The Other Family (32 page)

The taxi pulled up outside a large modern building set in an asphalt car park. Amy had been expecting, at the least, a cellar.

‘It’s here?’

‘Every Friday,’ Scott said. He paid the driver with the lack of performance Amy remembered from her father. Why did men make so much less of handing over money, somehow, than women did? ‘Home of the Keel Row Folk Club. It’s an arts centre. All the folk stars come here on their tours.’

Inside, it reminded Amy of nothing so much as school. There were green walls and noticeboards and lines of upright chairs outside closed doors. Scott put a hand under her elbow and guided her out of the entrance hall into a barn-like room full of tables and chairs and noise, with a small dais at one end in front of a row of microphones on stands.

Amy looked round the room. ‘I’m the youngest person here!’

‘Yes,’ Scott said, ‘but look how many of them there are. Just look. They come every Friday.’

‘They’re older than
you
—’

‘They know their music,’ Scott said, ‘just you wait. Just you wait till it gets going.’

‘OK. I’ll believe you.’

He smiled at her.

‘Believe me.’

He threaded his way between the tables and indicated that
Amy should take a chair next to an ample woman in a patchwork waistcoat with long grey hair down her back, held off her face with Chinese combs.

The woman smiled at Amy. ‘Hello, dear.’

She didn’t sound Newcastle to Amy. She indicated the bottle of red wine in front of her and her companions.

‘Drink, dear?’

Amy shook her head. ‘I’m OK. Thank you.’

The woman glanced at Scott.

‘Friday night with the boyfriend—’

‘Actually,’ Amy said, her voice sounding strangely distant to her, ‘he’s my brother.’

‘Oh yes,’ the woman said, laughing, ‘oh
yes
. And would your brother like a drink?’

Scott said, ‘I’ll get myself a beer, thanks. And this one drinks Diet Coke.’

‘No vodka?’

Scott leaned forward. He said, smilingly, ‘She hasn’t come for that. She’s come for the same reason you’ve come. She’s come for the music.’

The woman turned and looked straight at Amy, holding out her hand.

‘Sorry, dear.’

Amy took her hand. It was big and warm and supple.

‘It’s OK.’

‘D’you play?’

‘The flute,’ Amy said.

‘The flute? The flute. The art of playing the flute is to make it sound like the human voice—’

‘She knows that,’ Scott said.

The woman let go of Amy’s hand. Amy turned to look gratefully at Scott. He said, across her, to the woman, his voice still level and friendly, ‘We shared a very musical father.’

There was a pause. Then the woman picked up her wine glass and held it up towards them.

‘I think I’ll just stop and start again. Good luck to you both.’ She took a swallow. ‘Enjoy.’ Then she turned back to the man on her left.

Scott looked at Amy.

‘I’ll get you that Coke.’

When he had gone, Amy glanced sideways. Beyond the woman in the patchwork waistcoat was a thin man with a goatee beard, and another couple, the woman with her hair in braids threaded with coloured yarns. They were all laughing. Beyond them, at the next table, most people were laughing too, and when she looked round, from table to table across the room, the laughter seemed to be echoed. Amy thought, with amazement, that she had never seen such strange people, nor had she ever seen people having such easy fun. She touched the woman in the patchwork waistcoat nervously on one arm. The woman turned.

‘I didn’t,’ Amy said, ‘I didn’t mean to be stand-offish—’

The woman smiled broadly. The man with the goatee beard leaned across her and said, in the same accent as Scott’s, ‘She needs keeping in her place, believe me!’

‘You weren’t,’ the woman said. ‘You were just finding your feet.’ She nodded towards the stage. ‘Just wait till the music starts.’

‘Glad to be here,’ the guitarist said.

He stood on stage in a halo of red and green lights, a lanky man in black, his hair tied back with a bandanna.

‘Always glad to be here. Radio 2’s Folk Club of the Year – when was it? Can’t remember. Anyone here old enough to remember? Forget it. Today’s my birthday. It’s also my guitar’s birthday. It’s everyone’s birthday. It’s even our resident shanty man’s birthday and he’s planning to sing a song about
a strike with all the bairns dying, just to cheer you all up. But before that I’m going to play you something. When the lads are ready, that is. Will you wait while Malc puts more gaffer tape on his accordion? Now, I wrote this tune on the ferry from Mull. Such a beautiful journey. I was on deck, the boys were in the bar. I wrote it for a friend’s wedding and if it makes you want to dance I suggest you keep it to yourselves. Ready now? Ready, boys? Two, three—’

And then it began. Amy had been to concerts and gigs all her life, to Wembley and Brixton Academy and the Wigmore Hall, to jam sessions in pubs and people’s back bedrooms, to theatres and hotel ballrooms to hear her father perform in his polished, relaxed, almost casual way. She had heard music of every kind, she had heard it in the company of her family, her friends and alone in her bedroom, picking over melodies as her father had urged her to do until, he said, the flute could say something for her in a better way than she could say it in words. But for all that, sitting here in an institutional arts centre surrounded by people older than her own mother, people of tastes and habits that had never, ever occurred to her before, she felt a sense of something enormous flooding through her: not exactly excitement or an exhilaration, but more a sense of relief, of recognition, of comprehension, a sense of coming home to something that she had never been able to acknowledge before as there.

The group with the guitarist played a forty-minute set. Several times, the guitarist slung his guitar sideways, and leaned into the microphone and sang. Then they left the stage and the shanty man appeared, holding a harmonica.

‘It’s one hundred and thirty-three years since Joe Wilson died. I’m going to sing one of his songs, in his memory. And then I’ll give you Tommy Armstrong’s “Durham Jail” because my father was a miner, though he never was nicked for stealing a pair of stockings, as Tommy was.’

Scott leaned towards Amy.

‘OK?’

She nodded, her eyes fixed on the stage.

‘Next act,’ Scott whispered. ‘Wait for the next act—’

‘“Oh, lass, don’t clash the door so,”’ the shanty man sang.

‘“You’re young and as thoughtless as can be.

‘“But your mother’s turning old

‘“And you know she’s very bad

‘“And she doesn’t like to hear you clash the door.”’

Scott watched Amy covertly. He’d thought she might be intrigued, might quite like it, might be curious to hear the music Richie had grown up with, the music of the mines and the ships, but he had not thought that she would love it, that she would sit enthralled while a little old man with a mouth organ sang a comic song from a nineteenth-century music hall, a lament from an oakum-picking prisoner in Durham Jail. She looked, in that cheerful, warm-hearted, unambitious room, as out of place as if she had fallen from another planet, but she was as absorbed as any of them, and when the shanty man had finished, and gone hobbling off the stage, to be replaced by a second group, two fiddlers, an accordionist and a slender girl carrying a flute, he thought she was hardly breathing.

The girl stepped up to the microphone. She was perhaps in her mid-twenties, with hair as long and dark as Amy’s own, dressed in deep green, to the floor, and wearing no jewellery except for long glimmering silver chains in her ears.

‘Good evening,’ she said softly. Her accent was Scottish. ‘We’re so happy to be back. This is the twenty-ninth gig of our epic tour round England, Wales and Scotland. But we love coming here. We love coming back to the UK’s home for music and musical discovery.’

She paused for the cheering, standing quiet and still and smiling. Then she bent towards the microphone again.

‘Sometimes, as you may remember, I want to jazz things up a little, give them a bluesy twist. But not tonight. Tonight, you get it sweet and straight, played the way it was written.’ She raised her flute and inclined her head to meet it.

‘Ladies and gentleman. Brothers and sisters. “The Rose Of Allandale”.’

They bought burgers on their way home, and carried the hot polystyrene boxes in the lift up to Scott’s flat. The flat was dim, lit only by the summertime night glow from the city coming through the huge window, and Scott didn’t switch any lights on, just let Amy walk in, and drop her bag on the floor randomly, just the way he dropped his work bag, and wander down the room, running her hand over the piano as she passed it, to stand, as he so often did, and stare out at the lights and the shining dark river far below and the great gleaming bulk of the Sage on the further shore.

She’d hardly spoken on the way home. He’d rung for a taxi while she was buying the CDs of the groups they’d heard, and she’d climbed in beside him in a silence he was perfectly happy to accommodate. In fact, he respected it, was gratified by it, and when, as they were crossing the river, almost home, and Scott had asked the driver to drop them off so that they could pick up something to eat, she had said suddenly, ‘Oh, I want to be her!’, he had had to restrain himself from putting his arms round in her in a heartfelt gesture of understanding and pleasure. Instead, with an effort, he’d asked her if she wanted a burger or a kebab, and when she didn’t answer, when it became plain that she had hardly heard him, he almost laughed out loud.

‘D’you want to eat standing there?’

She turned, very slowly.

‘Where – where are you going to eat?’

He gestured.

‘Where I usually do. On the sofa.’

She came away from the window.

‘Will you play for me?’

‘What, the piano?’

‘What else?’

‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Maybe tomorrow. Maybe we’ll both play tomorrow.’

She sat down on the sofa. He handed her a box.

‘Want a plate?’

‘No.’

‘Good girl. Eat up. What have you had today – coffee and crisps?’

‘My favourite,’ Amy said.

She opened the box and looked at her burger. She sighed.

‘I want to be her.’

‘I know.’

‘I want—’

‘Wait,’ Scott said, ‘wait. You’ve work to do first.’

She glanced up.

‘What work?’

‘Exploring.’

She lifted the burger out and inspected it.

‘What are we going to do tomorrow?’

‘What are
you
going to do tomorrow.’

‘What?’

‘I’m sending you off,’ Scott said. ‘I’m sending you on a little journey of discovery.’

Amy stared at him. He winked at her.

‘You’ll see,’ he said, and wedged his burger in his mouth.

C
hrissie had never felt quite at home in Sue’s kitchen. It wasn’t the disorder really, or the noise – the television never seemed to be switched off – but more a sense that Sue’s children and Kevin were so intent upon their own robust and random lives that her presence there meant no more than if a new chair or saucepan had been added to the mix.

Sue herself seemed oblivious. The muddle of people and purposes, of washing-up and lunch boxes, of newspapers and flyers and scribbled notes, wasn’t something she strove for, but rather something she simply didn’t notice. She had absently moved a football boot, a magazine and an empty crisp packet from a chair in order that Chrissie could sit down, in a manner that suggested that sitting down wasn’t necessarily a chair’s function in the first place.

‘Can I turn that off?’

‘What?’ Sue said. She was polishing a wine glass with a shirt lying on top of a pile in a laundry basket.

‘The TV,’ Chrissie said.

‘Course. I’ve stopped hearing it. I’ve stopped hearing most things, especially anybody under sixteen asking for money.’

‘I gave Amy twenty quid,’ Chrissie said, ‘and now I’m
worrying that wasn’t nearly enough. A whole weekend, on twenty pounds.’

Sue put the wine glass on the table, amid the clutter.

‘They’ll pay for her, won’t they?’

Chrissie made a face.

‘That’s what I was thinking when I gave her the money. They can darn well pay for her, that’s what I thought. But now, I wish they weren’t. I wish I’d given her more.’

Sue found a second glass, and blew on it.

‘Stop thinking about her.’

‘I—’

‘Haven’t you got enough to think about?’ Sue demanded. ‘Isn’t there enough going on without fretting over the one child who’s actually striking out?’

‘In the wrong direction—’

‘For
you
,’ Sue said. ‘Not necessarily for her. Don’t you just love it that wine comes in screw-top bottles these days?’

Chrissie wandered back from turning off the television and watched Sue pouring wine into the glasses.

‘I’ve sometimes wished, since Richie died, that I really,
really
liked alcohol. I mean, I do like it, I love a glass of wine, but I don’t crave it. It would have been easier to crave something rather than just be in such a state.’

Sue held a full glass out to her.

‘Tell me some good news.’

‘It’s sort of OK news—’

‘Fine by me.’

‘I took the job,’ Chrissie said.

Sue let out a yelp, and clinked her glass against Chrissie’s.

‘Go, girlfriend!’

‘It isn’t amazing. In fact, it’s very lowly, very lowly indeed, but it’s the first one I’ve been offered, actually
offered
, in all these months of trying, and I suppose it might lead to something—’

‘It’s a
job
!’

‘Yes,’ Chrissie said, ‘they were so nice to me. I met Mark’s father, and all his uncles, and they were lovely, so welcoming.’

‘You’ll be so good at it—’

‘I hope so. Nine-thirty to six, four weeks’ paid holiday, pay-as-you-earn tax.’

‘Chrissie,’ Sue said, ‘this is good. This is even great. This is like starting again, and do not, do
not
, do not tell me that starting again is the last thing you want to do.’