We set up early in the morning outside the Royal Pavilion. Sage digs deep in his tattered rucksack and finds his Mozart tie, shell-coloured with black musical notations and a silhouetted Wolfgang Amadeus on it. Puffing his chest out beneath it, he strides back and forth across the path, waving his arms like a conductor. I stand on the fringes of the grass and play my harmonica. I wear fingerless gloves, and my breath comes out of the other side of the metal grille as sighs of steam.
‘The magnificent Rab,’ Sage cries. ‘Hear him play, hear him sing!’
There are groups of tourists milling around, mostly schoolchildren. They look up at the ice-cream-scoop domes of the Pavilion only for an instant before looking back to their phones. They listen to their headphones rather than to me. They ignore Sage completely.
I’m not too worried about their indifference. I have no interest in the youth market, nor in breaking through to the Americans who’ve sauntered up from the seafront. With my eyes closed, I’m just content to breathe runs and licks out into the cold September air.
‘Excuse me, mate.’
I open an eye; my melody trails off. ‘Yes?’
There’s a guy in a checked shirt, chinos and a black body-warmer standing in front of me. He wears his hair up in a shark’s fin and, when he smiles, he shows a flash of white teeth beneath his thin moustache. These details give him the look of a predator.
‘This is my spot,’ he says, motioning with his guitar case.
‘Really?’ I say. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t realise…’
‘No worries. I’ve played here every day this week, though.’
I nod. Instinctively, I tuck the harmonica into my jacket pocket and shuffle backwards on to the grass. My thinking is that if he takes a swing, if he starts a fight, then all my valuables will be hidden and I’ll have a soft landing for when I take a fall.
‘What’s happening?’ Sage is over to us now.
‘This is my spot,’ the newcomer explains. ‘Don’t worry, you had no way of knowing.’
‘No,’ Sage replies. ‘This is public ground.’
‘Listen, mate – ’ the newcomer lays a hand on Sage’s sleeve ‘ – this right here is prime location. This is where the tourists come. No offence to your friend, but you can’t be taking up prime location with harmonica-playing and begging.’
I stay quiet, flushed with embarrassment.
‘He sings as well,’ Sage says, ignoring the last word.
‘How do you sing and play the harmonica? You’d need to leave off one to do the other.’
I nod. ‘That’s how I do it.’
‘We were here first,’ Sage points out. ‘That’s the end of it.’
‘How about a compromise?’ the newcomer says.
‘No,’ Sage says.
‘What kind of compromise?’ I ask.
‘Well, what kind of stuff do you play? We could busk together, maybe, and split the profits down the middle.’
‘Sounds good,’ I say.
‘Absolutely not,’ says Sage.
The newcomer introduces himself as Luke and I step to one side to let him stand on the grass next to me. Sage stands in front of us to protest, windmilling his arms as if to block us from the view of the gathered tourists. Ignoring him, Luke takes out his guitar, tunes up, and then begins to play The Beatles. Old classics: bird seed for the tourists. It’s easy for me to harmonise with him, with both voice and instrument.
‘We were here first!’ Sage shouts over us, a discordant backing singer. ‘He didn’t even ask – not really!’
Those placing money in the guitar case don’t pay him much attention, they do their best to ignore him, and I’m doing the same. Luke is a decent guitarist and vocalist, and between the two of us we pull in a small crowd consisting of Spanish students, two stag-dos, a hen-do and what looks like a Women’s Institute outing.
I’m used to people staring off to the side or just beyond me. As if I’m on the other side of one-way glass and they can’t quite see me, though they’ve an idea I’m there. So it’s nice to have folk doing a shoulder-dance or a head-bob or sharing a smile. Usually busking is about gathering as many pity-clinks as possible before the police or the cold moves us on. Not today, though. Today I’m enjoying myself.
It’s only half an hour later, when Luke takes a couple of coins from the case and goes off to get us cups of tea, that Sage can make his objections fully known. In the meantime he’s taken a sulk and a seat on a bench over towards the museum. As soon as Luke strides off, though, he’s over to me and grasping me by the shoulders as if to shake me to my senses.
‘This was our spot,’ he hisses.
‘What does it matter?’ I reply. ‘I’m enjoying playing with someone. Besides, is it not you who’s always going on about collectivisation, pooling resources and all that shite?’
He sighs deeply. ‘He dictated to you, though.’
‘He offered a compromise.’
‘On his terms.’
There’s a pause. Sage stares at me through it. Then, with his hands still on my shoulders, he turns me and pushes me over towards an empty bench. We sit and he leans back.
‘Rab,’ he says. ‘Let me tell you the difference.’
‘There is a story…’ Sage begins.
I have a hollow hunger in my stomach, and I concentrate on that more than on Sage’s story. Which is about a man who uses force and threats to get a job over another candidate, then offers his rival a role as his assistant. I’m almost certain that Sage has made it up on the spot; it’s not one of his best. I offer no comment and the story trails off as Luke returns with the teas. He’s brought three of them. In spite of all Sage’s griping and heckling, he’s brought back a tea for the man in the Mozart tie.
As he makes his way over to us, I lean over to Sage. ‘You see that? He’s brought you a tea.’
Sage just shakes his head. ‘You don’t get it, do you?’ he says. ‘He thinks he’s better than you.’
‘You’re criticising him, but he let me sing with him.’
‘It was a hostile takeover, Rab. From first to last, a hostile takeover.’
There’s precious little conversation over our tea at first, so I ask Luke where he’s from and how long he’s been playing. He’s from Worthing, further along the coast, and he’s been busking since he was sixteen, for nearly five years now. He goes to Sussex University, studying dentistry, and he’d rather busk to bring in money than work as a waiter or a barman.
‘In my experience,’ Sage says, smoothing his tie, ‘students are the worst. They think they’ll change the world, think they’ll change the system, but they end up reaffirming it instead. Especially dentists.’
‘Why dentistry?’ I ask, choosing to ignore Sage, since his own teeth look as if they’ve been used as a firing range by miniature soldiers – cratered, chipped, cracked, scorched with brown and black.
Luke shrugs. ‘Good wage, good benefits, chance to work for myself.’
Sage snorts derisively. It kills the conversation for a moment.
‘What about yourself, Rab?’ Luke asks.
‘I got a record contract straight out of school, just over a year ago,’ I say. ‘Came down to London to record the album and ended up in debt to the record company and without – ’
‘Capitalism sucked his soul,’ Sage interrupts. ‘It bled him dry and left him eviscerated in the gutter. Sorry, I should explain: to eviscerate is to disembowel or to remove an essential component.’
Luke blows on the surface of his tea, creating ripples. Not yet a storm in a teacup, but not far off. It’s in situations like these that Sage is at his worst. When all that’s called for is a normal conversation, or a casual chat. Don’t get me wrong, I owe him a lot, but I can’t be arsed with him when he’s like this.
‘Did you release the album, then?’ Luke asks.
I nod.
‘Any good?’
I shrug and look down at the sleeve of my jacket. There is a stray thread. I pull at it until it snaps, then look back up at Luke. ‘How do you judge these things?’ I say. ‘I mean, it sold next to no copies and the label didn’t take up the option for the second one, so…’
‘Are you proud of it, though?’
I have to think about that. I remember back to the day, a week or two ago, when I was wandering about around North Laine. The tight-knit streets with their market stalls and cafés spilling out on to the pavements were the perfect place to spend the sunny days busking. When I still had my guitar, that is. You’ll see all sorts down that way – some in sunglasses that cost no more than a few quid and others in designer ones that cost a few hundred – but no one judges you for having trousers that are too short in the legs or a T-shirt that is tie-dye-discoloured beneath the armpits. It was so muggy-warm that my guitar kept slipping out of tune, and I had to pull my tuning fork from my pocket to strike against my kneecap or the cobbles at my feet.
After busking, I was browsing through the second-hand CDs in a music shop – the kind with cardboard dividers and handwritten price tags – when I came across a copy of my first and only album: Measures Taken. It was a little worse for wear: the corner had snapped away and left a split like a fork of lightning down the case and the CD inside had a thin maze of scratches across the surface. Still, I considered paying the three-quid asking price. With my fingers fumbling through the change in my pocket, I thought about buying it. Because I don’t have a copy. Out of all those thousands that were pressed, I don’t have one.
And what stopped me, above and beyond my hunger, my thirst and my thoughts of a hostel bed that night, beyond my lack of a CD player even, or the vague notion that some scout might stumble across it, buy it, and ‘discover’ me for the second time… beyond all of that was… what was it?
‘I’m not too sure, mate,’ I reply to Luke, with an uncertain smile. ‘It was a bit of a crazy time, to be honest.’
‘Still, quite an achievement to have an album out.’ He looks at me, then lays a hand on my arm as if to console me. ‘And you’re a brilliant singer, mate, I’ll tell you that. You’ve got that gravel tone to your voice like a young Bob – ’
‘Thank you,’ I interrupt, before he can get out the surname.
‘Maybe, if I have any gigs going, you could come along and help me out?’
‘I’d like that.’ My smile broadens. ‘Cheers.’
Sage holds out his clenched fist between us. It is a gesture somewhere between a military salute and a child raising their hand in the classroom. He means it as a protest. We both turn to him.
‘As your manager, Rab,’ he says, ‘I would advise against it.’
‘What?’ Luke frowns. ‘Are you for real?’
‘This boy – ’ Sage speaks only to me ‘ – is clearly a charlatan. He’s only looking to exploit your talents. After all, he’s training to be a dentist.’
Luke stands and looms over Sage. ‘What is your problem, buddy?’
Sage tries to maintain his dignity as he squares up to Luke, looking off into the distance as he rises to his feet and straightening his tie before standing nose-to-nose against him. The effect is undermined slightly by the broken zip on the fly to his corduroys which, as it has a tendency to do, flaps open.
I want to step in, but I don’t want Luke to withdraw his offer of us gigging together and I’m mindful that Sage is likely to interpret any calming measures as disloyalty, as a betrayal.
‘You’re only out for what you can get,’ Sage says calmly, slipping into his lecturer’s voice. ‘You muscled your way in on Rab’s busking spot and now you’re thinking about exploiting his talents to make up for your own shortfalls.’
‘And what’s your deal, mate?’ Luke replies. ‘Are you a homo, or just a sad old man with nothing to do?’
‘What does my sexuality have to do with it?’
‘I’ll take that as a yes.’
‘Take it any way you choose.’
We’re beginning to gather a crowd again, but not in the positive way we were before. This time the stag-do guys edge closer in anticipation of a fight, the Spanish schoolchildren look up from their phones and consider recording it all to put on YouTube, and the WI ladies discuss whether it’s a matter for the security guards in the Royal Pavilion or the police officers down by the pier.
‘Look,’ I hiss, ‘why are we making a scene, anyway?’
‘I’ve forgotten more than you know.’ Sage stabs a finger into Luke’s chest. ‘I used to teach at university level. I used to give lectures. And not one of them was about bloody teeth.’
‘Used to.’ Luke smiles, showing his perfect teeth.
‘I’m outside the establishment now, where I want to be.’
‘You’re a greasy old man who hangs about with Rab here to make yourself feel important.’ Luke turns to me. ‘No offence, mate.’
‘You’re everything that’s wrong with society – ’ Sage begins.
‘Listen, Luke,’ I interrupt, trying to defuse the situation, ‘how about we get busking again? There are a lot of folk about, and we could make a killing if we played some more.’
Luke looks across at me and nods. Before stepping away from Sage, he hooks a finger in underneath the Mozart tie and flicks it up so that it hits Sage on his chin. I can see that Sage is bristling with anger, that he’s ready to launch into a speech, so I quickly reach into my pocket and lift the harmonica to my mouth. I run off a scale before he can open his mouth and then step over on to the grass to stand beside Luke.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, any requests?’ Luke calls out.
‘Fuck off and die!’ Sage calls back.
We ignore him.
‘“Sweet Caroline”,’ one of the stag-do lads shouts. ‘Bill here’s getting married to Caroline next week.’
Luke looks at me. I shrug, then nod. It’s easy enough to come up with a quick lick on the harmonica, an approximate melody, to replace the opening instrumentals and, after Luke’s come in with the vocals and guitar, the whole crowd join me for the three notes after the chorus – duh, duh, dah – and we’ve suddenly got ourselves a sing-along that drowns out all but the worst of Sage’s shouts.
It all goes really well, and after we’ve finished that one someone shouts out that we should sing ‘Come on Eileen’ in honour of another bride. She’s called Evelyn rather than Eileen, so we change the words accordingly and continue our impromptu karaoke session on the lawns of the Royal Pavilion.
All the while, though, I’m keeping half an eye on Sage, who goes slouching off towards the flowerbeds but then turns and comes back to sit himself cross-legged on the grass to the side of me. Luke’s too busy working out the chord progression to ‘Layla’ to notice, but I see Sage snaking out an arm, lifting a note from the top of the heaped piles of coins in the guitar case and tucking it into his coat pocket.
I see him, but I say nothing.