The Epigone:
Parts 3 & 4
by John McGroarty
Genre: Drama
Swearwords: None.
Description: Having bumped into Miriam by chance, the failed Glaswegian writer, nicknamed Jimmy by a colleague, then stalks her, imagines she needs help and decides to get involved in her life.
Swearwords: None.
Description: Having bumped into Miriam by chance, the failed Glaswegian writer, nicknamed Jimmy by a colleague, then stalks her, imagines she needs help and decides to get involved in her life.
3
One day in late May, I saw Miriam in the supermarket. She had a blank look on her face and a sullen emptiness in her eyes. She had two young children under the age of five with her. One sat up in the trolley and the other toddled along at her side. She was drifting through the store and filling up the trolley mechanically. I had forgotten about her and imagined that she had moved on. I was shocked to see she had two children; she must have been only twenty-eight or twenty-nine. I didn’t know what to do. It had been almost six months since I last saw her. I was no one for her. There were twelve people in our reading group. Twelve faces. I had never said anything memorable or stood out in any way. Yet I thought maybe she would remember me. Because I was a foreigner. Because of my old blue eyes. I tracked out her route in my head and maneuvered around so that I could walk right into her. She looked through me. I walked past and stopped at the end of the line of fridges to think what to do. I thought I should just walk right up and reintroduce myself. I am not normally shy. I have been a confident straightforward person all my life. I never saw the point of being anything else. Just then the gods took a hand in the matter. As I was moving towards her I saw a woman stealthily sneak behind her and lift her purse from her bag. I rushed in. To the rescue. Like a superhero. When Miriam realized what had happened she turned aggressively to the thief. She kicked out at her and made a grab for her hair. She swore and cursed her to the devil. I admit I was shocked. It was a side to her I had never seen or expected. She reached out and slapped the pickpocket violently round the head. The woman staggered a little under the force of the blow. Miriam was a big woman. I went to intervene but the security guard arrived. I started to explain but Miriam stopped me. It’s okay, I’ve got my purse, she said coldly. The security guard moved off with the thief to expulse her from the shop. Miriam turned to me and began to say thank you. Then she stopped and a little light went on. You’re that guy from the library, from the reading group, she said, the guiri, the one who likes Dostoevsky. She looked at me strangely for a moment. As if weighing up the possibility of someone you know being on hand just at the right time to save you from being robbed. The likelihood of it. It was a writer’s thought. She laughed to herself, thanked me again, and pushed off with the trolley. I went to ask her if I could take her and the kids for an ice-cream but stopped myself. With a woman like Miriam you have to win the little battles before the war. I was two or three people behind her in the queue. When I got outside I decided to follow her to see where she lived. I looked left and right and saw that she was heading down Calle d’Espronceda. Towards the sea. I followed her slowly. She crossed Calle Pujades and then Llull and went into the Gandhi Park. One of the children was pulling on her hand and dragging her to the swing park. I saw her sit down on a bench and the children went whooping to the swings. She pulled a book out of her bag and started reading. I watched from a bench just out of view. I felt like a spy of some sort. I usually did this in my imagination when I wrote but this time it was real. I wondered if she would think I was weird if she saw me. Tell the police or her husband; I imagined there was a husband. After fifteen minutes she put her book away, slipped on her sunglasses, and called the kids. She crossed the road and went into a building on the corner of Espronceda and Ramon Turró. I stood looking up at the building. Then the green wooden shutters on the first floor opened and she came out onto the balcony. She looked out over the park for a minute and then draped something over the metal balustrade and went back inside. There was a little bar with a terrace under her building and I went over and sat down and ordered a coffee. I really don’t know what I thought I was doing. As I said, I was very lonely. I had always sought solitude in my old life in Scotland but now that I really had it, it was playing strange games with my head. I thought I could live just in my imagination but I have found that the philosophers of the social animal are right and that without that we lose something human for all the individual freedom that we may gain. There was music coming from somewhere. Classical music. The cello. It was coming from Miriam’s flat. I wasn’t sure what it was exactly. Bach or Chopin. Something gloomy and saturnine. A man reading the sports press at the table next to me scowled. It’s like that all the time, he said. The guy’s a Latin American, un sudaca, es deprimente, tío, it would be okay if he played reggaeton. I listened closely and the playing was excellent. Professional. Now they’ll have a fight, said my friend. And sure enough I heard a woman’s voice screaming about letting the children sleep. The music stopped and the male voice started in a pleading tone to argue about needing to practise, that that was the only way to get better, to get an audition, and other things that I couldn’t make out. Then the woman again, Miriam, about the children, about him being a terrible father, that he should get a job, be responsible, that she was fed up cleaning and cooking for him. Then a big bang and silence. Gracias a Dios, said the guy opposite. A short time later the main door opened and he came out with a cello case on his back. He turned right and went down towards the sea. He plays down there in the park at the sea, for hours, my friend informed me, raising his eyes to heaven. I nodded. I finished my coffee and went into the bar and paid. On the way home I thought about Miriam and her cello player. He was really good but there was something about it. Something not quite right. Some imperfection; missed notes, blind musical alleyways, and a touch of desperation to get it just right. I had it all straight in my head then. Her sullenness and aggression and unfriendliness. He was playing at being the great artist and Miriam was sacrificing her life for him. Offering herself up to his dreams. It was like in that film by Bergman. To joy. Life copying art. Or maybe it was a universal. A theme of life. One of the songs of life. Whatever way, that was when I took the decision to get involved. Even if I couldn’t create the way I wanted and the muses had abandoned me, still my sense of the artistic and the tragic demanded it.
4
I have a part time job. I don’t need the money as I have the cash from selling my business, live frugally, and in two years I’ll get the full pension. But the job gives me a routine and stops me from drinking too much at night. It’s in a translation firm. We do a lot of corporate stuff and it’s pretty dull. Still it’s good for me. It’s a bit like driving or writing; when you do it, you stop thinking about everything else and concentrate wholly on the task at hand. It’s therapeutic. I did Spanish and French at university and have picked up Catalan quickly so I am a man with three fingers in the pie and the boss likes that. He’s a young Frenchman with a Mexican wife and twin daughters. He’s from some place around Toulouse. I spent a week in his cousin’s house there a few years back. His family were refugees after the Civil War and he always says that he has returned to his country two generations later to reclaim his birthright. His support for the Ciudadanos party is a little incongruous but he’s what the Spanish call un buen tipo and I like him and I even feel some loyalty to his wee chiringuito. There are a couple of other workers. They’re a lot younger than me so apart from the odd beer we don’t have much to do with each other. One’s a grungy American even more lost than me. He’s married and divorced from a girl from Lille. They had a son and got tired of playing at being hippies. He’s very sensitive and I believe was some sort of disappointment to his parents. They visited one time and we had lunch. They were like two refugees from Andy Warhol’s Factory who had turned conservative republican with age but had kept their faux eccentricity. I put them in a story which I never finished and I am keeping them for future reference. The other’s a German called Hans. He’s touching forty but still has a dream of becoming a teenage musical success. He was in a boy band in Munich but I don’t think they made it very big. He busks on the Metro and is always writing cheesy songs and asking my advice on their grammatical accuracy or the acceptability of their inaccuracy. Sometimes I turn on my writer self and give them a flourish but he never accepts any of my versions but does look duly impressed just to please me. We are both Zappa freaks and I quite like him and if he wasn’t such an obvious opportunist I would even befriend him. Anyway, he makes me laugh with his deadpan German humour. And so it was to him that I turned with my first idea to find a way to introduce myself into Miriam’s life. I had the idea that her husband needed a job and could take up busking on the Metro and make some cash. I knew that Hans had done it. And he could barely play “Redemption Song” on the guitar never mind Bach’s cello suites. I told him I had a friend who wanted to know what he had to do to get the licence. Hans looked at me suspiciously. Mensch, you don’t have any friends, he said, his eyes laughing. And you’re too uncool to know musicians. It’s a young neighbour, I lied. He wants to make some money in the summer. He’s going to study at the Conservatori next year. OK, Jimmy, he said, it’s all on the internet, I’ll send you the link. He always calls me Jimmy as I am from Glasgow and he heard one time that that’s how we talk to each other. I did say that he made me laugh. I never put him in a story though. Very quickly I had it in my inbox. I downloaded and printed out two copies and put them in a folder in my bag. Hans shook his head. I had never imagined you were a real mensch, Jimmy, he said, never in a million years.
One day in late May, I saw Miriam in the supermarket. She had a blank look on her face and a sullen emptiness in her eyes. She had two young children under the age of five with her. One sat up in the trolley and the other toddled along at her side. She was drifting through the store and filling up the trolley mechanically. I had forgotten about her and imagined that she had moved on. I was shocked to see she had two children; she must have been only twenty-eight or twenty-nine. I didn’t know what to do. It had been almost six months since I last saw her. I was no one for her. There were twelve people in our reading group. Twelve faces. I had never said anything memorable or stood out in any way. Yet I thought maybe she would remember me. Because I was a foreigner. Because of my old blue eyes. I tracked out her route in my head and maneuvered around so that I could walk right into her. She looked through me. I walked past and stopped at the end of the line of fridges to think what to do. I thought I should just walk right up and reintroduce myself. I am not normally shy. I have been a confident straightforward person all my life. I never saw the point of being anything else. Just then the gods took a hand in the matter. As I was moving towards her I saw a woman stealthily sneak behind her and lift her purse from her bag. I rushed in. To the rescue. Like a superhero. When Miriam realized what had happened she turned aggressively to the thief. She kicked out at her and made a grab for her hair. She swore and cursed her to the devil. I admit I was shocked. It was a side to her I had never seen or expected. She reached out and slapped the pickpocket violently round the head. The woman staggered a little under the force of the blow. Miriam was a big woman. I went to intervene but the security guard arrived. I started to explain but Miriam stopped me. It’s okay, I’ve got my purse, she said coldly. The security guard moved off with the thief to expulse her from the shop. Miriam turned to me and began to say thank you. Then she stopped and a little light went on. You’re that guy from the library, from the reading group, she said, the guiri, the one who likes Dostoevsky. She looked at me strangely for a moment. As if weighing up the possibility of someone you know being on hand just at the right time to save you from being robbed. The likelihood of it. It was a writer’s thought. She laughed to herself, thanked me again, and pushed off with the trolley. I went to ask her if I could take her and the kids for an ice-cream but stopped myself. With a woman like Miriam you have to win the little battles before the war. I was two or three people behind her in the queue. When I got outside I decided to follow her to see where she lived. I looked left and right and saw that she was heading down Calle d’Espronceda. Towards the sea. I followed her slowly. She crossed Calle Pujades and then Llull and went into the Gandhi Park. One of the children was pulling on her hand and dragging her to the swing park. I saw her sit down on a bench and the children went whooping to the swings. She pulled a book out of her bag and started reading. I watched from a bench just out of view. I felt like a spy of some sort. I usually did this in my imagination when I wrote but this time it was real. I wondered if she would think I was weird if she saw me. Tell the police or her husband; I imagined there was a husband. After fifteen minutes she put her book away, slipped on her sunglasses, and called the kids. She crossed the road and went into a building on the corner of Espronceda and Ramon Turró. I stood looking up at the building. Then the green wooden shutters on the first floor opened and she came out onto the balcony. She looked out over the park for a minute and then draped something over the metal balustrade and went back inside. There was a little bar with a terrace under her building and I went over and sat down and ordered a coffee. I really don’t know what I thought I was doing. As I said, I was very lonely. I had always sought solitude in my old life in Scotland but now that I really had it, it was playing strange games with my head. I thought I could live just in my imagination but I have found that the philosophers of the social animal are right and that without that we lose something human for all the individual freedom that we may gain. There was music coming from somewhere. Classical music. The cello. It was coming from Miriam’s flat. I wasn’t sure what it was exactly. Bach or Chopin. Something gloomy and saturnine. A man reading the sports press at the table next to me scowled. It’s like that all the time, he said. The guy’s a Latin American, un sudaca, es deprimente, tío, it would be okay if he played reggaeton. I listened closely and the playing was excellent. Professional. Now they’ll have a fight, said my friend. And sure enough I heard a woman’s voice screaming about letting the children sleep. The music stopped and the male voice started in a pleading tone to argue about needing to practise, that that was the only way to get better, to get an audition, and other things that I couldn’t make out. Then the woman again, Miriam, about the children, about him being a terrible father, that he should get a job, be responsible, that she was fed up cleaning and cooking for him. Then a big bang and silence. Gracias a Dios, said the guy opposite. A short time later the main door opened and he came out with a cello case on his back. He turned right and went down towards the sea. He plays down there in the park at the sea, for hours, my friend informed me, raising his eyes to heaven. I nodded. I finished my coffee and went into the bar and paid. On the way home I thought about Miriam and her cello player. He was really good but there was something about it. Something not quite right. Some imperfection; missed notes, blind musical alleyways, and a touch of desperation to get it just right. I had it all straight in my head then. Her sullenness and aggression and unfriendliness. He was playing at being the great artist and Miriam was sacrificing her life for him. Offering herself up to his dreams. It was like in that film by Bergman. To joy. Life copying art. Or maybe it was a universal. A theme of life. One of the songs of life. Whatever way, that was when I took the decision to get involved. Even if I couldn’t create the way I wanted and the muses had abandoned me, still my sense of the artistic and the tragic demanded it.
4
I have a part time job. I don’t need the money as I have the cash from selling my business, live frugally, and in two years I’ll get the full pension. But the job gives me a routine and stops me from drinking too much at night. It’s in a translation firm. We do a lot of corporate stuff and it’s pretty dull. Still it’s good for me. It’s a bit like driving or writing; when you do it, you stop thinking about everything else and concentrate wholly on the task at hand. It’s therapeutic. I did Spanish and French at university and have picked up Catalan quickly so I am a man with three fingers in the pie and the boss likes that. He’s a young Frenchman with a Mexican wife and twin daughters. He’s from some place around Toulouse. I spent a week in his cousin’s house there a few years back. His family were refugees after the Civil War and he always says that he has returned to his country two generations later to reclaim his birthright. His support for the Ciudadanos party is a little incongruous but he’s what the Spanish call un buen tipo and I like him and I even feel some loyalty to his wee chiringuito. There are a couple of other workers. They’re a lot younger than me so apart from the odd beer we don’t have much to do with each other. One’s a grungy American even more lost than me. He’s married and divorced from a girl from Lille. They had a son and got tired of playing at being hippies. He’s very sensitive and I believe was some sort of disappointment to his parents. They visited one time and we had lunch. They were like two refugees from Andy Warhol’s Factory who had turned conservative republican with age but had kept their faux eccentricity. I put them in a story which I never finished and I am keeping them for future reference. The other’s a German called Hans. He’s touching forty but still has a dream of becoming a teenage musical success. He was in a boy band in Munich but I don’t think they made it very big. He busks on the Metro and is always writing cheesy songs and asking my advice on their grammatical accuracy or the acceptability of their inaccuracy. Sometimes I turn on my writer self and give them a flourish but he never accepts any of my versions but does look duly impressed just to please me. We are both Zappa freaks and I quite like him and if he wasn’t such an obvious opportunist I would even befriend him. Anyway, he makes me laugh with his deadpan German humour. And so it was to him that I turned with my first idea to find a way to introduce myself into Miriam’s life. I had the idea that her husband needed a job and could take up busking on the Metro and make some cash. I knew that Hans had done it. And he could barely play “Redemption Song” on the guitar never mind Bach’s cello suites. I told him I had a friend who wanted to know what he had to do to get the licence. Hans looked at me suspiciously. Mensch, you don’t have any friends, he said, his eyes laughing. And you’re too uncool to know musicians. It’s a young neighbour, I lied. He wants to make some money in the summer. He’s going to study at the Conservatori next year. OK, Jimmy, he said, it’s all on the internet, I’ll send you the link. He always calls me Jimmy as I am from Glasgow and he heard one time that that’s how we talk to each other. I did say that he made me laugh. I never put him in a story though. Very quickly I had it in my inbox. I downloaded and printed out two copies and put them in a folder in my bag. Hans shook his head. I had never imagined you were a real mensch, Jimmy, he said, never in a million years.
About the Author
John McGroarty was born in Glasgow and now lives in Barcelona, where he works as an English teacher. He has been writing short stories for many years. His long short story, Rainbow, his novel, The Tower, and his two short fiction collections, Everywhere and Homo Sacer, are all McStorytellers publications.