The Paradise

There’s a hall in every town that used to be full of music.
Ours is called The Paradise.
Now it’s empty. Locked. Forgotten.
But some nights, you can hear a band playing inside.
Old songs. Perfectly played.
And when someone dies in the town…
the music draws a crowd you can’t see.
If you pass by, don’t stop.
Don’t look in.
It’s not for you.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:34

You know the building even if I don't name the town. Every town has one. The hall with the grand old door and the cracked fan light, the poster frames that still hold the shadows of posters. Once a civic hall, then a cinema with the red curtains, then a furniture place with leather suites stacked like thrones. Now nothing but a husk with pigeons for users. We call ours the paradise. It's a good joke. And like most good jokes, it's true enough to sting. I'm younger than those who really knew it. I've only the stories my mother told, and my father told when it suited him, and the old lads at the corner in the pub told when the talk got around to the way things were. They say the floor there was laid by carpenters who knew about dancing. It had a spring to it, a sweet give, so that your feet came up glad again. You could bounce a coin by the stage, and it would hop on back up to your hand. Talc in the corners, a mineral bar that served red lemonade, and a glass that remembered your lips. Girls in Taffeta, boys in suits borrowed from cousins, chaperones with eyes like hawks, a slow set that could make a life or undo one. And the bands. There were real ones, famous ones, that came through on the showban circuit. Dickie Rock sang there. One summer when the town had more hair than sense. Brendan Bauer and the Royal turned up in a fog, and you could feel the brass in your bones for a week, it was said. The freshmen with their harmonies, better than any radio. The Dixies rolling through like they owned the town. Joe Dolan in a white jacket that made the girls pull at their sleeves. Big names on small stages. They all left something of themselves behind. The way swallows leave more summer in a place than they carry away. But the band that stayed weren't any of those. The band that stayed were ours. And are ours still. No one saw them arrive. No one remembers hiring them. Yet if you ask in the right tone, at the right time, the old ones will lower their voices and tell you about the Celestials. Some say they first appeared after a storm that tore slates off like tissues and slung them down the street. The hall was shut then, you see. The cinema gone, the furniture men finished, the doors chained. After the storm, someone passed at dusk and heard tuning notes from behind the door. Not rats, not pigeons. Instruments. A fiddle clearing its throat, a trumpet trying a quite scale, the soft thump of a bass drum as a hand settled on it, and then lifted gently away. Someone else swears it started the week the travel agent closed. As if the town took the need for leaving and turned it inside out, and it came out as music in the place where the leaving had always begun. You can laugh, I won't mind. I laugh myself the first time I heard it. Then I walked by the paradise on an evening in late October, when the light goes down like a curtain, and the damp comes up through the road, and I heard the first bar of a tune you would know. It wasn't a complicated song. Everyone knows it. When the saints go marching in. The real musicians here will forgive me for getting the key wrong. It started on a cornet. Or a trumpet, but softer than you would expect, like breath on a glass. Then the fiddle took a line under it that I hadn't known the tune could carry. And a guitar laid out a step for both of them to walk on. No singing. No words. There was a clever grace to it. If you've ever watched a good dancer step down from a height and not jar their bones, you know the feeling. I stopped without meaning to, the hairs on my arms lifted. I felt the coin jump under my heel, though there was no coin and no spring. The first time I tolted in the pub they said I was hearing the radio from a van. They said I was hearing the flats behind the hall where a young fella practices on a trumpet he'll never learn. Then Tommy at the snug, who never says much, put down his glass and said, I heard it too. He said it quiet, as if he was telling on himself. The Celestials, that's what the old ones call them when they will name it at all. A strange name for a dance band, as if heaven or the sky over the estuary when the weather is on your side had a house band and they were only slumming it with us. You might well ask, who are they? That's the tricky part. No one sees them whole. They are glimpsed with the way swans are glimpsed when the lake fog lifts a finger and then puts it down again. You see the gold of a saxophone bell and the shape of a man behind it who looks like someone you half remember from a photograph in your aunt's hallway. You see a girl at the drum kit, hair pinned up with the nerve of someone who has never asked permission to be brilliant. And then she's not there, and the sticks are ticking away on their own. The fiddlebow moves by itself, and you think I know that wrest. That's Bridie Nolan's wrist. And then you think Bridie's dead three weeks, and you stood at her grave, and you tell yourself nothing. Let me give you the lay of the land so you can picture it when I say that the band started up again of an evening. The paradise sits on a corner of the square. Across from it's a takeaway that used to be a butcher's. Beside it is a shop that keeps changing its name but always sells the same shoes. The lane to the back runs electric in summer with the bottle bins. Pigeons do their sermons along the eaves. In the windows of the paradise there are curtains that have been washed out by forty years of light and are now the colour of an undertaker's sigh. It was in that window I first saw them properly, if properly is the word. It was a Friday. I was walking home from the pub, sober enough to have my wits, mind you, rich enough in company to have my courage. The street was quiet in a way small town goes quiet when the second pine turns everyone conversational, and nobody thinks to shout. The sky was a lid. I heard the tiny drum checks first, and without knowing my feet found the slow step they used to teach. Heel toe, heel toe, as if the street itself were learning me how. A shadow passed across the inner curtain, and then another. The light inside the hall is always the same in those evenings. Not electric, but not candle either. It's the kind of light you get when you open a wardrobe that's not been open for years and find the sun someone left inside. They were playing the Saints again, only this time it was no warm-up. It moved with a kind of tide in it. In the corner of the window, where the glass was not quite clean, you could see the reflection of the square and the band together, and the effect was that the parish was dancing. I knew the tunes they folded into it. A bit of the hucklebuck, because this is Ireland, and you can't play anything without at least threatening the hucklebuck. Or so it seems. A snatch of the black velvet band braided in so fine it took five bars to know it was there. A cord that had no business in a showband chart, and yet made the hair on the back of my neck stand to attention. I stayed as long as I could bear it, long enough to taste dust that was not on my tongue and feel the clock go funny. Then I did what sensible men do, and I went home and put the kettle on and stared at the steam. After that I was never quite right and never quite wrong. Whenever I passed the paradise in the evening I slowed. Sometimes there was nothing. Sometimes there was nothing. Sometimes there was that faint, tender, intoxicating sound, like the band were rehearsing in a room made of memory. In the mornings there were scuffs on the floor that had not been there, the chalk dust of talc near the skirting, a sweet smell of hairspray hidden under the usual damp. Pigeons don't use hairspray. I started keeping stupid notes. I started asking foolish questions. Two things happened around then that turned hearsay into story. First, a woman died who had not missed a dance in the hall from nineteen fifty eight to nineteen sixty six, or so she said herself when anyone was listening. She had a photograph in her kitchen of herself and a man in a suit standing under a banner that read Welcome, Miami Showband. The man had his hand on the small of her back like he was steadying her from a fall. He was not the man she'd marry. She died quietly, with her good rosary in her hand, the one from Mejigori. At her wake, her daughter said, half joking and half not If you listen this week the paradise will be lively. She was right. The band were at it every evening until the funeral, and on the evening of the removal they played a tune none of us knew. A blues and a key that made the lamplight buzz, and if there had been words to it, I know they would have been about a summer that never ended, and a mistake that everyone forgave. The second thing, I'll tell you the way Tommy tolted in the snug. Tommy keeps the kind of sober you hold on to with both hands. He doesn't gild. He doesn't embroider. He says this he was passing the paradise one Saturday afternoon towards dusk, when he saw the door open, just a hair. Not the big door, but the side door the bands used. A hand came out, a man's hand, older than his own but not shaking. It took a stick of chalk and drew a thin line on the step, like marking a place in a book. Then the hand went back in and the doors clicked shut. That night, said Tommy, the music started with a march, a different march, one that he couldn't name, that curled up on itself and came back out again smiling. You're wanting to tell me now that all this is very well and good, but where is the horror? And where is the grace? It's not a horror story you say, unless something awful happens. It's not a grace unless someone is forgiven. There is a kind of horror that is only the truth told without blinking, and I will do my best. You know how the old go in a town like this? Not in ones and twos but in seasons. A cold spring and they fall like leaves in reverse. A winter of easy weather and they gather themselves for the finish of the following year. It isn't that they conspire, it's that there's a music down in the bone that our calendars don't hear. That year there was a run of departures that would have sobered the corporate tense in the Galway races. Faces in windows grew softer and went out. Notices went up at the post office like school reports. We lined up in black and held hands where we could and said it's a mercy because that's the tune you learn. Each time on the week that someone went, the paradise had a night. Not every night. Not predictable. You couldn't make a booking of it for the tourists. But often enough that people stopped saying coincidence and started leaving space in their sentences for something else. The Saints would strike up at a pace set for walkers. And if you listened from outside, there was a moment in the middle of the tune when the step changed. And it was not a walk anymore. And it was not a run. And it was not what we do here, but something that belongs to another grammar. That was the moment, I think, when someone turned a corner and none of us can see and they didn't look back. I'm not saying the dead danced. I'm saying the music asked a question, and someone answered. And the floor had been made by men who understood what a body might do. There was one night I'll tell to you of entire. For it's a night I keep for myself when the dark is on me. It was January again. Because you know, the way years can't help themselves. A storm was coming, the kind that had a name. The town had tied up what could be tied and surrendered the rest to chance. The river had that greasy look it gets before it lifts. People got their messages in early. Around half past eight, the lights went in the square. Not for long. A blink. Then another. The shops gave up and put up their shutters. The takeaway ran the generator, and the smell of chips went like holy incense in the damp. The paradise, which has and had nothing to run, stayed as it was. But there was a shine in the window that had not been there.

SPEAKER_00 14:03

A soft gold.

SPEAKER_01 14:05

And under it the tuning that means the band are minded to work. News came across the pub that Mrs. Keane had gone. You know, the small Mrs. Keane with the fine feet. She used to cut hair in her kitchen when the shop was shut, and she gave you tea until your head was washed from the inside. If you'd seen her as a girl, they said, you'd have caught your breath. She could float across the floor and you'd not see her set down, and she only waited for a gentleman who never came, and then she married a farmer with a mind like a kettle, given to boiling and cooling Maria, and she made a life out of that, and it said If God sees the whole of it, he would not keep her long outside. The men at the bar stood up without a signal, the way they do when there's something to be marked. They went into the street in their coats and hats and the rain met them like a glad dog. They stood under the eaves of the paradise where the water comes down in sheets from broken gutters, and they listened. The Celestials began with the saints, because they know their business. Slow with the cornets sweet and prayer. Then the fiddle took a keen across the top and made your heart feel too tight and too big at the same time. Then her and the drums tipped us forward, not rushing, just suggesting the floor wasn't needing to be that flat anymore. And we were going downhill towards something that would hurt and healed. And hurt again so it might heal. We heard feet then, not ours. Inside. A crowd. A soft stamp the way dancers do when they don't want to wake the neighbours. The music turned its shoulder and it passed. You could feel the breath of the town gather itself. And hold. And then the trumpets lifted. And for eight bars the whole square moved. I swear. The lamp standards swayed. The pigeons leaned on the wind like men to a bar. We moved with it, old and young, and no one put a name on what we were doing because a name is the thing to nail it to the board. It broke suddenly. The way a good step breaks on the snare. The gold light went soft. The storm took its breath again. We stood there, wet and stupid and crying without the faces we make for show. After that night, there were people who said they'd seen Mrs. Keene through the gauze of the curtain, and the man she waited for, and her small feet-making patterns that only children and angels remember. I didn't see her myself, and this is important, because I don't want you to think I'm offering proof. I'm offering a story, which I suppose is another kind of proof, and sometimes it's the better one. What you have in your head now as they finish is a question, and you're right to have it. What about now? Do they still play? Is the paradise still paradise? Or has the weather and the vandals and the council taken the last of it? Will the band keep going when the old have gone? And only the young are left who think dancing is something you do with your hands. Here's my answer, and I think it's the only one that fits. Sometimes I pass by late. I'm not proud, and I'm not careful. I have points in me and a song my mother sang when she thought I wasn't listening. The square is quiet, the flags and the poles slapping themselves awake, the gulls doing their court cases on the roof. I slow without really meaning to. I keep my eyes on the ground because the window is too much for me. I hear it then. Faint and exact a single trumpet line. Sweet and crooked as a smile. A guitar laying down, a bed like a prayer you say on a day you don't believe. Just in case. A brush on a snare. Tick tick. As if the drummer is reminding the band that time still belongs to someone else. And I hear it under it. The step of a new pair of shoes. Not old, not yet. Something young, uncertain, lighter than a worry, heavier than a joke. Someone joining without meaning to. Because the tune is a gate and was always a gate, no matter what the door says in the front. I don't look in. I keep walking, because there are things that sour if you look them in the eye. I go home and I tell no one, except here, to you, because the night is long and the wind is high, and the floor doesn't have that spring in it, and we all have to keep time with something until it does again. This is my story. If you pass the paradise yourself, don't bang on the door. Don't shout. Leave a little space in your step. And if you hear the saints, take the hat off your head and hold it to your heart. Not out of piety, but out of manners.

SPEAKER_00 19:16

And if you hear another tune, one you can't name, nod and keep going. It's not for you yet. Unless it is