Empty Orchestra

A short story in a pub.

Deep breath now. Don’t move a muscle. Four glasses float by your head and you don’t quite know how the man caressing them like bowling pins in his wide hands hasn’t managed to spill a drop. You’d have been impressed at the dexterity of his movement – which was deft, almost Biles-like – if he hadn’t looked down the front of your top as he pliéd by.

There was a hush before the music. Before the band really started to blow. You could see the anticipation in the slightly raised shoulders of the men standing in front of you. The crossed arms. The stern expressions. They wore matching gilets, reminding you of a huddle of penguins. It was a cold day, the streets were iced over like the back of a freezer. You looked to your left and watched tiny beads of condensation wet the frost-edged windows. A mismatched couple sat on a small round table by the bar and rallied nervous sips of pupil-black Guinness back and forth to one another. You could tell it was their first time at The Palm Tree. It was not your first time at The Palm Tree.

It was quiet, still, and you knew if you made a bit of effort you could hear the world going about its business outside. You forced your eardrums to focus and you could just about make out the soft crunch of footsteps in the snow. If you listen even more carefully, opening your ears up properly wide, you can hear the faint whir of the wind rattling the naked tendrils of the trees. The ka-clunk of the cash register brings you back to the room.

Christmas always makes you feel saudade. You rolled the shape of that word around your tongue before bringing it up to kiss your teeth. It’s a word you read for the first time in an inch-thick book the other day: ‘the vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist, for something other than the present, a turning towards the past or towards the future’. Nice, that, you thought. You made a mental note to use saudade in a sentence at work, but you hadn’t, yet, been brave enough to say it out loud. Its pronunciation concerned you.

The Palm Tree stands alone on Grove Road, a Grade II-listed relic on a desolate stretch of street that was reduced to rubble during the Blitz. The walk from the bus stop had been a little further than you’d expected – it always was – and it was only now, after sinking two pints in quick succession, that your fingers had started to buzz back to life. You should take your Raynaud’s more seriously, said Sophie, when she caught you rubbing your palms together as if you were trying to start a fire with a pair of sticks. They filmed an episode of Luther here once, you said, ignoring Sophie’s concern. You could feel the blood rushing into your hands in a hurry; blood cells barging past blood cells in a race to be the lucky ones who could boast about returning the feeling to your fingertips. It felt like wearing gloves full of flies.

You hadn’t even noticed that the band had started to play and yet you looked down and saw you were swaying in time to the music. At least, you hoped you were on time. Rhythm had never really been your thing. Your hips were moving parallel to Sophie’s, and before you knew it the two of you were going left-right left-right like two metronomes stacked on top of a baby grand. One misstep, though, and you knew you’d end up jabbing Sophie with the pointy, wing-like part of your pelvis on which you’d sometimes rest your hand. She might have been beside you in the milling crowd, which was getting busier by the second, but she wasn’t all there. Not really. Her ears were listening but her mind was elsewhere. She was thinking about Hector.

Hector is her boyfriend, who she lives with. Hector is her soon-to-be ex-boyfriend, who she doesn’t. He was somehow both things at once. A possibly dead cat inside of an unopened box. Sophie discovered Hector had been sleeping with someone else – possibly for weeks, possibly for months, and you tried your best to console her, you really did, but you wanted to come and hear the music tonight. Please, Sophie, you said. It’ll be good for you, you said. It’ll take your mind off things, yeah?

You used to come here every year before the Christmas break, just the two of you. A few stragglers had joined over the years but it’s always been Sophie and you at the centre of it all. It’s always been Sophie and you.

A man walked in with a straw-coloured polystyrene box and the smell of hot chips went straight down into your stomach. You realised, then, that you hadn’t eaten anything since your dad’s crumble the night before.

Did you know that forced rhubarb is grown in complete darkness and harvested by candlelight? Your dad asked you that as he forklifted a heavy load of vivid pink and pebbledash onto your plate. He’d gotten into his gardening since mum left. He’d bought a Uniqlo jumper that looked identical to the one Alan Titchmarsh used to wear on Gardeners’ World. You were embarrassed to spend time with him. ‘They grow the rhubarb in the dark because it makes them sweeter, more tender,’ he said. You spooned cool custard into your mouth and nodded softly. He told you how the darkness  accelerated their growth – how it encouraged the shoots to stretch towards the ceiling, giving them no option but to try and reach out and touch a sun that didn’t exist.

‘They grow because they’re looking for the light,’ your dad explained, looking at you with his wet eyes, ‘like any of us would do if we were put in the same situation.’ You got the feeling he was trying to be poignant. He said they could grow as fast as an inch a day. He said the rhubarb grew at such a rapid pace you could hear them creak and groan as they contorted their limbs in the pitch black. You hadn’t heard from Mum in months.

You lip-synced along to a maudlin James Taylor cover, loyally opening and closing your mouth like a guppy, before sneaking a glance at your phone. The trio usually finished their set at half ten, voices rasping and begging for beer, before they offered round the microphone to anyone who wanted to sing. To anyone who needed to sing.

You still had £20 sitting in your pocket, crumpled like taffeta. You pulled out the note and tried in vain to iron out the creases from Jane Austen’s face, before a man behind the bar swiftly took it off your hands. You ordered another two pints, holding up your fingers in a lazy peace sign as you do, and noticed the bartender had large gaps between his teeth. They stood upright in the cavern of his mouth like yellow tombstones when he smiled. You tried not to notice that his tongue was coated in a grey film as he called you darling. It looked like a tongue accustomed to saying the word cunt, you thought, unfairly. He handed you your change and you dropped the coins into your pocket like wind chimes before wheeling the drinks back to Sophie.

Some of the crowd were getting into the groove of it now. Even the people who were there ironically were starting to smile, starting to tap their feet to the kick drum, starting to actually fucking enjoy themselves for once. Not Sophie. Sophie was standing motionless in the middle of the room, craning her chin down to her navel as she thumbed at her phone.

Everything was falling apart. This wasn’t the Sophie you knew. The Sophie you knew wasn’t powerless to emojis. The Sophie you knew could ensnare anyone she met with a few simple sentences, leaving them caught up in the sticky threads of her influence. She wielded power over people like a halo. Giving a fuck simply did not suit her.

Her smile had always made you self-conscious of your own – it was one of those big, radiant Julia Roberts megawatt smiles that everyone has wished they had at some point in their life. She wasn’t smiling as the pad of her right thumb jittered across her screen, EFT-tapping the letters of her keyboard. Whenever Sophie was anxious, a thick line of worry would form between her eyebrows. She used to joke that you could insert a pound coin into it like a slot machine.

You became friends with Sophie because of cigarettes. You wouldn’t know each other if you hadn’t purposely synchronised your smoke breaks with hers in first year. She’d smoke an invisible fag at you across the lecture theatre and the two of you would go outside – even in the winter when it was so cold you could see your breath paint miniature cumulus clouds in the air – and take greedy drags of Amber Leaf on the concrete steps. She asked you questions about yourself while she ashed and you always answered, as succinctly as possible, before asking her about herself because you knew that was what she really wanted.

She was into hot yoga and French cinema and, eventually, you would be too. The first flat you lived in together was poky and riddled with damp. A nail in the kitchen floorboard had pierced a hole in the bottom of every sock you owned. It was home, however, and your landlady didn’t increase the rent once during your three-year tenancy. You’d drink litres of cheap, tannic wine and stay up until 2am most days of the week even though you both had work in the morning. You were young and fun and it felt like the done thing.

She met Hector about two years ago, at a house party through a friend of a friend, and moved out to live with him exactly one year after that. You never quite forgave him for that.

You watched Sophie lap at her pint – play-acting as she brought it up to her mouth, letting it gloss her bottom lip but allowing barely any of it to trickle down her throat. The alcohol sloshing about your system, on the other hand, was finally starting to work its magic. Your limbs were feeling looser, oiled at the hinges, and you were filled with the intense urge to whisper something into Sophie’s ear. It looked like a small, pink snail shell and you wanted to fill it with words that only she would understand. Maybe an inside joke. Something incantatory the two of you could use to bring yourselves closer together and distance yourselves further from the outside world.

But you didn’t know what to say. You’d forgotten which jokes still made her laugh, so you simply smiled at her instead. You gave her one of your signature closed-mouth smiles where you pulled your lips up as if the corners were being tugged by two invisible winches from the ceiling, and she smiled back with her perfect, toothy smile. Her eyes didn’t smile along. She’d had braces as a teenager. You remember her telling you that the first night you properly hung out. She was drunk and breathed it into your neck like she was telling you a deep, dark secret. You told her the dentist had said you needed braces when you were 16 as well but your family couldn’t afford them. She said it wasn’t a competition and smiled that fucking smile. That’s when you knew you were done for.

You lived with Oya now and that was fine. She was tidy and quiet and always chipped in when it came to buying things like washing up liquid and toilet paper and tin foil and candles. Oya wouldn’t drink wine with you on weeknights because she worked at KPMG and couldn’t afford to risk being anything but the very best version of herself at the office. It’s hard for me, she said. It doesn’t come naturally to me, she said. I have to work at it, she said. You nodded your head three times and told her you understood where she was coming from.

You’d asked (texted) Oya if she wanted to come tonight but she said (texted) that she’d already made plans sorry but next time! You were relieved when you read that message because it meant it was just you and Sophie and the music. Just like old times, you thought. The band were reaching the crescendo of Tiny Dancer and the pianist was beating the keys so hard you were worried some of them would splinter off in his hands.

Someone with an RP accent butchered a ‘sláinte’ behind your head and you heard two glasses clink like teeth on a first kiss. You decided to fill the silence between songs by asking Sophie how her cat, Michael, was doing, and she said something like he’s not my cat, he’s just a cat I live with. She was always like that. Quick. Deflecting. You got the feeling there was something else she wanted to say. You could see it in the bottle-green glint of her eyes – she was on the verge of saying something important, but she swallowed her words and took a large pull of her beer instead.

You walked a woman home once for over an hour. You’d almost forgotten it had happened until the sight of Sophie finishing her drink in three gulps, her thirst seemingly renewed by whatever she was thinking about, had knocked the memory loose. There had been a house party at someone’s flat (you forget whose) in a part of town far from your own (you forget where). You’d left alone, many drinks deep, and stumbled into the woman on the streets, lit like a tractor beam from the streetlamp above. The woman was bent into a tattered tweed jacket too thin to be effective against the weather, and asked if you could help her take her shopping home. She had one of those foldable four-wheel shopping trolleys, overflowing with yellow-stickered cuts of meat, and two plastic bags hanging off her limp wrists. You couldn’t pinpoint her exact age. But she was old. Her face was a roadmap of wrinkles.

She told you how she’d moved to Bristol in the 1970s and had lived in Stokes Croft ever since. Her husband had run the local Chinese but he was dead now, she said. You did the maths and worked out he’d been dead for as long as you had been alive. You walked the woman to her door but, before you could leave, she wrapped her bony fingers around your wrist. She said, with a frown, that you reminded her of herself. She told you to slow down. She told you to take it easy. Her voice sounded hollow and distant. Eventually, she eased her grip and let you go.

That night, in your bed, you leaned back against the creaky headboard and wondered what she had meant. You could still feel her fingers pressing against your pulse. You could still remember the look of sadness in her milky eyes. You got up and unscrewed a fifth of Glen’s Vodka, drinking until the sun peeked through your curtains, unsure if you had dreamed the whole thing up. Now and then, though, snatches of that night would seep back into your mind like a wave. Like a movie. You were sure it had happened. You were convinced it had happened. But memories can turn to fiction so quickly, can’t they?

You wished you could forget the day that Sophie left you. You wished you could forget how much hurt you had felt when she lugged her last bin bag full of clothes out of the hallway. Don’t go, you said. I’m having such a good time with you, you said. She hugged you and told you not to worry about it. She said that nothing was going to change as you brushed away the hot tears making track marks down your cheeks. But everything changed. It was always going to.

Sophie clapped half-heartedly, tapping at the fingers clasped around her now empty pint glass with her free hand, as the band finished their set. A dusty karaoke machine was wheeled on to the stage as the trio gently put their instruments to sleep in their coffins. The crowd quickly dispersed, most seeking Dutch courage from the bar with the remaining deserters filing patiently towards the toilets. You looked over at Sophie and she looked over at you – your eyes collided with a glassy dink, like marbles.

You could tell her it was you, of course. You could tell her it was you he thinks about now. You could tell her it was you he pressed into her mattress and you who sank your teeth into her expensive duck feather pillows. You could tell her it was you who was willing to do anything and everything that she wasn’t. But you don’t. You don’t tell her because she already knows.

You stood up to take the mic and everyone’s eyes were on you. The man behind the bar raised one of his spade-like hands, blocking out the glare of the spotlight next to your head, and squinted in your direction. It wasn’t an unpleasant squint. He was doing it because he wanted to see you better and see as much of you as possible, and the knowledge of that filled you up with a hot glug of desire.

You held the microphone between your hands like a prayer and licked along the crease of your top lip. Easy now. Deep breath now.