by Tot Taylor
A simple concept then. Two angle-iron girders coming together in an arrow formation – an isosceles triangle – to first capture and then harness the immense force of waves crashing into the Southern Californian coastline. This raw power to be channelled into a ‘gate’ of energy convertors, already positioned and buried under the sea bed, which would transform the waves into mass, and the mass into energy – electricity – which would, in turn, run the concert, the music.
So… you’re on the West Coast of America, you’re touring your masterpiece and ‘life’s work’, which also happens to be your new album, just released in the territory with more than half a million advance orders. You’re at the pinnacle of your career, which, up until now, has never been at any point other than a pinnacle. The pinnacles just keep getting higher. Steeper. Making it easier for you to lose your balance and fall. But that hasn’t happened and so, on the face of it, everything is, or really should be, must be, very much okay. Even close to ’mazin’. As one of the many assembled that day might’ve put it.
The current state of John Nightly must surely have been, from the outside at least, almost off the scale, nearing paradise-level. Even the little things were good; the singer approaching Messiah status within his own rapidly expanding universe. John Nightly was in a good place surrounded by well-meaning people, with an endless supply of anything he required or fancied either already on the table in front of him or waiting to come in and visit him to do his bidding and perform – like performing seals – if he so desired. LA’s most-desired groupies were gathered in the downstairs lounge, with another, younger, apprentice party outside, attempting to gain entry into the hotel itself. John Nightly was with friends and carers, including his own very loyal and respectful band. Jonathan, Justin, Ron and Ashley had been nourished by the boss’s patronage day and night coming up for five years. Accumulative nourishing, fed and watered by an almighty hand. The material rewards of that long-term engagement apparent in their threads and car keys, the wallets in their tour bags and the women on their arms. There was the boss’s own personal support crew: hairdressers, wardrobe, make-up, chefs, tailors, candlemakers. All here for John Nightly. Doing their thing, so that he could do his. Doing their best for him. Loving him and what he did. Been around each other a long time now. So in terms of a family situation, easy-going in every respect, it couldn’t get much more relaxed or comfortable than this. Not for a rock’n’roll tour.
That’s how it looks from here, then, from the outside. Hanging out in the premium and deluxe suites and ante-rooms along each velvet-lined corridor. Eating papaya, coconut, mango and other fruits that don’t make it as far as Huntingdon or Macclesfield in the Hyatt’s Venetian-themed restaurant while swigging exotic brandies and bourbons in the hotel’s well-stocked bars. Visited by a constant stream of ‘laydees’, willing victims who would not usually consort with an HGV driver from Birkenhead who failed his Eleven-plus and is penniless in the real world, or give a second look to an itinerant layabout from Hull who, had he not displayed a precocious skill for humping 4 x 12 speaker cabinets up and down narrow stairwells without a word of complaint, would most likely by now be working on Britain’s roads, if he weren’t safely locked up for the good of the general public by now. The MBR touring party consisted of a vast crew partying on, pleasuring themselves at the expense of their host and his patrons.
But from the inside… Room 313, the master bedroom of the Hyatt’s Presidential Suite, with its Chippendales and Chesterfields and its fake-Regency bureaux, gilt-embossed stationery and utter, utter emptiness, things aren’t quite that way. Certainly not since John Nightly and his representatives happened to catch a ten-minute item on NBC concerning today’s particular difficulty.
To sum up, after long consultations with Los Angeles Port Authority (LAPA) officials and local councillors, the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) – the Musicians’ Union of the bridge-building world – have decided that their members will now not be able to work alongside the team from the Water Board. This unfounded and unexpected decision is sudden and final. A surprise, since an agreement was signed some six months ago, confirming the arrangements as they stand today.
It can only be concluded that something has changed on the inside track. There has been an intervention. Someone has stepped in, someone of power has had a word and there’s no changing that word, that decision. The news from the Nightly legal representatives – as ever, doing their best under ‘very difficult legal conditions’ – is both depressing and unhelpful.
So… here it is in conclusion. The real, real deal. How things lie, if you are inhabiting (or would indeed for some reason wish to be doing so) the human form of a being personally and professionally known as John Nightly.
1: There is a warrant out for your arrest. 2: Your future father-in-law has accused you of ‘murdering’ his daughter. 3: You’ve just heard yourself described as ‘drug-addled’ and ‘subversive’ on the 9pm News. 4: You have 140 tonnes of iron parked closeby, a very heavy metal triangle that will now not be lowered into its mounts so that the ocean power your career depends on can be harnessed. 5: Some 160,000 people have bought tickets for an event that will now have no electricity with which to power it. 6: There are less than 24 hours to go to the concert. 7: No way can the concert go ahead and at the present moment you’re not feeling 100 per cent.
What to do? Some would turn on the television and simply forget all about it. Some just wouldn’t worry anyway. They’d claim it was nothing to do with them – ‘speak to the manager’, they’d say, and then go out and party even harder. But John Nightly wasn’t drinking at the moment. He wasn’t in the mood for partying. He no longer had a manager.
John Nightly didn’t do any of the above. He took on the responsibility. He worried. That’s why he was laying face down on the carpet with three LA County police, the county sheriff, the hotel doctor, two porters, his road manager, his guitarist, his new girlfriend, his old girlfriend and the conductor of his orchestra all sitting right there with him, loving him, vibing him, willing him, being there for him, holding his head, hands, arms, legs, feet… holding their breath. John Nightly did not look particularly well. He looked like he could do with a night in.
As far as anyone knew, it appeared that John may have suffered some kind of collapse, or seizure, while alone in his room. Not because of drugs: he had laid off those in the past few months; been quite ‘clean’ generally, since Pondy went AWOL. John’s alcohol intake was also non-existent. The boy’s current state must have been due to stress – panic, grief, despair. John had it running through his blood at the moment, what with Pond, Myra, Donna all gone. The deepest, baddest grief. The kind of distress a person might find it hard to recover from.
The internal telephone rang. A call from the Hollywood Roosevelt. Lady Jane, one of the Valley’s most desired, and her friend Irish Becky, wanted to come over. Justin took the receiver. He explained that right now, just right at this very minute, was not a great time, but that they should… yeah… call again tomorrow, or later tonight maybe, when things might be… back to normal a little – if they happened to still be in the vicinity.
A knock on the door. Room service arrived and was turned away. Another knock. The housekeeper came in with John’s suits, ironed, pressed and wrapped in the requested white tissue, box-fresh for tomorrow’s performance. If only the star himself had been. A chambermaid arrived to turn down the bed. It had the makings of a Marx Brothers set-up in Room 313.
All these events occurred. But the subject of the events, the reason they could occur in the first place, the reason Justin, Ashley, Ron and Jonathan were all here tonight and not at home in their cul-de-sacs watching television, still lay face-down on the floor.
The subject wasn’t dead, he wasn’t unconscious, he wasn’t comatose… yet. As far as anyone could see, the subject was just… petrified. Literally petrified. Not stoned, but stone. Nightly was frozen solid. That’s what happens when a p
erson has been crying and screaming, open-mouthed at the limit of their voice, into their phlegm-covered hands. Into the mattress, into the pillow, the curtains, sofas, daybeds and other upholstery, trying to dull the sound for normal folks, screaming into their blue-eyed little-boy soul… Bellowing into themselves, their whole being, their whole bag.
There he lay, the Grantchester boy. His stick-thin body contorted and locked in a kind of slow-mo spasm, right there on the Hyatt pile, resplendent with its large HH insignia. His eyes manically fixed on one small dot, an important, crucial dot, though a mere speck, up there on the ceiling. Just like he’d been told to. ‘Focus on something physical.’ Because you have to fix on something. And right now, this small piece of detritus – fly shit, something that had gotten flicked up there, just a trick of the light; maybe there was nothing really there at all – right now, this small fleck of imagination – midget crap, or a urine stain from the room above – became the single most important item in John Nightly’s life. It was his whole world. The dot that isn’t there at all is a dot that may one day save you.
After various comings and goings, and umm-ings and ahh-ings, stuff coming into the room and going out, cod-philosophical comments from the band and natural-born sympathy from the girls, John Nightly began to tremble; slowly at first, then uncontrollably, like chattering teeth in the coldest fenland winter, but it wasn’t just his teeth. The boy’s whole body was doing the Shake, just like Iona and Monika had done down at the Marquee. Do The Convulsion! That’s it! Shaking, twisting, jerking, Mashed Potatoeing, blabbering on. Just like them.
1-2-3-4-5-6-7
1-2-3-4-5-6-7
1-2-3-4
1-2-3-4
1-2-3-4-5-6-7
‘What the hell’s he doing, Just?’ Justin wasn’t feeling too well himself anymore.
‘He’s counting, Ash…’
And that’s how Justin found him. Shaking and sobbing, like an infant child, the old lady on Newlyn beach in a Walter Langley watercolour, her husband, the centre of the world as she had always understood it, lost to the waves. An abandoned relic of a person left clutching a rag handkerchief, staring into an unfocused, empty abyss. Langley was able to capture it. The panel of grief depicted in the fisherwoman’s face was the same unquantifiable pain John Nightly was experiencing right now.
Justin checked his stopwatch – another seven seconds. Multiply by 16, add 49, divide by 60 and you get a waveform time per minute. Over a two-hour duration that will change of course. There’ll be fluctuations. Need to add another three seconds every nine minutes, then a further four, so seven in all at the end of each 90-minute period.
But even using this simple, stabilising equation an allowance still needs to be made for natural Greenwich shifts and also of course, leap seconds. It was how both the old John Pond and the new John Nightly arrived at their conclusions about time inconsistencies in the turn of the earth. In terms of the calculation of waves and tides, for the astronomers of the old world the solution was to add one extra day every 218 years. In the final reckoning for John Nightly, a fixable resolution would be at least another lifetime away.
Trewin House, Porthcreek, Carn Point, Cornwall. Monday, 2 November 2006.
Robert had spent the afternoon mixing millet and oatmeal with packets of Bill Oddie’s Really Wild Bird Food.
‘Come to a bad state when they have to get Bill bloody Oddie to sell us bird food.’ The disgruntled nurseryman poured Bill-sanctioned seeds into gourd pods ready to be hung on wires across the back lawn.
‘I like him on them bird programmes, though.’ Endy was a long-established fan.
There was an enormous amount of bird noise today. Sparrows and gulls and other commoners could be heard from right across the compound, the disturbance carried along by a strong westerly breeze which howled through the outhouses and slip paths, sweeping through the long canna stalks, bruising a new crop of roses and making it difficult to stay the huge barn doors, therefore taking Robert Kemp much more time to load up trucks and vans with the week’s cuttings.
‘Bloody wind last night. Never known it so bad. Not at this time o’year, anyway. Funny how it’s all calm now.’
RCN piled more sugar into his mug while Robert continued filling the pods, packing them tightly into an old potato box; seed grenades ready to be dispatched to the frontline.
‘I’ll need to get there in a minute, Endy… need to fill up this can,’ Kemp shouted from the back steps. Mawgan was beginning to feel restless. ‘I’ll go and do a bit of work, I think. See if all the tapes and stuff are numbered properly. Check through my notes…’
It was just about time for Mawg’s evening smoke. The kid looked inside his tumbler at the residue of his Cappu-grain, gave Alexandre a cursory pat and shuffled back to the music room.
Robert’s next mission was to deal with pests. He dropped a large canister into the sink and squirted in Fairy Liquid.
‘There you are, Endy… the best deterrent for greenfly in the world. Detergent that really deters!’
Pleased with himself, Robert lifted the can out of the bowl and attached it to his knapsack sprayer. A solution of Fairy Liquid and tap water, roughly one part Fairy to ten parts tap, is just about the most effective way to relieve your roses of fly. Using a sprayer loaded with nothing more deadly than this household staple it is possible to rid your buds of crippling aphids almost as soon as you notice them. RCN wandered out onto the patio with canes and string to tie up some of the taller wind-damaged plants.
‘Ex-ter-min-ate! Ex-ter-min-ate!’ shouted the nurseryman as he followed RCN into the garden.
Endy raised her eyes to the heavens, pleased to have headed off both Robert and RCN and to have the kitchen to herself again.
‘He’s a funny one… that Robert,’ she murmured to Alexandre as she wiped over already spotless surfaces yet again and looked around for the next task to occupy her time.
‘To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time.’
Leonard Bernstein
‘Men are born with various manias.’
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894)
item: Monthly Cultural Notes: November.
If ants have been nesting in your lawn, then November is the time to re-turf or re-sow. The time for seed collecting and slip-taking. Consult your catalogues and order for next year’s display. Plant needle evergreens and ovate-leaved shrubs for ground cover. Prune and fertilise bungalow roses and honeysuckle. Cut down Evening Primrose and Japanese spiraea but not Spiraea prunifolia (bridal wreath) which will remove its early spring buds. Clean and disinfect greenhouses and sunhouses. Remember to feed the birds and top up their baths.
BBC News 24. Tuesday, 11 August 1998. Published 08:16 GMT 09:16 UK, ‘Total eclipse will bring chaos to Cornwall’. Reporter, Clinton Rodgers.
Planners in rural Cornwall expect chaos when eclipse-hunters descend on the county next year. Traffic gridlock, food and water shortages, sanitation problems, lack of accommodation and additional stress on the emergency services are anticipated when 1.5 million people arrive to see the first total solar eclipse over Britain for 72 years. Co-ordinator Brigadier Gage-Williams (Eclipse Planning) told civic leaders he was confident that problems would be overcome: ‘We’re advising people to book early, come early, stay long and leave late to avoid problems.’ Brigadier Gage-Williams said an application had been made for army help but he was confident ‘it’s all under control’.
The last time there was a total eclipse over part of Britain was in June 1927. It passed over the north of the country, where 3 million people watched; an audience that triggered the largest-ever recorded movement by train in England. This time only Cornwall and parts of Devon will be able to experience it, on 11 August 1998. Six times the usual number of people who visit the region during the height of the summer season are expected. Ron Morrison-Smith of the West Country Tourist Board is confident but admits there will be problems: ‘There is a major problem for the emergency s
ervices and traffic management – and also for toilets and water and fresh food. When services for 1.5 million extra people and the 500,000 extra cars that will carry them are sorted out, there is still the problem of accommodation. It is a major, major problem.
The two Johns shuffled along Robert’s new shingle path, now diverted through the summer cacti garden, where agave and moon-clover had colonised the rockery on both sides. A bonfire had been prepared at the top field where orchid lavender and echeveria had cleverly turned from lilac to tussock-purple in an attempt to shield themselves from the harsh midsummer sun.
At one time both the sun and the moon would’ve waited for John Nightly. Not any longer. For once in their lives the two rhythm guitarists were in a hurry. They shunted up the steep gradient of the path, not without a little huffing and puffing, until they reached a clearing beyond the grass. The boss walked on ahead, stopping at the canna sheds to check on overnight growth, while RCN brought the car round. The Jag turned on a sixpence, picked up its owner, and Daly and Nightly drove off across the freshly-turned fields.
10.16am. As they climbed the slopes away from the ocean, overnight fog began to clear and they caught their first sight of people, with their attendant camper vans, motorbikes and scooters – the preferred carriages of hippies, travellers, downsizers and eclipse-watchers. This ragged, dew-soaked congregation lined the coastal shelf as far as Zennor Quoit.
In the opposite direction, looking out across Doom Point, there was nothing at all. Just what they were looking for. So RCN reversed up and started back the other way, the Jag driving another mile or so before the Johns found what they thought might be a suitable spot, parked up and got out.
A family of crusties, weighed down with telescopes and camera bags, all weak smiles and good-for-nothing vibes, came towards them. Both Johns acknowledged them with stony faces as a drift of smoke, indicating more campers, came up from a ledge below. The weather was still misty, with a fine, almost horizontal drizzle as they ploughed on towards Black Cliff.