A Tempo

A tempo

It cannot be morning again. I squeeze my eyelids together and push my head into the pillow, desperate for just one elusive hour of sleep. Each night I spend like this drains more of whatever life force I have left.

Surely it is still dark? No chinks of light appear at my tattered curtains. I listen to the rhythm of my own breathing: in, out, in, out, in, held, out. If I can keep it steady, perhaps sleep will come.

But morning really has crept up on me again. The rain drums a tattoo on the window and gushes in a torrent through the old lead gutter, where it hangs, unstable, from the roof, and great globules of silt hammer onto the concrete ledge. The rush and tumble of the water washes over my exposed, exhausted limbs.

Outside, the baker is opening his shop and the oven starts with a deep-throated cough. Rusty gates scream their objection, trolleys with the greengrocer’s wares rattle across the concrete yard below my window and the shattering of metal trays judders through me. The noise permeates everything: clashes and ringing of metal, growls and toots from trucks and calls from their drivers, the pistol shot of a motorbike backfiring and then the roar of its engine.

The sun threatens to split open the sky, and I know the muezzin’s wail will be next. After a week of being unable to sleep beyond a fitful doze, I know the nausea will come – the sickness will engulf me in wave upon wave, will creep closer with the squeal of the brakes, the grunge of changing gears, the rattles and clatters as the city shakes itself into action.

I sit up, slide a cigarette from its packet with barely a whisper and scratch a match alight. Flicker, fizz, burn, suck, exhale. One more day.

I skip breakfast and dress hurriedly, the cogs in my brain creaking as I force them into motion: lift leg, insert in trouser leg, balance, stumble, balance again, pull up over hips. Each movement has to be broken down into its individual components until I can shake off the mists in my head. The denim rasps against the skin of my legs and the zip groans over my bloated tummy. It is that time of the month again, and the high sugar foods I am in the habit of pushing down my throat to keep my energy up are settling all over me. The blouse utters no more than a sigh of resignation when I yank it roughly over my head and shoulders. Just a rehearsal today – no need to dress up.

The daylight hurts my eyes but despite the brightness of the day, it is cold; the ice that lurks on the edge of the breeze slicing through the jeans, dipping down the neckline of my coat until it settles on my chest. I should have grabbed my scarf on the way out, but the thunder of my housemate’s alarm clock and her feet booming on the floorboards were too much for me. I preserve my ears for the music and wonder when I last had a shower.

I think about Ray and his latest proposal of marriage, and ponder whether I should just agree. I am forty, still single and reproductive body clock racing past the finishing post. Mousy-haired, gangling, skinny, smiling, generous-hearted Ray, who I knew had loved me for years, although I still keep him at arm’s length, always uncertain. Yet Ray is my refuge. I seek him when I am at my most exhausted, and only Ray can make me feel safe, wanted, loved again.

I walk past the Royal London Hospital and turn up Valence Road, a lull in the discordant rumble of the traffic bringing some relief from the assault that being out in the open makes on my ears: the deep bass of heavy lorries as they rumble at idle; the catchy melody of the cars, each vying to out-pitch the other, and all outdone by the high descant of the occasional motorbike.

The orchestra meets in Bethnal Green, at the church hall near Victoria Park. We are only a bunch of keen amateurs but we hammer out some decent performances between us, and it is the only place where I meet other people, communicate meaningfully.

The rest of the orchestra find me a little odd, I think, and this morning I receive a series of sidelong glances I have not noticed before. I arrive a little breathless and hoping that the mint of my chewing gum has disguised the stench of tobacco that hovers on my lips. Ray is our conductor, a gifted singer and pianist who never quite made the big time, and he disapproves of his wind section smoking. I can hear the distant rattle in the recesses of my chest, a sibilance as I inhale that causes me a little worry. But not enough to give up the few cigarettes I smoke each day. The poisons I inhale from the London air are enough to cause any number of respiratory problems.

“Ah Mariana, good to see you,” Ray grins. He has a thrilling voice, even when he speaks soave as he does now. If he were not the conductor......but it is unwise to have an affair with the head of the orchestra. If nothing else, it causes dissent in the ranks – especially among the string section who tend to be a volatile bunch and can switch from tittering with amusement to lathering up into a jealous fury in seconds.

“Morning, Ray.”

“Any new compositions this week? And have you given us any more thought yet?” his green eyes glitter eagerly, and he blinks, his eyelashes batting against each other with an audible pop.

I pause. Do I want to share that delicious flow of sound that surges from my guitar with anyone else? As the music came to me during the last few nights, it lifted me away from myself, caught me in its undulating spell and spun me in the freshness of the night air. I flowed with it, my fingers as much a part of the instrument as the strings and the fret board. As the first few notes fell cleanly from the strings and hung before me, I was caught in its current like a leaf that has dropped into a stream, and then carried forward effortlessly, sweeping over new landscapes, twisting and turning as the melody swung back on itself, mirrored its early rhythms, then found the open water and hurled me forward again. It was a tough journey into sound that left me breathless as I forced my hand to pen the notes. And when it became unbearable to prise my hands away from the warmth of the wood, I pressed the record button on my battered cassette player and let myself drift on the tide.

“A few notes, Ray,” my lips creak as I smile, “I’ll play it for you later. And we’ll talk about us soon.”

“Good, I have two people from the BBC coming to listen,” he kept his voice low, not wanting to ruffle the string section. I choose to ignore him. Playing during those interminable nights that run into day that soon became night again, is different, inspired. I worry about playing for the BBC.

I unpack my flute and begin my lip and breathing exercises as I slide each section into place, cringing at the grind of metal against metal, the heavy clunk as each piece fits snug into the other. No-one in the orchestra can hear the rattle in my chest. No-one there hears with the same sharpness as I can. Perhaps that is why I can’t sleep, and they, judging by the fresh smiles on their faces, evidently can.

“Brilliant piece of playing, Mariana,” Ray tells me at the break. I smile at him, a little wan now, his voice hidden slightly behind the residue of the final notes that still hover in the air above us.

“It was near perfect that last time, don’t you think?”

“Almost,” I agree. Ray is a far more experienced musician than I and I marvel that he should seek my approval.

“Any weak areas?” he persists and offers me a coffee. I sip at it gratefully.

“Percussion is perfect,” I muse, “just the first violin sometimes gets carried away and races. It’s very slight and she usually pulls herself together. Young and impetuous is our Jane. Talented.”

“She is,” Ray agrees, “but she doesn’t quite have your ear.”

No-one has my ear, and this bothers me as we settle down to rehearse the next piece – a Beethoven, harsh and stringent, a clarion call to action jarring my nerves. I wish Ray could have chosen a frilly little Mozart with few crescendos and less of the fortissimos.

It has not always been like this. When I used to sleep properly my hearing seemed just the same as everyone else’s – I had a musician’s ear, trained to listen to variations in notes and tones and pitches, to pick out nuances, the various instruments of the orchestra, to define emotion in a range of notes. But when I started to sleep less, the day after I found Father’s old guitar in the broom cupboard of my grandmother’s apartment, my hearing became more sensitive than I would ever have thought possible.

Father had been gone for years. He died when I was just a little girl, and my grandmother, devastated at the loss, had put away his guitar in a cupboard, and had pulled on a black veil. My mother was beside herself grief. She never remarried. The older generation of Gibraltarian women mourn their dead for a long time.

The little I remember about Father was his music: the lilting tones of a 'cancion' strummed on the guitar while he hummed, and eyes that were so dark that looking into them was like being embraced by the night. He was of gipsy family, and played flamenco and sang his soul out whenever the family gathered.

For years after he died the family thought I had gone deaf with my own grief. I hadn’t. I could hear perfectly well – too well. I knew their whisperings about me, that I had gone soft in the head from missing him, that I had been born with a deformity in my hearing, that it was God’s punishment for Father’s habits with drinks and women, that Father had filled me with his music and now there was no way I could ever let it out. Only the last was true, of course. I had been full of music desperate to be let out. But until Grandmother gave me his guitar, I could never compose much, at least not beyond what you need to do to scrape a degree and become a music teacher and a third rate flautist in an amateur orchestra.

“You look a little peaky today, Mariana,” the talented Jane approaches me as we put down our instruments at the end of the session.

“I’m tired. I've not been sleeping well,” I confess.

“You must sleep,” she advises, “going with no sleep can be fatal, you know.”

I stare at her back, transfixed, and wonder if she has ever tried to sleep when even the tap of a spider’s feet on the ceiling echoes around the room. I know if I persist in my wakefulness that I will die, but I play Father’s guitar every day, all the time I can. After work, I hasten to my room, eager to caress the cool of the wood, to hold its curves against my belly and feel every vibration as my fingers work their spontaneous magic on the strings.

“Is Jane bothering you?” Ray’s voice shatters like the boom of exploding glass about my ears. I try to hide the wince and shake my head.

“The guys from the BBC are here,” he continues. I nod and offer him a smile, nervous and needy of him.

The BBC has sent two women from Radio 3. They tell me they are looking for new talent to showcase on their station, and that Ray has recommended me. I glance at Ray who looks triumphant and a little shy. A wave of exhaustion crashes over me, and I find it hard to discern their words. Their voices are distant, as if they are little more than a holographic image in front of me, and I have to focus on the movements of their lips to understand them. I look at Ray and he swallows hard. My eyes follow the movement of his Adam’s apple as it groans its way down his throat, splashes when he swallows and sighs on the way back up again.

With automated movements I take Father’s guitar from its battered, black case. I stroke the neck and slide my hand along the curve of its waist, trim as mine was some years ago. When I start to play, the BBC, Ray, the room, all fade away, disappearing into the mists of reality until there is only me and the music.

Sometimes when I play, I hear the plaintive wails of the gulls over the bay, calling out of the agonies of my father’s people, persecuted for centuries. At other times, it is the gayness of the bars, the stomping of the dancers and the heavy rhythms of the hand-clapping watchers. Sometimes, the guitar sings to me of the hopes of love, of the scents of orange blossom in the sunshine, of the passion of a man for a woman and of the longing of a woman for the man she cannot have. Other times, Father’s guitar tells of nothing but pain, the agonies of loss, of death, of the wonderings of the soul in the wilds of sin.

Today, it croons at me, like a siren, weaving a spell that leaves a trail of gold-dust in the air. I play for a long time, my heart beating along with the pizzicato of the notes, shaking with every vibrato, swelling with the final crescendo until I think it will burst. When the last note fades away, I gasp, breathless with the exhaustion.

“Mariana, Mariana, are you alright?” Ray is leaning over me, anxiety palpable in his words.

“Yes, why wouldn’t I be?” I am confused and clutch at Father’s guitar. I am always safe when it is pressed against me.

“You look a little unwell, Miss Gomez,” the BBC woman says.

“I'm just tired: I didn't sleep well,” I give my usual response, but I let Ray prise Father’s guitar from my hands and nestle it back into its case, and then lead me home, his hand resting in the small of my back. I can still hear the music, following me, haunting.

“They loved it,” he tells me, “and they want you to go to the studio on Friday. This is your break, please take it. Mariana, everyone wants your music.”

I nod. I can barely hear. I can barely move.

Ray half carries me up the stairs, and makes me sip some water.

“I will look after you, Mariana, if you will have me,” his green eyes meet mine, intense, alight with something I thought I had only seen once before, in eyes as dark as the night from whence they came. I nod again, unable to speak.

Ray undresses me and lays me down on the bed. He closes the window, the curtain and the door, looks at Father’s guitar, safe in its case and carries it downstairs. I sit up and call out wordlessly in panic. He returns and lies with me, holding me until the shivering stops.

“The guitar is safe,” he croons, “you are safe, Mariana, I am here to look after you.”

I can only hear him with my ears pressed against his chest, so that his words are echoes of themselves. His breathing is a steady rhythm, in, out, in, out. I match mine to his. It is so easy, breathing. To a flautist, it should come naturally. I am floating away now, the grating of the traffic outside, the incessant murmur of voices muffled by Ray’s hard chest and his soft hand pressed against my ears, stroking my cheeks. He is singing, pianissimo. It reminds me of when Father would lull me to sleep as a child. It is all I need. I sleep.