14. Wheezing up that Hill

Clicking the heels to a few great tunes

Friday, out of town and not even tea time

Vardaman doesn’t ask again, about the two of them going back to his place to wait things out, even though Moses can’t stand the smell with that acrid sweet stench of skunk sponged into the wallpaper, the carpets, the soft furnishing, the curtains, the coffee table. It’s a half hour walk from town to his place on the hill down from the army barracks, and they spend the whole walk discussing Bowie’s Berlin period, or more specifically, the Fripp and Eno and Visconti dynamic, and this somehow leads on to perfect partnerships in music, and on to siblings, the Davies’s of the Kinks, the mystery of the White Stripes’ boyfriend/ girlfriend/ brother/ sister/ cousins thing, and then on to the Fiery Furnaces because Vardaman has recently been playing “Single Again” every weekend and he’s read in Mojo magazine that they’re brother and sister.

The boys are a bit buzzed from the swift early afternoon drinking and as they get to the underpass they start singing, When I was single, my pockets did jingle, and I wish I was single again. The tunnel gives a pounding reverb to their rendition, and Moses booms a fat-lipped drum loop so it echoes down the tube of muralled tiles, just as an old lady enters from the far end and both the boys stop their dancing and quieten down and Vardaman apologies as they pass her.