Dreams Underfoot

“Oh, Geordie,” Jilly murmured as she held me close. “I’m so sorry.

* * *

I don’t know if the ghost was ever seen again, but I saw Sam one more time after that night. I was with Jilly in Moore’s Antiques in Lower Crowsea, flipping through a stack of old sepiatoned photographs, when a group shot of a family on their front porch stopped me cold. There, among the somber faces, was Sam. She looked different. Her hair was drawn back in a tight bun and she wore a plain unbecoming dark dress, but it was Sam all right. I turned the photograph over and read the photographer’s date on the back. 1912.

Something of what I was feeling must have shown on my face, for Jilly came over from a basket of old earrings that she was looking through.

“What’s the matter, Geordie, me lad?” she asked.

Then she saw the photograph in my hand. She had no trouble recognizing Sam either. I didn’t have any money that day, but Jilly bought the picture and gave it to me. I keep it in my fiddle case.

I grow older each year, building up a lifetime of memories, only I’ve no Sam to share them with. But often when it rains, I go down to Stanton Street and stand under the streetlight in front of the old Hamill estate. One day I know she’ll be waiting there for me.

Freewheeling

There is apparently nothing that cannot happen.

— Attributed to Mark Twain

There are three kinds of people: those who make things happen, those who watch things happen, and those who wonder, “what happened?”

— Message found inside a Christmas cracker

1

He stood on the rainslick street, a pale fire burning behind his eyes. Nerve ends tingling, he watched them go—a slow parade of riderless bicycles.

Tenspeeds and mountain bikes. Domesticated, urban. So inbred that all they were was spoked wheels and emaciated frames, mere skeletons of what their genetic ancestors had been. They had never known freedom, never known joy; only the weight of serious riders in slick, leatherseated shorts, pedaling determinedly with their cycling shoes strapped to the pedals, heads encased in crash helmets, fingerless gloves on the hands gripping the handles tightly.

He smiled and watched them go. Down the wet street, wheels throwing up arcs of fine spray, metal frames glistening in the streetlights, reflector lights winking red.

The rain had plastered his hair slick against his head, his clothes were sodden, but he paid no attention to personal discomfort. He thought instead of that fatwheeled aboriginal onespeed that led them now. The maverick who’d come from who knows where to pilot his domesticated brothers and sisters away.

For a night’s freedom. Perhaps for always.

The last of them were rounding the corner now. He lifted his right hand to wave goodbye. His left hand hung down by his leg, still holding the heavyduty wire cutters by one handle, the black rubber grip making a ribbed pattern on the palm of his hand. By fences and on porches, up and down the street, locks had been cut, chains lay discarded, bicycles ran free.

He heard a siren approaching. Lifting his head, he licked the rain drops from his lips. Water got in his eyes, gathering in their corners. He squinted, enamored by the kaleidoscoping spray of lights this caused to appear behind his eyelids. There were omens in lights, he knew. And in the night sky, with its scattershot sweep of stars. So many lights ... There were secrets waiting to unfold there, mysteries that required a voice to be freed.

Like the bicycles were freed by their maverick brother. He could be that voice, if he only knew what to sing.

He was still watching the sky for signs when the police finally arrived.

“Let me go, boys, let me go ....”

The new Pogues album If I Should Fall From Grace With God was on the turntable. The title cut leaked from the sound system’s speakers, one of which sat on a crate crowded with halfused paint tubes and tins of turpentine, the other perched on the windowsill, commanding a view of rainswept Yoors Street one floor below. The song was jauntier than one might expect from its subject matter while Shane MacGowan’s voice was as rough as ever, chewing the words and spitting them out, rather than singing them.

It was an angry voice, Jilly decided as she hummed softly along with the chorus. Even when it sang a tender song. But what could you expect from a group that had originally named itself Pogue Mahone—Irish Gaelic for “Kiss my ass”?

Angry and brash and vulgar. The band was all of that. But they were honest, too—painfully so, at times—and that was what brought Jilly back to their music, time and again. Because sometimes things just had to be said.

“I don’t get this stuff,” Sue remarked.

She’d been frowning over the lyrics that were printed on the album’s inner sleeve. Leaning her head against the patched backrest of one of Dilly’s two old sofas, she set the sleeve aside.

“I mean, music’s supposed to make you feel good, isn’t it?” she went on.

Jilly shook her head. “It’s supposed to make you feel something— happy, sad, angry, whatever—just so long as it doesn’t leave you braindead the way most Top Forty does. For me, music needs meaning to be worth my time—preferably something more than ‘I want your body, babe,’ if you know what I mean.”

“You’re beginning to develop a snooty attitude, Jilly.”

“Me? To laugh, dahling.”

Susan Ashworth was Jilly’s uptown friend, as urbane as Jilly was scruffy. Sue’s blonde hair was straight, hanging to just below her shoulders, where Jilly’s was a riot of brown curls, made manageable tonight only by a clip that drew it all up to the top of her head before letting it fall free in the shape of something that resembled nothing so much as a disenchanted Mohawk. They were both in their twenties, slender and blueeyed—the latter expected in a blonde; the electric blue ofJilly’s eyes gave her, with her darker skin, a look of continual startlement. Where’ Sue wore just the right amount of makeup, Jilly could usually be counted on having a smudge of charcoal somewhere on her face and dried oil paint under her nails.

Sue worked for the city as an architect; she lived uptown and her parents were from the Beaches, where it seemed you needed a permit just to be out on the sidewalks after eight in the evening—or at least that was the impression that the police patrols left when they stopped strangers to check their ID.

She always had that upscale look of one who was just about to step out to a restaurant for cocktails and dinner.

Jilly’s first love was art of a freer style than designing municipal necessities, but she usually paid her rent by waitressing and other odd jobs. She tended to wear baggy clothes—like the oversized white Tshirt and blue poplin lacefront pants she had on tonight—and always had a sketchbook close at hand.

Tonight it was on her lap as she sat propped up on her Murphy bed, toes in their ballet slippers tapping against one another in time to the music. The Pogues were playing an instrumental now-“Metropolis”—which sounded like a cross between a Celtic fiddle tune and the old “Dragnet”

theme.

“They’re really not for me,” Sue went on. “I mean if the guy could sing, maybe, but—”

“It’s the feeling that he puts into his voice that’s important,” Jilly said. “But this is an instrumental.

He’s not even—”