‘Life is confusing.’
That is all it says. It has six likes. I feel guilty about how rude I was to her. I wonder, as I often do, if it is ever going to be possible to have anything resembling a normal life. Looking at Camille made me want that. There was an intensity to her that I could sense and relate to. I can imagine sitting next to her on a bench, watching Abraham. Just sitting there, in the comfortable silence of a couple. I haven’t wanted such a thing for centuries.
I shouldn’t do anything, really. But I find myself pressing ‘like’ on her update, and even adding ‘C’est vrai’ as a comment. The moment I comment and see the words there with my name beside them I think I should delete them.
But I don’t. I leave them. And I go to bed, a bed Abraham is already asleep on. He is whimpering in his sleep.
For years now I had convinced myself that the sadness of the memories weighed more and lasted longer than the moments of happiness themselves. So I had, through some crude emotional mathematics, decided it was better not to seek out love or companionship or even friendship. To be a little island in the alba archipelago, detached from humanity’s continent, instead. Hendrich was right, I believed. It was best not to fall in love.
But recently, now, I was starting to feel that you couldn’t do mathematics with emotions. In protecting yourself from hurt you could create a new, subtler type of pain. It is a dilemma. And not one I am going to solve tonight.
Life is confusing.
That is all we really know, I think, and the thought keeps repeating like a musical motif as I slowly fall into sleep.
London, 1599
Bankside, in those days, was made up of liberties. A liberty was a designated area outside the city walls where normal laws didn’t apply. In fact, no laws applied. Anything went. Any kind of trade could be plied. Any entertainment was allowed, however disreputable. Prostitution. Bear-baiting. Street performance. Theatre. You name it. It was there.
It was an area, essentially, of freedom. And the first thing I discovered about freedom was that it smelled of shit. Of course, compared to now, everywhere in or out of London smelled of shit. But Bankside, in particular, was the shittiest. That was because of the tanneries dotted about the place. There were five tanneries all in close proximity, just after you crossed the bridge. And the reason they stank, I would later learn, was because tanners steeped the leather in faeces.
As I walked on, the smell fused into others. The animal fat and bones from the makers of glue and soap. And the stale sweat of the crowd. It was a whole new world of stench.
I walked past the bear garden – called the Paris Garden for some reason I never knew – and saw a giant black-furred bear in chains. It looked like the saddest creature I had ever seen. Wounded and unkempt and resigned to his fate, sitting on the ground. The bear was a celebrity. A major draw of Bankside. ‘Sackerson’ they called him. And there would be many times I would see or hear him in action over the coming weeks and months, pink-eyed, clawing dogs from his throat, his mouth frothing with rage, as the crowd roared in cruel and fevered excitement. It was the only time the bear ever seemed alive, when it was fighting off death. And I would often think of that bear, and that pointless will to survive, through whatever kind of cruelty and pain life chose to throw in his direction.
Anyway, on that first day, I had followed Rose’s directions but I did not necessarily feel like I had come to the right place. It was far enough away from the noise of the soapmakers, though not as far as I would have liked from a shit-smelling tannery. There were some people milling around. There was a woman in green, with a blackened tooth and coarsely powdered face, staring at me with some curiosity as she leaned against the wall of a stone building with a painted sign depicting a cardinal’s hat. This, as I already suspected, was one of the many brothels in the area. The busiest, it turned out, with a flurry of trade at any time of day. There was also an inn. The Queen’s Tavern. It was one of the more pristine buildings in the area, although its clientele turned out to be at the filthier end of the scale.
There was an open space in front of this pub and the brothel, a rectangle of grass where people hung about, and that was the spot where I decided to stand.
I took a deep breath.
And then I started to play.
There was no shame in music. There was no shame even in playing music. Even Queen Elizabeth herself could strum the odd instrument or two. But playing music in public – in both France, and here in England – was something you didn’t do if you were from a noble background. Certainly you didn’t do it on the street. For the son of a French count and countess to be there, playing music in the least salubrious part of Bankside, would have been something of a disgrace.
And yet, I played.
I played some French chansons my mother had taught me and people walked by and raised the occasional eyebrow. But throughout the day my confidence grew and I switched to English songs and ballads and I quickly acquired an audience. Once or twice, someone in the audience even threw a penny. I had seen from the other performers that the thing to do was to take around a hat at regular intervals – much as buskers still do today – but I had no hat, so I went around after every couple of songs with my left shoe, hopping around, which the crowd seemed to enjoy as much as the music. The audience was a strange and intimidating mix of watermen and hawkers and drunks and prostitutes and theatregoers. Half heading from the tenements to the south and half – the half more prone to losing pennies – from across the bridge. It may have been because of the gawping crowd that I found I played best when I closed my eyes. At the end of the first day, I had made enough to pay for the basket of fruit. By the end of the week, I had paid for a new basket.
‘Don’t get ahead of yourself, Tom Smith,’ said Rose, stifling her smile, eating the hot rabbit pie I had bought on my way home. ‘You still have your lodgings to pay for.’
‘Can we have a meat pie every day?’ asked Grace, her face decorated in pastry crumbs. ‘It’s a lot better than stew and shitting parsnips.’
‘Parsnips do not shit, Grace.’
‘And better for you than parsnips too,’ I told her, recounting the wisdom of the day. ‘You’d never catch the queen or a nobleman eating a parsnip.’
Rose rolled her eyes. ‘We are not noblemen, though, that is the thing.’