“I don’t have anything else but the songs you’ve heard me sing.”
“I don’t believe you.”
Anger mingled with the fear, making my cheeks flush. “I don’t care what you believe.” I made to slide out of the booth but he grabbed my elbow.
My eyes blazed with warning but O’Dea didn’t let go. “Why would a person choose to stay stuck on the streets rather than take up an offer to change her life? That doesn’t make sense to me.”
I laughed unhappily at his naiveté. “Do you think fame and fortune are all they’re cracked up to be? It’s an emptier existence than mine.”
“And how would you know?”
“Let go of my arm.”
“How would you know?”
“You only have to look at the lives of famous people. How many of them seem truly happy to you?”
“I happen to know a few who are genuinely happy.”
“Then they’re probably self-medicating.”
“You’re awfully cynical for a young girl.”
I lifted an eyebrow. “How young do you think I am? If you’re looking for a new teenybopper to burst onto the scene in short skirts and fake pointy nails, you’re barking up the wrong tree.”
“If you think that, then you haven’t been listening. How old are you?”
“Why the twenty questions?”
“That was one question. I haven’t even asked for your name. Why the evasion?”
“Because you’re a strange man who is buying me dinner because he wants something from me. It might not be what most men want, but it’s still something I’m not willing to give. You can dress it up anyway you want, but we both know you couldn’t give a shit about me. You want to make money and I don’t want to make you that money. Still going to pay for dinner?”
O’Dea reluctantly let go of my arm. “Aye.”
Relief flooded me but I didn’t let it show. I pretended I wasn’t shaking all over and got out of the booth, hauling up my backpack onto my shoulders.
“You’re right,” he said.
I paused reaching for my guitar case and waited for him to go on.
“I couldn’t give a shit what age you are, what your name is. I couldn’t give a shit that you’re homeless. All I care about is your voice, the songs you write, and your ability to sell records.” He stood up, pulling a wad of cash out of his wallet and dumping it on the table. It covered way, way more than the meal. His dark eyes were steely with disappointment and annoyance. “When you’re ready to pull your unwashed head out of your arse, give me a call.”
Outraged pride suffused me. “You condescending, pain in—I washed my hair this morning.”
He strolled around the table and stopped to stare down at my head, making me squirm. When he finally met my eyes, the hardness in his didn’t soften as it clashed with the fierceness of mine. “In a public shower somewhere. Let me guess . . . a swim center?”
Shame prickled my cheeks, and in that moment, I hated him for mocking me. “What kind of man shames a homeless person?”
“I’m trying to shame someone who doesn’t need to be a homeless person, unlike the thousands of other poor souls in this country who don’t have a choice but to sleep rough. You think I’m mocking you. You mock them every day.”
I flinched. “Bullshit.”
“No? They don’t have a choice. You do.”
“I don’t.”
“I just offered you one.” He grabbed my hand and slapped his business card into it. “Do with it what you will.”
And then he was gone, leaving me sweating hot and cold in TGI Fridays. My legs felt like jelly and my head swam with lightness. I refused to put it down to his harsh words and instead stumbled for the booth, slumping into it. It was just the food and excitement of the day—that was all.
Still, my fingers trembled as I reached for the money he’d thrown on the table.
“Would you like the bill?”
The new voice made me clench my hands around the money in a panic that took me by surprise. I nodded at the waiter as I drew my hands under the table so the cash was out of sight. When the bill came, I counted out what we owed along with a nice tip, and I felt the burn of tears when I realized what was left.
The bastard had given me two hundred pounds. Small change to some, but it meant I wouldn’t have to worry for a few weeks about making money busking.
I hated him even more for his charity. Why give me money if he thought so little of me?
Try as I might, I couldn’t get his voice out of my head as I took the bus out of the city center. And that night as I layered up in my tent, I tucked the money into a hidden compartment in my guitar case and then pulled out a notepad I hadn’t touched since arriving in Scotland.
When everything went to shit, I’d taken off. I left everything behind and I backpacked through Europe for over a year. The whole time I’d written new music. Music that was unlike anything our band had produced. It wasn’t about looking for a new sound or a new hit. I didn’t want that life anymore. But music would always be the way I expressed myself and I’d hoped that the songs I was writing would bring me peace somehow.
They hadn’t.
I knew then if music couldn’t help me, nothing would.
So I stopped when I got to Scotland. I used the last of my money on a cheap flight from Paris to Glasgow. And for five months I’d kept singing, but I didn’t write.
My visitor’s visa was about to run out. Although I had the money from O’Dea, soon there would be nothing. No money to get home. Frankly, I didn’t want to go home.
Staring down at the notepad, at the lyrics I’d written, at a song that was too honest for me to sing while I busked, I felt an urge I hadn’t felt in months. I’d spent all my time here trying to forget, forcing all the bad stuff out so I could pretend I was someone else. Yet . . . I wanted to finish what I’d started.
After fumbling for a pen, I began frantically making changes to the lyrics. I stopped when the song was half finished, needing to hear how it sounded.
Then I opened my guitar case and pulled out my Taylor.
And I sang.
“No, I didn’t understand then
That your soul was part of mine and
When yours faded out
Mine broke down to du—”
My voice broke before I could even get the last lyric of the first verse out. I lay back in the tent, curled around my guitar, my song discarded beside me and for the first time in months, I fell asleep with tears on my cheeks.
* * *
DURING THE SUMMER THE CITY had a distinct smell, a homogenized scent that was difficult to describe until you broke it down into all its separate parts. One of those parts was hot asphalt. The summers here were nothing compared to back home but on those elusive warm days, the many buildings, people, and traffic built up the heat until the sidewalk was so warm to the touch, it gave off that distinct smell of hot concrete.
Now as the temperatures dropped, I found myself surprised at the underlying smell of wet concrete everywhere, even when it hadn’t rained for days. Scotland was damp in the fall no matter if those gray clouds overhead deigned to stay full.
It was the kind of damp cold that seeped into your bones.
The following Saturday, Killian O’Dea didn’t show up to hear me sing. I’d like to say it didn’t bother me, but I knew there had to be a string attached to the money he’d given me. I was so desperate, I’d taken it, but that didn’t make me naive. It wasn’t really kindness that had caused him to leave it. So I was on edge. Waiting. I wanted to return to being invisible. Yet my eyes searched for him beneath the brim of my fedora and I had an unpleasant restless feeling itching in my fingers and toes as I packed up for the day.
But it wasn’t Killian O’Dea himself that was the cause for the feeling. He’d merely helped unveil them. Popping open my emotions like one of those joke snakes in a can. They’d jumped out in an unraveling mess and now I couldn’t figure out how to neatly fold them back in. Instead I swept them under an imaginary rug. A lumpy, untidy rug that reminded me every day those feelings were there.
Along with a now dawning fear of approaching winter.