Bluebird Day
An unnecessary scene from ENGRAVITATION
[Some time ago Gail Boenning mentioned having been in a certain place at a certain time. Some of my characters — mostly non-speaking parts in the novel — had been in that place and others like it, at a different, earlier time. I thought I’d let them all get together. I didn’t have a title or direction for the piece.
More recently, the same Gail gave us the phrase Bluebird Day, which I thought deserved wider currency. Hey presto! I stole it and added the first three paragraphs below.
If you spot a Gail you think you know in this, please remember she’s acting. No similarity is intended to actual Gails, living, imaginary or wholly-fantastical.]
In the novel:
“Art would happily drive us down… he refused absolutely to get on the boat with us. On the first occasion, either Bob or Rocky had compared him to King Canute, in a conversation that quickly took a bawdy turn and stopped only when I threatened both of them with fines.”
The year is about 1964±1. Now read on…
The sky was a deep, uniform blue, the sea a similarly deep green flecked with white and the foam of our wake. Ahead of us were Calais and the bulk of Europe, and the opportunity to find our way through four countries without the benefit of up-to-date maps. For now, we had an hour to kill.
“See any bluebirds?” Rocky asked, looking back at the slowly receding white cliffs of Dover.
“I can’t even see Vera Lynn,” I told him. The old gags are the best ones: everybody recognises them and smiles. Nobody laughed.
As usual, to while away the time, we played games with the people we saw: games like What’s My Line? and This Is Your Life, that required us to make up stories about them. Bob the Bass was the champion at these, because (they all said) I had no imagination, and Rocky was only interested in what he could imagine about girls. Jake was usually somewhere else, preferably downwind of us and any other passengers.
We didn’t tell the people. That would have made it too easy. Even so, our playing of the game could sometimes get sufficiently out of hand to attract comment, and we would have to move away.
“I spy, with my little eye, someone whose name is Grace,” Bob told us.
Rocky looked interested. It was the animal expression that I sometimes recognised as too interested. “Whereabouts?” I asked.
“Behind you,” Bob inclined his head slightly. “Don’t look — oh, you idiot!” Rocky’s head had whipped round as if on a spring.
Following his lead at a slower pace, I saw the girl staring at us. She was standing with her back to the ship’s rail, wearing a sulky expression that was not improved by chewing. Honey-coloured hair fell in bunches toward a check shirt, long shorts, and unsuitably light footwear. She must be, at most, fourteen.
“You could catch more than a cold there,” I told them.
Rocky’s leer widened. “If they’re old enough to — ”
“Cut that out,” I told him, “right now.” The last thing I needed was an irate parent complaining that my singer had molested their daughter. Singers are hard to come by. Rocky constantly required steering away from temptation.
“I’m only going to talk to her,” he grumbled. “Two hours’ time, we’ll be gone and she’ll be forgotten.”
“That’s what bothers me,” I told him, more than half serious.
“I met her in the shop,” Bob said. “She was very interested when I told her we were a group,” he added. “And she likes my funny English accent.” I frowned. “She’s American.” Well, that explained the chewing. “From Wisconsin.”
“Where’s that?” I asked. “Somewhere in the middle?” I knew a bit about the geography of western Europe now, but had never needed to spend long on a map of the USA. The Knights were never going to be part of that particular British Invasion.
“Dunno, who cares?” Rocky said, still looking at the girl by the rail. Her sullen face stared straight back at him. Trouble, I thought. How could I keep him out of it?
“Bob,” I said, “call her over.” If there was to be any chance of trouble, I needed to be where it would happen.
Bob nodded to the girl and waved an invitation. In no hurry, she peeled away from the small knot of bored sub-teenagers bickering beside her and meandered in our direction.
“Hello,” I said as she approached, “I’m Danny Porter, and this is Rocky. I believe you’ve met our bass player, Bob?” I stuck out my hand for her to shake. She ignored it and looked at us in turn, silent. “Do you have a name?”
The girl’s face was suddenly uncertain as she glanced at Bob. “It’s Grace, right?” She looked relieved. “Unless you’ve got an even more beautiful twin sister?”
The mask cracked, just momentarily, and Grace let herself smile. I couldn’t help thinking she looked better that way.
“I have an older sister,” she told us, all long vowels and elided consonants. “She’s old enough to look like my Mom.” A small shadow passed across her face. “And you’re a band, right?”
It wasn’t the first time we’d been called a band rather than a group, but it still put me more in mind of trumpets and sousaphones and The Flight Of The Bumblebee than our own repertoire, or even the standards I’d been playing after I first met Art. I put the unaccustomed epithet aside and went through the introductions again, and explained Ian’s absence and talked about Jake’s psychosomatic seasickness and told Grace about our itinerary and complained about Jed booking us to play at a party in Lille, which he said was on the way to Hamburg. “It’s a shorter crossing,” he’d told us, emphasising all the positives. “Jake will hardly notice if the weather’s good.” (The sea was flat calm. Jake was still sick.) “And the party’s paying well. It’s a twenty-first. Someone I know, actually.”
Grace looked as disbelieving as I’d felt at hearing all this. “Hamburg, Germany? Is that a long way?”
“The far end of Germany,” I agreed. “Normally we’d go direct, but my manager assures us that the additional thousand miles drive will be worth our while.” Jed had a magic touch when it came to numbers, especially if those numbers were associated, however indirectly, with money. “I should have made him come with us to do some of it.” Although if I had, I might not have picked up the information about Jed that would shortly lead me to open a separate bank account without telling him.
“You made any records?”
“Yeah, you wanna buy one?” Rocky must have been taking lessons from Jed.
The girl shook her head, the ends of her plaits doing a little two-step on her shoulders. “It’d only get broken,” she said. “We don’t have a lot of room.”
“What brings you to Europe?” Rocky asked, raising a hand against the strong likelihood that Bob or I would say Aeroplane.
“Concert tour,” she told us, inclining her head at the other bobbysoxers. “We’re a choir.”
Rocky nudged my arm. “Hey, boss, whaddya think, could we use another singer?”
“What do you mean, another?” Bob asked. “We only keep you on to carry my amplifier.”
I ignored Rocky’s suggestion, as anyone would. “Where are you singing?” I asked.
“Paris next,” the girl said. “Then — ”
“Gail!” called a voice, in an accent like her own. Without another word, she turned and ran back toward her party, who were now milling around a man with a clipboard.
Rocky and I looked at Bob. “I thought she was called Grace?”
“That’s what she told me.” Bob shrugged. “Kids, you can’t trust a word they say.” Bob himself was an old man of eighteen.
Rocky’s standard supercilious sneer was on home ground. “Bass players, you can’t trust their cloth ears,” he said, ducking out of the way of Bob’s lazy fist.
“Hey!” I said, a little louder than strictly necessary, rubbing my thumb and fingers in the gesture that was now shorthand for You’ll be paying for this. The altercation subsided, and we mooched off to the stern in search of Jake.
I spotted Grace-or-Gail one last time as we were waiting for the van to be unloaded. She was standing in the sunshine at a coach stop across the quay with a couple of about my own age and an older man, gazing in our direction in the same way as when I’d first seen her. It wasn’t sullenness, I realised, just a disguise for keen observation. She knew all about us and our business, and apparently we didn’t even know her name. “Bye, Grace,” I said to nobody. “Be seeing you.”
A coach drew up in front of the group, cutting off my view. When I was able to look again, they were gone. I rounded up my unruly charges and set off on the road to Dunkirk and the Belgian border.
