The Thrill of It All

by Joseph O'Connor

  I listened to the radio, which I hadn’t done in ten years. And I’ll tell you the truth: it helped. Hear ‘You Make Me Feel Like A Natural Woman’ or ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’, and you know that our species, for all our violence and vulgarity, aren’t apes – that if there’s vanity and hatred and frailty and lust, stupidity and cruelty and the everyday viciousness, there’s also Bessie Smith and Cole Porter. It wasn’t T.S. Eliot who noticed the change from major to minor, every time you say goodbye. That dry little thin-lips would have gnawed off a limb to have written a couplet so wrenchingly recognisable. But for me, he never quite did. Up the dial I found Adele, Keb’ Mo’, the Unthanks. I knew nothing of the charts except what I’d overheard from my Molly, but I ventured to Radio 1 and found myself cheered. There’s vapid stuff, sure, but when was there not? Pink’s songwriting amazed me. Emeli Sandé was fantastic. I’d long had a little thing for ‘Bad Romance’ by Lady Gaga, indeed for Her Ladyship personally. A programme broadcasting from Kerry, The South Wind Blows, reached me on medium wave. Vyvienne Long became my second-favourite rock and roll cellist. Seasick Steve howled the Dog House Boogie. One midnight, a Jamaican nurse came down the ward when almost everyone was asleep and peered at me in an unusual way.

  ‘Mr Goulding, are you . . . dancing?’

  ‘Just looking out the window.’

  ‘You were dancing.’

  ‘No, really. Just . . . moving.’

  ‘What you got on them headphones?’

  ‘“Boom Shak-A-Lak” by Apache Indian.’

  ‘Man, I love that song.’

  ‘Yeah, it’s kind of infectious.’

  ‘Can I listen just a minute?’

  ‘Here you go.’

  I handed her one ear-bud and listened through the other. The ward was dark and quiet, like a shadowed old ship, and the moon over London was lovely. She was nodding to the music. So was I. You can’t not want to dance when you hear that song. It goes into your hips. Like a jig or a reel. Whatever inadequate bootie the Good Lord decided to give you, you want to start shaking it. Hard. In dressing-gown and slippers, I danced with Nurse J. Thirty seconds max. No more than a minute. It wasn’t even dancing, just a shimmy and a shuffle. She held my hand aloft and I pirouetted like a flunt. Then she glanced at her watch and whispered sternly: ‘Go to bed. Now.’ Which I did.

  I have danced with Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders, and with Debbie Harry. In clubs in New York, San Francisco, Barcelona, in Tokyo all night with Trez. But if St Peter should ask me to name the loveliest dance of my life, I’ll have only one answer to give.

  St Thomas’ Hospital, London. April 2012. In a dressing-gown. Dancing in the dark.

  The night they let me out, I came home to a worry, and it put me in strange, low mood. Welsh John told me that a tabloid reporter had called to my boat, asking tactfully worded questions about my health. Well, they’d started out as tactful but it was obvious what she was after. Was it booze or liver failure that had me in hospital? Would I maybe call her number? ‘Just a quick, friendly chat.’ She had then approached Mary and Mary, who told me she’d been ‘a bit snooping’. I’m fond of my neighbours on the canal, of the particular peacefulness we enjoy together there. Some of them are elderly but there are also families with children. I don’t like them being bothered or upset.

  It happened that the next morning I had an appointment at the tax office, which I hadn’t got around to postponing. On the Tube, I felt angry and tired. The meeting went all right, but I was preoccupied, a bit ratty. When your case manager at the Inland Revenue is telling you not to let silly little things upset you, you know you’re sending out mixed signals. I didn’t want the hassle of press or any kind of attention. Turn on that tap and it won’t turn off. Better to leave it disconnected.

  Back at the boat, there was a note from the reporter. She’d ‘pop by tomorrow’. Hoped I was ‘better’. Just a little colour piece. ‘How’s Robbie Goulding doing?’ She’d bring along a photographer. ‘Nothing heavy.’ As a rule I do not throw litter into the Grand Union Canal. But this time I made an exception.

  My experience of tabloid reporters is far from the stereotype. Generally they aren’t grubby little wideboys in drool-stained raincoats but plausible, articulate, pleasantly mannered and calm, often highly educated too. That’s why I am afraid of them. I can handle an enemy, but not when he’s dressed as a friend. You invite him in for coffee. Oh, he deeply loves your work. Such a pleasure to meet you. Might he make a few notes? Would you say you fuck goats, Rob? Er, no, I bloody wouldn’t. Tomorrow’s headline will read ROCKER DENIES FUCKING GOATS: CLAIMS ‘WE’RE JUST GOOD FREHHHHNDS.’

  The only other thing I know about the red-tops is that they don’t like to be bored. Jade them, and they go away. I reckoned the hack would find it mind-numbing to keep returning to my boat only to find it locked up and no one home. Walk out of the gig and the gig don’t happen, at least not in the way they want. Anyhow, I was feeling a bit restless after my stay in the hospital, discombobulated and more turned-inward than I like. I gave keys to Welsh John so he’d come in and feed the cat, stacked whatever cash I could muster and cabbed to St Pancras; from there I caught the night train to Paris.

  My plan, if I had one, was to drop out for a week. Put the head back together. Take stock. But that was a lie. I was planless. I traipsed around the 6th, went to galleries, museums. You can walk in and out of churches all day in Paris, lose yourself in the shadows and the afterglow of incense. There was a kind of dislocation. It’s hard to explain. Once, on tour in Japan, I got trapped alone in a hotel elevator fifty storeys up, and my response was to think I was dreaming, that I’d awaken at any moment. That’s what the days after my time in the hospital were like: a sleepwalk. Sudden thuds of weird dread – perhaps the reporter had gone ahead and written her piece without me? I found myself hurrying to the news-stand on Rue Jacob for whatever English tabloids were available, scanning them fearfully in the blaze of a Paris spring. What would she write? Should I call her after all? An elevator, stuck, looking down over the skyscrapers of a glittering city you don’t know, only there isn’t an alarm bell to press. Suddenly you’re between the floors of a life. You listen to the thing you’re not certain is silence, wondering if anyone is coming.

  After a week, during which no article about me appeared, I dared to start feeling relieved. I spoke with Michelle and Molly in the States. There were tears. You can imagine. But there was anger too. Molly’s fury inflamed itself into several varieties: I’d been ill without telling them, I’d gone away alone, I was smoking, she could hear me down the line.

  ‘You had a heart attack, didn’t you?’

  ‘I didn’t have a heart attack, Molly. It was a violent allergic reaction.’

  ‘You’re lying.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘You saw a fucking cardiologist?’

  ‘That’s routine.’

  ‘It was a heart attack.’

  ‘Put your mother on the line.’

  ‘You’ve upset her, you klutz!’

  ‘Look, it’s my heart, Molly. It’s none of your business. I had a violent allergic reaction and you’re giving me another one.’

  ‘You’re a sick puppy, Dad. You’re a douche.’

  It was only then I faced the fact that I hadn’t told Jimmy. That was a tough conversation.

  Next day was dark in Paris. I didn’t get out of bed. I listened to the people passing by in the street, the cars, the trucks, the metal shutters on the shops. Night had fallen by the time I put myself together and went down. The city was alive. Couples entering cinemas. Pavement artists and buskers. Students. I went into a Turkish cybercafé on the Place des Vosges and killed a couple of hours on the Net.

  The ’55 Strat I’d let go for twenty grand made 82 K that morning at Christie’s. ‘An anonymous collector in the Far East market’. I’ll be honest, it stabbed. But I’d needed the twenty. Twenty, when you need it, is enough.

  There was no email from Seán, whic
h took me aback. Later, I learned he was in Alaska on vacation, ice-fishing with the family, all devices powered down. But at the time I didn’t know, and I guess I was cheesed off. Okay, so it wasn’t a tremendously serious violent allergic reaction. But still. It might merit a shout. We’d long had a routine of calling every couple of months. Like all drummers, he’s a creature of habit. But the arrangement had slipped and I hadn’t heard from him in a while. I looked at the screen and a little miracle happened. ‘Ping,’ it said quietly. ‘New message’ popped up.

  From: prof.sarah.sherlock-marinelli@exetercollege.edu

  I’ll be in the Place Saint-Sulpice at noon. Every day until you meet me. I’m patient. Love you always. Trez x

  I went the next day at twelve, but stayed among the street-vendors under the arches of the church, where I knew she couldn’t see me. If you’re asking me why, I don’t have an answer. Maybe you’re not asking, which is also fine. All I know is that if there was a more beautiful forty-eight-year-old woman in Paris that day, she must have been Emmanuelle Béart. Trez looked like my father’s idea of a French minister for culture: cool, elegant, in a serious pair of sunglasses, with the aura of one of those Parisian women who can dress like a movie star without looking like some imbecile’s trophy. She was seated outside a café on the edge of the square, reading a magazine, or pretending to. And she was smoking, which surprised me. I’d assumed she’d long quit. From time to time she’d peck at her iPad or scribble on a place mat or exchange a couple of sentences with the waiters. I couldn’t walk across to her. I hadn’t the words. There’s a David Byrne song in which he imagines Heaven as a place where nothing happens. That morning, I knew what he meant.

  My phone rang. I answered.

  ‘Do you think I can’t see you?’

  ‘Trez. How you doing?’

  ‘Pretty good, mon amour. Are you coming over here or am I going over there?’

  A greengrocer polishing apples. The boulangerie open. In the windows of the men’s store across from the church were expensive-looking shirts on mannequin torsos. She peered at me and said nothing. I uttered her name. She was pressing her lips together hard like a person who doesn’t want to weep.

  ‘I’ve your mail,’ she said.

  ‘How’d you get that?’

  ‘I went to the boat.’

  ‘To the boat?’

  ‘How you doing? This okay? Not pissed off I pitched up?’

  ‘Why would I be pissed off? Don’t be dense.’

  She was tired, hadn’t slept. It started to rain. There’s an antiquarian bookshop in a winding lane nearby and we browsed a few minutes without speaking. When rain falls on Paris, it changes the light. There’s peacefulness in any place where old books are gathered, but that day we had to reach for it.

  You’ll think it odd but we didn’t talk about my hospital stay even briefly. We spoke of Elisabetta, the child I had often sung to sleep, now living in Madrid and making short films and ‘having fun with inappropriate boyfriends’. Trez showed me snaps of her stepchildren, two girls and a boy, and we went for lunch in a Vietnamese near Shakespeare and Company, one of those touristy gaffs with photos of food in the windows. Orwell says when you’re in Paris the cheapest restaurants are best. She told me about the university in Exeter where she’s now Professor of Art History, her farmhouse in Cornwall, the monograph she was working on, provisional title The Torch-song of Frieda Kahlo. Her book on the Italian baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi had led to a year teaching at Yale, and in 2010 she’d contributed to the catalogue raisonné. She still played cello now and again, was in a quartet with three colleagues from the college, but ‘didn’t bother’ with the bass any more. I hadn’t seen her in six years, not since her wedding. No reason. Just a drifting out of touch.

  We talked about albums. She liked Björk, Ida Maria. I played her a clip I had on the phone, Sarah Vaughan and Billy Eckstine doing Irving Berlin’s ‘Easter Bonnet’, a lovely thing my daughter sent me. How was Molly? Entering Princeton? Had I a picture? Could she see? I found a clip of shaky video, High School graduation. ‘That’s a trip,’ Trez said. ‘She’s you at eighteen.’

  ‘She’s prettier,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, she is.’

  We sat there in Paris, Sarah Sherlock and I. The lunch crowd departed. Time passed. In the sunshine through dirty windows, she looked statuesque. After a while, she asked if I wanted to talk about ‘the body situation’. I said I didn’t, at least not for now. She nodded and glanced away, towards a street-singer who was doing Édith Piaf’s ‘Milord’. Then she looked at her glass without seeing it.

  ‘What’s the story for bread, Rob?’

  ‘Grand. Why?’

  ‘Don’t be spinning me yarns. Fess up.’

  Well, I spun them a while more but she didn’t believe me. Anyhow, it made me uncomfortable, lying to Trez. Lies, for an addict, are notes in a song, and you need to watch out for that number when it starts. So I told her the truth, disliking every word: there was nothing going on but the rent. Any dough left after the divorce had been invested by my accountant, a genius who believed in Irish bank shares. The ninety grand I’d spent on those for my daughter’s future security was by the spring of 2012 worth enough to buy a hockey puck. My fiscal sage had further advised diversifying into Eastern European property where it was ‘literally impossible to lose’. So I was now the co-owner of an unfinished but already condemned block of apartments in Minsk, a city situated on the Svislac and Niamiha rivers, so I’m told. If you’re ever there, say hello to my ruin.

  ‘Could me and Gianni help you?’ Trez asked, already knowing the answer. ‘We’re okay at the moment. Bread-wise I mean. If a couple of grand –’

  ‘Bugger off.’

  ‘Gianni asked me to tell you. We’ll do anything we can.’

  ‘What’s this about, Trez? You’re not talking straight.’

  ‘I called up a friend, a cardiac specialist in New York. I’d love you to go over and see her. They’ve a different approach.’

  ‘You’ve been talking to Molly.’

  ‘She says you had a heart attack.’

  ‘Trez, look – I actually didn’t. Can I make this very plain?’

  ‘That’s good. Because you’ll be needing your heart. I’ve a favour to ask.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘You’ll agree?’

  ‘Depends.’

  ‘I’m putting together a gig. Some little place in Dublin. And I’d like you on the bill. What you reckon?’

  She reached out with a napkin and removed what must have been a morsel of food from my face.

  ‘You and me?’ I said.

  ‘Well, you, me and John-John. He’s up for it. Whenever. And Napoleon if we can get him.’

  ‘He wouldn’t do it.’

  ‘Never know till we ask.’

  ‘If you think I’m asking that fucker for anything –’

  ‘So okay. We’re a trio. Relax.’

  ‘I haven’t played in twenty years. I’d be shit playing live.’

  ‘I don’t seem to remember that stopping you.’

  The notion didn’t appeal. I’d rather cocktail sticks got stuck in my eyes. Sleeping dogs, all of that. Old roads. We meant nothing any more. And I was cool with meaning nothing. Music had changed, which is what it does best. A lot of bands now have more talent and drive than the whole boiling of so-called past greats. Punk was full of energy? Hmm. Give a listen. You were full of energy yourself and that’s what you heard: the riot going on in your head. Fran used to say there are always only four cracking groups, no more, no less, always four. It was true in the sixties, true of glam, punk and grunge, and will always be true until Gabriel blows the last horn and the four last bands get fried. My most recent annual royalty statement revealed the salutary reality that songs of mine had been played a total of fourteen times on the radio in 2011. Fourteen plays, in the entire measured world. You want the writing on the wall, there it is. Anyhow, there’s nothing more pitiable than a long
-busted group reforming. As a wise song said, Let it Be.

  Well, she didn’t see it like that, turned her smile on me like a lighthouse. ‘There’s days I talk to the washing machine. I don’t want it talking back. Last trip to the well. Be a bit of a laugh. You owe me, babe. Pony up.’

  ‘I sold my guitars.’

  ‘We can hook you up with a guitar.’

  ‘You’re impossible.’

  ‘And that’s why you love me.’

  I couldn’t help laughing. ‘Is that what I do?’

  ‘Is that not what you do? Fickle twunt.’

  We went in to a French movie, but the story made no sense. Still, it was cool to sit in darkness and say nothing. Afterwards, we walked down to Notre-Dame and the island. As we walked, she linked my arm, quietly whistling ‘The Coolin’, a traditional Irish air I’d once tried to teach Molly on ukulele, not one of my wiser endeavours.

  ‘You’re on board for the gig?’

  I said I wasn’t, but thanks.

  ‘So when are we rehearsing? I’ll need a bit of notice.’

  ‘Trez –’

  By now we were in the doorway of my hotel in the rue des Canettes, one of those narrow Parisian walkways that have the curious effect of making you stand very close to the person you’re talking to.

  ‘My handsome,’ she said. ‘Sweet Roberto, precious angel. Do this one thing for me? Say you will.’

  All I did was look at her. I could have done that all night. ‘Precious Angel’ is the name of a Bob Dylan song from his record Slow Train Coming. One evening a thousand years ago it was playing on a car stereo as Trez and I kissed. The only kiss we ever had.

  ‘What’s a girl gotta do to persuade you?’

  ‘I’ve the bridal suite booked.’

  ‘I was hoping you’d offer. Is breakfast included?’