I said some of this to the appraiser. I don’t know why. She couldn’t up her offer – the boss would have her eyes – but my acceptance seemed to open a newer conversation. There was a time when I owned 27 guitars. This was my last. A farewell’s a farewell. A loving home was promised as she took it from my hands. I swear the damn thing was about to unspool its own strings and tendril them around me, pleading. She showed me photos of her boyfriend and talked away my clouds. A cool, clever kid. Sardonic and funny. Studying Sound Engineering at night, lived with her folks. Played accordion in a Zydeco band. She was eloquent and gutsy and attractively cantankerous. In truth, she reminded me of Molly.
Around that time, I got myself a second-hand laptop from a neighbour’s kid on the canal, a smart and affable boy who’d hang out with Molly whenever she was in town, taking her to gigs with his mates. The old Toshiba that Michelle gave me was virused to death and I hadn’t got around to replacing it. This smaller, nattier gizmo appealed to me, somehow. It was company, I suppose. Living alone, you get curious. Well, curious is one of the things you get.
Jimmy, like a perhaps surprising number of older people, is a tremendous fan of the Net. He took to sending me emails, alerting me to references on websites, to newsgroups about the bands of the ’eighties. Oh, I’d googled us before, don’t be getting me wrong. I’m not devoid of vanity. But I’d stopped. The burgeoning of the internet coincided with a phase of my alcoholism when Memory Lane and its tenebrous cul-de-sacs were not my favourite haunts. But all of that was over by the spring of 2012. I’d been clean sixteen years, had work I didn’t mind, teaching English as a Foreign Language in a college down on Queensway. I’d smoke a little weed with my neighbour Welsh John now and again, but nothing to frighten the horses. I was working towards an MA at Goldsmiths in South London, on children in post-war English novels. Music was no longer any part of my life, and to tell you the plain truth, I didn’t miss it. There was bad stuff back there. ‘Like Fran,’ Molly said. That wasn’t what I meant. Not entirely.
Well, maybe she was right. Fran was once my closest friend. I didn’t want to see him, but it’s important not to be a nutcase, especially when you’re father of a teenager. Maybe the past and I could figure out an accommodation. Perhaps the past and I could be neighbours, or ‘partners in a process’, like the loyalists and the IRA.
In this spirit of tense détente, I braved cyberia again. I thought it might be character-forming. I’d sit in my houseboat like a lame old hoofer shuffling through her shoeboxes of faded reviews. The screen brought me grainy photographs I hadn’t seen in twenty years. Youthful, angry faces, sweat-drenched bodies. Turned out YouTube had footage of us performing in the Paradiso, Amsterdam, at the Rainbow Theatre, London, at the Summit, Houston, Texas, an interview I once did with Fran on Late Night With David Letterman, a clip of us doing backing vocals for the Ramones at a fundraiser in CBGB’s. Michelle would ping me from time to time, flirty little haiku, playful, nothing more. Had I seen Wikipedia? I was hot in that shot. I should set up on Facebook. She’d ‘like’ me.
Gruesomely, I image-searched. Who was this youngster with all that gravity-defying hair, the vertiginous cheekbones, the pout? Encountering your younger self can be sweet and amusing, but usually, if you’re honest, there’s also a hint of regret in the snow-globe you don’t want to shake. Well, it mightn’t be regret, that’s putting it too strongly; more a pointless wish that you could corner that inexperienced flunt and subject him to the bludgeoning of your hard-won wisdom. Strange, when arguably he was wiser at nineteen than you are now, innocence being a form of intelligence. Maturity is only added time and the ability to be dull, perhaps with varicose veins.
Click the mouse and another old photograph would form. When the image was on video – your younger self in motion – the pang made your marrowbones throb. And if you’ve ever had your Warholian fifteen minutes, there is stuff in the nooks of the Net that astounds you. Directions and a map of how to get to the old watermill in Mougins where I lived with Michelle in the bad years. Our divorce papers were downloadable, with appetising redactions. Then there was the band. Accounts of our doings and undoings. Discographies, lists of shows, biographies of the four of us. If there were inaccuracies and outright howlers, they didn’t bother me much. Well, some of them did. I won’t lie.
I’d had the laptop six weeks when this story changed key. I’d been feeling kind of strip-mined for a while. My weight was where it should be, I went swimming or running every morning, but I was on meds for a blood-pressure issue inherited from my mum, and I found one of its side effects to be a stupefying sleepiness. Also, I was bothered by irksome bouts of bronchitis, a nuisance since my early twenties. The desire to sleep in the afternoons began to assail me, the strange red dreams of daytime. I’ve never liked the feeling of awakening twice on the same day. Now, it could happen three times.
I’d hear people passing my barge on the towpath above, children coming from school, old London ladies talking. It was the habit of two lovely young women, au pairs from the Philippines, to stroll via that route to the shops at Kilburn. Sometimes they might pause and look at the allotment I share with Welsh John – they were teaching me little phrases of the Tagalog language – but one day when I heard them calling I was unable to rise from my bunk. After my AA meeting that night I fell asleep on the Tube and was prodded awake out at Heathrow at two in the morning by a police officer armed with a Uzi. He was courteous, but London is not as relaxed as in former times. That’s an experience you’d tend to remember.
In March, Molly visited for a fortnight and I shook myself together. We went hiking in the New Forest, hung out and cooked Thai. My neighbours on the canal loved her. She never asked them questions. For a girl raised in assertive America, her way of negotiating our little flotilla’s nuances is admirable, and I missed her when she left, as I always do. By April, the dodgy chest was irking me again, and I changed medication, which helped me to breathe, but not quite as freely as I’d have liked.
I flew to Derry, Northern Ireland, early that month, for a convention of my old group’s fans. ‘Shipsters’, they called themselves, dads and mums with a mortgage. Some brought teenagers. That seemed strange. I’ll be honest: no atom of my body wanted to attend. I went as a favour to Seán, who was due to represent us, but he was grounded by a strike at LAX. There were talks, discos, swap-marts for records. Two tribute bands played, so loud they hurt my teeth. The boys doing ‘me’ were spindly.
When you once were in a pop group, people are kind. And it wasn’t that I didn’t find it moving. You played ‘Wildflowers’ at your wedding? Well . . . thanks very much . . . Seán and Trez are great . . . Very happy . . . Both married . . . No, I’m not in touch with Fran . . . Didn’t hear his new album . . . No, I don’t do music any more . . . Enjoy your weekend.
A professor of something called Media Studies at a university in England gave a lecture on the influence of something called ‘Celtic Paganism’ on our lyrics. Since I’d never been aware of any such influence, I found his paper riveting. He was a small, obese, turbot-faced piece of work who seemed excited to veritable moistness about being in Ulster. I think he’d been hoping to run into a druid while visiting the Occupied Territories; at very least, a photogenic rioter. Some of the Shipsters took him for a Sunday afternoon spin into rural Donegal and he returned with the customary ecstasies.
On the Monday dawn Ryanair flight back to what we mustn’t call the Mainland, he happened to be seated in the aisle just across from me. I’d supped late with the Shipsters and was regretting it. Something fried in batter had been consumed in the song-filled wee hours and was commingling uneasily in the chasms of my gut with eleven or so Coca-Colas.
Van Morrison’s ‘Have I Told You Lately That I Love You?’ was stuck on perpetual replay in my head, an earworm that was causing me discomfort. The rhyming of ‘I love you’ with ‘above you’, the zizzing violins. I will horsewhip the cretinous infidel that denies the genius of Van Morrison, but I was feel
ing so rank that I disliked that song. Suddenly it seemed not beautiful or even pleasant, but like being locked in a paint factory with Vincent Van Gogh only to discover him daubing ‘AᴙSE’ on a wall.
I realise – forgive me – that I am digressing again. Let me try and get my needle in the groove. As we disembarked at Stansted, I was sweaty and nauseous. But Stansted can do that to a person. I noticed the academic gentleman staring as we waited at Customs, and I wanted to tell him to stop.
On the coach for Victoria station, he was again across the row from me, and I felt, in all decency, that I couldn’t continue ignoring him, as I’d managed to do all weekend. He was one of those Marys who have a way of transmitting themselves. Even their silences speak. Looking at them brings the feeling that a sort of sunburn is going to happen if you don’t make the effort to avoid it.
‘Enjoy yourself?’ I asked, as we trundled out of the airport.
‘Fabulous. Such an honour to be there.’
‘Your lecture was fascinating,’ I lied.
‘Probably a little far-fetched and up itself.’
Faced with the oldest gambit, the self-deprecating appeal for reassurance, I failed to do the only correct thing and strangle him. We’d an hour or so to kill before arriving into London. I might as well kill it by false praise and disingenuous tripe, since the in-coach Wi-fi was down.
‘No way, it was great. The punters were stoked.’
‘That’s gratifying to know. Put a lot of work into it, must admit.’
‘I could tell.’ Work was one of the things he’d put into it, undoubtedly. The contents of his bowels was another.
‘Your stuff is so teachable,’ he said. ‘Do you tweet?’
All my life I’ve suffered an unmanly cravenness that pretends to be courtesy, the reluctance to call a spade a tool. Fran always said it would be my undoing, this refusal to shoot on first sight. The artist needs the heart of a monster, he’d tell you. What I had in my chest was a soggy lump of Weetabix. On this – on many points – Fran was correct. But we are what we are. God help us.
I found myself defending the criminalities the professor’s lecture had inflicted, as though anyone would waste a single brain cell attacking them. Every ludicrous grandiosity, each preposterous gobbet of nonsense, I hailed as the glittering truth. I told him he was a perceptive critic. He told me I was ‘a poet’. That’s about the worst thing you can say to any failed professional musician, particularly one who has aspired to feed his family by attaching a key-change to his neuroses and calling the result a song. John Prine is a poet. Antony Hegarty is a poet. Morrissey, Polly Harvey, Richard Hawley, Joni Mitchell, they are all of them poets, if you must. I prefer to think of them as songwriters, since that is the highest calling, but demean them by misnaming should it please you. How belittled a medium is the one-time soundtrack of white America’s nightmares, that it’s been so poignantly re-baptised and told to grow up, having fought the law so long. Jim Morrison, the poet? If you think so. Go ahead. It’s like terming Pablo Picasso a Spaniard. You’re not wrong, but is your category the most relevant in which to place him? For three minutes of Emmylou Harris, I will trade you much of Lord Byron, with a barrowload of Pope and Dryden thrown in, and all of that vowel-hound, Hopkins. You like Stevie Smith? I prefer the McGarrigles and June Tabor. A.E. Housman? I’ll raise you the Kinks. Any frontispiece featuring the words ‘Collected Poems’ has an invisible subtitle reading ‘Hardly Anyone Has Read’. But enough. I shouldn’t rant.
‘Do you think you’ll play music again? Professionally, I mean?’
‘I very much doubt it. I don’t have the interest.’
‘Season to all things?’
‘Something like that.’
‘But you listen, I imagine?’
‘Not as much as you’d think.’
‘I rather like the Fuck Buttons. And the Vaccines are good.’
‘The . . .?’
‘Vaccines. “Post Break-up Sex.” And the National are interesting. Epic sonic washes and deeply bleak sensibility.’
‘Fabulous,’ I said.
‘Well, sort of.’
By now the A1080 Roundway was going past our windows. I pretended to fall asleep.
We were almost into London when he slid into the seat beside me. ‘Robbie,’ he said, quietly, ‘you really don’t look well. I hope I’m not being personal. But don’t you think you should see a doctor?’ I was in a lot of pain as he spoke to me, so much that it was hard not to faint. My face was on fire. My lips and eyelids roared. It was a pain I wouldn’t wish on anyone, not even my former accountant. I remember weeping and wanting my dad.
And this poor professor I’d silently disparaged came and held me by the hand. Asking no questions. And London arrived. I was thinking of the first flat I ever had in that city, the gracious, stately squares and grubby, shrieking squatlands, in the winter I turned twenty and I glimpsed John Lydon in a bar. The coach hit a speed bump. A stranger held my hand. I awoke in St Thomas’ Hospital.
The doctor said I hadn’t suffered a heart attack, merely ‘a violent allergic reaction’. She was Scottish, in her thirties, and brisk. Had I done anything unusual? Something out of character? I confess that the north of Ireland is not my favourite place but it seemed unlikely to have induced in me a violent allergic reaction, at least not all by itself. Was I taking any drugs, legal or otherwise? I told her I was on meds for blood pressure and bronchitis. Had I varied the time of taking them? It happened that I had. Normally I would down the irbesartan last thing at night, the antibiotic on my morning walk to Porchester Baths. In Derry, a bit sleepy, I’d forgotten to take either. So I’d chomped down both at the airport.
‘Might be on to something there,’ she said, coolly enough. ‘We’ll keep you a day or two for tests.’
Like most of us I didn’t, and don’t, like hospitals. I have nothing but praise for the heroes at that wonderful institution, which wonderful though it is, is an institution. Noises in the night. Things done ‘a certain way’. The perpetual redolence of disinfectant ought to be a reassurance, but for some reason it’s usually a downer. Those gowns that show your bum. Slightly fearing the bathrooms. And also, let’s be honest, the sick people. I mean no offence. But I was feeling a bit gloomy. If we truly liked watching members of our species facing painful, traumatic or merely upsetting experiences, we’d need urgently to be placed in a different kind of hospital, one with bars on the windows.
Apart from Welsh John, I didn’t contact anyone. In all truth, I didn’t want to be scolded or advised, which the excellent Molly and Michelle, if they have any faults at all, are sometimes inclined to do. I was also – I admit it – a little ashamed. You see, I smoke. Alas. Not much, any more. The odd one, on Sundays, or after a meal. But telling my daughter that you smoke, or even think about smoking, is to sign yourself up for a machine-gunning.
I was wheeled to Cardiology despite being well able to walk, then Virology, Immunology and the day room. I repeat – better care could not have been given to Her Majesty the Queen. But I didn’t like that day room one bit. It gave me what acidulated hippies used to term ‘The Fear’. I’m set in my ways, like to brew my own mocha, a read of the paper, the aromas from my stove. It isn’t misanthropy: I like company, too. But there’s something in being able to close your own door, stand on the deck of a moonlit old longboat and take a surreptitious leak into the Grand Union Canal while marvelling at the radiance of the stars. There were ill people everywhere, some distressingly ill. And being in any hospital, no matter how well run, is being in every hospital of your life. I’ve been in a few. Don’t like thinking about them. I don’t know if you’ve ever spent, say, a Christmas night on your own, or a bad New Year’s Eve, when nobody called. For me, most hospitals have a wee touch of that. You can get a bit introspective, drawn to shadowy roads. Nothing at the end of them but the town called Remembrance. That isn’t a town I like.
Then, there is the necessity of making conversation with strangers, a skill I wish I had
, but haven’t. An old man wheeled himself towards me and offered a bag of sweets.
‘Did I hear you’re from Luton, son?’
‘I don’t know if you did.’
‘But are you? From Luton.’
‘I am.’
‘From Houghton Regis myself,’ he exclaimed with no small delight, using the indigenous pronunciation ‘Aayrton Regis’. I’ve nothing against this civil parish contiguous to the larger town of Dunstable, a mere bus ride from Jimmy’s house, indeed I wish its people well. But I didn’t want to talk about Houghton Regis at that moment, if ever. Still, what’s to be done? He was a genial old man. All he wanted was a bit of company, and you can’t say no. His son was in Birmingham. Daughter in Coventry. Wife dead a few years, ‘lovely Irish girl, Roscommon’. No one had come to visit him, but he said he didn’t mind. What broke my heart was that he didn’t.
On the scale of these things, the specialist said, it wasn’t a tremendously serious violent allergic reaction, merely ‘an unfortunate cross-effect’. Which is a little like being told that your recent and highly painful stabbing in the face wasn’t serious. Happy news but no voucher for Disney World. He wouldn’t actually describe it as ‘violent’ at all. His colleague, the Scottish doctor, could be ‘ebullient with language’. That’s the ruddy Celts for you, he didn’t actually say. ‘We’ll keep you one more night. Just in case.’
Life takes on colours, some of them intense, when you spend a third night in a hospital. There’s a lot of waiting around. You get ruminative. Fear, but mostly regret, in many lurid forms, all of them drawn by Ralph Steadman. The things you regret because you know you should regret them, and the things you regret because you do. They’re sometimes not the same.
Then there are the failures regretted for other reasons altogether, if only you had the language in which to express them, which you don’t, and you never will now. It’s why we have songs. They know we’re out of our depth. They get into the interstellar spaces between these ink-stains called words, living where there’s no oxygen, collapsing all the distances. I found myself pining for that sweet drug of song. Gently, I slipped off the wagon.