Free Jubilee by Shelley Harris Page A

is ‘edgy’.
    Then there’s the Sheryl Crow album that reminds him of Asha’s birth, and the Best of Madness CD Maya bought around the time his parents moved in. She’d play ‘Our House’ loudly, and he never knew whether she was being cheerful or ironic, and, it being a tricky subject, he never asked. There’s ‘Brimful of Asha’ which they’d play to their daughter, aged two or three. He remembers Maya dancing with her in the lounge, her face burrowed into Asha’s neck. Mehul had just been born then, a tiny two handfuls. Satish’s lad.
    Satish could order his music like that, in a way strangers would find baffling, a private chronology, starting with the Pogues. Before that, before Maya, there’s not much to speak of. Nearly nothing. Maya has sneaked something in under the wire, though. A couple of years ago she went to a Seventies fancy dress party (flares, platforms, afro wig). Her outfit won her a prize, and here it is: fluorescent yellow, a pink strip of ransom-note letters across the bottom: Never Mind the Bollocks .
    The headphones are the old-fashioned, bulky kind. Asha would crack up, but she’s not here to witness it. Satish puts the CD in, clicks through the tracks to the one he wants. He thinks of Cai going on at him about the Sex Pistols, trying to get through to him:
    ‘I want to play it at maximum volume, yeah? I want it to smash the windows.’
    He’d found Satish in Jennings Field and started this unsolicited proselytising. It was a week before Cai was due to leave for South Africa, and Satish didn’t want to talk to him at all. He got up and walked away, but Cai followed him.
    ‘Listen! When I put it on I can feel my hair standing up and my skin tingling. It makes me … I feel sort of strong, unbeatable. It’s like I’ve got this power and I don’t know what to do with it. I want to destroy things. Do you get it?’ Satish kept walking.
    Now his head fills with the noise of it: ‘God Save the Queen’. At first it’s almost like some kind of Fifties rock ‘n’ roll, then after those early bars, it takes on a raw, anarchic edge. Satish closes his eyes, blanking out the sofa, the coffee table, the flatscreen TV. He tries to see it as Cai did: a grey street, the movement of brown and orange curtains, the sameness of it all, the things he wanted to leave behind. Satish moves to the music: a dipping bob, his fists clenched. He shuffles and twists. What did Cai do? He bounces on his toes, the coiled wire of the headphones slapping against his shoulder. He jumps: knees together, his body an exclamation mark. He is Cai. He jumps higher, raises his hands. He punches the air. He mouths the words, most of them wrong, but he is Cai. This is what he felt.
    The song ends in a messy drum roll, a final percussive flourish. Satish leans against the wall, panting. When he opens his eyes, Colette is standing beside him.
    He yells before he can stop himself, the noise banging inside his head.
    ‘Sorry,’ she mouths. He pulls the headphones off and drops them. They clatter to the floor.
    ‘What are you doing?’
    ‘Sorry! I didn’t want to wake anyone up. I thought you knew I was coming. I—’
    ‘Oh God!’ Anger and fright and embarrassment are tussling inside him. He presses his hand to his chest. Colette steps towards him but he moves away. ‘What are you doing here?’
    ‘I said I’d come. “Hang on”, I said. I texted.’
    ‘But it’s …’ he glances around him ‘… it’s two thirty.’
    ‘More like three. But you were awake. What are you doing?’
    ‘I’m organising my CDs.’
    A laugh escapes her and she claps her hand to her mouth to control it.
    ‘And listening to music. Why are you here? How did you get in?’
    ‘I came in through the garage. Maya lets me, if she’s out.’
    ‘We’re not out, though—’ The garage. He pushes past Colette and through the hall, opens the garage door. It’s all there: his briefcase undisturbed, everything as it should be. She’s