All That Follows by Jim Crace

whether he is feeling less burdened or more. His phone conversation with Lucy, or at least the outcome of it, has not been a mistake. He feels that in his bones. It certainly has simplified his day. He can breathe easy, knowing that there’s nothing ill-advised ahead. This episode is finished with. He’s got away unscathed again. He’s made it back to shore. This is the day, he reminds himself, when he can take charge of his life. He will not fail again today. He will not disappoint himself again today. He lifts his one good fist and clenches it.
    The Selmer has not been touched for several weeks. Its case has not even been opened. Leonard lifts the instrument out of its baize-lined mold. Taped inside the case lid is a timeworn gallery of memorabilia: a copy of his Mercury citation; a CD cover (Less Plays Lester) with a pleasing and convincing digital mock-up of Leonard sitting in a 1950s diner with Lester Young at his side; some small family photographs, his sister with his mother, happy days; shots of Francine and Celandine draped around each other at some music festival, more lost and happy days; and, on the flap of a torn cigarette packet, the fading, scribbled telephone number of Francine’s old Brighton flat. She’d put it there herself, that windy and rewarding night of nursery rhymes. “But that was then,” she said.
    The saxophone feels heavy in his weakened arm. He has lost muscle tone. His frozen shoulder refers its pain across his back and down as far as the upper finger joints of his right hand. He clamps his jazz-soft Vandoren reed in place, ducks into the neck sling, checks that the spatulas and tone holes are still snugly sealed, and exercises the keys and rods with the usual practice set of unvoiced scales and melodic patterns before licking his lips and gums, lifting the horn to his mouth, and closing on that familiar, comforting rubber mouthpiece. But still he will not make a note. He takes deep breaths and pillows his diaphragm with enough air to support the sound, if and when it comes. He seals a tight, single-lip embouchure around the reed as carefully as a beginner might, judging how best to allow but still constrict a note, readying his tongue, his jaw, his pharynx, larynx, glottis, and his vocal cords, until these two vibrating tubes—the flesh, the brass—are ready to collaborate.
    What to play? Not nursery rhymes. That day has passed and dimmed. He tests the sound. Ba-dum. Ba-dum . Four hurried notes. He voices them again. Do it, do it, Davey Davey, do it now . But then he settles for something less agitated, something further from the bone: Simmy Sullivan’s “Midnight at the Lavender.” It’s his graduation piece; it’s his lollipop; he’s played it round the houses, tired it out—on radio, at festivals, solo and in combos. Once—and this is not a happy memory—in Austin, Texas, even. Feel-good music. Schmooze. It ought to be unchallenging. But Leonard wants to test and exercise himself. It is a worry, always was a worry, that his musical daring might, like hearing, eyesight, concentration, sexual potency, continence, be a faculty that degenerates with age. Therefore he shifts up half a tone, toys with the opening four bars, and then returns to flatten it. An awkward sound. He starts again, jettisoning the basic chord progression and introducing vagrant notes. So he drifts away from key and stays away, lick after lick, until—almost out of the blue, though not exactly out of the blues—he finds a route from Sullivan’s favorite Brooklyn bar to Davey Davey, do it now and finishes up with a piece he has arranged before, Shakespeare’s greasy Joan. This is something— Love’s Labour’s Lost and agitated schmooze—that the world or at least the walls of this living room have never heard before— ba-dum ba-dum, doo-wah doo-wah, tu-whit tu-whoo, a merry note —and will never hear again, not quite like that, not quite so desperate and fine, not quite so raw. The tapered lights