The Thrill of It All

by Joseph O'Connor

  Yeats says that his muse Maud Gonne had ‘beauty like a tightened bow’. Brother Clarence, the drunken fossil who taught us English at school had once seen her crossing O’Connell Bridge in Dublin and he’d tell us how right Yeats was. But I never knew what the words meant until I saw Sarah-Thérèse Sherlock. A stunner. An Oxfam Fatale.

  FROM INTERVIEW WITH TREZ,

  DECEMBER 2012, SKY ARTS TV

  . . . I was nervous of Fran and Rob, to be honest. I mean, I fancied Fran, of course. Who didn’t? The prettiest boy in the college. He’d this incredible self-confidence and seriousness. He walked like a model. I had a Saturday job in Bayliss Wright’s, an art supplies shop in the town, and I’d sometimes see him come in and look at the books. One day I saw him buying this beautiful poster, a Marc Chagall drawing. I wanted to tell him it was lovely, just, you know, to say hi. But somehow I hadn’t the nerve. It amazed me that he bought it, because he always looked really poor. You’d see him in the canteen, when no one was looking, taking leftover food off the plates. It’d break your heart. Hard to know what to do. I’d be buying an extra sandwich just to leave it, so he’d take it. You’re young – y’know – you don’t have the words. I should have gone over and just said hello. But I didn’t. I don’t know why.

  Someone told me he was born in Vietnam, adopted over here. There was a bit of racism in the college, yeah. Definitely there was . . . I wouldn’t want to overstate it, things were changing by then. But maybe that’s too easy. You’d have to ask Fran. I don’t think he likes to talk about it.

  Then I remember one night there was an Anti-Apartheid disco in the Student Union Common Room. Fran was there with Robbie and he was dancing away by himself to this James Brown record. Fran I mean. Poor Robbie didn’t dance. I remember thinking Fran was a star just from the way he was dancing. Ridiculous, I know. But I did. I knew he’d be famous. Daft, but that’s the truth. I could picture him on Top of the Pops.

  I had a little crush on him, for sure. But it didn’t last long. I reckoned he was far too ‘out there’ to look at me twice. Also, I thought he wasn’t interested in girls, I think everyone did. Maybe he thought that himself, I dunno. He wouldn’t talk to you much. He was, what’s the word – reserved. Always measuring. There was an astuteness about him that Rob didn’t have. A girlfriend of mine used to joke, ‘There goes Sly and Robbie.’ Which wasn’t accurate at all. What Fran had wasn’t slyness. It was more, he wouldn’t talk until he knew he could trust you. I didn’t think of him as an extrovert. I still don’t, now. He was one of those kids, you’d hear the cogs whirring away in his head. The cogs and the sound of the rain.

  Did I think they were an item? Fran and Rob? Oh no way. I can see why you’d ask, but that wasn’t the vibe. It was more that the two of them had this aura they’d be kind of transmitting: we’re, like, serious heavy musos, don’t be coming our way, we might be discussing, I dunno, guitar tunings. They’d finish one another’s sentences, be laughing at jokes you couldn’t make out. You’d see them sat in the canteen for about fourteen hours at a time, smoking, or reading the NME. Or they’d sit there saying nothing, which wasn’t something you saw. Two males able to say nothing was pretty rare in my experience. Still is.

  . . . Rob was absolutely lovely if you bumped into him by yourself. So clever and shy, and he listened to what you were saying, which wouldn’t be a strength of most boys in those days. He was a nice-enough-looking lad but I don’t think he knew it. He’d this beautiful head of curls. [Laughs.] You’d want to sink your fingers into them. There was a sadness around him, I guess, because of what happened with his sister. He didn’t talk about it much but it was there all the same. There’s this Irish poet, Paula Meehan, has a book called The Man Who Was Marked By Winter, and the title reminded me of Rob . . . His mum and dad were amazing people. Darlings, the two of them. His dad was a zookeeper in Whipsnade.

  I was nominally a member of Declan Kiely’s group tutorial that term but had missed all but one of its meetings. Well, why squander time discussing literature with the wisest scholar on the campus when you could be busking to glue-sniffers in the precinct? Trez, having completed First Year at Harlow, changed her mind about journalism and was permitted to enter Second Year Humanities at our Poly, doing English and History of Art. Told she’d been assigned to Declan’s tutorial, I contracted a dose of the Prodigals. I wrote a note to my tutor that he’s often quoted back to me. ‘Dear Dr Kiely. I am sorry for my absence. The reasons were compelling and remarkable.’

  There were ten of us in his group, but I looked at only one. Had you been there yourself, you’d understand. Let me contextualise by noting that in order to qualify for the Economic Journalism programme at Harlow Technical School you needed to have scored five high A Levels, including honours-level Mathematics and at least one language. I knew. I had tried for it, and failed. You didn’t abandon this course to study paintings and novels. It made you unusual if you did.

  She was rumoured to be from a London-Irish family, had won prizes as a kid for fiddle and Irish dance. Years later she told me that she’d deliberately worn her shoes on the wrong feet as a child, to make her toes point out more while dancing. For days after a competition she’d be barely able to walk. But she always won the prize, or came close. I’ve sometimes been asked by a journalist to sum up Trez. That story is the one I tell.

  There she was, seated beside me, while Declan talked books. She made notes at astonishing speed. The tattoo on her right forearm read ‘Million dollar hero in a five and ten cents store’, a line from a song by my favourite band of the era, the magnificent Radiators From Space. Sellotaped to the cover of her notes-folder was a portrait of David Bowie, the artwork from the sleeve of his godlike album Low. I think you’re getting the picture.

  It was a requirement that we write a major essay that year, on ‘The Idea of the Sympathetic Imagination in Romantic Poetry.’ Declan asked us to begin our pieces with a single short quotation that would sum up the idea in question. Most of us supplied dutiful drivellings from Shelley or Charles Lamb or from poor old Keats’s dreary letters. But the epigraph chosen by Trez was a statement no Romantic could deny. It was taken from the writings of Felice and Boudleaux Bryant, 1952, as sung by the Everly Brothers.

  ‘All I Have to do is Dream.’

  TREZ

  My brother Seán was a part of it. See, it was a time in my late teens when I was looking again at music. Saying ‘what do you want from this beautiful thing?’ You know? Is there something you could give it? Or are you just wasting time? I couldn’t see myself in an orchestra or, you know, a string quartet. The life of a professional musician can be seriously hard and you couldn’t face the uncertainty unless you loved that music to death. And I loved it. But not to marry. There were other things I was thinking about, professionally, for the future. So what do you do with your music? Give it all up? Or play something else? And there was other music I liked but I felt – I don’t know – a novice. Like that moment at a party when someone stops singing because they’ve forgotten the words, and you think, I’d love to join in. But would everyone laugh? Sounds mad to say it now but I figured I’d left it too late. All these questions – I reckoned I should have asked them younger. I was only eighteen or something. But that’s how I felt. ‘Age-rage’, I call it. Ridiculous . . . But I thought, if I don’t find – some vessel I can put music into, then all the hours of practice meant nothing, so my childhood meant nothing. So I started looking about. And Seán was into really different stuff than me. He’d say ‘Sis, you want to hear this. Just give it a listen.’ He’d be coming home from the flea markets with these boxes of scratchy records: the Small Faces, the Action, the Creation, the Smoke, John’s Children, the Skatalites, the whole Mod thing. A lot of it, I didn’t even like. I was mad into classical, and then, you know, the folk. But there’s stuff you put in your head lights no fires at all. The Who gave me something to burn. Like Mahler. Or the blues. When you’re young, you’ve a flame-thrower for a heart . . . Rob always thi
nks I was totally sussed around the time we met. But musically not. I was lost. Bless his heart, he could be a bit silly around an okay-looking girl. He thought, if you brushed your hair, you had life worked out. And that was a thing I got from my mum. Now, she was beautiful. If you’d seen her. Total smasher. And she’d say to me and Seán, take an interest in your appearance, looking nice doesn’t cost, it’s an armour. But no. I was lost. At a crossroads, you know? And I’d say it was the only reason I ended up in a band. Without it, my childhood would be, I don’t know, a chapter nobody needed. All my mum’s efforts to pay for my lessons, all the rest of it, too, the thousands of hours. And I couldn’t let that happen. No way.

  She’d jingle the coins in her pockets in three-four time. She was cleverer than anyone you knew. Perhaps you remember the actress Nastassja Kinski. Trez had something of her invulnerable cool and her saucer-sized umber-brown eyes. Often, on the bus, in the library or the lecture hall, the seat beside her was empty. ‘Cheekbones’, the girls called her, or ‘Warpaint’ or ‘Legs’, their resentment so obviously arising from envy as to make it endearing. ‘She thinks her shite’s chocolate.’ ‘Dr Lipstick’. ‘Lady Muck’. She was the only student in the college accusingly reputed to ‘wear perfume’. You forgave Fran the innocent floridness sometimes seen in gifted young poets when he remarked, in those days of well-meant exaggeration, ‘That girl makes Debbie Harry seem Rod Stewart in drag.’ Most of us, when young, were out of someone’s league. Few were out of everyone’s. Trez was.

  Let me fast-forward to the evening, near the close of November ’82, when she came up to me in the student canteen. We’d nodded at each other now and again before Declan’s tutorial, had sometimes murmured agreement about a novel or poem being discussed there, but had never, to my recollection, exchanged a word of extramural conversation. I was ‘Fran’s friend’, wasn’t I? I confirmed that I was. Could she join me for coffee? I swallowed.

  The coffee at the college was a mixture of sputum and beard-shavings, but I drank as much as I could hold down. I think I did this because Jimmy regarded coffee as suspicious. Like Russia. It presented itself as innocent but must be treated with stern scepticism, no mere beverage but the counterculture in a cup. A zookeeper of distant infamy, a man of coffee when the others were of tea, had brought shame upon the brotherhood by running away to Brighton with someone’s spouse not his own, specifically someone’s husband not his own. There they openly lived the grind-your-own lifestyle, it was whispered, and lolled about in togas arranging wildflowers. Coffee was the fuel of the bawd, the satyr and revolutionist, the uppity, the malcontent and the rakehell. In our kitchen was a jar of horrible brown powder that had perhaps once been in the same factory as a coffee bean. If you wanted to annoy Dad, and I usually did, you would suggest that he drink the reeking wolfsbane that occurred when the granules met boiling water. Tassste, you might hiss, giving your impersonation of Mephistopheles to Faust. ‘Ask my bollocks,’ he’d retort.

  Well, Trez sat down across from me, ‘coffee’ in hand, evidently one of the libertines like myself. Her hair hung over one eye, like Veronica Lake’s, and her earrings were Anarchy symbols. Did I like Dr Kiely? He was brilliant, we agreed. What was that novel I was reading? It was Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and I was finding it sticky oul going but I forbore from telling her this. Could I spare her a smoke? She’d owe me. No problem. Our talk was a little reticent as we circumnavigated and halted and gazed at our cups and the novel. What did I reckon the finest guitar solo in the history of New Wave? I answered that John Perry’s work on ‘Another Girl, Another Planet’ by the Only Ones would have to be up there, and she nodded. Robert Quine’s on ‘Blank Generation’ was technically more daring, she said, correctly, but Perry was epic, too. Then there was silence. I asked the obvious question.

  She’d given up on Harlow because her heart wasn’t in it. The teachers back in school had railroaded her a bit. She didn’t blame them for doing their best. But journalism was something you couldn’t profess without ‘a passion’. It shouldn’t be a matter of scoring A’s in exams but of wanting and needing to do it. She’d made the right choice. Her passion lay elsewhere. She wanted to be an art historian, to study in New York, eventually to earn a doctorate, to write. I’m fairly certain it was the first time anyone had ever spoken the word ‘passion’ to me in a non-religious context. That the speaker was someone of my own age was strange. She mashed out her cigarette in a saucer on the table and pulled a battered, coverless paperback from her bag.

  ‘That’s for you,’ she said. ‘You mentioned it in the tutorial. I saw it in a charity shop and just got it.’

  It was Babel by Patti Smith, a chapbook of her poems. Someone had scrawled across the grubby frontispiece an inscription in red pencil. ‘NYC ’78. I’m a believer.’

  Everything was quiet. There were tears in my eyes. I don’t know why. I was floored.

  She took off her glasses and peered through the lenses at the ceiling. Then she asked if it was true that I was in ‘a band’ with Fran. I said it wasn’t exactly a band, we only busked. She looked at me appraisingly as I fell slowly through space. Love-bees buzzed around me. Rocket-men zoomed. She was ‘into music’ herself, she said.

  When did we practise? Could she maybe ‘sit in’? She played cello and fiddle. ‘A little bit of bass.’ She didn’t mention that at the age of twelve she’d won a Royal Academy scholarship for composition and counterpoint, and the London section of the Fleadh Cheoil, the foremost competition for Irish traditional music, going on to win that title a further four times. No genius ever tells you she’s a genius. It wouldn’t have mattered had she done so, for there were other things on my mind. I was already wondering how to break it to Fran that the interloper busting up our citadel would be a cellist. But I’d find the form of words. His resistance would be crushed. Had she confessed herself a xylophonist, a banger of spoons, an admirer of the J. Geils Band or the Brotherhood of Man, a hater of every sort of music ever made in this world, I still would have piped her aboard.

  We went for a pint and we talked about novels, which is always a way of talking about other subjects. Had I a girlfriend? No. Had she a boy? ‘Not really.’ The Trap boasted a Pacman machine and we played it a long time because Trez knew a way of cheating. Supper was a cellophane sandwich and a packet of pork scratchings. At eleven o’clock she cycled home.

  I had missed the last bus, so I set out to walk the four miles to Rutherford Road. At mile one, the rain came on. It surged steadily, viciously. I was drenched to the underwear. The wind was a mad dog kicked out in a storm, shrieking like Siouxsie Sioux. But in all the great conurbation of Luton, there was no happier boy that night.

  I didn’t know that I had just begun the most continuous conversation of my life. You don’t, when you’re a kid. The novels get it wrong. The past is another country, but at least you were there. The future has latitudes of its own.

  Four

  OUT THE BACK of our house was a good-sized, dry-lined shed built by Jimmy. There he pootled around, fixing household appliances, or sometimes enjoying the surreptitious cigarette my mum pretended not to know about. In the very distant past, it had been a kind of aviary, planned headquarters of the pigeon-breeding empire he felt would smash the competition. But the birds had been noisy and the gentle complaints of the neighbours had prevailed, and his dreams had flown away. Still, the ‘chalet’ – you didn’t call it ‘a shed’ – was his place of private resort. He’d spend time there of a summer’s evening, reading his cowboy novellas or practising the cornet, which he played in the Jim Connell Memorial Trade Union Silver Band. He had his wood-turner’s lathe and he ran up pipe racks and back-scratchers and Christmas tree decorations for the annual British Legion sale of work. There was perhaps that simple pleasure I assume any amateur must feel in a structure put up by his hands. This was no splintery obscenity bought in a flatpack, but a thing he’d drawn out with care. I remember, in the year my sister was killed, helping him saw and plane. The
spars were dug down, and the windowpanes painted. Often, we worked in silence. One night when I happened to look in his direction I saw him weeping into his paint-stained hands. It was among the most terrible sights of my life.

  Beyond the shed, he grew tomatoes under sheets of polished glass, and gooseberries in huge bushes where the butterflies were lovely. He told you their names with an insider’s joy. They seemed a kind of music. They dazzled. He also raised that vilest of all plants, rhubarb, and my poor mum, who didn’t like it any better than I did, out of love for him found many ways of cooking it. The Grace Before Meals would be oddly touching on those evenings. Forgive me, I wander again.

  It was a perfectly sound structure, if a little cold by autumn, but he permitted Fran and me to practise there. This would have the advantage of ‘ridding the house of that arse-aching racket’ and giving us a zone of our own. We spent many, many hours there, trying to write songs, amid the mossy, loamy aromas of teak dust and potting compost, the sweetness of sanded-down pine. The black-and-white television Jimmy couldn’t bear to euthanase sat on its shelf like a respected old relative draped in her spider-spun veil. Sometimes it uttered a strange click from the depths of itself, as though enjoying the transmission of oblivion.

  On the first evening Trez was to ‘sit in’ I gave the place a bit of a sweeping. Fran was surprisingly helpful, proving handy with the squeegee and enjoying the pink rubber gloves that my mum insisted he wear. (‘You’ve beautiful skin, dear. You don’t want to ruin it.’) His eyelids were besmirched with kohl, so that he looked like an Arapaho mop-woman. Well, we dusted and broomed, fetched a chair from the kitchen. But Jimmy’s chalet was a venue Trez would never see. I suppose that shouldn’t have surprised me.

  She pitched up a bit early, cello on her back, fiddle in its case in a knapsack. She was wearing a broad-brimmed bonnet, silken poppy in its band, lace veil covering only the eyes. What threw me was that she had a bunch of lilies for Alice, wrapped in a fold of newspaper. This was by no means an era in which students bought flowers for their elders, especially if said oldsters were unknown to them. Alice had recently gone working part time in a secondary-school canteen and was not accustomed to kindliness from teenagers. She looked at these flowers. I thought she was going to embrace the caller. She led her into the kitchen, while Fran and I watched, confused. He was staying with us at the time, owing to a number of painful difficulties. Encouraged by me to make contact with his foster-people back in Rotherham, he had written to them but the response was a final rejection. They wished him well, so they said, but didn’t want him back. ‘What’s done is done.’ It hurt him. Also, he’d been evicted from his room in the town, the landlady having discovered that she didn’t like his ‘type’. She had nothing against him ‘personally’ and didn’t ‘believe in prejudice’. ‘But I don’t want your type in the house, love.’