough. It’s just that my imagination doesn’t fit the shoe.’

  ‘What shoe?’

  ‘What it takes – to build a successful career. I hate that word career,’ I added, before she did.

  ‘As long as you don’t crack up.’

  I had expected her to say, ‘But you are successful.’ So I gave her another opportunity: ‘Look, this success deal, it means you have to be doing these enormous great blockbuster works, operas, symphonies, with seriously sexy titles like, I dunno, Heidegger’s Last Kiss or Dark Woods, Funny Games.’

  ‘Did you just invent those? They’re really good.’

  ‘Or you go for film, like Glass. Or bootleg a pile of pop and classical, like Anne Dudley. Otherwise you’re just part of this minuscule little self-congratulatory coterie. Who all hate each other. OK, I’m exaggerating. But.’

  ‘Can’t you put lots of your little things together, string them out?’

  What I say out loud is different from what I think. So I don’t like interviews. I look dark and moody in the photographs, but my interviews sound like a fifth-former who hasn’t yet got it together.

  I pretended to think about it, therefore. I didn’t want a scene, not at the Hall. I liked the Hall and its hundreds of acres of prime English cut, it kept reminding me how lucky I’d been in life. We’d all just polished off a 1962 Sauternes, my father-in-law holding its tawny gold up to the light and saying it was the only white that kept more than thirty years. ‘Thirty-seven, to be precise,’ he’d added, with that patented knowing chuckle of his.

  Happy birthday, Jack!

  Milly was still looking at me in a worried way. I was watching the swans on the water, how strict they looked. Dark death in their shadows.

  ‘Well, I could just repeat the same note for two hours,’ I suggested, at last; ‘only varying the tempo. And call it Following the Thread.’

  Now I was in a different country and the air was cold. The light wouldn’t go for ages. I thought: were I to settle in Estonia, I would learn to skate on lakes, the ice groaning and banging under me – a very beautiful sound I’d first heard in Norway.

  I spent the next two days fulfilling my vague suspicion that wherever you are, however exotic, gets submitted to your own level.

  I worked away at the score in the flat at the very healthy rate of about a minute a day and walked in concentric circles around Tallinn, probing once beyond the old centre into the grim suburbs, where all the buildings seemed to be huge and wearing shabby grey overcoats with padded shoulders. When I thought about the waitress in the Café Majolica, a sort of golden age opened in my chest, starring Aphrodite. The piece wouldn’t come right.

  I avoided the actual street, although I came close when visiting the House of the Brotherhood of Black Heads. Milly had insisted I visit this, because of its name. ‘I wonder how nasty your zits had to be,’ she’d said, laughing. There was an alleyway near it that, according to the map, came out close to where I reckoned the café was. I found myself walking up this alleyway and then peering out; ancient merchant houses, a shop selling Indian stuff called Exotik, but no café. Perhaps it had been a dream. Perhaps I could write an opera based on the story of this young dude who falls for a waitress, but when he returns the next day the café has vanished. And then what?

  It is always: And then what?

  I walked a little way up the street in the direction of St Olav’s Church, and saw the sign Café Majolica poking out on its curly wrought-iron frame where the street curved slightly to the left. Another blustery, autumnal wind that was playing havoc with the leaves on the trees – summer was finally throwing in the towel. The last summer of the twentieth century. The last summer ever, according to the optimists of a religious bent.

  I didn’t know why I was doing this.

  I wanted to see her again, that’s why. Just her face, as sometimes you want to test if something’s real. I had to match the reality with the picture in my head, which was confused, like a triple exposure.

  I stopped a few yards short. There was no one sitting out on the terrace. The windows were mirroring the street, from this acute angle. My legs started trembling. A power tool started up behind the tarp opposite the café, like the shrill condensing of all that was really sensible in the world. Then it stopped. Then it started up again, whiningly working the bit into masonry or concrete or whatever it was. The worst material being metal, like something composed by Roger Grove-Carey.

  I turned on my heel and headed for the upper town.

  I had already established a circuit, this animal run. I would take it from either direction, clockwise or anticlockwise; halfway round this circuit there was a view, a fairly amazing view at the foot of the castle. It was a panorama of the lower town, the harbour with its big ships, the Bay of Finland. Every evening so far I had stared and marvelled as the northern sun sank slowly, taking its time, turning the sky a deep greeny-blue as lights twinkled on the sea.

  I decided I really liked northernness.

  Yes, I could live here. I had done a lot of travelling in my career up to then, but it was always with other people and to do with performance, nerves, a certain exhibitionism. A certain placing of myself, not in the actual landscape, but in the landscape of contemporary music. I felt shut off from wherever I found myself.

  Each evening, here, standing behind the low wall and looking out, with the odd stranger sharing the dying light and not speaking, or the odd pair of lovers canoodling with sloppy noises from their lips, I felt free. As if I could tear everything up and start again. Or as if my whole life up to now had belonged to someone else, and I could ditch it as easily as a book.

  What helped was that, after I had waved goodbye to Olev’s taxi a few days earlier, there had been this sudden slammer of a squall. The rain had billowed in a kind of mist, as if the wind wasn’t allowing the drops to fall all the way, and people took cover under shop awnings. But I’d kept going. London, travel-fug, Olev’s smoke: all blown away. Then the rain was switched off, and the sun gleamed like metal on the wet cobbles, and the air was scented with something I couldn’t quite fix until I was waiting for the apartment’s owner in the newsagent’s below.

  Almonds, that was it.

  I was a new man. I felt it was all going to be fine. Graced by almonds.

  The building itself was this old grey Soviet tooth in the done-up dentures of the street, described on the Internet as being ‘a laughable distance from the Middle Ages center’. Sure enough, it joined the city’s historic main square, Raekoja Plats, about fifty yards further up. A café and a jeweller’s occupied the ground floor, along with the newsagent’s.

  The owner was not the cool, new-capitalist slicker I had been expecting: in his late forties, dressed in a comfortable woolly sweater, he looked like a bumbly don. His name was Koit, which I couldn’t pronounce: a whiplash of a diphthong. Koit had laughed, dangling the keys from his finger.

  ‘So you are having a nice time to Tallinn. Good luck. Any troubles, call this nomber.’

  The steps up to the third floor were marbled and impeccably clean, while the apartment itself – two-bedroom, all mod cons – was surprisi
ngly plush. In fact, I had expected jerry-built plumbing, wobbly chairs, really bad pictures of cats with big eyes. There was a damp smell of new plaster, the odd protruding wire and a packet of grouting next to the sugar in the kitchen cupboard, but otherwise it was fine. White fake-leather sofas, gilded bed-ends, curvy smoked-glass lamps and a supersize Sony television felt nicely alien. The hot-cold tap in the shower was dodgy, but they are the world over.

  Someone – maybe the cleaner, maybe Koit – had sprayed the rooms with lavender air-freshener, so I opened the double-glazed windows after my shower. The sounds of the street poured in with the cold: voices, high heels, the thumping bass of a restaurant opposite, the usual instant-anxiety suppliers in the form of passing motorbikes, just as nasty as anywhere else. I watched the street action for ages, leaning on the sill, forgetting Olev, trying to forget London. I was here. I was not there.

  A drawer in the retro dresser was full of red candles that rolled like the rollers in an airport baggage belt, but there were no matches or lighters anywhere: no hoor, if that’s what the word meant. The fridge was empty, bar a single egg. A high-quality lithograph – forest at twilight, dark and menacing – faced the heavy dining table on which glass ashtrays were laid out as if for an executive meeting.

  And all this, after just a few days’ use, had come to feel like home.

  Maybe that was the mistake. Is home that shallow? It was probably to do with being alone. I’d have quite liked a piano thrown in, but I was able to test out ideas on the baby grand in the musical-instrument shop, where the owner had a big hippy beard and spoke English. I’ve always found it hard nattering with strangers, and I hardly talked to anyone else.

  I’d bought a bottle of Jameson’s, rationing myself to a slug before supper. Tonight, in memory of my abandoned Tolstoy and maybe other things, the slug was generous. I sat on the white sofa, watching the news in Estonian. What did ‘Majolica’ mean, anyway? Men were crawling over great slabs of concrete, pulling out dust-covered bodies: I wasn’t sure whether it was an earthquake, or a gas explosion, or terrorism. And no idea where.