We Will All Go Down Together (2 page)

(Sort of creepy, I guess, in context. Or maybe just creepy anyways, no matter what.)

So I sighed, louder than I’d intended to, and I swear Sister Apollonia—a nice girl from what I could gather, Bride of Christ or no—looked like she was really feelin’ me. “You know, that’s not everything,” she said. “We’ve actually got another complete folio of material from Spring 1908, things he didn’t use in the book for one reason or another. Would you like to see?”

Oh
yeah.

And here, constant readers, was the true pay-off to this lovely little adventure of ours. I don’t want to go too far into it, naturally, because I have a
lot
of work to do before I can trot it out in public . . . but suffice to say, I got my song, and it’s something I’ve genuinely never heard before. Which, given my encyclopedic memory for murder ballads of all kinds, does tend to imply it’s probably something
you’ve
never heard, either. Cool beans, right?

So why don’t I feel
more
excited?

UPDATE: I Googled the Magritte, BTW; turns out to be from 1934, not one of his more famous ones. It’s usually exhibited as “The Empty Picture Frame,” except for in the Marlborough catalogue of 1973, where Langui calls it “La Saignee”—“The Blood-Letting.”

August 25, 2004

Mood: Intrigued

Music: “I’m Going Home,” Sacred Harp Singers

Title: Curiouser and Curiouser

After all that, I didn’t even try out the new song last night, during my first solo set at Gaucho Joe’s—Glamer for one, ha ha. But that guy did finally turn up again: Mr. Scottish My-Eyes-Look-Like-Cedar guy. He was standing in the back throughout most of it, right in the shadow of the bar; I actually didn’t even notice him until after I’d wrapped, when he touched my arm as I brushed past him, heading for my courtesy drink.

“Well-played, hen. Y’are a proper—” but I couldn’t quite hear this last bit, something borderline weird . . . sounded sort of like “glee-maiden,” whatever
that
might be. “Thanks,” I told him. “You already fixed, or can I buy you another?”

“Not tonight. You’ll sit with me though, yeah?”

Well, apparently. It wasn’t just some sort of half-assed instant first date, though, all hunched over a candlelit booth back over by the bathroom door—turns out, this dude actually does know his stuff, when it comes to Folk. For one thing, he totally got what I’d been doing in terms of my roster, i.e. mixing and matching different versions of the same song: transpositions specifically paired to highlight the inherent resonances even when the tunes are explicitly different, like going from “House Carpenter” to “The Demon Lover,” “Bank of Claudy” to “Her Mantle So Green,” “Blackwaterside” to “Dark-Eyed Sailor,” “When I Was on Horseback” to “St. James Infirmary”—
I am the king’s soldier and I’ve done no wrong
vs.
I am a young cowboy, I know I’ve done wrong.
Impressive, and not something most people get even slightly, which I outright told him; got that same bad-teeth smile in return, with a startling side order of smoulder. “Most must not be listening, then,” he said, simply.

Oh,
rrrrrrowr
.

Which, granted, might’ve been either the lateness, the booze or the general lack of Josh and/or (even!) Lars talking, but even so. An hour or so after Last Call, we were still swapping song titles and making jokes about how much trouble you can save yourself in life by just listening to the lyrics, like so:

1. If you are an unmarried lady, for God’s sake, don’t have sex, because then you’ll get pregnant.

2. But if you do get pregnant, then for God’s sake, don’t tell the guy, because he’ll ask you down by the waterside—or the wild rippling water, the wan water, the salt sea shore, the strand, the lowlands low, the Burning Thames, or any area where the grass grows green on the banks of some pool—and kill you. Or he’ll run off, and you’ll have to kill yourself, then haunt him ’til he dies.

3. On the other hand, if your unmarried girlfriend gets pregnant, for God’s sake, don’t kill her, or her ghost will make sure everyone finds out, and then they’ll kill you. Or you’ll get hanged, or kill yourself, or be carried off bodily by Satan. In any case, your last words will probably be: “Come all ye wild and roving lads, a lesson take by me. . . .” and the last three stanzas of your life will purely suck.

See also: a former significant other turns up unexpectedly after a long absence, late at night, but refuses to eat anything, and also wants you to leave with them immediately; they say it’s no big deal that you’re now married to someone else and have a child with that person, while simultaneously making mention of a long journey, a far shore or a narrow bed, and being oddly skittish about the imminent arrival of cockcrow. Do you—

A)  Check their back for bat/fairy wings?

B)  Drop everything to book yourself the first available

one-way ticket on a ship bound for
those evil hills/which seem so dark and low
?

C)  Kick ’em where it counts, and run like hell?

D)  None of the above?

So the evening pissed away prettily, and I was pleasantly drunk by the time he loaded me into a cab, slipping me a card with his number on it. He’d already told me to call him “Ganconer,” and I’d already laughed in his face over the relative likelihood of that one—“fairy love-talker,” riiight, just like the Sheila Chandra drone remix version of “Reynardine:”
And he led her over the mountain/Beyond her mortal life
.

Wasn’t until I woke up this morning that I noticed the family name written next to it, though—Sidderstane, like Torrance. Like the Ontario ballads collector.

Have to remember to run my version of that song past him, when I’m done with it.

August 27, 2004

Mood: Content

Music: “The Lake of the North,” by me

Title: .mpg Link—Click Below

Okay, everybody. Try this one on for size:

Comments:

Dude, amazing! Are you gonna be at TellCon? Gonna sing?

—Posted by:
[email protected]

This really is something else . . . the tune’s a bit like “The Cruel Mother,” while the content recalls “Red Roses” quite a bit. Did Sidderstane’s book say where the lake is?

—Posted by:
[email protected]

[
Subsequent ICQ chat logs were found to be missing for this time period.
]

August 29, 2004

Mood: whatever

Music: n/a

Title: n/a

Yeah, so suddenly my life has no soundtrack; sue me, bitches. It’s been a bad, bad day.

Strike One: Daphinis got to fire me before I could quit.

Strike Two: she got to do it after closing, so I couldn’t even make a scene.

Strike Three: Renaissance—
both
of them, East and West—got bought out (by Starbucks), so no big Glamer-returns-in-style show. No public “Lake of the North” debut. No auditions for back-up. No nothin’.

Strike Four: rent is due this week, plus I broke a crown grinding my teeth in my sleep, plus somebody popped the knob off the back door while I was having this particular dentally destructive nightmare and stole my freaking guitar. Who steals a
guitar
, for Christ’s sake? You sure as shit can’t pawn the things for much, even when you need to.

And now Mister How is going to charge me for damages and a locksmith, like it’s all my fault. And I am, at this point, so broke I might well be unfixable.

I mean—you just think things are going to change, you know? Someday. Soon. Ish. Think: Sure, I never got my degree; sure, nobody pays you to do what I was studying anyway; sure, I’m pushing thirty-five and alone, still living in somebody’s basement, and the only good part of
that
equation is at least it’s not my parents’. But
things change
, right, whether you want them to or not. Even if you did nothing but sit by yourself in a room for fifty years, you’d still get old and die. And that’s got to count for
something
, doesn’t it?

Does it, fuck.

Whenever I get like this, what I always end up remembering is . . . that time after Mom and Dad’s divorce, when Oren and I were really at each other’s throats, and they took us to play-therapy. And Oren, sneering, told the therapist: “Oh yeah, Galit always wants to sing those stupid songs because she thinks if she just does it long enough, the fairies will come and take her away.”

So I bounced a china pony off his head, obviously, and the whole thing ended in tears and stitches. But you know? Yeah. Sorta. Even now. Because—Josh’s vaguely stalker-y stylings aside—these days, I seem to spend a fuck of a lot of time feeling like I could basically break my neck getting out of the shower, and it’d probably be a week before anybody ever thought to check on what that smell was. So no, I don’t expect Queen Titania to show up at my next busker job and whisk me away to Tír-na-nÓg, or anything . . . but it’d still be cool to think
anybody
might care enough about me to try.

Oh God, shit. I don’t know what to do.

Comments:

You could always come stay with us, Galit.

—Posted by:
[email protected]

September 2, 2004

Mood: Cautiously optimistic

Music: “King Henry,” Steeleye Span

Title: And in There Came a Griesly Ghost, Stamping on the Floor

Funny—and maybe just a little bit scary—how deceptively easy walking away from almost everything I own turned out to be, in the end. Funny, also, how fast the basic
illusion
of having money again seems to turn you back into a human being, in some people’s eyes . . . oh no, wait. That last part’s really not very funny at all.

Ganconer wrote Mister How a cheque for damages plus next month’s rent, which got me to where I could at least hit Gaucho Joe’s up for an a cappella set on their Open Mike, and pass the hat to get me up back to Mississauga. Mom and Kevin have been hinting around wanting me to visit, and since they apparently keep my room open and stocked like the local Motel Six anyway, I can’t feel too guilty, except that I (inevitably) do. But that’ll pass. ;)

Did the second version of “The Lake of the North” at the top of my roster, and that went surprisingly well; yes, the mike was a bit too loud, and I could hear all my consonants popping like bombs, but the breathy counterpoint had its own weird charm, as everybody in the audience seemed to agree, judging by the sound. Not to mention how the lights in there are so mercifully hot, it’s always virtually impossible to see exactly what’s going on beyond the first row, if that—though there
was
that odd flicker near the end of “Donologue,” my second song, during which I got a sudden glimpse of Ganconer talking animatedly with some chick near the couch-pit: her face backlit, a blur of motion hidden by hanging hair (red?), but I think she turned to smile at me, and I think he didn’t like that much. I think I could see the candlelight of a nearby table reflected on her teeth.

She was gone by the time my ovation was done, though, which just now strikes me as a trifle weird, too. Because I seem to recall her giving him a classic Fran Drescher talk-to-the-hand-flip and then striding off to her right, except . . . there’s no place to stride
to,
where her right would have been. Unless you count the wall.

Oh, and for those who are interested, the “new” version of “Lake” goes like this:

“So who was that?” I asked him; his cousin, he said, and added her name half under his breath, too low to really hear: something whacktastic, just like his, except the last part wasn’t Sidderstane at all. “They’re country-bound in the main; I’d not thought to see her here, nor any else of them.”