‘Do you have plans for the next album?’
‘There won’t be a next album.’
‘No?’
‘No.’
‘But aren’t you still under contract? I thought I read something about a covers collection.’
‘Yes, believe it or not I still owe two more albums. I signed a six-album solo deal and have not exactly been what you would call productive. But another album? No. That’s never happening.’
‘How can you be sure?’
‘Oh, I can be very sure,’ she says.
‘Never say never.’
‘I just did.’
The writer pauses. Steels himself. Tries to be as casual as possible.
‘And are you still in touch with Simon?’
He notices one eyelid flutter as he asks this. Her smile spreads. He can see her molars. He thinks of the time he badly sliced his hand on the jagged edge of a baked beans tin lid last winter. A bachelor’s injury. He remembers the way the wound opened up and paused for a moment before the brilliant blood streamed out of it. That is what her smile reminds him of: a wound awaiting blood.
She rolls her eyes. She picks up her cup and looks away.
‘Of course. We have a child.’
‘What is he working on?’
She takes a sip. Shrugs. Says nothing.
‘His last album – ’
She cuts him off: ‘I never heard it.’
‘Does listening to the albums you made together bring back bad memories?’
She suppresses a sigh as best as she can.
‘Everything from then brings back bad memories.’
The writer laughs but then sees that she is not joking.
‘It must be strange being asked about him thirty years after your divorce?’
‘Yet still you do.’
They fall silent. He clears his throat.
‘What is your day-to-day life like?’
‘Ordinary,’ she says. ‘Routine. Are people even interested in that?’
‘Of course they are.’
‘You think?’
‘Yes. Aren’t you?’
‘What – interested in your day-to-day life? No. Not at all.’
The writer smiles.
‘Are you always this guarded in interviews?’
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘At least it says so on my Wikipedia page.’
‘So you google yourself, then?’
‘Well, yes. Sometimes, obviously.’
‘What’s the biggest myth you’ve read about yourself online?’
‘That I can sing. And that I slept with Sting.’
‘That you can sing?’
‘Yes.’
‘But you can.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Of course you can. You’re – ’
‘I know who I am. But I have little confidence in my abilities. Never have. Hence the guardedness.’
‘Even after all these years?’
‘Even after all these centuries.’
There is a pause.
‘You’ve not asked about Sting.’
‘I don’t believe you’d lower yourself to sleep with him.’
‘That’s the right response.’
‘So did you?’
‘None of your business.’
She smiles. This time it is real. This time it is less like a wound and more like curtains opening on a summer’s morning.
‘Are you always this probing?’
‘You think I’m probing?’
She shrugs.
‘By all means tell me if you think any of my questions are out of line.’
She waves her hand. ‘Oh, I don’t care. You can ask me anything.’
‘Anything?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you hungry?’
‘Am I hungry? Suddenly it’s open season and that’s your question?’
‘Yes. Or, specifically, would you like to go out for some food?’
‘We’re already in a place that sells food. We’re already out.’
‘But would you like to go somewhere else that sells other types of food?’
‘But why?’
Her eyes sparkle as she says this. The writer sees something in there. Hope, maybe. Or mischief. Longing, even.
‘Because – ’
He pauses. She comes to his salvation.
‘Is the interview finished, then?’
‘I don’t know. Do you want it to be?’
‘You remind me of my therapist,’ she says.
‘You’re seeing a therapist?’
‘Isn’t everybody?’
‘I’m not,’ says the writer, and more quietly: ‘But only because I can’t afford one.’
‘I can give you his number if you like. Anyway, I feel like I’m just getting warmed up. We can talk some more. Tell me about this other place that does food.’
A beat passes. The writer feels flustered.
‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I hadn’t got that far.’
‘You were being spontaneous.’
‘Yes. I suppose I was.’
‘But not that spontaneous. Your mouth wrote a cheque that your arse can’t cash, as they say.’
Their coffee cups are empty. The writer watches as the wheels on his tape recorder turn. He is the only music journalist he knows who still uses one. Recently, the guitarist of a young band tipped for big things pointed at the machine and asked him, in all innocence, what it was, and then, when the writer told him, responded in a sort of affected stoned drawl that nevertheless did not disguise his good schooling: ‘Wow, you must be really old.’ Their debut album went Top 10 the following week. It sickens him to think that those little scrotes will soon be millionaires.
He pulls his mind back into focus.
‘Well, then.’
This is his fallback phrase. A conversational comma.
‘Well, then,’ says the folk song singer, in a convincing act of mimicry.
‘Thanks for your time. It’s been really good talking to you.’
‘You liar.’ She smiles then says: ‘So the interview is finished, then?’
‘Yes. I suppose it must be.’
‘You’ve got enough for your article or whatever it is?’
‘I think so.’
‘So we’re officially no longer working now.’
As she says this she uses her fingers to put speech marks around the word working.
‘Yes.’
‘Good. Then we can go somewhere and eat food and not have to worry about talking with our mouths full. Everyone knows that interviews start once they’re no longer “interviews”.’
Barons Court is not Stockwell. The writer does not know the area so the folk song singer leads them to a neighbourhood restaurant. It is Turkish.
He is relieved when she says she needs to smoke a cigarette outside first. He smiles and offers her one of his but she shakes her head and takes out a menthol from a pocket hidden beneath her scarves.
‘We’re a dying breed,’ he says, but she doesn’t laugh.
The humidity is cloying. The air feels close and dense and the sky is a tumult of clouds folding in on themselves. Shades of pale purple and sepia streak across it. The writer thinks he can hear a distant rumble, though it could be traffic coming off the Hammersmith Flyover nearby.
She holds her cigarette between her second and third fingers. Like Michel Houellebecq, he thinks. He wonders whether it is an affectation that has stuck or a practical necessity. She pecks at the cigarette like a bird unearthing a half-submerged worm after a rainfall.
They smoke in silence for a minute and then she looks at her cigarette and says, ‘I’m down to three a day. Doctor’s orders, though it makes no difference now.’
‘Me too,’ he says. ‘Three lighters.’
For a moment she looks at him, confused, and then realising that it is a quip she smiles briefly before pushing her cigarette into the sand-filled ashtray. The butt stands there, bent and dirty like t
he burned stump of a bonsai. His is still only half-smoked.
‘Have you always lived around here?’ he asks.
‘No, of course not,’ she says, and then turning adds, ‘Come on, then’ and enters the restaurant.
Seated, she orders grilled salmon and he has kleftiko lamb. No starters. They both have wine. She white, he red. They eat awkwardly, no longer sure of their roles or what they are doing here.
He asks, ‘Have you ever considered writing your memoirs?’
‘No,’ she replies.
‘Really – never?’
‘Plenty of people have mentioned it to me but I’ve never considered it, no.’
‘Why?’
The folk song singer slowly breaks apart her salmon with a fork. She eats a small amount of bulgar wheat salad. He wishes he had ordered something less messy.
‘Why? Because it would be a boring read.’
The writer picks up a piece of lamb and runs a fork down the bone of it. Feathers of meat fall away.
‘I find that hard to believe. You’ve seen the world, met so many other famous musicians. Sung on all those sessions. You’ve achieved so much. I’m sure you have a lot of stories that readers would be interested in and plenty of dirt to dish. I know a publisher or two who would be desperate to get their hands on it.’
‘Dishing dirt is precisely not what I want to do,’ she says. ‘Anyway, lots of people have seen the world and lots of people have achieved things of far greater significance. What if it didn’t sell?’
‘Would that matter?’
‘Yes, of course. Knowing that only a couple of hundred people thought that your life was of interest would be crushing, don’t you think?’
‘It would still be a couple of hundred more than if I published my memoirs.’
‘The shops are full of unread books,’ she says.
She moves flakes of salmon around her plate then continues.
‘Well, anyway. I’m not a writer. I’m not suggesting that you, as a journalist, record an album of pastoral ballads or wassailing songs so I don’t see why I should presume to master your chosen art form, if you can call it that.’
‘You could get a ghostwriter. A collaborator.’
‘Are you fishing for work here?’
‘No. I’m really not. Not at all. I hadn’t thought about it until just now.’
‘Good.’ She points her fork at his plate. ‘How is the lamb?’
‘Nice. Very tender.’
The folk song singer abandons her food. She puts down her cutlery and instead picks up her wine, drains her glass and then signals the waiter for more.
‘Have you written any biographies?’
‘No,’ says the writer. ‘Not yet. I’m working on a couple of novels, though.’
‘It is my experience that every music journalist is working on a couple of novels.’
‘Probably. That’s probably true.’
‘Are you interested in writing biographies?’
‘Are you fishing for a biographer here?’
‘No,’ says the folk song singer. ‘But I might need someone to write an accurate obituary.’
The restaurant feels airless. The folk song singer can feel it pressing against her. Encasing her, almost.
They have finished eating. The writer’s plate is empty, hers has barely been touched.
She removes her scarves and for a moment the writer looks at her neck – at the throat that has produced so much music – and then he sips more wine.
‘We should have bought bottles instead of glasses,’ she says. ‘More economical.’
There is a rumble of thunder outside, sonorous and foreboding. She flinches. It sounds unreal, like a studio effect.
‘A storm,’ he says.
‘We’ll have to drink our way through it,’ she says, then excuses herself.
In the bathroom she puts down the toilet lid and sits on it. She holds her stomach and takes tiny breaths. It is even warmer in here. Close. The air is a piece of elastic that has been pulled to snapping point. It has an energy to it, a potential.
She is bent double clutching her stomach. Her head is between her knees. She tries to control the pain in the way she was taught, through controlled breathing and mental projection. Meditation for beginners. It does not seem to work and she stays like this for a long time.
When she straightens and stands, the pain has finally decreased.
From her pocket she pulls a sheet of tablets and pops two of them out. She swallows them dry. Sees herself in the mirror. Leaves.
She is old if sixty is considered old, though it is difficult to tell any more.
He knows where and when she was born and the names of her parents. What school she went to. Star sign.
He is thirty-five. She does not know this. She does not know anything about him. He thinks that thirty-five is no longer considered young. He is not sure. Everything seems so mixed up. His is the generation of arrested development. He knows people – husbands, fathers – whose hobbies are computer games and skateboards. Isn’t he, with his vast collection of vinyl and his faddish fixations on certain films or songs and an inability to get what his mother once called a proper job, stuck in some sort of perpetual sub-student existence too?
Then again, this is London and no one grows up in London. They come here for many reasons. For escape, reinvention. To make it. But never to grow old gracefully.
And people meet in the middle these days too. This is what he tells himself: people meet in the middle. Twenty-year-olds can date forty-year-olds and forty-year-olds sixty-year-olds. It is no big thing. Loneliness does not age-discriminate.
‘You need to tell me something about yourself.’
She says this as the waiter hovers with a dessert menu for a moment before she waves him away. Though she does not intend it to, this statement comes out as an accusation.
‘Why?’
‘To redress the balance. It’s only fair.’
The edges of their words are blurred now. They are both flushed from the wine, flushed from the humidity of the stifled night and the understanding that the storm is veering towards their clammy corner of the city. A strand of the folk song singer’s hair is stuck to her forehead. The writer has loosened his shirt. There is perspiration on his upper lip.
‘OK, then. When I was seven years old I saw a man die.’
‘Fantastic. So what happened?’
‘We were on a train. Me and my mother. I can’t remember where we were going but a man stuck his head out of the window just before the train entered a tunnel.’
‘Jesus. And then what happened?’
‘Do you really want to know?’
‘Well, you’ve started your little story now so yes. Yes, I do.’
‘His head came off. People started screaming.’
‘His head came off?’
‘It was taken off, yes. By the force of the blow. But the funny thing was his body remained where it was.’
‘And you saw this?’
‘All I really remember is the noises that people around me made – sort of horrified groans; sounds I had never heard adults make before or since. And then the screech of the brakes being applied. The man was still standing there. I could see his fingers curled around the glass of the lowered window. He was wearing trainers. There was a carrier bag by his feet. It was full of hats.’
The folk song singer looks at him, aghast.
‘All sorts of hats,’ says the writer.
‘And then what happened?’
‘The train was delayed for ages. I suppose they were trying to find his head.’
She looks at him for a moment and then she bursts out laughing. She laughs for a long time.
She laughs until she is sobbing.
When they have drunk enough wine for their hips to bump together as they leave the restaurant she says to him ‘How big is it?’ and when he looks at her she says ‘I mean how long is it, the piece?’ and he laughs and says ‘I don’t even know, maybe
two or three pages, my editor said I should see how it goes’ and the folk song singer says ‘And how has it gone?’ and the writer says ‘Good, it has gone really well’ and then they find themselves standing in the road and the sky cracks again and it is nearly dark now as a taxi swishes past and they both ignore it and a flash of lightning makes her eyes look even bluer than they are and it makes the puddles blue too and then it starts raining.
It starts raining hard and she grabs his elbow and they begin to run as the rain seems to shift up a gear. The sound of it is all they can hear.
She is used to better men than him. But it has been a long time.
He is two years younger than her son, and in a strange way that is exciting, but in another more obvious way it is depressing. She tries not to think about it.
In her flat he feels like an invasion. In her private space he seems to her to have doubled in size.
‘Do you live here alone?’ he asks.
‘Sometimes,’ she says.
‘I like it,’ he says. ‘Good light.’
She is barefoot and drunker than she has been in several years as she opens the sash window and lets London in.
It has stopped raining and now the room smells fertile. Gamey. When she turns around she expects to see steam rising from the writer but instead he is crouched down looking at her bookcase.
She opens more wine but it has not been chilled and it is hard to drink, so in the absence of anything else to do she fills the silence and the awkward space between them by leading the writer through to her bedroom.
When he lays her down and kisses her flesh he thinks of Anne Bancroft in The Graduate and the phrase cookie dough and how when her cells were first joining together rationing still existed and Elvis had not yet entered Sun Studio. He thinks: This is the body that sang ‘We Walk Through the Woodlands’. He thinks: This body is responsible for magic. It is a legendary body.
Many people have written about the person inside it. They have paid money to see the owner of this body and they have dreamed about that person when sleeping. And now, he thinks, I am kissing the skin that holds it together. I am writing my own biography with my lips. I am tasting history.
As he presses her against the mattress and his mouth finds its way to hers she does not think about her new album or her career or music or Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate or the body of the stranger who is shifting and breathing on top of her. Instead she thinks about all the paperwork that she has yet to sort out, all the loose ends to tie up, all the arrangements yet to make, the painful conversations that she will have to have. She thinks about solicitors and accountants and doctors, an army of doctors, and how everyone remembers the first time but do they remember the last time?
Male Tears Page 3