Before Your Very Eyes - Alex George

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jump of Count Basie.

      The music was spell-binding, but Simon’s fixation went further than that. He adored the stories, the legends, and the myths that surrounded the charismatic and enigmatic people who played jazz. Beguiled by the faded glamour, in his imagination he immersed himself in the smoky netherworld of jazz clubs, and the musicians who played there, men punctured by their own brilliance. Scenes played themselves out in Simon’s mind in the grainy black-and-white of the effortlessly cool photographs of the period. The world he inhabited in his head was unattainable, forty years old and an ocean away. It was a world of flawed genius, dashed hopes, and the cataclysmic ravagings of drugs and self-destruction. It was a world of iconoclasts, dreamers and idealists. And it was his to frolic in as he wished.

      Once the heavy chains of teenagerdom had been shaken off, Arabella went to Cambridge to read English, Simon to Bristol to read History. They did not see each other often. Finally both had gravitated to London, like errant moths to the brightest lightbulb. Arabella began a promising career at a small, independent publishing house in North London. Simon, who did not feel that he was quite ready for the responsibility of a proper job, drifted aimlessly between various enjoyable but poorly paid and short-lived careers. Cautiously, bridges between brother and sister began to be rebuilt. Trips were shared to their parents’ home in Wiltshire. Invitations to dinner were issued, reciprocated, and enjoyed. After a year they discovered, to their surprise, that they liked each other.

      Shortly afterwards, Arabella fell in love with a lawyer called Michael, and they were married the following spring.

      Simon’s parents stoically did their best to find the good things in Michael, for Arabella’s sake, but there was little good to find. Family visits became tense affairs. Michael made no effort to be polite. He treated his new family with teeth-gritted disdain. Arabella and Michael’s visits became less frequent, especially after the birth of their daughter, Sophy. When family reunions were unavoidable, Michael could be hostile towards Simon all day, but when pressed to remember specific incidents, Simon couldn’t name one. It was the social equivalent of Chinese water torture. Any one individual act seemed innocuous, but cumulatively the effect was devastating. After a while it was decided by tacit agreement that it was easier to avoid each other completely than endure further unpleasantness.

      As a result of Michael’s behaviour, Simon had not seen Arabella for several months when the telephone had rung one Monday evening in late November, three years previously. It was the North Wiltshire police. There had been an accident.

      His parents had been driving home from their weekly bridge club along the narrow hedgerow-lined lanes which latticed the countryside surrounding their village. A car had come too quickly in the opposite direction round a tight corner. The car’s back wheels had lost traction. It had spun, and crashed into the side of his parents’ car. All three people had been killed instantly. At the inquest, a dour-faced policeman announced that the driver of the speeding car had a blood alcohol content four and a half times in excess of the legal limit.

      One drunk driver. That was how tenuous his parents’ grip on life had been. His mother had taught English in a local school, and his father was an accountant who spent his spare time building model aeroplanes which he flew at displays on the weekends. They were kind, uncomplicated people. His father would always raise his six o’clock gin and tonic and seriously intone, ‘The Fish of God’ – his own translation of Carpe Diem, Seize the Day. He hadn’t finished seizing his days. It was unbearably sad.

      To Simon’s surprise, his parents’ estate had been significant. Despite his professed belief in living for today, Simon’s father had been planning for tomorrow. Some prudent investments, a generous insurance policy, their large, mortgage-free family home – when the assets had been realized, there was enough for both Arabella and Simon to pay off their debts and live comfortably off the balance of capital.

      The funeral had been terrible. The sympathetic and bewildered condolences of well-meaning friends and neighbours had had to be endured, the telling of interminable anecdotes borne with a polite smile. Throughout the sober-suited canapes after the service, Simon had fought the urge to escape. It was only when he returned to his empty flat at the end of the day that the accumulated grief of the past week finally burst forth. He stood in the middle of the flat that he had longed to escape to all afternoon, and suddenly saw that there was no escape. Your parents were not supposed to die. They were solidly dependable, a safety net of affection and reliability which had always hung reassuringly beneath Simon and his endeavours. Now the safety net was gone, and nothing was going to bring it back. Simon had wept long, hot tears that night.

      Life, of course, went on, albeit in a faltering fashion. For weeks after the funeral, Simon’s waking hours were tinged with a despairing sense of unreality. Only slowly did he come to terms with what had happened, the hollow permanence of his parents’ absence. Then came the regrets, of the warm words left unspoken, the awkward emotions never expressed.

      Finding themselves parentless so unexpectedly had thrown Simon and Arabella back together again. Bella of course had a family of her own, but she had welcomed him into it and slowly they had begun to reacquaint themselves. They established a comfortable ritual of Sunday night suppers; elbows on the table, homely food and warm talk. Their evenings together had become a source of deep comfort to them both.

      

      Simon looked around his sitting room. The floor was strewn with old record covers, the colourful designs of the Blue Note and Columbia labels migrating in all directions from the record player. Simon had resolutely refused to succumb to the compact disc revolution. There was a magic about sliding the black slabs of vinyl from their musty cardboard sleeves which the clinical silver discs could never replicate. Jazz was about feeling, a sensuous experience which was more than just the sound coming out of the speakers. The cover art, the smell of old cardboard, the anticipatory crackle as the stylus settled into place before the music began – these were all integral parts of the experience. Simon’s collection of second-hand records was carefully arranged in alphabetical order, from Albert Ayler to Joe Zawinul. It was to the dust-covered comfort of these records that he retreated when he needed to escape.

      The sitting room was dominated by a large sofa, which sat in front of a small television. There were two rattan wastepaper baskets, in opposite corners of the room. They were both overflowing. A Thelonious Monk poster hung on the wall behind the sofa. Over the television was a photograph of a young Chet Baker, his trumpet hanging disconsolately at his side as he moodily contemplated whatever story was unfolding behind the camera.

      Usually Simon derived comfort from his flat’s messy homeliness (his expression), but that evening he felt a rising sense of claustrophobia as he surveyed the chaos (a more accurate description, possibly) surrounding him. Going to see Arabella in Battersea would be a pain on crutches, but it would be better than hobbling around the flat all evening until it was time to flop into bed.

      Simon decided he couldn’t face the prospect of London Transport just yet. He pulled on his coat, gathered his crutches, and went back outside to find another taxi.

      Half an hour later Simon stood outside the front door of Arabella’s house on one of the more fashionable streets running off the north side of Clapham Common. He pressed the doorbell. Immediately there was a chorus of shrieks and barking, the sound of things falling over and footsteps hurtling towards the door. Simon braced himself.

      The door opened, and a flash of brown shot past Simon into the front garden.

      ‘Daniel!’ shouted Arabella. ‘Come back here, you little sod.’

      ‘Hello,’ said Simon.

      ‘Hello. What happened to you?’ asked Arabella, looking Simon up and down.

      ‘Long story,’ said Simon. He raised his bandaged hand a couple of inches. ‘I got this because a man farted in my face.’

      Arabella regarded her brother evenly. ‘Must have been some fart,’ she said. ‘What about your foot?’

      ‘As for that…actually, I don’t know,’ Simon confessed. ‘Nobody at the hospital would tell me.’

      Arabella

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