If I needed you

A Novella from England in the 1970s

1

The morning smelled of salt and coal smoke as Michael Jones walked along the wet planks of the pier. The wind carried the tang of seaweed and the distant hammering from the shipyard, which had been running only half-days for weeks now. Between the piles the sea slopped steadily against the steps as if nothing had happened – no winter of strikes, no closures, no drifting apart. England in the early seventies was only just starting to shift; the significant changes were still to come.

He stopped at the edge. Over there, where the river emptied into the bay, the fog lay flat as a tablecloth. Out of the white nothing, the outline of the old lighthouse surfaced, then vanished again. Michael shoved his hands into the pockets of the wax jacket his father had left him. The leather had split at the elbows; he didn’t mind.

He had come back from London the night before last on an overheated train, a slow stopper that halted at every milk churn. No telephone number any more that he knew would be answered. Only the address of her aunt in Polperro, Cornwall, scribbled on the back of a cassette cover. The Graham Nash tape held a song about a hand you promised to hold, and a sea you’d cross if you had to. He had played it for months until the ribbon frayed at the edges.

In West Street, the red phone box still had a rotary dial. Three times he slid his finger in, and three times pulled it back out.

Now he was standing here. ‘Are you coming?’ he said softly into the wind, as if the fog might answer.

2

In the summer of 1972 Michael had seen her for the first time: Lynn Bowles, standing in front of the EMI record shop window in Plymouth, red hair tamed with a scarf, dark eyes restless with impatience. The shop was playing Joni Mitchell, but Lynn laughed at it and reached for a Sandy Denny album. ‘Music that makes wind outside,’ she said.

Lynn had grown up with her aunt, a widow who seemed to boil the smell of lavender into every towel. Her parents had been lost at sea when she was five; she hardly spoke of it. She sang at folk nights in the Sailors’ Rest when the men from the yard sat at round tables in oily overalls and pretended, they were only listening to improve the beer tasting. Michael accompanied her on a borrowed guitar with a surface scratched to ribbons. It was enough.

Back then, he rode a rattling Triumph motorbike that would only be persuaded to start with patience and a kick. Soon it drank more oil than petrol and smoked at every gear change. On the pillion, Lynn held on to his jacket carefully, as if checking whether touch would still be there the next day. When they sat on the beach, she counted the lights of the ships and invented a story for each one. ‘For people who’ve got nothing, every story’s a treasure,’ she said once. ‘You only have to hold your hand out.’

Michael wasn’t one for big speeches. He worked in the paint shop at the yard; the colours settled as the finest dust in his beard. In the evenings, he smelled of solvent and salt. He believed he was owed both: the job that brought bread, and the voice that told him when it was time to lift his head. Near Lynn, he could hear that voice.

3

In 1974 the shipyard went on short time; no one knew how long there’d be work for everybody. From far-off London came word that clubs were looking for young musicians who were cheap. London was hip, the scene kept moving, one music style shoved the next aside, and the big companies were insatiable. An old friend wrote saying he had a gig in Islington, contacts, a sofa. ‘Come, Michael,’ the friend wrote. ‘No one here asks where you’re from. What matters is what you bring.’

The night before he left, there was no wind. They sat by the harbour. Lynn flipped open the cassette deck of his record-breaking scratched player and slid a tape in. ‘If you need me, you’ll come, won’t you?’ she asked, half teasing, half afraid, and left the sentence hanging. Michael looked at her hands; they were slender, but there was a quiet strength in the knuckles.

‘I’m not the one who runs away,’ he said.

‘The one who runs away never knows it beforehand.’

She kissed him for a long time, without urgency, as if giving the moment time to settle. Later, in the dark, resting against his shoulder, she said, ‘Don’t close your eyes too early. You miss so much.’

He promised everything people promise on nights like that.

4

London was louder than his own head. In the clubs, the air was hazy blue with cigarette smoke and the fear of those who’d come a long way and still hovered at the edge. Michael played whatever people wanted to hear—songs about streets that led on and on, and mornings you overslept too often. A booker took an interest; there were small tours in the North, Irish pubs in Birmingham, warm-up sets for bands whose names he forgot. It was always just enough from one week to the next.

He sent Lynn postcards: brick walls the rain drew on; a hotel room where the red wine tasted of metal; a man crying in a bar’s back room because his wife had left him and the music hadn’t. Lynn replied in rare letters, with her aunt breathing between the lines and the shipyard groaning behind them. She carried on singing, went to the beach on Sundays, got up early to watch the fog. ‘I’m holding my place,’ she wrote, ‘until you know where yours is again.’

In the spring of 1975, her aunt died. Lynn wrote it on a thin sheet the post delivered, creased in its envelope. Michael was in Sheffield now, rain tapping the windows for three days straight. He rang—the rotary dial turned slowly, as if time itself were limping. Lynn answered and said nothing.

‘I’m sorry,’ Michael said. ‘I’ll come down on the weekend.’

‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘This time I’ll manage on my own.’

His unsettled musician’s life went on without incident; he could barely keep himself afloat. They didn’t see each other again for months. He felt something standing between them then, something that wanted no words. At his last appearance in the Sailors’ Rest, she sang a song he didn’t know, and the men at the tables suddenly weren’t just looking at their glasses any more. Afterwards, she left early; he stayed behind, coiling cables as if he had all the time in the world.

In the morning, he went back north. No goodbye like before; she didn’t wave.

5

Winter 1976: power cuts, cold corridors, cold that slid through the windows like a thin knife. England learned the hardness of strikes. Rubbish piled in the streets, the bakers stopped baking, and the chimneys of the power stations went cold. Michael shared a room with two other musicians. One stole, the other loved every girl who crossed his path. Michael loved the silence between two notes – the brief lie that it might change something. Sometimes he saw Lynn in a crowd that wasn’t there. Then he’d tune the guitar too high and play the song too slowly.

One January night, after a man in the pub told him he ought to ‘finally decide work or dream’, Michael went barefoot into the yard where frost polished the bricks. He thought of Lynn’s line about missing things. The next day he wrote a letter. There were no promises in it, only a direction: ‘I’m coming home. If you need me, I’m there.’

He had no words for the months in between. The train went past chimneys that no longer smoked. Past cows standing in a grey field. Past women in headscarves by the roadside waiting for their men. He held the letter as if it were a ticket for a connecting train.

6

He took a room at the Royal George. The landlady remembered his parents, his father who had once slipped off the pier in the fog and lived, as if the sea had been kind that day.

‘Bowles girl,’ she said. ‘She doesn’t sing as much now. After her aunt died, she helped down in the shop. But she comes in now and then – when it’s quiet.’

On the second evening, Michael went down. The Sailors’ Rest smelled as it always had beer, paint, and wet wool. A young man stood on the stage with a banjo missing its strings, thumping it for rhythm. Lynn was at a table with her back to the wall, a wool coat over her narrow shoulders. When she saw him, she didn’t lift a hand; she only tilted her head slightly, as if waiting for the note that would show who would breathe first.

‘So, you’re back,’ she said later, quietly, on the threshold where the air smelled of rain and sea-salt.

‘I was never really gone,’ Michael said, and heard at once how wrong it sounded. ‘I just didn’t know how to come back.’

‘You don’t come back. You arrive,’ she said flatly.

Then they walked in silence to the water. Small crowns of foam rode the river’s surface, though there was hardly any wind. ‘I waited a lot,’ Lynn said, ‘but not the way you think. I waited until I knew whether I needed you – or only the idea of you.’

Michael nodded. ‘I sang a lot about coming when you called.’

‘But at last, I only heard myself.’

‘You can call without sound,’ she said. ‘You can also hear without coming.’

7

In the weeks that followed, they didn’t avoid each other, but they didn’t seek each other out either. People saw them in the same café in the mornings, where the cups were white with limescale inside. They saw their lights go out at the same time at night. When they met, they discussed harmless things that didn’t hurt: a trader who was bringing onions from Spain; a dog that never barked; the woman who had worn the same dress for years. By day Michael worked in the fishmonger’s store, oiled hinges, carried crates, relearned the weight of things. At night, he sometimes played in the pub corner without a stage. The men stared ahead; one of the women wiped the rims of glasses with her thumb; a dirty tea-towel lay on the bar.

One morning, Lynn met him at the pier. ‘Come on, Michael,’ she said. ‘Today you won’t miss anything.’ He followed her to the beach, broad at low tide. Mist drifted in from the sea, almost colourless. Lynn took off her shoes and waded in barefoot.

‘I always thought,’ she said, ‘if someone says things like you did back then – about roads and seas and all that – then he means me. But maybe he only meant himself.’ And she splashed water at him with her feet.

‘I meant you,’ Michael said.

‘And now?’

‘Now I mean both of us.’

She stood still. The waves came and went without deciding. ‘Don’t show me with words,’ she said. ‘Show me with waiting. With being there. With what you do with your hands.’

8

Spring made it easy for them. Orders at the shipyard picked up, as if everyone had decided to try once more. The economy was on the rise again; James Callaghan had taken over from Harold Wilson. Children jumped into the harbour in the afternoons when the boats were out. Lynn sang again – not often, but when she did, the room filled with a kind of brightness the lamps couldn’t match. The guests loved her clear voice.

One Tuesday, a boy fell off the jetty while playing. It was low tide, the water was shallow, and the piles were slick. Nobody screamed because nobody knew who should first. They were all frozen. Michael jumped without thinking, vest soaked, boots heavy. He reached the boy before the mud could pull him under and lifted him out, his own heart pounding so loudly it could have woken the harbour. It was pure reflex. When they lay on the planks again, exhausted, he saw Lynn. She stood there with her hands clenched, as if she had to hold on to something that might otherwise fly away.

‘You’re here,’ she said later, when the rescue lot wrapped a blanket around him. ‘You’re really here.’

He wanted to say something that wasn’t sentimental. He said nothing. She simply laid her hand on his, carefully, as if it were new.

9

The night after that was clear. Not a cloud, only the lighthouse breathing in long droughts, its pale finger pointing far into the Channel. They went down to the water. Lynn took his fingers and set them into her palm – not like someone asking permission, but like someone coming home and wanting to be held.

‘I’ve learned to live without you,’ she said. ‘That’s not a reproach. It’s the condition.’

‘I’ve learned that hurry isn’t a place,’ Michael said. They laughed at the odd sentence. Then the wind fell silent, and they heard only the quiet clicking of shells on the shore and the shrill cries of the eternally hungry gulls.

Morning was on its way, the sun fighting through the sea-mist, slow at first and then stronger. ‘Don’t close your eyes,’ Lynn said, ‘not this time.’

‘I’m staying,’ Michael said.

They watched the light creep over the fog and the first gulls, screaming, hit the edge of the day. There was no big word, only the certainty that sometimes you don’t keep things with promises, but with repetitions: ‘buy bread’, wipe the windowsill after rain, listen to someone who doesn’t know what to say.

10

In summer, they rode two-up on the Triumph Bonneville whose engine Michael had repaired with a patience Lynn hadn’t known in him. They pitched a tent at the edge of a field that smelled of camomile and listened to the night trains higher up, trains that never quite arrived. In the evenings, Lynn put the old cassette into the little player; it crackled as if there were a fireplace hidden inside it. The song that kept talking about crossing water was worn out. It didn’t need words any more.

‘You always wanted long roads,’ Lynn said.

‘I’ve found them,’ Michael said. ‘They go through you.’

Later, breathing under the warmth of canvas, Lynn said, ‘If I ever ask you to come – then come. But not like someone running. Like someone who knows where he’s going.’

‘And if you ever need me,’ he answered, ‘then I’ll swim.’ Not heroically. ‘Just – until I’m there.’

They both knew it wasn’t about grand gestures. It was about the quiet knowledge that the way across the water is made of small steps: one foot, then the other. The hand you put down when the other is tired.

11

There were difficult days later. The winter when they had hardly any work. A quarrel that lasted four weeks and was about nothing and everything. A loss they didn’t speak of because silence held the shape of their grief better than words. But every morning, when Michael woke early, he made tea and put a cup by her bed. Sometimes she was asleep, sometimes not. Sometimes, when the wind came in from the sea, half asleep, she would lay her hand in his – a motion so simple it said everything they needed.

Down in the harbour people liked to tell the story of the man who had once promised he’d come if he was called – and then truly came, without noise, without proof. They said that this love was ‘nothing special’ and meant the opposite: that it wasn’t made of deeds that need headlines, but of what you hardly see.

12

One morning, when the fog was so light, you could have folded it, they stood on the pier again. Michael held the old cassette in his hand, now more crackle than song. He didn’t throw it away, and he didn’t put it in. He slipped it into his pocket like a talisman meant only to remind him: of a time when words had seemed huge, and of another when coming had become small and precise.

Lynn glanced at him. ‘If you need me?’ she asked.

‘Then I won’t wait to call.’

She laughed. ‘And if you don’t need anything?’

‘Then I’ll stay.’

The sun came as a thin line over the sea’s horizon. Anyone who closed their eyes would miss it. They didn’t. They stood there – two people in a small town by a vast sheet of water – and knew that a question as simple as the one a song had once written on a forehead had found an answer that needed no stage.

The day began. They went home.

Forever.

The melancholy song “If I Needed You” by Don Williams & Emmylou Harris inspired me to write this story; the lesser-known original is by Townes Van Zandt (7 March 1944 – 1 January 1997).