Graeme Simsion is a Melbourne-based novelist and screenwriter. The Rosie Project was the 2014 ABIA Book of the Year and has sold over three million copies worldwide. The sequel, The Rosie Effect, is also a bestseller. Graeme’s screenplay for The Rosie Project is in development with Sony Pictures.
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Copyright © Graeme Simsion 2016
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Angel Of The Morning – C. Taylor © 1967 EMI Blackwood Music Inc. For Australia and New Zealand: EMI Music Publishing Australia Pty Ltd (ABN 83 000 040 951) Locked Bag 7300, Darlinghurst NSW 1300 Australia. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
First published by The Text Publishing Company 2016
Book design by Text
Typeset by J&M Typesetting
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry
Hardback ISBN: 9781925355888
Paperback ISBN: 9781925355376
Ebook ISBN: 9781922253835
Creator: Simsion, Graeme C., author.
Title: The best of Adam Sharp / by Graeme Simsion.
Subjects: Man–woman relationships—Fiction.
Dewey Number: A823.4
The paper used in this book is manufactured only from wood grown in sustainable regrowth forests.
This book is—again—for my wife, Anne, my inspiration, collaborator and first reader.
It is also a nod to the music and musicians that contributed so much to the life of my generation. If you don’t know the songs in this book, I encourage you to download them and listen as you read: there is a playlist at the end.
Before the Deluge
If my life prior to 15 February, 2012 had been a song, it might have been ‘Hey Jude’, a simple piano tune, taking my sad and sorry adolescence and making it better. In the middle, it would pick up—better and better—for a few moments foreshadowing something extraordinary. And then: just na-na-na-na, over and over, pleasant enough, but mainly because it evoked what had gone before.
A day that began in my childhood bedroom in Manchester, boxed in by photograph albums and records, was always going to evoke the past.
My walk to the station, through streets grey with drizzle and commuters huddled into their coats and plugged into their phones, did not so much remind me of days gone by as stir a longing for them, for a summer under blue skies half a world away, where the music of boom boxes competed with the laughter of carelessly dressed drinkers spilling from the pub onto the footpath.
My route took me past the Radisson Hotel, once the Free Trade Hall and scene of a seminal moment in popular music. Seventeenth of May, 1966. A heckler shouts ‘Judas!’ to the young Bob Dylan, who has returned after the interval with an electric guitar, and he responds with a blistering rendition of ‘Like a Rolling Stone’. My father was there, in the audience, eyewitness to music history.
And on the station concourse, a teenage girl in a light-blue anorak and a beanie like mine was singing Adele’s ‘Someone Like You’, a song about glory days, regrets and the passing of time. It might have been just a pretty tune had there not been the memory of another young woman, twenty-two years ago now, to give substance to the observation that love only sometimes lasts.
I leaned against the wall opposite the busker. Passengers passed between us, a few of them tossing coins into her keyboard case. She was singing without a microphone, leaving it to the acoustics of the enclosed space to do the work. Her playing was basic but she had a good voice and a feeling for the song.
I allowed it to wash over me, letting music and performance take the simple sentiments to a higher plane, indulging for a few minutes in the sweet sadness of nostalgia, so different from the everyday gloom I had woken to in my mother’s house.
I tossed in a two-pound coin and earned a smile. There was a time when I might have done more: put a tenner in to get her attention, offered to accompany her so she could stand up to sing, made a little personal history. That time was gone. These days I was taking more from my bank of memories than I was putting in.
The day might come when I had nothing but memories, and the choice of whether to indulge my romantic side and wallow in them, or my cynical side and reflect on their reliability.
Had I painted the Australian skies a deeper blue because they were the backdrop to my Great Lost Love?
Did they really jeer Dylan at the Free Trade Hall? A month ago, I had pulled the bootleg from my dad’s vinyl collection, and my mother had thrown her own handful of mud into time’s ever rolling stream.
‘Your father had a ticket to that concert. But he didn’t go. He had his own job to do and a family to look after.’
I would have backed the original version. My mother was constantly recasting my wayward dad as a responsible breadwinner and role model, more so lately since I did not have ‘a proper job’. Which was why I was able to travel halfway across England in the middle of the week to take her to medical appointments.
No matter now. I would soon have more immediate matters to occupy my mind. Later that day, as I continued my engagement with the past, scouring the internet for music trivia in the hope of a moment of appreciation at the pub quiz, a cosmic DJ—perhaps the ghost of my father—would lift the needle on the na-na-na-nas of ‘Hey Jude’, say, ‘Nothing new happening here,’ and turn it to the flip side.
‘Revolution’.
Part 1
1
I was back home in Norwich, reading up on Pete Best, the Beatles’ forgotten first drummer, when the email popped up in the bottom corner of my screen.
From:
[email protected] Hi
That was it. Hi. After twenty-two years, twenty without any contact at all, out of the blue, Angelina Brown, my Great Lost Love, decides to change the world and writes Hi.
There was a song to mark the moment. ‘My Sentimental Friend’, a hit for Herman’s Hermits in 1969, was, thanks to the physics of headphones, playing in the middle of my skull. It would now have a place in the jukebox musical of my life, with the line about the girl he once knew who left him broken in two. Not quite Wordsworth, but sufficiently resonant that, when the message arrived, I was thinking about its sender.
Was this the first time she had thought about me, letting her mind drift to a time when ‘Like a Prayer’ was top of the charts, wondering what happened to that guy she met in a Melbourne bar and fell in love with? Just a browse of her contacts list and a casual wonder what he’s doing now?
Click on Adam Sharp, type two letters, Send.
There had to be more to it. For a start, I would not have been in her contacts list. We had not been in touch since email was invented.
The address suggested that she was still in Australia. I checked the World Clock website: 1.15 p.m. in Norwich was a quarter after midnight in Melbourne. Was she drunk? Had she left Charlie? Had he left her? Maybe they had split up fifteen years ago.
She was still using her maiden name. No surprise there. She hadn’t changed it the first time around.
I knew barely anything about Charlie—not even his surname. In my mind it was the same as
hers. Charlie Brown. The little bald cartoon character in his baseball mitt: It’s a high fly ball, Charlie Brown. Don’t miss it, Charlie Brown. In real life, I was the one who had missed it.
One night, after a few pints, I had googled her. I got nowhere. Angelina shared a name with an Equal Opportunity Commissioner and a newspaper columnist, and finding her among the litigation and opinions had been too much for my beer-addled brain. Unless I searched images. I stopped myself. Angelina was—had been—an addiction, and the only way to deal with an addiction is abstinence.
Maybe. Time passes. Every alcoholic wants to prove they’re cured. Surely, after twenty years in a committed relationship, I could exchange an email or two with my ex-lover, who had, as the Americans say, reached out.
She might have a terminal illness and want to tie up the loose ends. I could blame the breakfast conversation with my mother for that thought. Perhaps she and Charlie just wanted advice on holiday options in northern England: ‘Looking for somewhere cold and miserable to get away from this interminable sunshine.’ What would it say about my relationship with Claire if I felt too vulnerable to respond to an innocuous query?
I let Angelina’s email sit until the evening. I was still weighing my options when Claire arrived home. Our conversation was shouted between my room and the bottom of the stairs, but I could picture her in her important-meeting grey suit with the green scarf and the chunky-heeled boots that brought her up to a neat five foot four.
‘Sorry. Meeting went a bit over. Dinner smells good.’
‘Jamie Oliver. Chicken casserole. I’ve had mine.’
‘Do you want a glass of wine?’
‘Ta—bottle open in the fridge.’
‘How’s your mum?’
‘Haven’t got the results yet. I think she’s a bit scared.’
‘Did you give her my love?’
‘Forgot.’
‘Adam…Better not have. Have you fed Elvis?’
‘You’d know if I hadn’t.’
That was a fair snapshot of the relationship that Angelina’s email might test. We were a functioning household. We didn’t fight; we enjoyed meals together on the weekends; we looked out for each other. Good friends. Nobody writes songs about those things, but there is a lot to be said for them. We had done better than my pub-quiz teammate Sheilagh and her husband, Chad, who cared for everyone except each other. Or our friends Randall and Mandy, whose battle for custody of their IVF twins had left casualties from San Jose to Liverpool. Or my parents, for that matter.
But the last few years had seen a fading of what was left of the romance. Two months earlier, I had purchased a single bed for my study, ostensibly because of my snoring and Claire needing her sleep because she had a lot going on with the prospective sale of her software company. Our sex life had followed me out of the bedroom and I didn’t miss it as much as I thought I would. I wasn’t sure if that was a good or bad thing.
Our situation was probably not so different from that of many couples our age. It would be a stretch to blame any shortcomings on a relationship that had ended twenty-two years earlier. I didn’t think about Angelina when I was deep in a database-tuning problem, or trying to recall the name of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band’s lead singer, or giving Claire a kiss on the forehead as she left for work. It was only when I was listening to music or on the rare occasion I played a song on the piano. For those few minutes or hours, I would be back in 1989.
I was playing in a bar—not a pub, a bar—in Melbourne, up a staircase off Victoria Parade in the inner-city suburb of Fitzroy. It was one of the few places that stayed open late, drawing a mix of yuppies and baby boomers. In those days, a baby boomer was a person born shortly after the war, not someone like me who came along almost twenty years later.
Most nights the boomers outnumbered the yuppies, and my sixties and seventies repertoire got a good workout. There was a steady trickle of customers early in the evening, but it only got busy with the after-dinner crowd and the stragglers from the pubs shaking out their umbrellas, piling their winter coats and woollen hats on the stand and ordering an ice-cold lager. It was early July, midwinter, and Australia had yet to deliver on its promise of sunshine.
The place would not have won any prizes for interior decoration. There was a bar that seated eight or ten on stools, a dozen small tables, a couple of leather sofas and old movie posters on the walls. No meals—just bar snacks. But once a crowd built up, with more patrons standing than sitting, the noise and smoke provided enough atmosphere to compensate.
I had been in Australia three weeks. A local insurance company was implementing a new-generation database and I had landed a fifteen-month consulting assignment that would give me a tour of its branches around the world. I was twenty-six, barely five years out of a computer-science degree, riding a wave of technology that the old-timers in their thirties had failed to catch. Computing was my passport out of my lower-middle-class, comprehensive-school origins—after I had abandoned the more obvious option of becoming a rock star.
In my first week in Melbourne, I tagged along to the bar with a few workmates to celebrate one of them becoming a father and ended up playing a couple of songs on the piano. I remember doing ‘Walk Away Renée’ in homage to the new arrival, who had been given that name. The barman, a knockabout bloke named Shanksy, gave me a half pint—a pot—of lager. I thanked him for letting me use the piano and he said, ‘Anytime, mate.’
I took up his offer and the bar became my social life. Shanksy looked after my drinks and I put a tip jar on the piano. I did all right with it, but money was not the motivation. My day job paid well and included an accommodation allowance, which covered a warehouse apartment above a vegetarian restaurant in Brunswick Street, a fifteen-minute tram ride from work and a ten-minute stagger from the bar.
I got to know the piano well. It was a locally made Beale, old, but with a nice sound, and there was even a microphone and a small amplifier. I would drop in on the way to work or after my morning jog and entertain the cleaners with my scales.
In the evenings, it made all the difference. Without it I would have been a loner paying for my own drinks, with no reason to talk to anyone and no reason for anyone to talk to me. And too much time to think about the hole in my life.
I didn’t see her walk in. I saw her when she came over to the piano. In a town that dressed in black, she was wearing a white woollen dress and high boots. Mid-twenties, shoulder-length dark-brown hair against light skin, maybe five foot seven with the heels.
She had a pink cocktail in her hand. We were in what was technically a cocktail bar, but this was Australia and most people drank beer, wine and simple mixed drinks unless they got into downing shots—B52s and Flaming Lamborghinis. The collection of liqueurs behind the bar was more for show and Shanksy’s cocktail repertoire was limited. But tonight he had produced a pink one. With a cherry and an umbrella.
I was playing Van Morrison’s ‘Brown Eyed Girl’ and she stood to one side of the piano, close enough to let me know she was there, sipping her cocktail.
When I had finished, she clapped, walked up and asked: ‘Do you know “Because the Night”?’
I had a chance to look at her more closely and was struck by her eyes: big and brown, and, under the right one, a streak of mascara tracking halfway down her cheek.
I don’t usually notice perfume unless it has just been applied. Perhaps hers had been, because it was strong and distinct. For the record, it was Obsession by Calvin Klein. Ever since, I have been able to detect it at twenty paces. A woman steps onto the bus and I pick it up, along with all the memories attached to it. Proust’s madeleines.
‘It’s by Patti Smith,’ she said, while I was wondering if I should say something about her mascara.
‘And Bruce Springsteen.’
‘Say that again,’ she said and laughed.
‘Bruce Springsteen. They wrote it together. Springsteen never did a studio recording, but it’s on his live album.’
‘
Root i’ togevver, eh? Loovely.’
Her impression of my accent would have placed me closer to Glasgow than Manchester but it was accompanied by a light-up-the-room smile.
I gave her a look of mock offence.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to be rude. I just love your accent.’
I decided to take the risk of being rude myself and drew my finger down my left cheek.
We had an exchange of touching our faces, nodding and laughing as she got the message, wet her finger, rubbed the wrong cheek, then managed to turn the streak into a smear on the right one.
‘Hold on,’ I said, and walked to the bar where there was a pile of paper napkins. On the way back, I realised that the place had gone quiet, and not just because the piano player had taken a break. Everyone—from Shanksy behind the bar to the couple standing in the doorway still wearing their coats—was watching me. Watching us. I had no desire to play out in public what I had begun to imagine as a tender moment, nor to draw attention to the fact that she might have been crying.
I blew my nose on the napkin, stuffed it in my pocket and sat back at the piano.
‘So, “Because the Night”, was it?’
She wiped her cheek with the back of her hand, then looked around the room.
‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘You got most of it.’
‘Would you mind if I sang?’
In general, the answer to ‘Can I sing with the band?’ is a polite ‘No’, a response based on experience and the advice of my dad. He used to have—he said—a firm rule that nobody, but nobody, got to sing or play with whatever band he was in.
‘If Eric Clapton comes in and wants to play, I’ll tell him he can bugger off. Because if the owner decides he likes Clapton better than us, then he’s got our gig and we don’t eat.’
He delivered his lesson in job security so many times that, despite the improbability of Mr Clapton deciding to settle for the audience and financial rewards of the King’s Head in Manchester, it became family history as an actual event.