THE TUNE IN DAN’S CAFÉ
SHAMUS FRAZER
At that hour it was the only place open in the little town. A gap-lettered red neon sign above the door spelt out DAN FE, giving off Californian overtones that the drizzle on that greasy sub-suburban road made at once pert and woebegone, like a fiery painted nose on a consumptive clown. The mechanic at the all-night garage had told us it would be a long job before our car was ready: all of ninety minutes. Yes, we might fill up on coffee and bangers at Dan’s place, the next corner beyond the lights.
There was no one in the place when we entered, but the juke box was wailing sadly in its alcove: a dying moan.
There’s only this thing you gotta learn
Like two times two
That I’ll return to you
Oh baby, I’ll re . . . re . . . TURN
The mechanism whirred: metal claws picked up the record, twisted and slipped it into the trough among the others: cogs whirred again and clicked into immobility and silence.
We chose a table by the window where the neon sign dabbled our hands and the plastic cloth with little pools of blood, and spread over one side of Helen’s face a crimson glow. I thought a bell had rung faintly as we pushed open the door, but this might have been imagination for no one appeared at its summons. We stared out on the emptying street: the drizzle had become a downpour and wind-tugged umbrellas tapped and scratched now and then like great bats on the glass, shadowing for the instant our table. I don’t know why we had chosen this table with its view of the rain-filled street to one further down the warm interior of the cafe: but somehow it seemed more cheerful than those ranged nearer the little bar with its polished espresso machine and its bubbling cylinders of orange and lemon drink, or by the shallow alcove where the juke box gleamed. We had chosen this table as if by instinct, and now we looked out on the rain and waited, but no one came.
There was a hand-bell one end of the bar, and a notice RING TWICE FOR PROMPT SERVICE propped against the coffee machine; but neither of us seemed to wish to walk down between the rows of tables, pick up the bell and shake it. We preferred to wait for someone to appear from the rear quarters; and we looked through that rain-beaded window and made comment on the few passers-by and the weather in unnatural voices that grew purposefully louder as the minutes ticked by, as though we felt someone would be sure to hear us before long and so make unnecessary the journey between the empty tables to the bell.
‘A perambulator at this hour, Charles.’ Helen’s lipstick was a purplish black in the neon glow. ‘Two hoods too. Twins?’
‘She can only bring it out at twenty to midnight, Helen—and in the rain. Two hoods so that no one can look inside.’
‘But why shouldn’t they look inside?’
‘Because they’d die of shock if they did—and she loves it so.’
‘I think you’re being revolting, Charles.’
‘It wasn’t her fault. She’d been reading Space Fiction in the Labour Ward,
and . . .’
‘No,’ said Helen, ‘you’re NOT to tell me.’
‘But whatever it is it died six months ago.’
‘lt’s probably her afternoon’s shopping—huge packets of cereals and detergents . . . and a second-hand television set.’
‘At this hour? . . . Now she’s turning off by the Baptist Chapel, look.’
‘Oh, Charles, d’you think she’s going to blackmail the minister?’
‘I know,’ I said, ‘I know for a certainty that minister has anthropophagous tastes. He was once a missionary in darkest, oh darkest Africa.’
‘I thought I was hungry,’ said Helen in a wail, ‘but you’re putting me off.’
‘lt’s as well. I suspect Dan’s forgotten to hang the “Closed” sign on the door.’
‘Darling, you look diabolic in this light. . . . Charles, did you see that?’
‘What?’
‘That umbrella tilted, and it was a Negress under it.’
‘She too is turning down by the Baptist Chapel, you’ll notice.’
‘What a dismal place to have a breakdown!’
‘Have psychoanalysts ever attempted to analyse places, Helen?’
The forced-smart conversation might have gone on interminably if the juke box had not interrupted it. Surprisingly, for no one had come in from the street, it had started to play—and the same wailing dirge as before: the rhymes seemed to be hammered into the cheap varnished lyric like coffin nails—‘learn’ and ‘burn’, ‘spurn’ with the inevitable ‘yearn’—and like a rattle of earth the refrain ‘that I’ll return to you . . . Oh baby, I’ll return’.
‘He must have come in,’ said Helen. ‘and just not seen us.’
‘Dan?’ I said. ‘He couldn’t have helped seeing us. But oh BABY, he’ll return. I’ll toll that bell on the bar until he does.’
‘No,’ said Helen quickly, ‘don’t leave me.’ And as if to disguise the intensity of that plea. ‘He’s probably nipped back to fetch his false teeth. He’ll be back in a minute.’
‘He might have said something while he was here.’
‘Some people are touchy about being caught without their teeth.’
The song keened into crescendo.
‘If he hasn’t got them in by now,’ I said, ‘I hope he swallows them. It’s we who want to eat.’
I walked to the bar—resolutely I hoped, or at least not showing the discomfort I felt. The song was working itself out, and I wanted to get past that juke box and back to our table before the whirring began. I seized the bell—tourist’s Benares work—and jangled it twice. There was no prompt service. I shook it again and went on shaking it, and a voice which sounded as if it came from the basement cried: ‘All right . . . all right. I heard . . . Is it you, Bob?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘it’s not. Is that Dan? We want something to eat.’
‘All right. I’m on my way.’
I went back to Helen. The juke box was silent now.
‘He’s on his way,’ I said.
I don’t know who we expected to see, but certainly not this big cheerful fellow in the blue jeans and bright cowboy shirt.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I was putting up the Zeds in there.’
‘Putting up the what?’ asked Helen. ‘Do you mean you’re closing?’
‘Not a bit of it. Just taking a Sizz . . . z . . .z. Zeds, see? A spot of shut-eye to you, sister. We keep open all night. They come here off of night-shift—and there’s always the lorries. . . . What can I do you?’
‘What can you do us?’
‘Fried eggs, beans, chips, pork bangers—fresh today—a nice rasher of bacon . . .”
‘Everything,’ said Helen, ‘except the baked beans. But pints of black coffee.’
He began laying the table, rattling the sauce bottles into formation in the centre.
‘You didn’t see us,’ I said, ‘when you came in first.’
‘See you?’ he exclaimed. ‘I heard you on the bell, as if you wanted to wake the dead.’
‘Earlier,’ I said. ‘Ten minutes ago, at least.’
‘You’re not telling me you rang that bell for ten blinking minutes.’
‘We waited, and when you didn’t come back I tried the bell.’
‘That’s right. Told you I’d been kipping. Sorry. There’s that notice by the bell, but the regulars usually shout “Dan! Hi there!”—see. Not that there’s many just at this time, after I’ve cleared the cinema couples. Got my head down and my feet up at eleven tonight. Must have fallen off.’
He had moved behind Helen and was setting out the cutlery, ostentatiously wiping the forks on a crumpled paper napkin he had picked up from the next table.
‘Then you weren’t the disc-jockey?’ I said.
‘Disc-jockey? Come again.’
‘Someone was plugging a record on the juke box,’ I said, ‘but he couldn’t have seen us.’
A fork and knives clattered among the sauce bottles.
‘You didn’t see him?’ said Dan. ‘What I mean is you didn’t see no one at the juke box?’
‘We saw no one. We thought it odd,’ said Helen. ‘We were looking out of the window, but as soon as the tune started up again we looked round of course—and there was nobody there.’
‘Again?’ said Dan. ‘You mean you heard it before?’
‘As we came in,’ I said, ‘and then after a bit someone started up the same tune.’
‘One of the girls that does my washing up I expect,’ said Dan, and the lie was as shaky as the hands that groped for the dropped cutlery and set it uncertainly in place. ‘They knock off about then. She started it up then, seeing you, nipped behind the bar—that’s about it. . . . There, I knew I’d forgotten something. You’ll want mustard.’
It was an excuse to turn away, an attempt to break the tension that held him or to forestall a question that might increase it. He brought over a tube of mustard from a nearby table and placed it in a pool of red light beside our sauce bottles. ‘How’s that, eh?’ he had recovered some of his old breeziness of manner, but now it blew too gustily. ‘That’s real hot stuff, that is. . . . I’ll be back with your order soon as it takes, and if that’s too long ring the bell like you done before: I’ll come riding in on the fire engine.’
‘Like twice times two,’ I said, ‘we prefer to wait for you. Till you return.’
His features sagged: he looked at me a moment with sick, hopeless eyes. He tried to speak but no sound came. He turned and moved off in the cheerless gaudy light, walking the gauntlet between the vacant tables; and I noticed how he quickened his pace and dropped his shoulders in almost a cringing gesture as he passed the alcove where the juke box stood.
‘That man’s terrified,’ Helen whispered, when he had disappeared, ‘and I think I am too.’
‘He’s got guts,’ I said, ‘to-ing and fro-ing all night in this abysmal den. There and back was enough for me.’
‘You noticed how relieved he was we hadn’t seen him, whoever he is?’
‘You mean one of the girls that do his washing up?’
‘Eye-wash! But why should he want to lie?’
‘Because he’s scared,’ I said, ‘and doesn’t want to scare us.’
‘But we are scared, Charles. Who’s he trying to shield? Whoever it is he’s the end, the unutterable end—like the tune he plays.’
‘Oh for Heaven’s sake, darling, let sleeping skeletons lie in the cupboards provided for them. l’m hungry.’
‘I’ve an awful feeling,’ said Helen, after a minute, ‘that he’s crawling about on hands and knees under the tables.’
‘Dead to the world, you mean, and pressing the juke box buttons in a kind of drunken stupor?’
‘You’re like the cowboy, now. You’re trying to pretend there’s nothing. You’re trying to persuade yourself you aren’t scared.’
‘I’m hungry,’ I said, ‘I’ll feel better after sausages and chips.’
‘But you know that he’s somewhere about the place—and that he’s a horror, don’t you Charles?’
‘Look here, darling—it’s the place, it’s the whole place,’ I said. ‘It’s not a question of any individual. I told you the place needed analysis.’
‘It’s what I’m trying to do. You know as well as I—and Dan—there’s someone about the place, who’s . . . wrong.’
‘Perhaps I do—but I don’t want to make the autopsy, please Helen, until I’ve had some coffee at least.’
But Helen persisted.
‘Dan wants to keep him out of our way. Why? I think it may be because he’s his brother, and he knows he’s a criminal lunatic. What do you think, Charles?’
‘I think of sausages, Helen, grilled sausages—bronzed but pink in parts like sunbathers: and a fried egg like the noonday sun, and—’ I broke off, and I suppose that like Dan’s my features sagged.
‘Oh, my God!’ said Helen in a tone that was not quite a sob, not exactly a protest and not wholly a prayer but seemed to comprehend in a breath the emotions of all three. ‘I knew he was still here.’
That abandoned tune had started moaning again out of the juke box. We looked at one another, at the raucous, empty alcove and again at one another: we tried to speak, but the tune was spinning round us like a whirlpool and we were drowning in it.
At last I struggled free to gasp: ‘Shall we cut and run?’
Helen slipped a hand like Lady Macbeth’s across the table and clutched my own.
‘We can’t!’ she seemed to be shouting, but her words were the merest croak. ‘We couldn’t move.’
‘When it stops. We’ll bolt—when it stops.’
‘And Dan? We’d seem like the proverbial rats.’
‘This ship isn’t sinking,’ I got out, ‘it’s submerged.’
But the thought of that pathetic cowboy bringing our supper past the rows of empty tables only to find our table empty too, was so intolerable that it made what we had to bear seem suddenly endurable.
‘If you can take it, darling, we’ll stay.’
‘Oh, it’ll be over soon.’
So we sat the tune out, clutching hands over the dabbled plastic cloth, and leering at one another like honeymooners.
When it ended I said: ‘After all it may be a mechanical fault, Helen.’
Helen said nothing at all, just squeezed my hand more tightly. We were still holding hands when Dan came in with the supper. Obviously he had not heard the tune in his basement, for he was whistling: he did not give the alcove a glance this time—but the whistling stopped and he moved more quickly as he passed it.
‘You’d like your coffee now or after?’ he asked, as he set the heaped plates before us.
‘Now, please,’ said Helen.
He went back to the bar and busied himself there with the machine. Thence he called to us occasionally—for companionship—and we returned his hails.
‘Sugar?’
‘Yes, please.’
‘Like cream?’
‘Black for me . . . It’s a good grill you’ve done us.’
‘Glad you like it.’
‘It’s what we wanted.’
‘Got far to drive?’
‘Highgate.’
‘Should do it in under the hour.’
‘We’d be home by now,’ said Helen. ‘We had a breakdown.’
‘Where’ve you left it? Awcock’s?’
‘Two blocks up the street.
‘That’s Awcock’s. They’ll fix it, Awcock’s will.’
Spurts of small talk echoing down the long empty room, they seemed to belong there as little as the human cries that fall from space out of the television screen; and yet in their very triviality they were significant—a glimpse of order in the heart of chaos.
He brought us the coffee and stood watching us finish the meal.
‘Good, eh?’
‘Good! Been here long?’
‘Couple of years. I could do with a change.’
‘It must be a strain,’ I said, ‘keeping open all night. You’re single handed?’
‘I get help most nights.’
Helen lit a cigarette and said: ‘You’re not alone tonight?
What about the girls who do the washing up?’
‘They’ve knocked off. I told you.’
‘Someone came back just now and started the juke box going.’
‘What? Since I been away cooking?’
‘It stopped just before you came in.’
‘There’s some fault with that box. I mean to have it seen to.’
‘Does it always play the same tune?’
He looked haggard and deflated. ‘When it starts by itself it’s usually the one tune,’ he admitted. ‘It plays normal when customers select a record, perfectly normal.’
‘Why,’ said Helen, ‘there’s someone bending over it now.’
‘It can’t be!’ said Dan. ‘I’ve only seen him twice myself.’
‘No—there’s nobody.’ Helen blinked. ‘I could have sworn, but there’s nobody. . . . But look, look,’ she added on a more shrill note, ‘it’s moving, it’s beginning to work!’
There was a scratching noise, and then the cafe was engulfed in the opening bars of that hideous, forlorn song. Dan stumbled into a chair, edged it up to our table; and there the three of us sat, frozen and motionless until it ended.
‘Why don’t you destroy the record!?’ I asked out of the breathing silence.
‘Of course I destroyed it. What do you think?’ said Dan, wildly. ‘I smashed it up the week after. It’s a new juke box I had in too. But it makes no difference. He comes back about eleven to play it, and keeps right on to the end. It’s all right after one in the morning. It’s all over with, see. You hear the bang—and it’s done with till the following night. It’s like one of these West End plays that goes on night after night after night—only there’s no matinee performance to this one. Not everyone hears it plain as you, but enough’s heard it; and I say like I done to you it’s one of the girls or it’s something gone wrong with the juke box. My regulars know it’s Dave of course, and they don’t visit here except those hours they know he won’t be about—before he comes and after it’s done with . . .’
‘Who is Dave?’ I asked, and corrected myself. ‘Who was Dave?’
‘He wasn’t no regular,’ said Dan, ‘at least not while he was alive. But he came in some week-ends with his girl. He was a London Ted, duck-arsed hair dyed red, shoestring tie, pale blue eyes that bulged so you saw the bloodshot rims, slack mouth sucking a cigarette, or a bit of gum, or his teeth. But his girl? Oh, she was really something to look at. Dark and pale, tight black sweater and slacks, and great eyes painted with blue shadow, and pouted lips pale as corpse’s with that kind of off-beat lipstick: she had her hair wound up like a beeskep, and she sat there as quiet as a statue drinking her coffee and smoking while Dave worked the juke box. Moira he called her: some kind of model, I suppose. They kept themselves close: never talked with the others, and took themselves off about midnight till the next week-end or the one after that when they’d be back, sitting at that table by the juke box there.’