Coming Through Slaughter - Michael Ondaatje [29]
After breakfast I train. Mouth and lips and breathing. Exercises. Scales. For hours till my jaws and stomach ache. But no music or tune that I long to play. Just the notes, can you understand that? It is like perfecting 100 yard starts and stopping after the third yard and back again to the beginning. In this way the notes jerk forward in a spurt.
Alone now three weeks, four weeks? Since you came to Shell Beach and found me. Come back you said. All that music. I don’t want that way any more. There is this other path I beat the bushes away from with exercise so I can walk down it knowing it is just stone. I’ve got more theoretical with no one to talk to. All suicides all acts of privacy are romantic you say and you may be right, as I sit here at 4.45 in the middle of the night, sky beginning to emerge blue through darkness into the long big windows of this house. Here’s an early morning ant crossing the table …
Three days ago Crawley visited me. I made you promise not to say where I was but you sent him here anyway. He came in his car, interrupted my thinking and it has taken me a couple of days to get back. With a girl fan he came in his car and played some music he’s working on, while she was silent and touching in the corner. I could have done without his music, I could have done with her body. Music quite good but I could have finished it for him, it was a memory. I wanted to start a fight. I was watching her while he was playing and I wanted the horn in her skirt. I wanted her to sit with her skirt on my cock like a bandage. My old friend’s girl. What have you brought me back to Webb?
The day got better with the opening of bottles and all of us were vaguely drunk by the time they left and me rambling on as they were about to leave, leaning against the driver’s window apologizing, explaining what I wanted to do. About the empty room when I get up and put metal onto my mouth and hit the squawk at just the right note to equal the tone of the room and that’s all you do. Pushing all that into the car as if we had a minute to live as if we hadn’t talked rubbish all day.
You learn to play like that and no band will play with you, he says.
I know. I want to get this conversation right and I’m drunk and I’m making it difficult.
Shouting into his car, standing on the pebble driveway, the sweat on me which is really alcohol gone through me and bubbled out. I said I didn’t want to be a remnant, a ladder for others. So Crawley knowing, nodding. I ask him about Nora, tells me that she’s living with Cornish. And I’ve always thought of her as sad Nora, and my children, all this soft private sentiment I forgot to explode, the kids who grow up without me quite capable, while I sit out this drunk sweat, thinking along a stone path. I am terrified now of their lost love. I walk around the car put my head in to kiss Crawley’s girl whose name I cannot even remember, my tongue in her cool mouth, her cool circling answer that gives me an erection against the car door, and round the car again and look at Crawley and thank him for the bottles he brought. His brain with me for two days afterwards.
Alcohol sweat on these pages. I am tired Webb. I put my forehead down to rest on the booklet on the table. I don’t want to get up. When I lift my head up the paper will be damp, the ink spread. The lake and sky will be light blue. Not even her cloud.
THREE
Interviewer: To get back to Buddy Bolden —
John Joseph: Uh-huh.
Interviewer: He lost his mind, I heard.
John Joseph: He lost his mind, yeah, he died in the