Wasted Years

Fifteen

He hadn’t recognized him at first, not for certain; only later, watching Rylands fake his way through sincere parenting, had Resnick been able to slip the younger face over the old. A trick of memory. Tighter, eyes screwed up against the smoke, the lights. Sweat that slid down the channels of Rylands’s face, sprayed from nose and forehead as he jerked his head from side to side. Slow smile that would glide into place, when on the stage in front of him, either tenor or guitar would strike a serious groove. The way he would arch back on his stool, sticks a blur as patterns and paradiddles grew from his hands.

Drinking even then, but didn’t they all?

Pints of best bitter slopping across the boards: quarter bottles of scotch or vodka passed from hand to hand.

Pills.

Without effort of imagination, Resnick was there, too many bodies crammed fast, rhythmic thump of dancing feet, sweat that seemed, like raindrops on a windscreen, to rise directly up the walls. Girls you walked back along the Trent, whose interest waned when finally you told them what you did, whose hands eased free from yours, who moved a pace apart.

Walking all over me like that. It’s a wonder I didn’t go flying back down the stairs.

Elaine.

Resnick had looked for her again, other evenings when the band was playing “In the Midnight Hour,” “My Girl,” “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long.” Scanning the crowd for that half-serious face, angry, mocking eyes. When next he did encounter Elaine, it would be another place, another circumstance.

The music had changed, too. Instead of soul, rhythm and blues, it was slim young men decked out with purple eyeliner, stars glittering on their cheeks, songs about ancient forests or stars in the skies. Resnick stopped going.

Rylands had beaten him to it: one week Resnick had walked in, together with Ben Riley, and there had been someone else behind the drums.

Rumor was a name band had made Rylands an offer, a group, and he was back on the road, up and down the Ml more times than Peter Withe and Tony Hateley combined. There was talk of a record that should have been a hit. To the best of his knowledge, Resnick had never heard it.

He wondered how many years Rylands had been back in the city, if he still played? A pub, maybe, on the outskirts, requests from customers, keyboard and drums. Draw for the raffle, roll on the snare and a cymbal crash. Blokes pushed up on stage, half-pissed, by their mates, dropping the mike midway through some half-remembered song.

Wondered what Rylands really thought about his son.

Any of your own? Kids?

Without realizing what he was doing, Resnick had climbed the stairs to the top of the house.

All those times I’d walk in here and see the expectation rise and fall in your eyes. Fancy a cup of tea, Charlie? Not what you wanted to hear. What you wanted was for me to walk in and say I was pregnant.

Through windows that needed cleaning, Resnick looked down on muted streetlights, the road that curved away in front of the house, the road not taken, not by him.

What Elaine had finally said when she had walked in: Charlie, we need to talk. He knew then-the tone of her voice, the look in her eyes-that she was leaving him. Just not when.

Downstairs he checked with the station: Divine and Naylor were still on obs, no sign of Keith. It was a little shy of eleven p.m.

Resnick realized that his instincts could have been wrong. He set aside the idea of going back out there and mooched into the kitchen, began opening and closing cupboard doors. Appetites excited, cats pushed at his ankles, slid their sleek heads across his feet. It wasn’t simply finding himself face to face with Rylands for the first time in-how many? Twenty? — years. It was more. Other bits and pieces of the past were nudging their way back into his consciousness, rubbing themselves against the back of his mind.

Rylands.

The Boat Club.

Ben Riley.

Elaine.

Prior.

Ruth James.

In the front room he rooted through the shelves of records, albums he’d collected since he was in his teens. After a first, and a second search he still hadn’t found it, wondered if he could have lent it to someone long ago, if maybe Elaine had taken it, memories of that first time they had met.

He doubted that.

He finally found it inside the sleeve of another record, Serge Chaloff’s Blue Serge-not bad, Resnick thought, for an impromptu overcoat. A four-track EP with a laminated cover, soft-focus picture of the singer, head bent, before the microphone. Ruth James amp; the Nighthawks. 1972.

Resnick slid the record onto his hand: a memory of her hand struggling to push back the air. The pallor of her face, auburn of her hair. He dispensed the worst of the dust and set it on the turntable, changed the speed. The stylus stuck near the start and when Resnick eased it gently on the vocal had already begun.

All those dreams and wasted tears,

Every minute, every second,

The worst of all my fears

He had been called to a burglary, January seventy-four, one of those big houses off the Mansfield Road, divided into flats and then divided again. A warren of rooms in which clothes hung drying in front of a two-bar electric fire and every squeak of conversation came through the partition wall. Cooker behind a screen in one corner, the bathroom down the hall-only hot water enough to cover your knees, the plughole circled round with other people’s pubic hairs. A rusting fire escape that climbed up from the overgrown garden at the side. Too many windows with a faulty catch. One man, working alone; he had got through four rooms before Elaine came out of hers to go to the toilet and there he was, trying the door across the hall.

“What the hell d’you reckon you’re about?” she’d shouted, grabbing at his arm.

The burglar-dark shirt, jeans, wearing gloves-had bolted for the stairs, out through the main door, the lock of which he’d slipped as soon as he’d got inside.

“Sure you’re okay?” Resnick had asked, self-conscious inside her room, Elaine sitting on the only chair.

“Oh, yes, I’m fine. Fine.”

“You were lucky.”

She looked at him then, questioning.

“When you reached for him, that he didn’t react.”

“He ran.”

“I know. What I meant, he might have felt provoked. He might have hurt you.”

She smiled. “Like you, you mean?”

Resnick’s eyes had smiled back. “I didn’t know if you’d remembered?”

“Someone your size? All over me? I had a bruise on my instep that lingered for weeks. Not to mention my big toe.”

“Bruised, too?”

“Worse.”

He gave her an inquiring look.

“It came off.”

“The toe?”

“The nail.”

“Oh.”

She continued to sit there and he continued to stand where he was, watching. Somewhere above, a cistern was noisily refilling,

“Shouldn’t you be looking for clues?” she finally said.

“That fire escape,” Resnick said, embarrassed, “it’s like an open invitation.”

She smiled again; it was a good smile, strong, not ingratiating. “Sooner burgled than burned.”

“What I was thinking, window locks …”

“We’ve been on to the landlord for months.”

“Maybe now he’ll pay some attention.”

She got to her feet. “And maybe not. Anyway, who cares? By then I’ll have moved.”

“By when?”

“Week after next.”

She could read the disappointment in his eyes: just when I’ve found you again.

“Do you think you’ll catch him?” she asked at the door to her room.

“Honestly?”

“Of course.”

“If he’s a regular, if we pick him up for something else … otherwise, no. Probably not.”

He stepped out into the middle of the corridor and she looked at him again. “Are you always that honest?”

“I hope so. I try to be.”

“Don’t you find that a hindrance in your work?”

He couldn’t tell from her expression whether she was teasing him or not. He couldn’t think of anything else to say. Before he had reached the head of the stairs, she had gone back inside her room and closed the door. Three weeks later a card arrived, the envelope forwarded from Central Station. On the front was a photograph of a saxophone, black and white; on the reverse Elaine had written Maybe you’d like to call round and check the security arrangements? along with her new address.

Elaine.

And Ruth James.

This was their story, too.

Empty arms and empty promises

And ten more wasted years