Karaoke Night at the Vindication

It's the first Sunday of the month, so this week's longer story is free for everyone. It's about doing karaoke in a different town where nobody knows you.

I am perhaps a little discombobulated this week, as a result of returning from Eigg to my office job, and the discovery that our adopted cat was once named Biggie Smalls. I don't think this has unduly affected the daily stories, but I will let you be the judge.

This week’s daily stories

Monday

Everyone is jealous of my little teal Mini. I see it when I’m driving, when I’m parking up, when I’m out washing it. One day someone’s going to put a key down that beautiful paintwork. One day someone in the oncoming lane is going to pull across and smash into me, just so I can’t have it anymore. I hope they do it soon. I hate that colour.

Tuesday

Outside, people were hurrying along beneath newspapers. This confused Graham, since few people take a newspaper these days, and since it wasn’t raining. He waited impatiently for the lift to arrive, and to carry him down, and to open its doors on the ground floor. Then he stepped outside. There was neither rain nor beating sun, and as Graham walked he tried to catch someone’s eye, but with their hurry and the newspaper drooping over their faces it was difficult. After a minute or so, he began to feel a prickling, first at the back of his neck, then his shoulders, then his scalp. He rushed for the bin, for the locked door of the newsagents, for any sort of cover he could find, but there was nothing left.

Wednesday

When I was a fly I was often waved away from picnics and al-fresco tables, from all the places where the good food was. Now I am a man it is much the same, though once in a while I am invited to sit and have my glass filled. And sometimes, too, there is still that kind of generosity I feared before: the kind that drowns you in syrup and wine.

Thursday

Nobody was looking at the crack. A few hadn’t noticed, but most had chosen to look away. Of those, some were afraid they would see it get bigger and some were afraid it would become theirs to attend to. I had been of all three types in my time. They all had me smooth on the surface and cracked somewhere beneath. So now I look, ready for painful truth, ready to bear responsibility. Or so I thought. Tell me – being the only one brave enough to look – shouldn’t that be enough?

Friday

I never slept more than an hour at a time. Every sound was a burglar. Every silence was someone hiding in the dark. My hair was greying. My hands were swollen. One morning Jackie knocked on my door carrying a cardboard box with holes punched in it. Inside was a cat who looked almost as rough as I did. Jackie went back to her car for food and bowls and a handwritten sheet of instructions, and then she left. That night, I didn’t sleep thirty minutes at a time. Every silence was the cat, frightened, hiding, not eating. But now, every noise is just little Fernando, and I sleep right through. And the burglars didn’t take anything that mattered.

Saturday

There wasn’t much left at the yard sale by the time I arrived. A kid’s bike helmet. A dog bowl. I bought the single walkie-talkie, price one pound. Somehow its being completely useless didn’t make that feel any less of a bargain. At home I changed the batteries and saw the light come on, and that was that, I supposed. But almost straight away it crackled into life with a message I couldn’t make out. “Receiving,” I replied, “Please identify. Over.” It was worth a pound to talk that way. A moment later the voice was back: “I just got this walkie talkie from some kid for 50p.” I threw mine at the wall, and the fresh batteries rolled away. He didn’t even say “Over.”

Sunday

Kev got the fruit machine at auction, with fourteen pounds still in the cash drawer, which made for a nice little discount. When he had fixed it up and changed the lock he persuaded Maeve to have it in the corner of the lounge bar, with a fifty-fifty split on the takings, since it would be drinking her customers' beer money. It made a tidy profit, and sometimes Kev sat in the opposite corner and watched. He liked to see it earning for him while he had a quiet drink. He even liked to see it pay out: the cheers, the celebratory rounds. But there was that one older fella, who came in Friday lunchtimes and posted up until the bell rang or his money ran out. Kev didn't like to watch that, or to empty the cash drawer afterwards. He started paying Maeve's lad to do it. He started drinking over the road instead.

I have been reading...

• The Crofter and the Laird by John McPhee, which has been on my shelf for a while but leapt off it following my trip to Eigg.
• I was similarly moved to leaf through O Choille gu Bearradh/From Wood to Ridge, which collects Sorley MacLean's Gaelic poetry with his own English translations. This seems to be out of print now; the currently available collected poems seems to be Caoir Gheal Leumraich/White Leaping Flame.
• Having got over my Scottish island kick, I started on The Colony by Audrey Magee, which I had out from the library but remembered nothing about. It turns out to be about an artist visiting a small island. But this one's Irish!
• Away from islands, I also read (Don't) Call Mum by Matt Wesolowski, part of Wild Hunt Books' Northern Weird Project. It's a fun book, perhaps more as straightforwardly scary story than a weird one. I think it's most effective in how it captures the in-betweenness of early adulthood.

If you buy books linked to from Scattering, I may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops.

Karaoke Night at the Vindication

There was a note that Zoë couldn’t hit. Not in the shower and not in the car and not with the hoover on. But she could hit it at the Vindication. With Silver Jim’s scuffed-up mic in her hand and a display board of Scampi Fries to sing to, she didn’t see it coming until she was already past it. She sailed up and over and back down into the last chorus, and it felt like the hills had when she hired that ebike.

Afterwards, Silver Jim said to her “We should stop letting you come in. You’re showing the rest of them up,” and Zoë blushed, even though she had heard him say it to four other women. But they had all been young and pretty, and Jim might not have been thinking of their voices. She smiled and rolled her eyes as she handed back the microphone, and he went on with introducing the next performers, Kim and Johnny singing “A Little Respect”.

Zoë went to the bar and ordered a diet Coke. Eight months ago, when she first started coming to the Vindication, it would have had a double rum in it. For her nerves, and because she thought it looked strange to come out and not drink. But the nerves had never really been there, only her expectation of them. As for the look of it, well, she had learned as a teenager that nobody could see the difference between plain Coke and rum & Coke. Besides, on her first sober night, she had discovered she if these people thought she was strange, and for their part, none of them did. And it was all easier, with a clear head. Easier to hit the notes. Easier to say what she meant. Easier to remember that her name was Zoë.

🎤

The first time she took the train to Barcombe, she wasn’t Zoë yet. The train had been almost empty, just a few commuters who worked late or had stopped for a swift half after work. Anyone dressed up like her was going the other way, heading to the city she was leaving, where the nightlife was. But her date assumed she would come to him, and she, keen to please, had proved him right. She arrived in that strange town and made her way to the strange bar they had agreed on, where that strange man stood her up.

If she had turned around then, she could have got home just as soon as if she never left the station. She couldn't face it, shoving onto the train with all those pre-drunk out-of-towners. She felt stupid coming out here just to go straight home.

She left the bar, and turned quickly onto a side street. It was winter, treacle-dark already. Not-Zoë liked dark streets, despite a lifetime of warnings. She liked to wrap herself in a long coat and a long night and walk about with nobody seeing her. But that night, it didn't feel right. She had readied herself to be seen, for the gamble of it. And perhaps she had been seen, through the window or across the room, and the gamble had failed. But she had a terrible itch to chase her losses. She wanted to throw off her coat and show herself to this whole town. And why not? Nobody here knew her. Anyone she saw tonight she would in most likely never see again. She could walk naked back to the station if she wanted to. Maybe she did want to.

It was as she thought that thought, and her hand toyed idly with the button of her coat, that she passed the door of the Vindication, and heard the sound of ABBA filtering through it. And she thought for a second time a thought that had become something a stranger to her: "Why not?"

That, she sometimes told herself after, was the best night of her life. She knew it wasn't true: she had sat quietly in a corner for most of it, and only sang once, writing the name she always wished she had on Silver Jim’s little slip. She didn't even get the last train home. If it had been the best night of her life, then she wouldn't have gone back. She would have put it in a little box and taken it out to look at when she couldn't sleep. You shouldn't try to have the best night of your life again, Zoë thought. The best day of your life is meant to be your wedding day, isn't it? And if you have another one of those then it means the first one didn't work out, one way or another.

🎤

Zoë didn't go to the Vindication karaoke night every week. She had a life back home, after all, as much as she might try to forget it. But she went most weeks. She had never been a regular at anything without some manner of rot setting in, resentment or obligation or just plain boredom. But the Vindication excited her every time. The pub wasn't her kind of pub and the people weren't her kind of people and what surprised her the most was that it didn't matter. She could be the kind of person who doesn't care only for her kind of person in her kind of place. She could wash up with a bunch of strangers and come to love them just because. At her kind of pub, her kind of people had insulted her and patronised her and threatened her and belittled her, and done it all in that quiet way that meant they could blame her, too, if she made a fuss. The men at her kind of pub would have called Silver Jim a creep as a way to get your guard down. She was sick of her kind of people. She wanted to spit them out onto the train tracks for the city to keep.

So she had. She had given her notice on the flat and at work, although like most of the rest of Barcombe she could have commuted. She packed up all her things and discovered that there weren't very many of them, after all. That was a relief. She wanted everything new. She moved into a furnished flat with a rucksack and a suitcase, not far from where she had been stood up. For the first time, it occurred to her to wonder where that man was. If she had passed him in the street, or at the station. If he had seen her singing at the Vindication and recognised her, and kicked himself for missing his chance. If she had seen him singing there, and not known it, and if he had been any good.

On the first morning, she woke up scared to go out. She had never been on these streets in the early light. She had never seen them quiet and empty, or industrious, full of people working and shopping and sober. It felt a little like waking up next to someone you had only seen in the half-light: the fear of finding out who you had gone to bed with, and what it meant about you.

But the town was cute enough. At the bottom of the stairs that led up to her flat there was a handsome old bike and a folded pushchair. On the street outside there were sensible cars bought second hand for cash, kept clean but not too shiny. As she walked down to the high street she saw a single pint glass, a cider logo printed on the side, liberated from some pub or other and left carefully on a garden wall. She slipped it into her shopping bag. She had nothing in the flat to drink from except her stupid oversized water bottle.

She bought one of everything from the charity shops: one plate, one bowl, one mug, one knife, one fork. One day, she would need more. She would have friends round to eat, Sally who only sang Sinatra in a winking baritone you wouldn't think fit inside her, or Imran who never put his name down but spent all night singing along and never missed a word. One morning she would need a second plate for someone else's breakfast. But for now, simple felt good.

As the sun set over the railway line, she cooked supermarket tortellini in tomato sauce and ate it from the pan like she had as a student. She changed, not into her best clothes, but into fun ones: a top with a bit of sparkle, a skirt that whirled out when she turned. She put on the lipstick her mum said men wouldn't like and Silver Jim said made her look like the rockstar she was, and went out.

She didn't recognise the feeling at first: the shimmer at her breastbone, the shivers in her vision. She thought the pasta must not have been enough. It was a feeling she knew well, but not here: like running into a colleague in the swimming baths and not recognising them. She had never been nervous on her way to the Vindication. For half a breath, she could feel the top note lifting away from her, just out of reach. But that was change, and you had to change sometimes.

With her head so fuzzy, she didn't notice the quiet. She just felt something wrong, unplaceable. As she drew closer and heard the rustle of wind in a tree, she understood, and she thought: of course, without the office and the train I'm early. She thought about Silver Jim setting up, pulling boxes and cables from his big hard cases, his pint of stout placed carefully two tables away where nothing would catch it. She thought about taking the first song, and announcing to them all on the mike that she was here to stay, and what she would sing. But she knew she wasn't early. Those nerves, that tooth-tightening uncertainty that was not Zoë, had made her late. And Silver Jim's lights were not shining through the windows of the Vindication, because the windows were covered with big plywood boards, roughly whitewashed. On the locked door was a laminated notice that she couldn't seem to read. She thought of Sally belting out "My Way" with tears in her eyes, and how it had felt like a sign, like something that was about her life. She thought of all her friends, knowing and thinking that she knew, and not wanting to talk about it. She thought about her one fork, drying on the draining board. She sat on the cold front step of the Vindication, and sang to herself, just quietly. Her voice was close to breaking. But she hit all the notes.