WEYES BLOOD

THE LAST CHAPTER: WEYES BLOOD AT SHEPHERD’S BUSH EMPIRE, SHEPHERD’S BUSH – 10/6/20 - CANCELLED

Imagine a world with no live music.

I get out of bed at seven fifty-eight. That’s not bad going for me these days. I go downstairs with the boy. I listen to the end of the Circuit des Yeux record that I’d started listening to the night before. I’m the kind of person that if I start listening to a record, I’ve got to finish listening to the record. That’s just the kind of person I am. I listen to Black Fly twice because it really is a very impressive song. 

  Every day I have the same thing for breakfast: banana, coffee, bagel (cinnamon and raisin). I mix it up a bit for the boy. He seems to get sick of stuff pretty quickly if he has it too many days in row. Yesterday he couldn’t get enough banana, for example, but today he can hardly even look at a banana. Today he’s having Fruit and Fibre. He doesn’t seem too mad about it though. He’s also going through a little phase where he won’t sit down and eat, so he kind of eats on the move. He keeps coming back to the table and eating another mouthful. 

  The girl comes down later when she starts to feel hungry. She eats breakfast and then they both play in the garden. The girl builds a den with an umbrella, and some blankets and cushions from the lounge, and even though it’s raining lightly, they sit out there underneath the umbrella, eating popcorn and crisps from these brightly coloured little bowls that we have.

  The postman knocks. He hands me two parcels. He never says anything to me; he just hands me the parcels. One is a record for me: Dias Rosas by Melenas from Monorail; the other is some netting for wife’s kitchen garden. I’m glad that there is a parcel for wife because it means that I don’t have to tell her that I have received yet another record. The truth is that my record buying has spiralled out of control recently. I dread to think how many I have bought since the lockdown started, nor about how much money I have spent. It is truly extravagant. Certainly by my standards, at least. 

  I wake wife with a coffee and a bagel at about ten thirty. “Mama,” says the boy. “Mama, mama, mama, mama.” And so on. 

  “He’s desperate to see you,” I say. 

  The boy clambers into the bed.

  “Is that all right?” I say.

  “Yeah, fine.”

  “I’m just going to get on with some work,” I say.

  “OK.”

  I put on the Melenas LP and get on with some work. Working from home has grown from ten minutes here and there, to a solid couple of hours a day. I set work for young people to do, and mark whatever they send to me. Today I mark a lockdown poem in which each verse ends with the refrain, ‘Will the world ever be the same?’ and I wonder if it will be. In one of the photos of the kid’s work that his mother has sent me, you can see her toes peeping out at the bottom of the frame. Her toenails are painted dark red.

  ‘Will the world ever be the same?’

  I don’t know. Will it?

  Probably. Eventually. Or maybe not. Probably not exactly the same.

  Good poem, I write. Really thought provoking. Effective use of rhetorical questions. Well done!

  While I’m marking the kids’ work wife puts the boy down for a nap. The girl comes down. She wants food. Plain pasta with butter. Not even any cheese. It’s funny how kids like really plain food. What’s that about? I think to myself as I boil some pasta for her. 

  We have no bread. “I’m just going to pop to the shop. Do you want anything?” I say when wife comes down.

  “Why are you going to the shop?” 

  “I just need a few things,” I say.

  “Like what?” 

  “Bread, milk, ketchup, icing sugar,” I say.

  Wife sort of laughs a bit to herself. “You need icing sugar?”

  “Yeah, I’ve run out,” I say.

  I go to the shop. I go to Sainsbury’s but they don’t have any ketchup, so I go to BILO Food Centre, which is a ten minute walk down Lordship Lane. 

  I buy milk, bread, ketchup, icing sugar. All the things I came to buy. I buy some butter as well. What the hell, I think, we always need butter. We get through butter like nobody’s business.

  I walk home. I make myself a vegetarian bacon and scrambled egg baguette. I eat it while reading about the latest episode of Prime Minister’s Questions. Wife tells me about this man who does funny things on Twitter. It’s vaguely amusing in the way that things on Twitter often are. 

  I read a chapter of The Adventures of Captain Underpants by Dav Pilkey to the girl and am just starting a second when the boy wakes up and starts crying. “He’s up,” says wife, holding the monitor.

  “I’ll go,” I say.

  “No, it’s OK. I’ll go.”

  Wife disappears upstairs. I go up a few minutes later. We all take our clothes off and lie in bed. We watch the first few minutes of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Then we decide to go out. We decide to go to Hampstead Heath.

  We get dressed, put on our shoes and get in the car. The girl screams repeatedly when I try to do up her straps. There’s no reason for it as far as I can see. “Shut up,” I say. I shouldn’t have, but I did.

  “Mummy,” says the girl, “daddy told me to shut up.”

  “He shouldn’t have said that,” says wife. “Say sorry.”

  “I’m sorry I told you to shut up,” I say. 

  We park behind Jack Straw’s Castle and walk to the heath. The heath is just what we need. It breathes some life back into us. We appreciate the trees. There are some mighty trees. We respect what we imagine is their profound, incomprehensible wisdom. 

  “Well,” says wife, “if this isn’t reason enough to move to the country, I don’t know what is.” Wife wants to move to the country. We’ve been talking about moving to the country for years. I can see the attraction but I’m not sure it would be a good idea. As mother might say, we’re “London people”. I’m not sure we’d be right in the country.

  We order dinner and pick it up from Wagamama in Hampstead. We get home, wash our hands, heat up the food and eat. The boy doesn’t eat anything without being coerced. Earlier on I had listened to Side A of The Last Song of My Life by Tori Kudo, and so we listen to Side B while we eat dinner, or at least it’s on in the background.  After dinner I wash up, clean up and vacuum while wife gets the kids bathed. I say good night to the boy, and put the girl to bed. I tell her some stories and say good night. I go downstairs and look at some web pages. I need a poo so I go back upstairs and do a poo. While I am pooing the girl comes into the bathroom. “Can you help me get a book, because I can’t get to sleep?” she says. 

  “Sure,” I say. I pick out Matilda. I say good night again, and go downstairs again. I make some cinnamon buns. I have become pretty good at making cinnamon buns. If you had known me before you’d never have thought me the kind of person who is pretty good at making cinnamon buns, but here I am, anyway, pretty good at making cinnamon buns. 

  Wife comes downstairs. She looks outside. “She’s left my cushions out there.” She sighs. “I’d just washed those.” She turns to me. “Do you mind getting those in? They shouldn’t be left outside.” 

  “Sure,” I say. I go outside and collect the cushions and blankets. There is that rain out there that doesn’t seem to fall but just seems to hang in the air. I love that kind of rain. It’s my favourite kind of rain. Wife and I start having what becomes a heated conversation about white privilege. Wife tells me that I need to “deconstruct my white privilege” and I accuse her of using jargon and say that I don’t know what that means or how I would go about doing it. 

  “I was supposed to be seeing Weyes Blood tonight,” I say wistfully. And exactly a year ago, I think, I was watching Cate Le Bon perform What’s Not Mine at Village Underground, which was one of the most memorable moments of my silly little pointless life.

  Wife sorts of laughs a bit as if to say, “Bloody hell, with everything that’s going on in the world, and all you bloody care about is that you can’t go to a bloody gig.” 

  “Oh well,” she says. “Never mind.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Never mind.”

THE END OF NIGHTS OUT