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Granta
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But when she reached the corner of Tenth Avenue and 16th Street, she came to a stop. A few strides ahead, a lone woman in shirtsleeves was leaning against a wall and smoking a cigarette while a crowd across the street milled in front of a loading-dock door. In a single glance, Irina recognized the people in the crowd. She recognized them from the ruggedness of their clothes and the determination on their faces. The only difference between this assembly and the factory workers in Moscow was that they appeared to come from every corner of the globe. In their number were Africans and Asians, Germans and Italians, Irishmen and Poles. Wondering what she had happened upon, Irina looked up and saw a billboard on the building’s roof displaying a golden disk the size of the sun.
Suddenly, the loading door rolled up with a clatter to reveal a man in suspenders in the company of two armed guards. In unison, every member of the crowd began to shout and wave their hands. For a moment, the foreman looked them over, then he began to point.
‘Him, her. Her, him . . .’
Those whom he singled out were waved inside by the guards – having been bestowed the privilege of doing a hard day’s work – while the rest were left to swallow their disappointment just as they had swallowed their pride.
When the loading door came down with a bang, the woman in shirtsleeves was no longer leaning idly against the wall. Having tossed her cigarette into the street, she began thrusting a piece of paper in the hands of every worker who passed. Some of the workers glanced at the leaflet as they walked away, others stuffed it in a pocket, but most let it fall to the ground. When a gust of winter wind raced down the street, one of the leaflets was swept in the air and dropped at Irina’s feet.
Irina couldn’t read a word on the leaflet, but embedded right in the middle of the text, staring back with an expression at once determined and wise, was none other than Vladimir Ilich Lenin.
i did enjoy this
The music starts automatically, the ice-cream jingle, ‘Que Sera Sera’ on imitation chimes. Gulls scatter as the truck eases forwards, trundling towards higher ground. The tourists, for the most part, tend to keep to the safety of the dunes, bracketed behind canvas windbreakers, hunkered grimly over sandwiches and picking sand from the spines of overambitious holiday books. Every year, the coastguard finds on average six copies of Anna Karenina abandoned on the flats between April and high summer. The council has plans for a small exhibition.
Wondering whether she ought to stop and scoop up the wrapper, Alice glances at Min, only to find her bunching up her chewing gum in a paper napkin, preparing to throw it out of the window.
‘Oh, don’t,’ Alice says, regretting it almost immediately – the mumsy tone. Min raises an eyebrow at her, though she does withdraw her hand from the open window, throwing the napkin instead in the cupholder beside the gearstick.
‘Fair enough,’ she nods, and while her tone is light Alice feels she can detect the faintest note of mockery. ‘Mustn’t be bitter with my litter.’
It can be like this, sometimes. A sudden quirk of the lip. Alice biting back the wrong words. Sitting together in History, passing notes until Alice writes something stupid or uncool, underlines the wrong thing, and Min crumples the note in her fist.
‘Fair enough’, this stock phrase, its cringing detachment. The sudden removal of camaraderie and Alice clawing after it.
‘Earl Grey and sardine ice cream it is,’ Min replies, and Alice grins despite herself. It is a sleepover game they play, dreaming up the most disgusting of possible flavour combinations: lemon curd and spare ribs, duck and Parma Violets, tinned pilchards and strawberry jam. A strange pretence at early teenhood, despite the fact that they are both nearly eighteen – nights spent sleeping top to tail in Alice’s bedroom and playing stupid games, inking outlines of the constellations on one another’s arms in biro, tweezing eyebrows and talking on and on about kissing, Min’s little moonstone teeth in the dark.
At the serving hatch, Min hooks one bony ankle over the other and Alice wills her to retract her head and wink at her, give some sign that they still share ownership of the joke she has just hurled unthinkingly away from them. But Min remains where she is and the joke sails away over the head of the boy whose fingers now appear on the edge of the hatch.
I’d like you to start by listening to the first track on the A side, ‘Corcovado’. Bird doesn’t play the opening theme. In fact he doesn’t take up the theme until one phrase at the end. The piece starts with Jobim quietly playing that familiar theme alone on the piano. The rhythm section is simply mute. The melody calls to mind a young girl seated at a window, gazing out at the beautiful night view. Most of it is done with single notes, with the occasional no-frills chord added, as if gently tucking a soft cushion under the girl’s shoulders.
And once that performance of the theme by the piano is over, Bird’s alto sax quietly enters, a faint twilight shadow slipping through a gap in the curtain. He’s there before you even realize it. These graceful, disjointed phrases are like lovely memories, their names hidden, slipping into your dreams. Like fine wind patterns you never want to disappear, leaving gentle traces on the sand dunes of your heart . . .
from the (fictional) article. i want to read more music writing like this
I thumbed through the Charlie Parker section, but the record was nowhere to be found. I was sure I’d returned it to this section yesterday. Thinking it might have got mixed in elsewhere, I rifled through every bin in the jazz section. But as hard as I looked, no luck. Had someone else bought it? I went over to the register and spoke to the middle-aged guy. ‘I’m looking for a jazz record I saw here yesterday.’
‘Which record?’ he asked, eyes never wavering from the New York Times.
‘Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova,’ I said.
He laid down his paper, took off his thin, metal-framed reading glasses and slowly turned to face me. ‘I’m sorry. Could you repeat that?’
I did. The man said nothing and took another sip of coffee. He shook his head slightly. ‘There’s no such record.’
‘Of course,’ I said.
‘If you’d like Perry Como Sings Jimi Hendrix, we have that in stock.’
‘Perry Como Sings –’ I got that far before I realized he was pulling my leg. He was the type who kept a straight face. ‘But I really did see it,’ I insisted. ‘I was sure it was produced as a joke, I mean.’
"I was only thirty-four when I died,’ Bird said to me. ‘Thirty-four!’ At least I think he was saying it to me. Since we were the only two people in the room.
I didn’t know how to respond. It’s hard in dreams to do the right thing. So I stayed silent, waiting for him to go on.
‘Think about it – what it is to die at thirty-four,’ Bird said.
I thought about how I’d feel if I’d died at thirty-four. When I’d only just begun so many things in life.
‘That’s right. I’d only just begun so many things myself,’ Bird said. ‘Only begun to live my life. But then I looked around me and it was all over.’ He silently shook his head. His entire face was still in shadow, so I couldn’t see his expression. His dirty, battered saxophone dangled from the strap around his neck.
‘Death always comes on suddenly,’ Bird said. ‘But it also takes its time. Like the beautiful phrases that come into your head. It lasts an instant, yet they can linger forever. As long as it takes to go from the East Coast to the West Coast – or to infinity, even. The concept of time is lost there. In that sense, I might have been dead even while I lived out my life. But still, actual death is crushing. What’s existed until then suddenly, and completely, vanishes. Returning to nothingness. In my case, that existence was me.’
Gao’s mother pulled over and turned off the engine, the car emitting a few reluctant beeps. Outside the passenger window, I could see the buildings had been erected atop landfill, but where they were interrupted, a cliff of earth fell away, and below that was a rocky wasteland strewn with debris and construction material. At its center stood a lone concrete house. At first glance the house looked as though it might be several floors high, until I realized the earth had been hollowed around it, scooped away from it like the base of a sculpture; the building stood atop stories of packed earth.
It looked like an odd art installation, or an image from a surrealist painting: a city melting into a puddle, a single house floating on its remains.
I asked if anyone actually lived there, and Gao’s mother said yes. ‘It’s called dingzihu,’ she explained. ‘ The government wants to take their land but they won’t move.’
The doctor prescribed a mode of treatment that was short-term sustentative and long-term palliative. Hearing this, I looked to my mother, whose eyes were closed; who her whole life had never changed, until she did change; who since babyhood I had known as the worldly portal for all of life’s other-worldly grace to emerge through; her skin now roughened, turned to rind; her prematurely gaunt face desaturated of colour and cross-hatched with lines. It felt as though too illogically short a period had passed between her initial diagnosis and present state of ill health, as though the full duration of her sickness had been time-lapsed.
Wending my way through the indistinguishably grand culs-de-sac, I considered my position adrift on the map’s endless beige grid. Since graduating, I had taken up and quit a succession of entry-level jobs at both independent and corporate workplaces, each as weightless and unengaging as the last, monetising only my inborn ability to tolerate high measures of stress without ever showing it.
I had passed the last five years like this, occupied in drone positions I didn’t want to occupy that forced me to act like a person I didn’t want to be. The autogenerated recruitment emails I received on Mondays only solicited the same kind of unskilled, layperson work I already performed, just in different, occasionally more design-conscious, environments. I did not hesitate to lie to people when they asked what I did for a living.
I had no illusions about the arc of my future. I would never come close to affording a home inside or nearby the city, and sometime in the next year my mother would die of a natural cause. I wondered how my father and I would manage when that happened; whether he’d up and die the way some broken-hearted widowers do, and to which compensatory short-term pleasures I would have to turn to alleviate such unendurable pain.