Very Best of Charles de Lint, The (54 page)

It was such a shock to hear that her only lifelines were a friend who was hardly ever there for her and a dog. The guilt that lodged inside me then has never really gone away. I wanted to ask what had happened to that brashly confident girl who had turned my whole life around as much by the example of her own strength and resourcefulness as by her friendship, but then I realized that the answer lay in her music, in her songs that spoke of masks and what lay behind them, of puddles on muddy roads that sometimes hid deep, bottomless wells.

“I feel so…so stupid,” she said.

This time I was the one who took charge. I steered her towards the closest bus stop and we sat down on its bench. I put my arm around her shoulders and Fritzie laid his mournful head upon her knee and looked up into her face.

“Don’t feel stupid,” I said. “You can’t help the bad feelings.”

“But why do I have to have them? Nobody else does.”

“Everybody has them.”

She toyed with the wiry fur between Fritzie’s ears and leaned against me.

“Not like mine,” she said.

“No,” I agreed. “Everybody’s got their own.”

That got me a small smile. We sat there for a while, watching the traffic go past until it was time for her last set of the night.

“What do you think of the show?” she asked as we returned to the club.

“I like it,” I told her, “but I think it’s the kind of music that people have to take their time to appreciate.”

Gina nodded glumly. “And who’s got the time?”

“I do.”

“Well, I wish you ran one of the record companies,” she said. “I get the same answer from all of them. They like my voice, they like my playing, but they want me to sexy up my image and write songs that are more upbeat.”

She paused. We’d reached the back door of the club by then. She put her back against the brick wall of the alley and looked up. Fritzie was pressed up against the side of her leg as though he was glued there.

“I tried, you know,” Gina said. “I really tried to give them what they wanted, but it just wasn’t there. I just don’t have that kind of song inside me.”

She disappeared inside then to retune her guitar before she went back on stage. I stayed for a moment longer, my gaze drawn up as hers had been while she’d been talking to me. There was a gargoyle there, spout-mouth open wide, a rather benevolent look about its grotesque features. I looked at it for a long time, wondering for a moment if I would see it blink or move the way Gina probably had, but it was just a stone sculpture, set high up in the wall. Finally I went back inside and found my seat.

8

I was in the middle of studying for exams the following week, but I made a point of it to call Gina at least every day. I tried getting her to let me take her out for dinner on the weekend, but she and Fritzie were pretty much inseparable and she didn’t want to leave him tied up outside the restaurant while we sat inside to eat. So I ended up having them over to the little apartment I was renting in Crowsea instead. She told me that night that she was going out west to try to shop her tape around to the big companies in L.A. and I didn’t see her again for three months.

I’d been worried about her going off on her own, feeling as she was. I even offered to go with her, if she’d just wait until the semester was finished, but she assured me she’d be fine and a series of cheerful cards and short letters—signed by either her or just a big paw print—arrived in my letterbox to prove the point. When she finally did get back, she called me up and we got together for a picnic lunch in Fitzhenry Park.

Going out to the west coast seemed to have done her good. She came back looking radiant and tanned, full of amusing stories concerning the ups and downs of her and Fritzie’s adventures out there. She’d even gotten some fairly serious interest from an independent record label, but they were still making up their minds when her money ran out. Instead of trying to make do in a place where she felt even more like a stranger than she did in Newford, she decided to come home to wait for their response, driving back across the country in her old station wagon, Fritzie sitting up on the passenger seat beside her, her guitar in its battered case lying across the back seat.

“By the time we rolled into Newford,” she said, “the car was just running on fumes. But we made it.”

“If you need some money, or a place to stay…” I offered.

“I can just see the three of us squeezed into that tiny place of yours.”

“We’d make do.”

Gina smiled. “It’s okay. My dad fronted me some money until the advance from the record company comes through. But thanks all the same. Fritzie and I appreciate the offer.”

I was really happy for her. Her spirits were so high now that things had finally turned around and she could see that she was going somewhere with her music. She knew there was a lot of hard work still to come, but it was the sort of work she thrived on.

“I feel like I’ve lived my whole life on the edge of an abyss,” she told me, “just waiting for the moment when it’d finally drag me down for good, but now everything’s changed. It’s like I finally figured out a way to live someplace else—away from the edge.
Far
away.”

I was going on to my third year at Butler U. in the fall, but we made plans to drive back to L.A. together in July, once she got the okay from the record company. We’d spend the summer together in La La Land, taking in the sights while Gina worked on her album. It’s something I knew we were both looking forward to.

9

Gina was looking after the cottage of a friend of her parents when she fell back into the abyss. She never told me how she was feeling, probably because she knew I’d have gone to any length to stop her from hurting herself. All she’d told me before she went was that she needed the solitude to work on some new songs and I’d believed her. I had no reason to worry about her. In the two weeks she was living out there I must have gotten a half-dozen cheerful cards, telling me what to add to my packing list for our trip out west and what to leave off.

Her mother told me that she’d gotten a letter from the record company, turning down her demo. She said Gina had seemed to take the rejection well when she called to give her daughter the bad news. They’d ended their conversation with Gina already making plans to start the rounds of the record companies again with the new material she’d been working on. Then she’d burned her guitar and all of her music and poetry in a firepit down by the shore, and simply walked out into the lake. Her body was found after a neighbour was drawn to the lot by Fritzie’s howling. The poor dog was shivering and wet, matted with mud from having tried to rescue her. They know it wasn’t an accident because of the note she left behind in the cottage.

I never read the note. I couldn’t.

I miss her terribly, but most of all I’m angry. Not at Gina, but at this society of ours that tries to make everybody fit into the same mold. Gina was unique, but she didn’t want to be. All she wanted to do was fit in, but her spirit and her muse wouldn’t let her. That dichotomy between who she was and who she thought she should be was what really killed her.

All that survives of her music is that demo tape. When I listen to it, I can’t understand how she could create a healing process for others through that dark music, but she couldn’t use it to heal herself.

10

Tomorrow is Christmas day and I’m going down to the soup kitchen to help serve the Christmas dinners. It’ll be my first Christmas without Gina. My parents wanted me to come home, but I put them off until tomorrow night. I just want to sit here tonight with Fritzie and remember. He lives with me because Gina asked me to take care of him, but he’s not the same dog he was when Gina was alive. He misses her too much.

I’m sitting by the window, watching the snow fall. On the table in front of me I’ve spread out the contents of a box of memories: The casing for Gina’s demo tape. My twig people and the other things we made. All those letters and cards that Gina sent me over the years. I haven’t been able to reread them yet, but I’ve looked at the drawings and I’ve held them in my hands, turning them over and over, one by one. The demo tape is playing softly on my stereo. It’s the first time I’ve been able to listen to it since Gina died.

Through the snow I can see the gargoyle on the building across the street. I know now what Gina meant about wanting to live in their world and be invisible. When you’re invisible, no one can see that you’re different.

Thinking about Gina hurts so much, but there’s good things to remember, too. I don’t know what would have become of me if she hadn’t rescued me in that playground all those years ago and welcomed me into her life. It’s so sad that the uniqueness about her that made me love her so much was what caused her so much pain.

The bells of St. Paul’s Cathedral strike midnight. They remind me of the child I was, trying to stay up late enough to hear my cat talk. I guess that’s what Gina meant to me. While everybody else grew up, Gina retained all the best things about childhood: goodness and innocence and an endless wonder. But she carried the downside of being a child inside her as well. She always lived in the present moment, the way we do when we’re young, and that must be why her despair was so overwhelming for her.

“I tried to save her,” a voice says in the room behind me as the last echo of St. Paul’s bells fades away. “But she wouldn’t let me. She was too strong for me.”

I don’t move. I don’t dare move at all. On the demo tape, Gina’s guitar starts to strum the intro to another song. Against the drone of the guitar’s strings, the voice goes on.

“I know she’ll always live on so long as we keep her memory alive,” it says, “but sometimes that’s just not enough. Sometimes I miss her so much I don’t think
I
can go on.”

I turn slowly then, but there’s only me in the room. Me and Fritzie, and one small Christmas miracle to remind me that everything magic didn’t die when Gina walked into the lake.

“Me, too,” I tell Fritzie.

I get up from my chair and cross the room to where he’s sitting up, looking at me with those sad eyes of his. I put my arms around his neck. I bury my face in his rough fur and we stay there like that for a long time, listening to Gina sing.

That Was Radio Clash

December 23, 2002

“Why so down?” the bartender asked the girl with the dark blue hair.

She looked up, surprised, maybe, that anyone had even noticed.

At night, the Rhatigan was one of the last decent live jazz clubs in town. The kind of place where you didn’t necessarily know the players, but one thing the music always did was swing. There was none of your smooth jazz or other ambient crap here. But during the day, it was like any other low-end bar, a third full of serious drinkers and no one that looked like her.

“Joe Strummer died yesterday,” she said.

Alphonse is a good guy. He used to play the keys until an unpaid debt resulted in some serious damage to his melody hand. He can still play, but where he used to soar, now he just walks along on the everyday side of genius with the rest of us. And while maybe he can’t express the way things feel with his music anymore, the heart that made him one of the most generous players you could sit in with is still beating inside that barrel chest of his.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Was he a friend of yours?”

The hint of a smile tugged at the corner of her mouth, but the sadness in her eyes didn’t change.

“Hardly,” she said. “It’s just that he was the heart and soul of the only band that matters and his dying reminds me of how everything that’s good eventually fades away.”

“The only band that matters,” Alphonse repeated, obviously not getting the reference. In his head he was probably running through various Monk or Davis lineups.

“That’s what they used to call the Clash.”

“Oh, I remember them. What was that hit of theirs?” It took him a moment, but then he half-sang the chorus and title of “Should I Stay or Should I Go.”

She nodded. “Except that was more Mick Jones’s. Joe’s lyrics were the ones with a political agenda.”

“I don’t much care for politics,” Alphonse said.

“Yeah, most people don’t. And that’s why the world’s as fucked up as it is.”

Alphonse shrugged and went to serve a customer at the other end of the bar. The blue-haired girl returned her attention to her beer, staring down into the amber liquid.

“Did you ever meet him?” I asked.

She looked up to where I was sitting a couple of barstools away. Her eyes were as blue as her hair, such a vibrant colour that I figured they must be contacts. She had a pierced eyebrow—the left—and pale skin, but by the middle of winter, most people have pretty much lost their summer colour. She was dressed like she was auditioning for a black and white movie: black jersey, cargos and boots, a grey sweater. The only colour was in her hair. And those amazing eyes.

“No,” she said. “But I saw them play at the Standish in ’84.”

I smiled. “And you were what? Five years old?”

“Now you’re just sucking up.”

And unspoken, but implied in those few words was, You don’t have a chance with me.

But I never thought I did. I mean, look at me. A has-been trumpet player who lost his lip. Never touched the glory Alphonse did when he played—not on my own—but I sat in with musicians who did.

But that’s not what she’d be seeing. She’d be seeing one more lost soul with haunted eyes, trying to drown old sorrows in a pint of draught. If she was in her teens when she caught the Clash at the Standish, she’d still only be in her mid- to late-thirties now, ten years my junior. But time passes differently for people like her and people like me. I looked half again my age, and shabby. And I knew it.

No, all I was doing here was enjoying the opportunity for a little piece of conversation with someone who wasn’t a drunk, or what she thought me to be: on the prowl.

“I knew him in London,” I said. “Back in the seventies when we were all living in squats in Camden Town.”

“Yeah, right.”

I shrugged and went on as though she hadn’t spoken. “I remember their energy the most. They’d play these crap gigs with speakers made out of crates and broomstick mike stands. Very punk—lots of noise and big choppy chords.” I smiled. “And not a hell of a lot of chords, either. But they already had a conscience—not like the Pistols who were only ever in it for the money. Right from the start they were giving voice to a whole generation that the system had let down.”