for the common man

Another Saturday, towards the end of those Junior Guildhall Saturdays. I’ve thrown my lot in with my friend’s friends. She’s the only person I know when I start going there. Cello. One of her friends is a flute player, (he of the bent banana flute incident, who found my nose hilariously wobbly in orchestra). I am not a great fit with these cool kids but choose to hide myself here, rather than risk taking up the proffered friendship of the smiling young man that I like, or the more ordinary nerdy squares with whom I do, but don’t want to, belong. We all tumble out after orchestra one day and someone has a car. We have no idea of directions and don’t deign (or think) to consult a map. I know we all live West and how to get from my friend’s to mine but I have only once driven in, to the Proms at the Albert Hall with Sr Marion. I am vaguely included in the car party. The question of why I am is still out there, lurking suspended at the side, an unclaimed piece of my puzzle.

We leave and they’re talking about music. Looking with the perspective of many years, I had a lot of learning to make up, learning that had, for them, already been drifting around and snagging on them accidentally since birth, probably. Their brothers and sisters go to universities, their parents are academics or artists, they go to public school mostly. My friend easily straddles our worlds, but I have already assumed a mantle of vague shame, that I could be walking around in this company with so much missing from me. I have chosen the wrong lane. Now I can see how I could have learned the things I didn’t know. I had some good toeholds, and music did seem to make sense to me. I even took pleasure in being sure of some musical things, standing alone behind my answers, sure and steadfast, no gloating but quiet conviction and certainty even. I wish I’d known to enjoy those moments.

They are talking about a piece of music that they know and I don’t. I just listen as usual but then my friend asks me directly, conversational and friendly, do I know Fanfare for the Common Man? It doesn’t really matter to her whether I do or don’t except perhaps that of the two she might have wanted to share such a stirring discovery with me. They have all just heard it through their shared exam syllabus. I’m not in that class. And I’m trapped because I don’t know how to file Fanfare for the Common Man. Is it something that everyone should know? (Mozart 49? He only wrote 41!) Or is it a specialist piece, code for this company? By not knowing it do I prove myself generally ignorant or specifically stupid? I sense the trap closing in behind me and come out in ridiculous fighting stance.

Of course I know it, oozing as much sneering scorn and scathing as I can muster, my sister has practised on me often enough. My friend, of course, isn’t convinced. Do you really, though? Seriously, do you know it? All friendly eagerness and sincerity. Many roads back. I see it’s not a terrible disaster to not know this piece but it’s much too late. I pull up the drawbridge, all swollen snarkiness, out of proportion to the ordinary nature of her tone and I insist again and again and again that I know it, everyone knows Fanfare for the Common Man, of course. She gives up. She knows I lied. a detail that is probably floating around inexplicably amongst her jigsaw pieces. Why on earth would I? I can’t recover from this. A familiar hot shadow of shame settles over me. And the day remains one to which I want to reach out my arms. I long to take that poor misguided teen by her shoulders and shake her awake. Still the day plays on an occasional loop, after all these years.

We’re in the car. For some reason they look to me for directions. Probably I blag that I know the way. To them there’s no shame in not knowing. It’s an ordinary thing to defer to someone who knows more, and I’m busy bigging myself up about knowing the way. (I don’t know the way). Luckily none of us have any clue as to how long it should take to get home and no mobile phones for connection in transit. It’s hot (or I’m hot, perhaps) and I am desperate to recognise some of the names of roads that I know. The North Circular? I know that one. The A40? That seems to be going West. The journey is taking forever and I just want to get out. We drift somewhere near Norwood Green and I fabricate some ridiculously phony story about why I must be dropped just shy of my Auntie’s, and just leave me here, I’ll walk up… And then I walk home.

Around this time Mum asked me to stop saying things like, oh he’s really awfully good and she’s so terribly nice, or things like that that I’d heard my friend’s friends say. I think Mum hated the sound of those words from me. We didn’t talk like that. So there was that difference that I am always so determined not to see. I so wanted to be right in that group. All that chafing because I can’t accept things as they are. So many years thinking that I should be different to how I am. But why? More flotsam. Can’t you just settle quietly down without the answer? What if there is none?

july 2020

cornelia parker at tate britain