The departing lecturer was denounced, somewhat unfairly, as ‘Harry the Talking Haemorrhoid’ before the matter at hand was raised. He’d been teaching himself Stranglers riffs, he explained with some reticence. The instrument was a bass. He’d found it in a skip on Gordon Street in the town. A 1970s ‘Violin’ Höfner, spray-gunned green, white and gold by no craftsman, so that jags of its original black scowled through the tricolour here and there. It lacked its original pick-ups and the action was so wrecked that to hold down a high B made your wrist and knuckles ache. Poor navvy, it looked as though it had been used to smash down a door. He had stolen a set of strings for it, but hadn’t an amp. Would I know where to score one, cheap?
In truth, I was so fiercely flattered he thought me worth asking that I blushed to the meats of my teeth. It is the only blush of my life that I actually remember. Once or twice, it has coloured my dreams.
As it happened, my brother Shay had recently quit a band, a long story that would embarrass several people if I went into it here. Taking up space in the dustbowl of his bedroom was a Marshall JCM 800 bass amplifier. It was the size of a washing machine and into it had been stuffed Shay’s hopes, along with every red cent he scrimped ten months to pay for it from his part-time job cleaning the toilets at Luton Airport. He had a degree in English and Politics but the employers of Bedfordshire weren’t looking for that. A girlfriend was on the scene and so he didn’t wish to leave the town. Also, although he denied this, he was something of a home-bird. He was never a good bass player but had resolved to be loud, one admirable and far from unique compromise.
I had nothing to barter with Shay but I wanted to impress Fran. I sought a loan of the amp, but my brother’s refusal was stern, for even though it was a now silenced reminder of gruesome failure, he didn’t want to let it go. I’ve noticed this curious stubbornness in many people of Irish heritage. We like to hang on to the evidence that something didn’t work out: wedding photos, a miraculous medal, a passport.
Undaunted, I asked if we might buy it on credit, the repayments to come weekly, interest added. This amounted to seeking a loan from my brother in order to buy something from my brother, a commodity I didn’t need, except for the status it would confer on me: not a wise or sane model for progress, you might think, but actually, years later, in the era of the Single Currency crisis, all Europe was run on this Company Store basis. My thinking was that if I skipped a pint or four on a Friday night in the Trap, my sacrifice could be put to use. Asked by Shay what I intended to supply by way of collateral, I found myself puzzled, outdrawn. I wasn’t entirely sure what collateral was, but I suspected I was in no position to supply it.
He pointed out that the loan I had in mind would take seventy-two years to be repaid, by which point he was planning on being dead. It became a weird contest between us, a matter of pride – even of ideological skirmishing. Shay professed Trotskyism in those years, sullenly, beadily, with absolutely no concession to the realities of human nature, as all religions ought to be professed. Property was theft; the Workers’ Republic would abolish it. From each according to his abilities, this was his credo, to each according to his needs. But when the contention was turned back on him as a demand for the amp, he would out-Thatcher the Daily Mail with his scalding refusals and his defence of private ownership. ‘That amp is fukken mine, you work-shy fukken spazz,’ he’d roar, the vein in his forehead a throbbing purple glow-worm. Worse were the occasions when he shooed you away wordlessly, never looking up from his Collected Speeches of Lenin as you slunk to your pit of furies.
Our wranglings went on for a tortuous fortnight, to the amusement of my Dubliner dad and the grief of my mum. A farmer’s youngest daughter from the loveliest part of County Clare, she found arguments in the home upsetting. Her own family was the mildest and closest I have known, possessed of that sensitised and intelligent courteousness country people sometimes have. Shay and I didn’t give a jot. Onward we fenced. His method of awakening me was cruel. He’d creep into my room before dawn, slip over my ears the headphones now connected to the amp, then BLAST out the brutal triangular riff of Deep Purple’s ‘Smoke on the Water’, fleeing before I could recover sufficiently to strangle him. Once, in my later life, I had the privilege of meeting Jon Lord, Purple’s matchless keyboardist, a Paderewski of the Hammond Organ, and I was honoured to shake the hand that played the mesmeric blues solo on ‘Lazy’, but back when I was a teenager I adopted the stance of my peers: Deep Purple were lumbering dinosaurs, mired in sludgy pomp, sinking to deserved extinction. They would wallow in the Hades of the twenty-minute drum solo, where mules and apes cavort. Shay insisted I was wrong, they’d outlast all the fads. He wouldn’t collaborate with any fan of punk and New Wave. It would offend the dark lords of rock. Elvis Costello, whom I admired, ‘looked like an accountant doing four years for fraud’. Siouxsie Sioux was clearly ‘mad in the head’. Adam and the Ants? ‘Fuck me wept.’ To loan me his amp would be handing a shotgun to a toddler. The consequences could be awful, even lethal.
I’d totter home from the Trap to find Shay already polishing his denunciations, his tactic being to get in early with the sucker-punch of his NO before the question had a chance to be restated. He’d call me a scrounger. I’d call him a contra. Icons of Che and Fidel scowled down upon his bed, over his neatly shelved childhood collection of Airfix fighter bombers and battleships, but his mercenary little heart belonged to The Man, I chided. ‘Boil my cock,’ he’d retort. The high-water mark of my outrage came one memorable midnight, when, almost tearful with anger at being so long denied my quarry, I drew myself up to the full feather of my outrage and bawled, ‘What would Nelson Mandela do?’ The excoriation of his laughter still scorches.
My sister Molly had been killed some years previous to these events, suddenly, in an accident in the Dublin neighbourhood of Glasnevin, where we lived at that long-gone time. The driver was drunk. Molly was crossing the road. The presents for her seventh birthday were hidden in my mum’s wardrobe, and there they remained many months after the funeral because no one could bear to throw them away. You can imagine the grief. I’ve no words to describe it. To see a woman cradle the body of her seven-year-old girl a last time, a father knelt weeping at the lip of a grave, is to know that certain lives meet the undeserved cruelty that can never be overcome, only survived. My dad worked as a keeper in Dublin’s beautiful Victorian zoo, a job he adored, but he couldn’t do it any more. For a time he was unable to leave our house at all; he couldn’t forgive the road, or the town. Similar work came up in England. My mother was reluctant. But my father felt that England was his only option now. The shop steward at his union, which was organised across the two islands, put in a strong word, and we went. Dad’s brothers were in England, and three of my mother’s sisters. All but two of my thirty first cousins were born there. My mother, numbed by pain, and by broken, shipwrecked love for him, agreed to the move while fearing it. Molly, to my parents, and to my brother and me, had not disappeared – how could it be possible? – but subsisted in the air of our family’s life like dew on the apples of autumn. We could scarcely even bear to mention her name. But her absence sat to every meal, every little event and great, every silence of Sunday morning or Christmas night. She rained on our windows and arose from the sweet william and meadowsweet Dad grew in our new home’s garden. My parents had been through the worst hurt on this earth. Molly must have looked from our eyes.
What I’m about to say is ridiculous, but the fact is the fact. Something in the tussle about that amp wasn’t funny. The youngest child is often the centrifuge of a family. Molly was one of those objectively gorgeous and mischievous kids for whom siblings, especially brothers, are drawn to compete. Whenever Shay and I had stupid fights – and we fought all the time – I felt we were still fighting for my sister’s approval, that one of us would gain the prize and the other would be shamed. It was perhaps a means of not forgetting her while learning to say goodbye, a realisation I was beginning to approach in the month I
met Fran. It’s but one of the ways in which his appearance in my life revealed what had long been there.
In the end, I stole the wretched thing, one rainy Sunday afternoon when Shay was away addressing a meeting of the Cambridge University branch of the Socialist Workers’ Party. (Yes I know.) They were empathising over canapés with the working class of El Salvador or passing resolutions demanding of President Reagan that he, like, totally resign, as the rusted supermarket trolley I’d unearthed in Dad’s garden shed trundled from our house, heavily burdened. An Agatha Christie fan, I’d broken the kitchen window to simulate a burglary, but Shay, no fool, wasn’t fooled. Trotskyites can be sceptical, even in the face of evidence. Hence the story of the 1980s British Labour Party. Shay didn’t speak to me for nearly two months and would eventually get his vengeance by melting holes in my Buzzcocks albums with a cigarette lighter. Later we managed to parlay our battle into a joking kind of truce, not without the shedding of tears. He emigrated to New Zealand in 1991 and rarely comes home any more. He’s a research officer for that country’s National Council of Trade Unions, was a speechwriter for Prime Minister Helen Clark, and hopes to stand for election next year. But whenever I hear ‘Smoke on the Water’, my brother’s in the room, the sweetest and funniest man I’ve had the blessing to know, and one of the smartest, too. His Christmas card two years ago featured an improvised speech bubble coming from Baby Jesus’s cradle. It said ‘Deep Purple rock, you thieving Tory sod.’ My daughter is ‘Molly Shay’ for my sister and brother, whose haughty, Iberian looks she has, like many with West of Ireland blood.
Forgive me. I run ahead of myself.
It wouldn’t be fair to accuse Fran of giving me the impression he was a brilliant musician. But oddly, that was the impression I had. Wilde wrote somewhere, ‘I have set myself to music’, and I assumed Fran was doing something similar, or trying to. But when I unveiled the stolen amp, he seemed peevish and afraid, challenged as he would now be to produce. Having sought so long, he was reluctant to find: a recurring motif in the outlook of all maddening people. You could no more predict Fran’s behaviour than sculpt a statue of the sky. Doing the obvious was not in his kit. Instead he told me he’d been feeling ‘pangsious’, an adjective he’d invented, a compound of ‘anxious’ and ‘pang’. The bass guitar was not his instrument, he had come to discern. He was ringing himself up on this matter.
He got rid of the bass, acquired a cheap Takeharu-copy acoustic, and I hefted the amp into the artificial lake on the campus one night, in a rainstorm of guilt and fear. I was convinced that if I tried to sell it I would be arrested and end up in court and that the resulting criminal record would bring the horror that I would never be permitted entry to the United States. It was Fran who told me this, and who helped me ditch the amp. Emigration was my only ambition at the time – well, the only one I’d have been willing to state in public. We crooks with a past had to dump the evidence. The college was demolished some years ago but the lake remains, now centre of a leafy Business Park. I wonder if that lake has ever yet been drained. Perhaps the archaeologists of the twenty-seventh century will find an amplifier in the sludge and marvel at the strange rites of those peoples.
Amp sunk, Fran began offering me snatches of his lyrics, screeds of disconnected fustian and euphonious platitudes that sounded for all the world, if I’m absolutely honest, like well-meaning advertising copy. ‘Hope is a Breath Away’. ‘Love is a Home’. Unobjectionable burbles, yes, but a tad Eurovisionary in outlook, hardly the effusions of a rebel. At best you imagined them accompanied on synth by an eyes-closed Rick Wakeman or one of that Moogy fraternity. Had you been involved in the marketing of toothpaste, life insurance or cholesterol medication, Fran’s luminescent visions of couples running hand-in-hand through poppy fields in the rain would have set your cash-flow projections ablaze. As it was, they seemed to me vacuous and queerly unoriginal, produced, as they were, by a youth who had a self-pierced nipple and claimed an addiction to three-way sex. You wondered who he was trying to impress. Himself, perhaps.
The way I saw it at the time was that the world had an ocean of songs. We’d bob across it in our grubby boat, making for nowhere in particular, having a little fun and fishing on the way. In any case, nobody wants to hear original material from a busker. That’s like listening to music made by someone else’s toddlers: nice, even admirable, you’d bang your tambourine if asked, but really you’d prefer Stevie Wonder. The sooner Fran abandoned what I saw as a phase, the better. Of course, I didn’t say this. He was my friend, so I listened. Further spillages of numbing nothingness issued forth from his pen. But one day, something small and important changed. A lyric of Fran’s made me laugh.
It was by no means Cole Porter. But it had something, all the same. Call it juice, personality, a sense of itself. It reminded you of talking to him at a bus stop, had a sardonic ordinariness I found pleasing, and also a certain stance. It was Fran put into metre and nothing much more. John Lennon said the secret of song-writing is no secret at all: say what you mean and set it to a backbeat. He read me the lines and I chuckled.
Rang myself up.
But the answerphone threw me.
Telephone screamed.
I was pangsious and blue.
Mummy was out.
I was weird and self-conscious.
Rang myself up.
Beast who answered was you.
‘Who’s it about, Fran?’
He looked at me strangely.
‘There are times, Robert Goulding, when your shallowness has hidden depths. Come – thou shalt buy me chips.’
Two
THE HUMANITIES BUILDING at the Poly, now long gone to rubble, was a stomach-punch of 1960s modernism. Some architect who lived in Perugia or a converted rectory in the shires had reckoned that a neo-Stalinist tower block was just the setting required to get your youthful creativity spurting. Here and about were abstract sculptural works of frightening repellence and brutality, on which students hung coats or hats. The lifts didn’t work. The toilets rarely flushed. I’ve no doubt it won many awards. Fran’s nickname for the campus – ‘Bucharest Airport’ – will give you a sense of the scene.
On the ninth floor of Humanities was located the Department of Ethics, Comparative Religion and Theology, for obvious reasons a rarely visited place. The tumbleweed drifting the landing would very occasionally be disturbed by God-bothering students, an endangered species, even at the time, and by trysting undergraduate couples with no other venue for their ardour than those corridors hung with posters of popes and Michelangelo’s ‘David’ and Jonathan Livingston Seagull in uplifting silhouette.
Pious readers will know of the Stations of the Cross, a series of representations, sculptural or pictorial, depicting fourteen important moments during the last earthly hours of Our Saviour. I’m sorry to say that the student body had sacrilegiously appropriated the terminology of the Stations into the euphemism of its erotic slang. In B9, getting to ‘The First Station’ meant holding hands while French-kissing. Arrival at the Fifth involved manual stimulation through underwear (preferably someone else’s). Six was unzippering or de-knickering. Seven I don’t wish to go into. Gaining the Eighth meant you’d persuaded your co-conspirator of the time-honoured biblical injunction that it’s better to give than to receive. Fortunate to progress beyond Nine, your gratitude to the heavens was deep. Not that I myself had ever forged so far along the road. On this pilgrimage I was a Four, if that. The only person I’d ever gone to bed with was myself. I suspected that my self and I would be better just as friends. But we were finding it hard to split up.
There was an almost impressive view of the car factory from the landing’s wall-sized windows, which had never been washed since the day they were installed. They were splattered on the outside with asterisks of guano, on the inside with obscene graffito: blasphemies, oaths, defamations of the innocent; rude diagrams, commemorative boastings. Beyond the town, the fields of mushroom-tunnels and the airport might be seen, and t
he trading estate where most of my school friends worked or pushed prams. It wasn’t a vista that filled you with hosannas. But if you were willing to tolerate the sighing, the glimpsed entanglements in doorways, the assorted sounds of slobbering and ecumenical sucking, all the tingle-tinged soundtrack of teenage erogeneity, B9 could be a poorboy’s oasis.
Fran and I started to go there in breaks between lectures, armed with our guitars and my grimy copy of Bert Weedon’s Monster Chord-book, Fran with his jotters of lyrics. By then, there were few major scales in which I couldn’t twang around, with the possible exception of B-flat. G, C and D are good keys for the developing guitarist, their chord progressions easy and related minors doable, their dominants and subdominants attainable by any human being with normal levels of motor skill, and you can sophisticate with a little blues lick or a nifty jazzy sixth as confidence grows in the fingers. B-flat is a nightmare, since it involves you in D-sharp or a capo, which latter I was always forgetting or mysteriously losing, often because it had been stolen by Shay. Fran’s natural key was B-flat.
His baritone was hesitant, as though he was apologising for it. You couldn’t have called it powerful. That would all come later. But its combination of rawness and reluctance was like nothing I had heard, except maybe in Aretha Franklin’s early recordings for Atlantic, a collection of which glories my dad once disappointedly received in return for his Green Shield stamps. The Christniks came and went, and increasingly stayed, as Fran paced the charmless corridor that overlooked the Science Department car park, shaking his fist at the lake and the recently erected student gymnasium (‘Asbestos Towers’), as though he resented the existence of both. He trembled when he sang. He clutched at the air. He pushed his hands through his fringe, the great tart. I didn’t know that I would one night see him on the stage of the Hollywood Bowl, on his knees like James Brown, pleading with the spotlights, my frantic fingers scurrying what felt like the ten-mile length of my fretboard while the crowd chanted his name in roared unison. They’d want him to whirl the mic by the flex, lasso it, make it scream, smash a tambourine against the floor. All this would happen. But not yet. He was eighteen and a few months when he first sang in my presence. You’d think the moment would be burnt into my memory but it isn’t. What I remember is my hope that he’d sing like a hero. Which by Jaypers he did. Yes, Fran always had the pipes. It just took him a while to locate them.