In early 2012 Walter sat to listen for the first time. I was there with him at his studio when he finally listened to all the pieces as one, but it would probably be impossible for me to try to explain his reaction. Suffice to say he was transported. His father knew what he had been feeling, and had captured the immense intensity of his strange connection with the fearful folks of Sheen. The recordings were literal transcriptions of what Walter had written, music made from what he described. Of course it might not have been exactly what Walter had himself heard, but it was damned close. Father and son had connected, perhaps in a kind of hell. But a hell of art, science, social conscience, and political empathy for the people of west London with whom they shared their daily life.
And so there was a second listening session in the garden room for Crow, who was quite proud of the solution he had engineered for Walter via Selena. I attended, nervously. Anxious to mediate if needed.
All around there are small whirring creatures, mechanical, sounding like sophisticated mini-robots, but with clockwork motors inside them, slowly, steadily running down. Massive airships, driven through the whistling breeze by buzzing motors that seem far too small for the job.
When the partly realized soundscape was finished, I could see that Crow wanted—desperately—to break the ensuing painful silence with a joke. He wanted to say, right, Walter, very nice, let’s get your leather jacket back out of the wardrobe and I’ll see you onstage at Dingwalls at nine thirty tonight. Instead he got up, walked over to Walter who was looking at the floor, and put his hand on his shoulder, and did so surprisingly gently and kindly.
“This is your father’s work, isn’t it, Walter?”
I jumped in quickly. “What Walter has been experiencing has been extraordinary. He’s connected to the people around him. Look at the soundscape descriptions.”
“I have looked at them,” said Crow. “I see my old buddy in them. But I don’t hear him in the music. Selena fixed this. Siobhan passed it to Harry. Brilliant.”
He turned to Walter.
“You always worried too much about the planet, mate.”
He gestured to the computer and the speakers. “You can’t orchestrate for violins and brass, or classical organ. But you and your dad have made Stockhausen sound like Abba by comparison. Same old shit, but really heavy shit. Great sounds.”
There was no greater compliment for Walter from his old bandmate.
“Steve has to hear this stuff, Walter,” Crow continued gently. “He’ll know exactly how to make it work for a band.”
Walter looked up and there were tears welling in his eyes.
Crow broke the spell. “And of course we need some fucking songs to hold it all together, and to lighten the fucking mood. Leave that to the other grown-ups in your past life. Me and Steve and Patty will make this work.”
Crow left quickly and returned later that same day with Hanson in tow. Walter and I were waiting.
“Walter,” breathed Hanson, holding his old friend in a bear hug. “How the hell are you?”
Hanson was looking slightly bloated and his thinning hair was long. He seemed a little dizzy as he walked around the room and I got the feeling that at any moment he might just fall over slowly and gracefully, like a condemned chimney. At one point he took out a silver cigarette case that was obviously full of pre-made joints, then had a last-minute rethink and snapped it shut. His eyes were bleary. He wasn’t drunk; he just seemed luxuriously and dissonantly worn out, like some grand Russian duke from the time of the Romanovs. His coat was more like a cape, and was lushly embroidered with threads that glinted with gold and silver.
The three men from the old band fell easily into the same kind of catching-up chitchat that Crow and Walter had had earlier in the day. This catch-up was a little easier for Walter because Hanson’s band was famous, always on television and radio. He was perhaps also of the opinion that Steve and Patty had been happy to move on, and had found what they wanted.
After these preliminaries, Steve swung around in a circle, taking in the almost empty room. He was holding a bottle of Evian and waved away the offer of a hot drink.
“Patty told me you were doing brave new stuff.” He gestured around him at the clean, open space. “I love this! Just a piano and a laptop; it must challenge you to get new ideas down.”
He sat at the Yamaha grand piano and performed a flourish evidently meant to show off the piano itself and the reverberant sound of the room rather than his own skills. But despite his world weariness he was obviously still an incredibly adept musician.
“Great sound in here, nice piano too.” He nodded as he stood up, tottering very slightly like an old tree in a strong wind. “Inspiring.”
Crow looked at Walter. His friend was standing quietly, not moving. Crow looked down at Walter’s hands and saw that two of his fingers were moving, fluttering in a nervous motion. Still treating Walter with uncharacteristic gentleness, he put his hand on his friend’s shoulder.
“Are you OK?”
Walter nodded and looked up and smiled. He turned back to Hanson.
“And you and Patty,” he said quietly. “You’ve done so well. How are you guys?”
Hanson was clearly trying hard not to brag, but as he spoke easily about Hero Ground Zero and the triumphs they had enjoyed in the preceding fifteen years, it fell to Crow to bring him down to earth.
“It’s all on fucking tape these days,” Crow sneered. “They don’t play live onstage!”
“Computer you mean.” Hanson was unapologetic. “Not tape. Everyone uses computers now. You have to use them to synchronize the video.”
“Oh yes, the video.” Crow laughed. “We’re thinking of smashing some television sets at Dingwalls to remember the sixties.”
His jibes were on one level affectionate, but they were also accurate: Hanson had made a lot of money and sold huge numbers of CDs, but times were changing. In any case, Hero Ground Zero were fucking awful in Crow’s opinion. Hanson laughed, relying on Crow’s affection, but everyone who had followed the extreme divergence of the members of the Stand after Walter’s departure knew Crow would never hold back. He would say what he felt was true. Hanson would never return the criticism because the Stand had been his band too, and for many years he had been a passionate advocate of what they had done. He wasn’t immovable like Crow. He never said much. For those who are as successful as Hanson there was nothing much to be said to detractors. Better just to let them rant. Where Crow had driven to Sheen in an absurd and anachronistic old American car that polluted the air and used ten gallons of fuel to get there from Camden Lock, Hanson had driven in a powerful sports Lexus hybrid costing as much as a Porsche. Walter later told me he thought they were both nuts, but then he never drove anywhere except to the local horticultural nursery, and he went on his scooter and had his purchases delivered to his house.
“Hanson,” Crow said with a laugh, “fifteen years and really nothing has changed at all. You’re still avoiding the main thing. We are just musicians. That’s all.”
“You’re right, Crow,” agreed Hanson, seeming to give in. “We both feel we’ve been off in a wide circle, a great arc, and we’re back facing the basics. We need great songs. But you know that for Patty and me this was all inevitable. You can call our journey pretentious, and you may be right, but we did what we had to do.”
Walter seemed content to stay out of the discussion. Perhaps he was surprised at how easily he had fallen back into his old role as the front man of their band and felt some of the dignity of that position returning. Then Crow, impatient as ever, turned and looked at him.
“Will you play Hanson that stuff you played me?”
Walter knew what was expected of him, and what he had to do, and was surely aware that Hanson would be a far more receptive listener than Crow.
As Walter touched the space bar on his laptop to start playing the soundscape composed by his father, the mix of music and sound effects mangled together and disturbing, he realized how
strange was the day he found himself in: his old bandmates gathered to listen to something he had “written” after a fifteen-year hiatus. This was friendship, if nothing else. I could tell he trusted his two old compatriots to be kind, but to be honest. He knew he was making himself vulnerable, but he also knew he was being true to who he really was as an artist, and that he had changed, for whatever reason. Steve Hanson’s expression as he listened to what Walter had put together was telling. His face first hardened, then his eyes narrowed and took on a gleam. When the sound stopped, he turned to Walter, glanced at Crow, then back to Walter.
“Fuck, man!” Hanson took Walter again in his theatrical bear hug; then he held him at a distance with two strong arms. “Crow was right. This is really heavy shit.”
He had echoed Crow, but with an entirely different angle: it was clear he thought he had discovered the Holy Grail.
A clap of thunder shakes the horizon, even the clouds seem to shudder. Lightning sizzles as it flashes, earthing down to the steeple of the distant church, barely visible through the teeming rain and blown spray. Huge trees crack, branches falling. Wind buffets the windows, rattling them with deadened thumps as though large wet cushions were being hurled at them. There is nothing to see; there is only a grayness, a kind of darkness illuminated by sound. The wind carries flotsam, leaves, sticks, fir cones that crash against walls and trees, and it all splashes into the lake. Small buildings, sheds and the like, are blown down, and then their fragile parts lifted up into the sky to spin and whirr until they clatter down. Over the lake the rain drives down onto the surface of the water so powerfully that it flattens the spray it generates as soon as it has whipped it up. Hailstones clatter on the tin roofs of the remaining barns; the animals are uneasy, cows, sheep, horses, pigs, moaning and frightened. The collies from the farm begin to howl, tethered in the open as absurdly it is still summer. They are drenched, huddled down, utterly miserable. Dozens of blinding flashes of lightning illuminate the underside of the trees as they bounce, reflected up from the lake and lighting up the black and deep gray clouds at the same time. The clouds seem to be moving, folding and unfolding at high speed, like a fast movie. The wind whips water off the grass near the house and hurls it at the windows so hard it sounds like metal chains being lashed at the building. Water overruns the gullies, backs up the drains, washes over the brick pathways, and runs in rivulets over the grass. Thunderclaps sound in machine-gun series, impossibly rapid, impossibly deep, impossibly impossible. A freak wave of water so monstrous it seems as large as a huge meteor crashing in from outer space drops from the sky and hits the ground so violently that time itself seems to miss a beat, then recovers and ticks on relentlessly. Space is being bent, curved, by the lightning, the rain, and the thunder. Nature, created by some manifestation of God, is challenging that very same God to stop her, to snicker at her: “This too will pass.” For it seems as though this storm will never, can never pass; since it began it has only grown in intensity and volume, without a second of let-up, not a hint it might desist. Then, the most frightening single clap of thunder ever heard since the beginning of time, louder than any that has gone before, seems to burst our ears, and the storm is over.
Chapter 16
I found myself in the dear old Caprice a few days later having lunch with Selena. Permissible, I think. I was a single man. I felt flattered by her invitation and her company, and I was pleased to see the envious looks of the men around me and the evil glares of their female companions. Selena was quite clearly half my age. She was one of those extraordinary women who seemed to rise above the aging process. She had never looked young, even when she was young, and now she didn’t look any older, despite having made no apparent effort with her hair or makeup. At the age of thirty-six, she simply looked slightly overweight, but still beautiful. I felt smug, I suppose, sitting in a quiet banquette against the mirrored wall in the bustling Caprice.
She had been the one to summon me. She wanted me to know she was not with Crow. She had slept with him just once, and she knew I knew. Was that all? I wondered. There was more. She told me that Walter had an “entity.” That is, a disembodied soul tagging along, living vicariously through him whenever it got the chance. Like Ronnie’s entity? No, not like Ronnie. And she was very serious. Walter, she felt I must have known, was the one lifelong love of her life. That was how she put it. She knew I would understand, where others would not. I worked with artists who claimed to be visited by angels, or demons, or heard voices. I took them and their work seriously; surely I could see that Walter was subject to the same kind of possession? Something had happened to change him; a door of perception had opened in him that he had been unable to handle. That’s why he had quit being creative fifteen years before, except in his garden.
Selena could be difficult to read. I could see her obsession with Walter was still strong, but why was she turning to me? It was almost as though she were giving me a warning, to prepare me for something terrible she could see ahead.
I am an art dealer, but I can’t pretend that I understand what the people I represent are going through. I had my own experiences, of course, and I knew that it was too easy to put everything down to drugs. Drugs had opened a door for me too, and slowly, as that door had closed, I settled down and managed to live a more normal life. But I could not forget what I had seen, what I had experienced. I could not set aside the fact that the practical Rain, a journalist no less, had followed a trail leading from the walnut bedhead with all its screaming faces right back to the brutal and appalling inquisitions of the Pope in the thirteenth century. Intuition and psychic rawness had operated in me at some level, and the facts gathered by Rain seemed to support that; the facts followed the feelings. It was irrefutable evidence as far as I was concerned.
So was it possible Walter was “possessed” as Selena claimed? Who was I to argue? I wasn’t entirely sure it mattered as long as Walter was alive and reasonably content. Yes, it was true Walter was struggling with his new art, battling with the rigors of his return to composing, albeit in collaboration with his brilliant father. But why would Selena be so solicitous? Selena, who always said she could see angels, who was not getting a little overweight but was instead “pregnant” with forthcoming angelic expositions, the backed-up logjam, she said, of voices attempting to speak to a wayward society, lost souls. I understood what Selena was saying—after all, I represented Nik and I took seriously the visions he had seen up on Skiddaw—but what the hell did she want me to do?
Selena must have noticed my mind wandering. The waiter had brought my main course a few minutes before and I hadn’t touched it.
She leaned closer to me as though to block out the chatter of the other customers in the Caprice, her pretty face inches from my own as her voice dropped to a paranoid and conspiratorial whisper.
“Floss,” she breathed, “has secrets.”
I was more unsettled by this idea than the image of Walter with an “entity” following him around.
“What secrets can Floss possibly have?”
As far as I could tell Floss was a simple soul, a jolly girl who bred horses, albeit with a diamond in her front tooth.
Selena settled back in her chair and I thought with a flash of anger that I would probably get no more out of her.
“What about Walter?” I asked. “What do you want to do? What do you want me to do?”
She shook her head as though to indicate that I needn’t worry about Walter. “Floss might need you, Louis,” she warned. “She might need you very soon.”
She turned away and took a sip of wine as though the action might offend me. It was dismissive.
“Why? What would make Floss turn to me?”
I was getting irritated by this all-knowing seeing-eye charade.
“Oh, I think you and Floss share a very special bond, don’t you?” She leaned toward me again, not quite so close this time, and lowered her voice once more. “And Floss might need you and your support because… well, I am—at last�
��going to steal Walter away from her.”
Oh, that! Yes, of course. Always. Forever. Yes. I found myself nodding as though in approval when in fact I was relieved to see that Selena had remained in the same familiar track and that nothing had really changed.
Then she said something that really did ruin my lunch. “I know you’re still troubled by awkward circumstances in your past, Louis.”
“What do you mean?”
“Seventeen years ago, at Walter and Siobhan’s wedding.”
“I was there,” I said. I’d been so drunk I remembered very little about it. “Of course I was there. I am Walter’s godfather.”
Selena leaned back and, gently caressing the phantom promise of her swollen belly, delivered her best and most unexpected shot. “I know you are ashamed of what you did.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I refused to rise to her dark insinuation, but it planted an uneasy seed. I had a vague memory of Selena and Floss, Ronnie too, running around at the wedding looking precociously pretty, slightly drunk. But I had been on the edge of blackout. In the recesses of my mind, a sliver of memory, there were drugs that I had supplied and plied, ketamine the worst, and there was lust, but probably for Sally, who was more my kind of woman.
“Don’t try to kid me, Louis. I saw you together, getting it together, Louis, when you thought no one could see you.”
My head was spinning, but I was alert enough to realize for the first time that Selena was trying to exercise some kind of control over me, even blackmail me over something I may or may not have done at Walter and Siobhan’s wedding. I sat there expecting accusations of perversity, for her to call me a disgusting old fart even for agreeing to take her to lunch. Then suddenly she surprised me.
“Louis,” she said with a sweet smile, “do you like me? Do you care about me? Do you love me at all, as a friend?”
“Of course I do, of course,” I said, relieved she had modified her tone. “We are friends, of course we are.”
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