The moment I came off stage the audience, the applause, the music – even the Kraftwerk covers they put on again – disappeared. Or rather, I knew they were there, but instead of sharing a skin with me like they had been a moment earlier, now they were going on somewhere else.

I sat back at the table but it was empty. The band was getting ready for their set; Jason was adjusting the amps.

I stared into the glass and saw Radko looking up at me through a single eye. He died on an ordinary evening in October that year. I sat on the landing, listening through the banisters to Dad and Gyorgy talk. Their words came in tiny bursts, the long silences between broken only by the whirring of a moth that had found its way in off the porch.

“I went to see his landlady,” said Gyorgy.

“And?”

“Didn’t know a thing.”

“You were the first to tell her?”

“Yes, and you know what?”

“What?”

“She didn’t cry. Didn’t cry but she was devastated. She told me I had to go and see his room. I want you to see how beautifully he kept it, she said. Kept saying he was only young but he knew how to look after things. I told her I knew. Told her he was the best worker I ever had.”

“So what was it like?” asked Dad.

“What was what like?”

“His room.”

“I couldn’t face it,” said Gyorgy.

Silence settled again until I heard a strange, rhythmic noise, that got slowly louder until I could hear it was the sound of sobbing.

I sat and watched Camus the vineyard cat leaping to try and reach the moth as the tears continued, interrupted only by Gyorgy’s occasional cry of “fucking animals.”

The next day’s papers said Radko was beaten to death by a gang of racist thugs on his way home from work. They described the attack in detail. One guy knocked him on the back of his head with a piece of metal or an exhaust or something like that. He fell to the ground. Someone stamped on the side of his head – they knew because there was a boot mark on Radko’s cheek – pinning him to the ground while the others kicked him in the kidneys again and again and again until his organs burst.

*

I drained my beer and watched The Point of the Bomb finish their set. Michael worked the crowd with just a few movements of his right hand, which he reached out to them and reeled back in slow motion. The audience lost any individual identity and became one being, its ripples of movement following Michael’s lead. It was like watching a snake charmer. With his black curls and leather trousers he reminded me of Jim Morrison.

“Fancy another beer?” he asked when the set was finally over. It was 10.30, about the time one of their gigs would normally be getting started. But the Grey Wolf was already half empty as people went to jostle for position in Piata Universitatii.

“Not heading off yet?”

“Not yet. I’ll turn up at the last minute, make sure I get a nice place on the edge.”

“I never had you pegged as claustrophobic,” I said.

“Now you put it like that, neither did I. I guess I like to get a whiff of what’s going on, but when it comes down to it I’d rather watch than join in.”

“You wanna watch it,” said Greg. “That kind of thing could get you arrested.”

“See you back at the hotel, then,” said Steve. “We’d rather take our chances in the mosh pit. You were great by the way, Sandrine.”

“Thanks,” I said.

Steve put his index finger to his eye and gave me a mini salute. I giggled. I had a fresh, cold beer in my hands and I was beginning to feel like I belonged again.

“Don’t wait up,” said Michael.

“As if,” said Janie, who turned to me, bent over and whispered, “mind yourself with that one,” just loud enough for Michael to hear.

“Fuck off the lot of you,” he said. It was the last thing he said to any of them.

With the rest of the band gone, Michael and I finished our beers in near silence. We’d spent two years talking in the chatrooms and forums of his website, Endangeredworlds.net, swapping lyrics, discussing tunes, chewing over politics. He’d heard my amateur MP3s. I’d seen YouTube clips of his concerts from all round the world. Now we’d heard each other play for real there wasn’t much left to say. But the silence was pleasant enough.

“I might head back to my hotel and watch on TV,” I said when both our glasses were empty.

“You sure?”

“Yeah. Or I might just wander around.”

“I know what you mean.”

“You do?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Sometimes you don’t want to be in the middle of things. Sometimes, when something’s really important, it’s best to watch it from the edges, from the spaces. Or even to watch other people rather than the thing itself.”

We said goodbye, and I headed out of the Grey Wolf high on the smell of beer and smoking fireworks. People bumped and jostled down the streets like pinballs, stopping to fling their arms around strangers, kissing each other and shouting messages of love and peace that were instantly lost in the noise. They seemed to share my heady feeling of hope and endless possibility.

I didn’t see the ghosts standing at every shoulder, pushing them on; ghosts of the thousands who simply disappeared from the world, drawing substance again for one night from the beery breath of the masses. As far as I was concerned Ceausescu had died in 1989, and taken Romania’s problems with him.

I weaved up and down the alleys off Lipscani Street, wondering what to post on my blog, Songs From the Other Side of the Wall. I started walking up Smârdan Street, crossed into Ion Ghica Street. The crowds had almost thinned to nothing. My feet felt like they were on springs. Come midnight something – the old East? My old life? – would stop forever, and something new would take its place.

I approached the back of the wall of people as the giant clock counted down the last few seconds. Romania held its breath. I half expected to see Mum walking ahead of me, melting the crowds in front of her so I could follow. But I didn’t see her.

I saw Claire.

I stopped about twenty metres from her. She hadn’t seen me. She was in the middle of a conversation with someone. It took a few seconds to realise it was Michael.

My brain didn’t have time to put things together before the countdown finished and the crowd erupted. A wave of sound swept back towards me. Immediately afterwards another wave followed. Of movement. A row of heads rose up out of the mass and fell back down. It seemed like these heads became detached and rolled back towards me. As they reached the back of the crowd everything slowed.

I felt something tickle inside my chest. I was calling out to Claire, only the sound was taking too long to climb its way out of my lungs. I watched, motionless, as she and Michael broke off their conversation and turned to see what was coming. Then she turned her head 180 degrees, searching for a way out. She must have been looking right through me but then she vanished, and so did Michael.

Through the forest of running legs I saw her for a fraction of a second. Or at least I thought I did. I thought I saw her last breath leave her, silently, in a cloud of ice crystals that evaporated into the night; and an eye, a single eye, unnaturally wide and black, in what seemed like recognition.

Something snapped inside me. The violence of it threw me against a wall. I stood there as the world around me – the mad, vibrant, exciting world that had sent a flirtatious glimpse of what it had to offer me – shrunk down to the size and shape of my skin.

I was alone.

Songs from the Other Side of the Wall
Bucharest January 2 2007

I stared into his single eye, the one that wasn’t pressed flat to the pavement, for five minutes; it refused to stare back at me. Although I scoured the dark of his dilated pupil; although I counted the crazings of blood across the glassy white, I did not, for even one of those three hundred seconds, nor the three months that followed, think of Radko as anything other than an idea. He became in my eyes, in my thoughts, in the lyrics of my songs and the words of my blog, the emblem of everything the world needed to hear.

I didn’t actually see his body. I didn’t see the moon-black blood leak onto the cobbles or the early autumn wind pick up the torn corner of his shirt and tease the passers-by with the sight of prepubescent welts and bruises that, cut off in death, would never mature; or of starburst thread veins that gave the skin around his kidneys the patina of toecaps. But in the five minutes it took Gyorgy to tell my father that Radko was dead, to explain the positioning of every blow, to cry into his arms; to dry his tears and hold my father as he let go the uncontrolled sobbing of his own; to sit at the table, two men approaching old-age drinking beer in a silent toast to a youth they barely knew – in that five minutes I screwed my stare through the glassy surface of a single eye, down the optic nerve, past brain and spinal cord, limbic system, circulation and endocrine; but as far as I looked nothing of Radko looked back. His soul had already gone.

All I was able to see that night was Radko’s eye – the one that wasn’t pressed to the pavement. I knew it was the pressure of the boot that forced it open so it looked like it would pop out of its socket; but in my imagination it was wide in astonishment. I watched as the astonishment turned to fear then resignation then the pupil began to swirl as blood surged up from his liver and spleen and slowly the shiny black went dull and grey. And I kept thinking to myself, What’s happening to his other eye? Is that eye dead as well? Radko was split in two and one of them was dead but what about the other one? Eventually in this picture the kicking ended and the thug with the boot on Radko’s cheek gave a flick of his ankle and flipped him over. Radko turned face up and I could see that the second eye was as grey as the first – there was only one Radko and he was dead. But what had happened in the thirty seconds or so in between? The other Radko could have been desperately trying to signal something. It might not have been too late for him. But no-one would ever see.

Three months later, yesterday, just after the stroke of midnight, in the first screams of the crowd’s celebration, Claire was dead. I saw her body. I watched it fall, watched  the horrified scream of Michael’s contorted figure as it tried to twist free, as it turned and spun and eventually fell, squeezing the final breath from her fragile flesh. I know – the images to prove it are there on YouTube – that she took less than a frame of film to die and be buried in the crush. In that one twenty-seventh of a second or less; in that time so small there is no proof it ever existed (or rather there is digital proof that it did not) I saw enough in one frozen eye to know that she understood every detail of my love for her. But before her death stare could answer me she was gone.

After Radko died I locked myself away and wrote song after song; I cannot write a word for Claire. I don’t understand, and the thought of what my silence means terrifies me.