festival for departed souls

This morning I passed a parade of hairdressers, at attention on the pavement outside their shop.  Their boss, his blow-dried spikes bobbing, read from his clip-board like a regimental sergeant major.  Their jeans and tops were an irregular uniform.  None of them could quite manage to look at attention, and why should they, they were hairdressers.

All along the river front, waiters and waitresses, cooks and shop assistants were being put through their morning parades; while the staff of the local supermarket were bobbing through their morning exercise – touching toes and swinging their arms up and down – before being marched into work. 

Nothing strange about the daily parades.  Communism – or maybe something older – still lingers in China in a few scattered puddles like these.  What was strange was the autumn smell of burning in the summer streets; detached groups of people along the river front burning piles of fake paper money to their ancestors – or, it seemed by the number of old women, to husbands who had already passed away. Monks were working in a next door flat, muttering their way through the sutras, a tape player filled in the sound of cymbals, and the open windows smoked with incense and tobacco.  The temples were busy with bowing people, burning incense, fussy nuns pushing people on. 

As the late afternoon sky darkened a storm arrived at the top of Hongqi Road, black and angry.  The storm was fast, thunder growing louder as fat raindrops splattered on concrete, hissed into the hot ashes. I was hurrying home with a kilo of grapes and a handful of bananas, my son, Percy, on my shoulders carrying the umbrella over us both.  He was too young to worry about the rain.  ‘Go out!’ he said, even though we were out. 

We passed the stumps of two red candles by a pile of smoking ashes as a raindrop hit home.  The candle flames spluttered, one of them went out, and all of a sudden the rain was so intense that I had to run, and in that last thirty yard dash my shoes were soaked and my calves were splattered with dirt.

‘Go out!’ my son said when we were home, but it was time for dinner and bath and bed.  It was then that the lightning struck close by.  Red sparks flew from the light sockets.  The lights shuddered.  My wife put her hand to her mouth.  Our baby, Maddy, started to cry.

I picked the baby up and then the storm didn’t seem so bad, and she sat in my lap and stared up into the plunging shafts of rain.  We were still laughing about the last strike when there was a close fizzle and clap.  A second strike happened moments later, even closer this time and the electric socket’s glowed red then the lights went out and did not come back. 

We sat by candlelight and opened a bottle of red wine. 

After a couple of hours of darkness a man with a ladder came to rewire the block.  He was a black shape in the tangle of wires, his lit cigarette illuminating the left side of his face. 

When the power came back, Elle, my wife put on some music.  Solitude Standing.  Susan Vega.  Whenever I hear Susan Vega I think of Anton.  He was in her band. 

Our wives were friends in NYC.  That’s how we met.  When we meet up we laugh a lot.  And talk, too.  All four of us around the table.  He’s a composer now.  You’ve probably heard his stuff on some film somewhere on tv or in the cinema   

When we lived on 55^th Street I joined his book club, an odd bunch writers and professors and shrinks and film producers.  We met in Manhattan restaurants or Brooklyn brownstones.  The books were pretty forgettable, most of the time we talked about the latest episode of the Sopranos. 

It was a couple of years before I found, from someone else that he’d toured with REM. 

‘What Michael Stipe was like?’ I asked.

Anton seemed almost surprised.  ‘Er,’ he said.  ‘Bla.’

Another time we saw a film called Rabbit Proof Fence.

It was ok, but once you’d seen the poster you knew the plot. 

The soundtrack was written by Peter Gabriel. 

‘How can you tell?’ I asked.

‘Percussion,’ he said.

The last time I saw him was during a short visit to upstate New York.  I stood in his studio. It’s a shingled house with cathedral ceilings in a clearing in a wood in upstate New York. I don’t remember much else except a table with a computer set just off the middle of the room.  And large speakers, I guess. Hell – he’s a composer.

He showed the programme he uses to write music and it was a hot May day when Elle was still heavily pregnant with Maddy and Percy could not quite walk yet.  Anton’s wife, Tai, took Percy and swung on a swing tied to an overhanging branch.  The grass was summer-yellow; it was a warm day; Tai and Percy swung back and forth.  I took some pictures on the camera.  As the sun set we put our son to bed and stretched our legs out, drank wine that night and it did not feel that we had been away from each other at all. 

These details seem very close tonight, in China, after the storm, in the candlelit room.  More real than the storm and the smoke of burning paper and the festival for departed souls. The candle burns on the table beside me and my wife is talking and from the computer Susan Vega sings in the next room, the door half ajar, and I think about that day, and about Tai and Anton.  About when we lived thirty blocks – just thirty blocks – apart.  That seems such a luxury now; to be so close to people who are dear to you. 

On the table next to me the candle still burns.  It’s lunchtime where he is. 

I should email him, I think.

I really should. 

Just to say hi.