Before Your Very Eyes. Alex George
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me,’ said Joe. ‘Where’s the magic shop you work in?’
Simon named an address near Victoria Station.
‘I know the area,’ said Joe. ‘Maybe I’ll pop by.’
‘That would be cool,’ said Simon, slightly bemused.
‘Right,’ said Joe. ‘Hope you feel better soon.’
‘Thanks.’
‘See you, then,’ said Joe. He began to extend his hand towards Simon, but then thought better of the gesture and instead thrust it deep into his pocket, before turning and walking quickly out of the ward.
Simon settled back into his pillows. Well, he thought, that was a bit weird. He wondered whether Joe would ever bother to contact him again. He thought it was unlikely. Joe had come to see how Simon was and to apologize, and even that was probably more than Simon had a right to expect. He had seemed nice enough. A cynic when it came to women, of course, but otherwise all right. Despite his behaviour at the party, concluded Simon, Joe couldn’t be all bad. Simon checked the grape bag to see if there were any loose grapes rolling around the bottom of the bag. There weren’t. His wrist throbbed. He lay back and waited for something to happen.
Nothing did.
Later on that afternoon, Simon had his X-ray.
Soon afterwards, an attractive young doctor appeared by the side of the bed. ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘My name’s Dr Gilbert. We’ve had a look at the X-ray, and the good news is that it’s just a bad sprain.’
‘Oh good,’ said Simon. He was itching to ask exactly what had happened to his foot, but was too ashamed to ask.
‘There’s also some severe bruising around the big toe, and that’s swollen quite badly as a result. But that should go down in a couple of days.’
‘Right,’ said Simon, who thought Dr Gilbert was rather pretty.
The doctor put her pen into the breast pocket of her white coat. ‘The nurse will come along in a minute and bandage your foot up to keep it nice and firm. After that you’ll be able to go.’ She paused. ‘You’re going to need crutches,’ she said. ‘And I suggest you take things gently at first. They’re not as easy to use as you’d imagine. If there’s something to hit, you’ll hit it.’
‘Right,’ said Simon again. He flashed Dr Gilbert his best smile. ‘Thanks ever so much.’
‘Not at all,’ said Dr Gilbert. ‘Come back in a week and we’ll have a look and see how you’re doing. And I suggest you keep away from coffee machines for a while.’ She winked at him.
Simon stared back at her blankly. ‘Er, thanks,’ he said. ‘I will.’
Dr Gilbert turned away from him and strode down the ward without a second glance. Simon watched her go, perplexed. Coffee machines? What was all that about?
A little while later Simon Teller stumbled into a taxi at the front entrance of the hospital, his inelegant embarkation surpassed only by an even more spectacular exit twenty minutes later, which left him sprawled on the pavement outside his flat, his new crutches splayed either side of him. Dr Gilbert had been right. The crutches would take some getting used to. Having his hand bandaged up made matters worse.
The taxi driver watched with amusement as Simon picked himself up and hobbled to the window to pay the fare.
‘You ought to have “L” plates, mate,’ said the driver jovially as he pocketed Simon’s money. ‘Do someone an injury, heh, heh.’
As Simon opened the door of his flat, relief washed over him. He was home at last. He stood in the hallway and cast his eyes fondly over familiar things. Immediately the pain in his foot seemed to subside a little. He went into the sitting room. Simon sat on his sofa and listened for signs of movement from the upstairs flat. There was silence. Simon wondered whether that meant that Angus and Fergus had gone out, or that they simply had not bothered to get up yet. He looked at his watch. It was six-thirty in the evening. The second explanation was more likely.
Simon saw he had a message on his answer machine. He hauled himself to the other end of the sofa and pressed the button.
‘Hi, it’s me. Just calling to see how things were, and to check that you’re still coming round tonight. There’s somebody here who has something she wants to show you. Anyway. Whether that’s going to entice you to come or make you stay away, I don’t know. Give me a ring. Speak to you later.’
Simon shut his eyes and groaned. Of course. It was Sunday.
For the past three years, Simon had gone to his sister Arabella’s house one Sunday night a month.
Arabella was three years older than Simon. An early lack of affection for each other, due to the usual sibling jealousies, had subsequently been exacerbated by the on-set of prolonged adolescences. The tree of Arabella’s teenage years had borne a particularly fruitful crop of loathings and petty rebellions. For eighteen months she said almost nothing to either of her parents or to Simon. Most of that time was spent in her bedroom, where she listened to loud music, sat in front of her mirror applying make-up, and smoked out of her window. From time to time she would swish dramatically down the stairs in a shapeless black shawl, barely recognisable beneath an improbable kaleidoscope of lurid make-up. She would eye her family in silence for a few moments, and then slam the door behind her without saying a word, leaving the rest of the family looking at each other in a bemused way.
Then, a few weeks after her seventeenth birthday, Bella met a boy who played rugby. Overnight she became a picture of femininity, a vision of pastels and pearls.
Simon’s own adolescence was a less polished affair. He tried to cultivate an aura of affected loucheness, listening to Southern Death Cult records as he puffed on Sobranie Cocktails. He looked like the pimply love-child of Marc Bolan and Noel Coward.
After a while, though, Simon decided that another approach was needed. Realizing that adolescence was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, he did some research, and read Catcher in the Rye. The whole point, he saw, was that in order to do the whole teenage angst thing properly, you were supposed to feel alienated. That was the key. You were meant to be different.
In an attempt to irritate his father and create some measure of distance between himself and his friends, Simon raided his father’s record collection to try and find something different to listen to. (Musical taste was, of course, the principal criterion by which Simon and his peers judged each other, with the possible exception of the pointiness of one’s winkle-pickers.) At random he picked out an old Sidney Bechet LP, the unpromising words Jazz Classics, Volume One emblazoned down one side of the sleeve in large letters. On the cover was a picture of an old black man, leaning out of a window smoking a cigarette with a contemplative look on his face. Simon took the record back to his room.
Simon did not leave his room for three hours. When he did, it was to go back to his father’s record collection to look for more Sidney Bechet. He had listened to the record four times over. Bechet’s scorching soprano saxophone cut loose through the old jazz standards of New Orleans’ hey-day, wailing and honking with a vibrant and fervent joy. Simon hardly moved except to spin the record from one side to the other. As he sat on his bed, transfixed by the music, he realized that something important was happening, something that would remain with him the rest of his life. As the ensemble floated through Muskrat Ramble for the third time, Simon Teller, dizzy with music, fell in love.
After that, everything changed. Simon gave his other records, festooned with skulls and inverted crosses, away. Instead he began to buy jazz records, and soon discovered the music’s broad spectrum of colours, textures, and feelings. He started with the brittle modal jazz of Miles Davis, and then spiralled in all directions from