Coming Through Slaughter - Michael Ondaatje [9]
He woke up and his mouth was parched. He didn’t know what hour it was. The previous night of drink and talk with the Brewitts had made him lose the order of time. There was sunlight over part of the bed, his arm. He got some pants on and started down the hall towards the Brewitts’ kitchen. Robin came round the corner at the other end. She was naked except for the sheet wrapped round her waist and trailing at her feet. Her long black hair on her shoulders and down her back. In each hand she was carrying a glass of orange juice, one for herself and one for Jaelin, walking back to their bedroom. She saw him and stopped, awkward, not knowing what to do. She looked at each of the glasses in her hands, then at him, and smiling shrugged. He stood still, where he was, as she walked past him, as she mouthed ‘Morning’ to him.
Webb twenty and Bolden seventeen when they worked in funfairs along the coast. Being financially independent for the first time they spend all their money on girls, and sometimes on women. They take rooms, stock beer, and gradually paste their characters onto each other. They spend a week alone building up the apartment in Pontchartrain. It is during this time that Webb and Bolden get to know each other. Afterwards, busy with women, their friendship is a public act of repartee, bouncing jokes off each other in female company. They live together for two years.
So Webb wanted to focus on that one week. And it was difficult for in that era, that time, it was Webb who was the public figure, Bolden the side-kick, the friend who stayed around. If others spoke of the two of them it was usually with surprise at what Webb could see in Bolden. The two of them after work busy with their own hobbies, Webb’s curiosity making him move serene among his growing collection of magnets and Bolden practising for hours, strengthening his mouth and chest as he blew violently into a belled cornet. So the constant noise in Webb’s ears was the muted howl in the other room. Till coming into Webb’s room with beer and sweating Bolden would collapse in an armchair and say ‘Tell me about magnets, Webb’. And Webb who had ten of them hanging on strings from the ceiling would explain the precision of the forces in the air and hold a giant magnet in his hands towards them so they would go frantic and twist magically with their own power and twitch and thrust up and swivel as if being thrashed jerking until sometimes the power that Webb held from across the room would break one of the strings and Webb would put his magnet at his foot and drag the smaller piece invisibly towards him or sometimes throw the magnet across the room halfway up the strings and the tied pieces of metal would leap up and jointly catch it in their smooth surfaces like a team of acrobats. Bolden would applaud and then they would drink.
After two years Bolden had gone to New Orleans and Webb stayed in Pontchartrain. Since then it was Bolden the musician that Webb heard stories of. It was Bolden who had jumped up, who had swallowed everything Webb was. Webb left with the roots of Bolden’s character, the old addresses they passed through. A month after Bolden had moved Webb went to the city and, unseen, tracked Buddy for several days. Till the Saturday when he watched his nervous friend walk jauntily out of the crowd into the path of a parade and begin to play. So hard and beautifully that Webb didn’t even have to wait for the reactions of the people, he simply turned and walked till he no longer heard the music or the roar he imagined crowding round to suck that joy. Its power.
*
Frank Lewis
It was a music that had so little wisdom you wanted to clean nearly every note he passed, passed it seemed along the way as if travelling in a car, passed before he even approached it and saw it