Woolton Village, Fate

There it was again. That crashing opening chord. What was it? An augmented G major? A 12-string guitar double tracked, or perhaps two 6-strings with a piano behind? No matter. Whatever it was, everyone in the shop knew it instantly and, as usual, when the vocal kicked in a split second later, two or three customers started singing along, almost silently, always slightly off key. The women might swing their hips a little, in time with the music. The men, more self-conscious and usually of an age that danced badly and only at weddings, would nod their heads a few degrees to either side or, if they were standing still, tap one foot.

Kevin reached under the counter for his notebook, flicked past the first six pages to the one with a large H at the top and etched an angled line in red ink across the four strokes he had already made that day, next to the words (A) Hard Day’s Night. Five times already this morning. And it was only 11.30.

He scanned the page. There were only eleven titles. Hey, Jude had already been on twice. Here Comes the Sun not at all. That was unusual; even though the selection of around two hundred songs was supposed to be random, George’s most popular song always played at least twice before he’d finished his first double shot Americano of the day. He relished the irony that most of the customers would spend their entire day under artificial light, avoiding the searing desert heat outside, while silently mouthing delight at the end of the long, cold, lonely winter. Maybe some of them came from Vermont.

It was never winter here. Outside, the sun glared relentlessly off glass and stone surfaces, scorching any unprotected corneas in the streets and roasting rolls of freshly-exposed flesh at the hotel pools. Inside, unblinking white light illuminated the infinite labyrinths of card tables and slot machines.

In the shop itself, the television screens mythologised that it was always summer. The summer of ’63: grainy monochrome and hesitant, a country yet to learn its place in a post-war world finding optimism in four bars of harmonica and an audacious octave leap in the verses; the summer of ’66: England’s captain, Bobby Moore on his teammate’s shoulders brandishing the football World Cup and tapes running backwards, hinting at a formula turning a bit weird around the edges; or the summer of ’69: fuzzy figures bouncing across the surface of the moon and a thirty-piece orchestra bringing it all to an end in Studio 3, Abbey Road. 

Kevin knew every image on the monitors. Like the music, they ran on continuous random rotation. Every now and again, the two would fortuitously fall into step together, the song providing a wry commentary on the newsreel: the British Prime Minister, Harold Wilson trying to put a positive spin on the devalued pound in the pocket to the strains of You Never Give Me Your Money; Back in the USSR serenading Soviet tanks rolling into Prague.

The jangling eight-note arpeggio faded away and was replaced by a confident round of chords on the piano. Kevin flicked forward a few pages and put a mark next to Let It Be. First time today. The shop was quiet. It always was at this time of day. The busy periods were immediately after the twice-daily performances next door, when the audience would swarm through, paying over the odds for souvenirs: records, T-shirts, posters, mugs and badges, all branded and approved, keeping the myth alive, more than half a century after the story ended. That was when the shop made its money. For most of the day, it was more of a shrine, with Kevin as its custodian, devotedly caring for its artefacts as if the sight of a pilgrim buying a coffee mug with a zebra crossing design or a bright pink faux-Edwardian military jacket might cause some unknown god to intercede on his behalf and bring Marta home. Occasionally, a phrase from a song would slice through his contemplation, cruelly exposing its futility, taunting him that there would never be an answer to a question that could voice itself only as ‘why?.’

The harmonies were sweeping in over the rolling tom-toms in the final verse when a harsh voice said loudly: ‘I never liked this one. Good job it’s not in the show.’

Kevin looked up sharply. He’d registered the old man’s presence a few minutes earlier, as he did with everyone that came in. Tourists with nimble fingers were a fact of life but over the two years he’d run the shop he’d developed an intuition that picked out the ones to watch. This guy wasn’t one of them, so he’d barely observed him as he moved slowly around the displays, looking closely, but never touching anything. Now, as the man stood by the door leading back into the casino, he took him in more carefully.

they say if you can remember the sixties you weren’t really there

‘Yeah, it’s not one of my favourites either,’ he said.

‘The whole record’s a load of shit,’ said the man, standing dead still. There was a naggingly familiar tone in his voice, an English accent, overlaid with traces of unspecified American, suggesting that the speaker had not been home for many years. Something in his manner suggested he wouldn’t be interested in hearing Kevin’s view, nor anyone else’s for that matter.

‘Maybe,’ said Kevin, trying to sound neutral. He had made the mistake of getting into a debate about one of the songs in his first week in the job and had learned quickly that such discussions were not only futile but might also result in a potential sale walking out the door.

The man looked at him for a moment, turned and walked away, out of the shop and towards the slot machines. Kevin watched until he was out of sight, the charcoal of his greatcoat fading into the darkness. What was he? Seventy? Eighty? It was hard to tell under the untidy hair, grey beard and tinted glasses. Another eccentric wandering aimlessly through Vegas.

The music changed again. Kevin put a red mark next to Nowhere Man. It seemed apt.

That evening, over the whirring of the microwave, Kevin went through the notebook, updating his spreadsheet with the day’s playlist. Somewhere, there had to be a pattern. Surely it couldn’t be possible to write an algorithm that would genuinely recycle the same two hundred or so songs perpetually without ever repeating itself. But, after more than a year of keeping a record of every song played, he was starting to admit that if there was a pattern then he couldn’t discern it. Either it genuinely was chance that selected the songs or there was a coder somewhere in Silicon Valley playing an extraordinarily long game.

Kevin didn’t want to believe in chance. He didn’t believe in gods, astrology, lucky numbers or the Tarot. Surrounded every day by desperate souls squandering their last dollars in the conviction that their fate was to win big, one day, the only pre-determined outcome he could countenance was that the house would always win. Yet, how could it have been anything but fate that decreed that Marta would come into the shop on that particular day, the day that Sadie had called in sick and Kevin had stayed on through the afternoon to cover for her? He couldn’t envisage a world in which the two of them were not destined to meet, to fall in love. And yet now he was forcing himself to contemplate life without her.

What would she be doing now? He checked his watch. Almost midnight in Las Vegas was late morning in Dubai. She would just be getting out of bed, taking it easy after two performances the previous day. He hoped she was alone. A remembered image came to mind of his first sight of her, little more than a year before; how her loose, dark hair caressed the small of her back as she moved through the shop with a controlled grace that set her apart from the tourists shuffling from display to display. When she came to the counter, brandishing the CD of the soundtrack to the show next door, he was entranced by the whites of her eyes. They were searing, as though lit from behind, contrasting the dark chocolate buttons of her pupils like a surface of fresh cream. Her voice was accented; clearly not American, but he couldn’t say from where.

‘This has all the songs from the show?’ she asked.

‘It’s the soundtrack to the show, but it’s a mash-up,’ he replied. Seeing her incomprehension, he added: ‘It’s bits of the songs mixed together. If you want the proper versions, you’d be better off buying those red and blue collections on the second rack down. All the well-known songs are on those.’

She shrugged. ‘I only need the show music. I need it to learn my cues.’ Of course. Her elegant movement should have told him. She was a performer. There was a roster of seventy or eighty and every few months around half of them would change. Kevin had been in to see the show a couple of times when he had first taken the job in the shop and since then occasionally slipped into the theatre to watch part of a rehearsal, marvelling at the intensity of the dancing and acrobatics. Two hours of that, twice in a day, must be exhausting, he’d assumed. Small wonder that few of the troupe stayed for more than six months.

‘What’s your part?’ he said as he rang up the sale, wanting any excuse to keep the conversation going and delay her departure.

‘My character is called Eleanor,’ she said, mis-placing the emphasis on the middle syllable.

 ‘I don’t know any more but we start rehearsal on Monday, so I have five days to get to know all the songs. And I don’t have a machine for playing this yet. Do you know a shop where I can buy one?’

 ‘I have a portable one you could borrow,’ said Kevin, not believing the boldness of his own words as he spoke.

‘I can bring it in tomorrow if you can come back. Or maybe I can give it to you tonight. We close an hour after the show finishes.’

Later that evening, cursing his inability to keep the kitchen stocked, Kevin rustled up pasta with a bottled sauce, potato crisps and cheap red wine as Marta sat cross-legged on his floor, listening to songs more than twice her age and scribbling notes on her script. Occasionally she would nod in recognition as a new one started, her hair curtaining her face momentarily, before those luminous eyes reappeared. She kissed him lightly on the cheek before the taxi took her back to her hostel, promising to return his CD player when the rehearsals were over. Kevin felt as though he had been stroked by an angel.

A week later she reappeared in the shop. ‘I saw you,’ she said, accusingly, but with a smile in her eyes. ‘You were watching the rehearsal yesterday. At the back.’

He couldn’t deny it. Unable to stop thinking about her, Kevin had used his staff pass to slip into the theatre and found a spot to the side of one of the lighting rigs, out of sight from the stage - or so he thought. He’d been hypnotised as Marta threaded her way, lost, through collapsing buildings, representing post-war Liverpool, and floated beguilingly, in an illusion of slow motion, from one trapeze to another over scenes of Swinging London. Most of all, he had been bewitched by her solo performance, high above the stage, twisting and turning her body around a rope, in eulogy to a gently weeping guitar.

She had moved in with him a month later. Six months after that came the offer to join an updated version of the show that would tour Europe and she was gone. Europe had become Asia; Asia had become Australia; and now Dubai was playing host to its pyrotechnics and acrobatics. They hadn’t seen each other for almost five months.

At first there had been weekly phone calls and daily text exchanges. Marta would send photographs of herself in front of the standard tourist attractions: Tower Bridge; The Louvre; Raffles Hotel; Victoria Harbour; Sydney Opera House. From Europe had come selfies, her elegant pale arm stretching up enticingly towards the camera as though she were reaching out to pull herself back to him. By the time she got to Hong Kong, the photos would feature two or three of her fellow-performers, all in a line, smiling self-consciously, like teenagers on a school trip. As Kowloon Bay gave way to the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the images arriving on Kevin’s phone showed her and her fellow-acrobats posed with their arms draped platonically around each other’s youthful, toned bodies, like students on a gap year tour. Their relaxed familiarity taunted him. Since reaching the Gulf, the text messages had become sporadic and the phone calls had taken on an air of being a duty rather than a desire to share. There seemed to be little for them to talk about as the changing backdrop to her life threw the invariability of his into relief.

‘Why don’t you come out here for a holiday?’ she suggested in their call that evening. She had just told him how much she liked the city and that their residency had been extended by another two months.

 ‘We only perform five nights a week and the guys in the show are always organising fun things on our days off.’

‘It sounds like you’re having a good enough time without me there,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t want to cramp your style.’

He’d wanted to claw back his words immediately, but the damage was done.

‘Well, I guess I’ll see you when I get back then,’ she said, quietly.

They ended the call with the usual sentiments, but they felt empty. Nursing a brandy before bed, Kevin cursed his clumsiness and told himself that he’d blown the best chance he had ever had. Short of a miracle undoing all of the damage he had done with his casual tongue and convincing her that he loved her, no matter what, Marta probably never would be back.

The old man was, though. A few days after his first visit, he was waiting outside the shop when Kevin arrived to open up. He nodded. No smile, but a flash of acknowledgement in the eyes. He followed Kevin into the shop and stood in the centre, looking up at the posters.

‘Was there something particular you were looking for?’ asked Kevin as he opened the till and switched on the sound and video systems.

‘No. It’s just seeing all this stuff brings back memories. Things I didn’t even know I’d forgotten.’

‘Well, they say if you can remember the sixties you weren’t really there,’ said Kevin. Avoid conflict. Don’t get drawn in. Say something harmless. ‘I wasn’t even born myself.’

‘Oh, I was there all right. Right in the middle of it all. But I haven’t heard a lot of these songs in years. What’s on next?’

Kevin explained about the random programme.

‘So you’ve got no control over what’s playing?’ said the man. The first song of the day, In My Life, had finished and was being followed by the sound of an aeroplane landing.

‘What about if you turn it off, then back on again?’

‘It’ll just pick up where it left off,’ said Kevin. ‘It always does.’

‘Show me.’

Kevin pressed the power button and the music stopped abruptly. He waited a couple of seconds, then pressed it again, anticipating the ‘whoa’ that began the song. Instead, he heard a two-note piano motif, repeated three times before a string section joined in, laying the foundations for a voice that sounded as though it were being stretched across a cheese grater.

‘You see,’ said the old man, a slim smile of satisfaction spreading. ‘You took a chance. And it worked out.’

Kevin said nothing and fiddled with the volume control, turning it down slightly to compensate for the emptiness of the shop. That had never happened before. Probably a power surge or something; just a coincidence. If he turned the volume all the way down, then back up again, would it still be the same song playing? The music stopped briefly for the wail of a radio being tuned and a gaggle of barely comprehensible voices.

The old man was looking intently at the display of LP records, squinting at the covers but never touching any of them.

‘Chance again,’ he said, turning back.

‘That’s a bit of Shakespeare, you know. King Lear. It just happened to be on the radio the night this was being recorded. It could have been anything; even the weather forecast. But this fits the song perfectly. Listen to what the voice says: “a poor man, made tame by fortune”. Chance again. Turn left and you’re a millionaire. Turn right and you’re living on the street.’

‘Sorry, I don’t see your point,’ said Kevin, starting to feel he were being lectured.

The man gestured towards one of the speakers.

‘I know this. You’ve spent day after day alone in this shop trying to work out why the songs play in the order that they do. If Rain follows Here Comes the Sun, why not accept it’s pure chance, just like when one of those suckers out there on the roulette wheels actually picks the right number? So many things in life are completely out of our hands. Why worry about them?’

‘Are you saying that we don’t have any control over what happens? That everything is pre-ordained? What about free will?’

‘The opposite. How you respond to chance events determines how your life is going to be. A kid walks into Mr Epstein’s shop and asks for a record Brian hasn’t heard of. Does he send the kid away or does he order the record and then go to see the band for himself?’

He held out his arms as if waiting for Kevin to answer but continued.

‘George picks up a sitar on a film set. Does he put it down or does he buy one for himself and immerse himself in Indian music and religion?’

‘I get it,’ said Kevin, interrupting. ‘John meets Paul at Woolton Village Fete and realises that Paul is a better musician. Does he carry on playing skiffle, going nowhere, or does he invite Paul to join the group and change music forever?’

The man drew in his breath sharply.

‘Well, that’s an interesting one. They could write whole books about that possibility. Actually, someone probably has.’

A group of young women had come into the shop, clustering around the t-shirts. The song had changed, an electric harpsichord heralding dense harmonies; three voices recorded three times over, swooping around the melody like aerial ballet dancers. Like Marta encircling and caressing her rope while being lowered to the stage.

The old man’s eyes glazed. He was nodding, absorbed in the music as though he could hear a cymbal keeping time in his head. One of the women approached the counter, carrying several t-shirts and he turned away slightly, effectively acknowledging that the conversation needed to end.

This one’s good. Those three voices together really were something special.’

‘It’s been nice talking with you,’ Kevin said. ‘Feel free to carry on looking around. Just ask me if there’s anything you’re interested in.’

The man turned and started to walk towards the door, then stopped as the music changed again, double-tracked close harmony over strummed 12-strings. He gestured vaguely towards the speakers.

‘I’ll be back.’ He smiled properly for the first time, humour and warmth in his eyes shining through his guard. ‘That’s not true, though. You know what you need to do now, don’t you?’

Kevin watched as he faded again into the glare of the artificial daylight and, slightly distracted, rang up the sale. After the customers had gone, he took out his notebook and tried to remember which songs had been played so far that morning. The music changed again and scattered lines from the song burrowed into his brain. He saw himself running his hands through Marta’s hair. She had changed his life; he had to prove to her that love never dies. It was chance, nothing but chance, that had brought her into his world. But it was down to him to wrestle control of his life from the grip of coincidence and choose his own fate.

He took the phone from his jacket pocket, clicked on the search icon and began to type: ‘Flights, Las Vegas to Dubai.’ It wouldn’t exactly be coming home, for either of them, but he knew that all he had to do was to be there for everything to feel all right.

Clang. There was that chord again. Without thinking, Kevin reached for his pen to mark the appropriate page. Then he thought for a moment and tossed the notebook into the bin. Even if there was a pattern, it was finally time to accept that he never would work it out.