by Peter Wild
William glanced across at Johnny.
It was all he could manage to keep his eyes dry, shocked out on bliss as he was at the sheer beauty of the scene before him, and then he took hold of the guitar himself and he started up a new song, there was no choice but to sing and his voice the sweetest of them all, the most precise, the most golden, and the songs melted into each other as the sweet smell of dope circled the room, until the players were making up the lyrics as they went along, happy enough to let the music dissolve to their being.
By the time they walked out again, the air was drifting in from the sea colder and blacker still, caressed by clouds. Danny announced to all and sundry who cared to listen: ‘Life is a bad and lonely drug. One that gives just enough pleasure, but not enough to really get you high.’ But young William was too far gone to care about such talk. He was dwelling on the memories of a kiss. He was wondering how far it would go with Johnny, and whether the others would care to know, whether they would react with violence, or with friendship. There was no way of knowing for sure.
They dropped in for a pint at the Boar Between Arches. Here they sat, making light of their situation, celebrating the conditions of being here, in this time, in this place. But William was feeling out on a limb. He got Johnny in a corner over by the cigarette machine and he pulled up close to him, saying, ‘I’m getting the sense of being all hemmed in, Johnny. It’s like I wanna feel all the shame of the world, and pass it on to you, and you alone.’ Johnny said nothing. William glanced over at the table where his friends sat. He went on: ‘What I’m saying is, we don’t need the others so much. It’s changing, see. Can’t you feel that? We can make our own way forward.’ Johnny smiled back in reply and said, ‘You think that can happen, really?’ William said it could. Johnny said, ‘It can’t happen. Not yet.’
William clung to those two last words desperately, but it was hardly enough to lull his troubles asleep.
He needed release.
He needed to wrench the rusty spanner around his screwed-down life. Only then would he sing, really let his voice go wild, only then, letting slip the Cheap Lager Blues, as he called them, the Queen of Dirt and Forgiveness Blues, the Blues of Lost Love, the Bone-White Lonesome Moon Piano Blues, as he called them. The One-Way Bus Ticket Blues, the Late-Night Going Nowhere Blues, the Black Tie Blues, the My Daddy’s Done Up and Gone and Got Himself a New Woman Blues. As he called them. He got to thinking of all the towns and cities of England as a string of broken pearls that he would never get to breathe upon, never get to see glisten in his palm.
So long, my Liverpool, with your music of sadness and dreams, your various escapades. So long, my Birmingham with your sleepy eyes forever closed in the midst of prayer. Farewell to Leeds and Manchester, curtained by the rain falling in silver lines and sparkles.
And farewell most of all to old London Town, where the ghost of a man that William could one day have become still wanders, a shadow cast on a wall and forgotten.
All of these places alive in his heart, but never yet witnessed for real, ungraspable.
The group left the pub behind them and walked along the coast road towards the Palace Ballroom. They slipped down the side, to the back of the building. The place was quiet, dark, long closed up since the summer’s glitter and shine. Now they stood in the alleyway, contemplating a window some few feet above their heads. There was a slight gap visible, between frame and ledge. The two girls urged the young men to action, so Douglas bent down and made a cradle of his hands, into which William stepped, to feel himself being lifted aloft. From this vantage he worked the window open fully, and crawled through into the gentlemen’s loo. The others followed, making their way towards the ballroom. Here the floor was dust-covered, scuffed and marked by countless heels, by the twists and turns of dancers’ shoes over the years gone by, making these ghost tracks.
Brick found the box of light switches and he brought the room up just enough to add a reddish tinge to people’s faces. At this cue, Danny set off waltzing across the parquet, moving his legs in a most peculiar manner and nodding his head to the music that only he could hear.
William looked nervous in the shadows.
His eyes darted hither and back. He could not see Johnny anywhere, so he set off walking, climbing the stairs to the upper gallery. There he found his target, but not alone. Abigail pressed herself forward, and her lips met Johnny’s in the dim light.
A hand folded itself around William’s heart as he watched this.
The hand tightened.
Some ten minutes later he was rushing along the beach path, hardly knowing which circuit to follow. His mind reeled and he felt himself alone, some distant relative to the sliver of moon now visible, hanging low over a church made of purple clouds. And there amid the stench of seaweed, he thought about certain precious subjects: about reading Melville’s Billy Budd, Midshipman and finding himself in the pages; about taking a long shot, kicking the tin bucket over, cranking out the music loud; about snatching at love like stealing a penny, or is that stealing love like snatching at a penny? Best of all: the trick Johnny had taught him, about putting some grease in your hair, and then talcum powder. Spiking it high against the rain. And he thought about that time he had read aloud from Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, and Johnny saying, ‘That’s me. That is me! Johnny Panic!’
For sure: precious things.
Johnny’s mouth, for instance. That one sweet time when they had kissed, that one time alone; liking the taste of it. Thinking about how that taste might change, according to his mood. And now never to be known. William was pouring salt on the wound of his own heart, because it was all that he could do. Terrible images flickered in his mind.
His two hands tearing a bridal veil to shreds.
Stopping at the archway that led beneath the promenade, he cried out his despair in a wordless voice. Then he turned, hearing an echo, or more than an echo, an answer of some kind. There was but a faint light in the tunnel, the shadows heavy with the smell of damp and rust and human sweat. Here the Anytime Anywhere Boys hung out, boasting of their prowess, their lucid desires, and their eyes filled with lust when they spotted William. One of them began to recite in a gentle but mocking tone.
Sweet Cupid drew back his bow
To let fly his poisoned dart,
Which did wend its wicked way
Straight forth into my heart.
The lads moved towards William. He let them come.
Whatever happened from now on, it seemed cut off from what he was or wanted to be. He was putting the sleepers on himself, a stone soul loser serenaded by the quarter-dead screech of a broken guitar.
The blows came in.
A seabird flew low over the beach, gliding along the silence it made for itself in the cold dark air.
William looked up from the concrete floor.
He saw graffiti on the wall, a boy’s name and a scrawled heart, and then a girl’s name beneath. Here was love. Here was love encoded by a low-down but boisterous specimen, laughing her dear old Blighty soul out that one day this beau, this boy known only as Brian in red felt tip, might be hers.
Here was love, Sweet Cupid…
William wiped the blood away. His fingers ached, his wrist also, and one or two ribs. He opened his eyes to see that he was alone once more, voices echoing down the tunnel like car alarms howling to each other from a distance.
He got to his feet and walked on, dragging himself.
Then Johnny appeared above, hanging over the railing. He called down, quoting one of William’s fragment poems back at him:
‘O silken sleep! Come to me with your powders now and lull me into darkness, faraway and gone.’
William could not respond, until he felt Johnny’s arms around him, and then, ‘Put me on the music machine,’ he whispered. ‘Give me the noises of the town.’ Johnny dried William’s mouth and tested his limbs, deeming him in fit shape, if only just, and they went out together, the two of them alone, farther along the prome
nade, away from the lights. Johnny said, ‘You can only fall so far, William, before I miss my catch. Do you follow?’ William did. He nodded so. Yes. They walked down to the sea’s edge. Here the moon was clearly seen, or what little of it the Earth’s shadow allowed into view, ghostlike.
The clouds hung as mist over the world.
They found Johnny’s body three days later, washed up in a dirty salt-river basin, his cold rotten hands clinging to an old discarded boat spar as though to climb free even now, free of the icy clutch, the claws of the sea, the terrible drag of the moon.
The funeral followed. What could William do? He thought of turning the key of his tongue deftly if he only could, opening the mouth to let the words out, the most perfect words. Hush now, hush! Check the casket. Closed lid. There he sleeps, well hidden. Johnny Panic, the one and only. The smell of wax and incense, perfume to hide decay. A soul flickering in the candle flame. In truth, here lies a man who never really broke the seal of himself, holding all inside.
But what could William do, really? He was waiting for the last amen to finish the hymn.
It never came.
After the ceremony, Brick, Danny, Doug and William went down to the riverside, to the place where the body was dragged from the water, and there they stood bowed, whispering, praying to whatever god was on duty that day that Johnny Boy would be taken up pale and weak into the care of strangers with wings. That he would yield to the darkness softly, without voice, without tears.
All good boys and girls come home to a world at the end of time, but this was the day the sour rain fell on the new young queen divine, and William’s fingers changed, they changed their shape that evening when he picked up Brick’s old battered acoustic. He could feel his hands seeking new patterns on the strings, finding new harmonies, new ways of moving from each to each, from chord to chord along the neck and back again, minor key, then major, then falling away once more, soft and sad, drifting like dust to a song’s fade-out.
A week later, William walked alone towards the station.
He felt he was the fallen descendant of some slut of a bedraggled princess, hooked on living through pain. His head was all gnarled up and tender. But he was done with crying. Rather, he was the one true embalmer of Johnny’s blood, Johnny’s fingerprints on skin, Johnny’s breath. Johnny’s words: ‘You can’t play guitar as though you’re sitting in some woodland fucking bower. You have to plug yourself in, baby, hit the switch, feel yourself like stripped wire singing and trembling for darkness, cutting the sky six ways crazy. You need to be scraped against the limits, skin raw and open. That’s it.’
Indeed, that was it.
William climbed aboard the train, London bound, dallying on a new title for his life to come: Billy Budd, Rock-and-Roll Star. He began to sing under his breath, in perfect time to the train’s motion.
The pub can go fuck itself. Work can go fuck itself. Love. Love can go fuck itself. Tenderness also. Go fuck yourself. Hatred, go fuck yourself. Bosses. Lessons. Men and women and all that praises one and not the other. Go fuck yourself. Parents, sisters, brothers, go fuck yourself. Machinery, old brown shoes, grey shirts, flared trousers, bus stops in the fog, go fuck yourself. Broken windows, unbroken windows, go fuck yourself. Friends, lovers and enemies, go fuck yourself. Tower blocks and bungalows, fast food, slow movies, sports cars, cheap imitation guitars, the moon and the sun and the stars, go fuck yourself.
To sing. To sing on.
His hands tapped out rhythms for himself, for his litany. These two same hands, frozen around the wrists as they might be, holding a body beneath cold accepting waves, as they might be, waiting for the moment to end, the struggle.
Stretch Out and Wait
Chris Killen
Discovering The Smiths when I was seventeen was the same as discovering Richard Brautigan or Knut Hamsun or J. D. Salinger: I just wanted to devour it all. I ran out and scoured the charity shop LP bins. I wanted to somehow play all the albums simultaneously. I hadn’t thought bands could be so witty and literate and slightly sarcastic. I think I learned something important about writing, listening to the lyrics; something that went in at the deepest level and took root and shifted my perspective very slightly. If someone sat me down right now and forced me to write a list of my ‘influences’, I think Morrissey would be somewhere near the top of that list.
Emma arrives twenty minutes late, dressed like someone from 1935. She has a scarf wrapped around half her face, covering her mouth. Craig wishes she wasn’t wearing the scarf. He’d like to be able to see whether she’s smiling as she walks towards him. Her eyes look like she’s smiling. She has a kind face.
There’s a strange bird in the sky.
Today is cold and overcast, some time in autumn.
‘I really need a piss,’ Emma says. ‘Sorry, but I do.’
She pulls down her scarf and her mouth isn’t smiling and she kisses Craig quickly, just a peck, on the cheek.
‘Let’s go in,’ Craig says. He rubs his hands together and blows on them to demonstrate how cold he’s become while waiting. He feels as if he does it too obviously, though. She narrows her eyes at him. He feels awkward. ‘They probably have toilets somewhere,’ he says.
Craig isn’t sure whether they do, whether cemeteries have toilets.
They hold hands automatically and walk down the path. Emma’s fingers feel like wet, icy-cold twigs.
The bird lands in a tree. It watches them. Craig thinks about pointing it out but doesn’t know quite what to say.
At the bottom of the first path is a church.
‘They probably have toilets in there,’ he says.
They go round and look at the doors. It’s closed up. A sign says the opening times and right now isn’t any of the opening times.
‘I’m just gonna go behind here,’ Emma says, pointing at a bench in a memorial garden for dead babies. ‘Keep a lookout.’
Craig turns his back. He listens to her rustle behind the bench and shuffle up her skirt and start to piss. There’s a jogger in the distance, he notices, but jogging away from them. Squirrels run up and down the trees. Someone’s left half a Swiss roll in a plastic packet next to the church. A lot of the graves look untended and forlorn. Nobody is coming and leaving flowers. Emma taps him on the shoulder and he jumps.
‘That was quick.’
‘What can I say? I’m startlingly efficient.’
A few months ago, Craig stopped finding things funny. The only thing he ever finds funny now is the overhead melodramatic vision he sometimes gets of himself; a kind of strange conceptual art piece called My Life Is Not Turning Out How I Imagined.
(Emma has an American ex-boyfriend who she’s probably still in love with.)
‘I love you,’ Craig says.
It’s a test.
She pretends not to hear.
‘This way,’ she says, grabbing his hand and leading him towards some older, more elaborate graves. ‘I think Tony Wilson’s buried in this bit somewhere, too.’
They’re not here to look at Tony Wilson’s grave.
They walk along some more paths made mostly of grey dust and tiny brown leaves. They are not speaking and holding hands limply, as above them a few dark clouds start to shuffle up together in the sky.
‘It’s that one over there,’ says Emma.
She points at a grave obscured by another couple. The couple are dressed like goths. The couple are holding hands. The couple are wearing chunky New Rock boots and lots of eye make-up. The boy is waving a bunch of roses around. The girl is twirling and singing something.
‘Let’s go for a walk and come back,’ Emma says.
So they go back the way they came but somehow end up in a different part of the cemetery, in a kind of clearing between some large tombs, with dried-up trees overhead and home-made wind chimes dangling off one of the branches, rattling unmusically. They stop walking and look at each other.
Emma has a strange face. It’s the face she does when she looks at herself in the m
irror; a sort of sour pout.
‘Give me your hand,’ she says.
Craig wants to lie on the floor and roll around and stuff some pine leaves and bits of dirt into his mouth. Then he wants to run away and scream ‘FUCK AMERICA’ and kick down some of the headstones and disappear into the sky.
He holds out his hand obediently and she puts it on her boob. The boob is soft. Her nipple tries to press itself against his palm.
‘There’s no one around,’ she says.
A squirrel is frozen halfway up one of the trees, watching them nervously with its tail twitching.
‘Lie down,’ she says. She puts a hand up her skirt, steps out of her knickers, and stuffs them into her bag, all in one practised, economical movement.
Craig lies down obediently.
He feels worried about getting caught.
He feels like a nervous squirrel halfway up a tree.
Emma’s knees crack as she climbs over him and fumbles around with his belt buckle. There’s something hard sticking into his back. He reaches around and digs it out–a broken piece of plastic, half a plug socket–and throws it over his shoulder. It hits the trunk of the tree and the squirrel runs away.
We don’t have normal sex any more, Craig thinks. This isn’t normal sex. This is almost not sex at all. My life is not turning out how I imagined.
Craig starts laughing. He can’t help it.
‘What?’ says Emma. She has his belt unbuckled and about two buttons undone on his jeans. He’s not helping her out. His penis is flaccid and hiding in his boxer shorts. ‘What is it?’
‘Nothing,’ Craig says. He wants to be in a warm bath by himself. He wants to start smoking again. He wants to look over his shoulder and see a zombie lolloping towards them. This is not the start of a film.
‘I give up,’ Emma says, standing and taking the knickers back out of her bag. They look like a small white flag or a handkerchief. A small white flag made out of a handkerchief.