Chasing Pavements

Installment 1

Chasing Pavements was first published as an e-book on June 30, 2012, via Smashwords.com. It is now available at Apple iBookStore, Barnes & Noble Nook Store, and Diesel eBook Store, and will soon be found in the Sony eReader Store and Amazon Kindle.

Chasing Pavements, a novel by Neha Yazmin

Opening Quote:

Soul Mates

In ‘The Symposium’ by Plato, Aristophanes suggests that man was originally round, and had four hands and four feet.  But one head, with two faces looking in opposite directions.

They were powerful, strong.  They launched an attack upon the gods in the heavens.

Zeus, feeling the threat of man, was forced to cut them in half.

Following the division, the two halves of man could not bear to be apart and longed to grow into one again.

Aristophanes claimed that the need to reunite with our soul mates is in-built, innate.

And so, man is always searching for his other half.

PREFACE

It was awfully quiet in his head.

The unwanted silence drove out the sounds of the pavements and roads, footsteps and chatter, chaos and order, as Jamie made his fifteen-minute walk to the pub he was to perform tonight. Out of habit, he ignored the vibrant Asian grocery and clothes shops lining Bethnal Green Road, East London, the potent smell of the packed fast-food branches and half-empty English cafés, the occasional oriental restaurant, and the handful of DIY stores.

This wasn’t the world he lived in, not anymore.

The slowly diminishing muddy brown ice on the ground hardly registered with him, the purring of car engines barely a murmur, as he tried to think positively, something he was rarely found doing. It can’t stay like this forever, he told himself. It had been too long since his mind had filled with music and lyrics. He missed the thrumming of guitar strings, tinkling harps, the warmth and depth of the piano, rhythmic drums, and Jamie hardly missed anything.

Ending this year, a horribly miserable 2009, without a single harmony greeting him in recent weeks, was unthinkable.

Tightening his grip on the handle of his leathery black guitar case, he entered the humble pub near Cambridge Heath Road, with its worn-out bottle green carpet and wood-panelled burnt-orange walls. He liked this place – it was small and dark, and so he didn’t have to acknowledge its small group of customers. Performing here, somewhere he had once enjoyed, and singing songs he had written during the time he was at his most creative and productive, ought to lure his creative instinct out from hiding.

Because he made sure to listen out for his name, Jamie was quick to emerge from the shadows at the back of the claustrophobic room where he had been waiting, standing alone and rigid as a tree, his black clothes camouflaging him into the darkness. Hurrying past a cluster of round tables, and avoiding the gazes of all those around him, he approached the microphone and sighed. This gig just had to cure his musical muteness.

Taking out his guitar and slipping its strap across his body, he closed his eyes and went back in time, not just to when this song had come to him, but also to the times it spoke of. Strumming his guitar automatically, unthinkingly, he began a soft, fragile song that mirrored the tiny piece of nothing he had become.

“I’m still standing on the same square.

You used to be around here somewhere.