A Possible Life

by Sebastian Faulks

  I walked up Thompson Street towards the great divide of Houston Street, where the dumpster trucks rumble as they go over the potholes, where the big lorries push across the city, loaded down from the waterfront. I stood among the throng of people waiting patiently to cross and tried to mingle with them, to disappear into a greater mass of human life, hoping I might lose my pain, my sense of self, in that tireless commotion.

  I did see Anya again once, though I was in the auditorium and she was on the stage. It was at the London Palladium during her farewell tour at the age of almost fifty, in one of the closing years of the twentieth century. I’d read an interview with her in which she explained that this was definitely her last performance. She’d suffered from a recurrence of rheumatic fever and had had two heart valve replacement operations. She had arthritic pain in her joints. ‘Also,’ she told the journalist, ‘touring is such a king-size pain in the ass.’

  She’d carried on making records after Another Life, but none of them had been anything as good. She reopened her box of influences and went into folk and jazz and world music, and while almost every record had one or two moments of magic it was hard not to feel she was on a lonesome journey. Public appreciation trailed away. She became known as the singer who had made that one perfect thing. There was a five-year gap before a Greatest Hits, though no single of hers had ever actually charted. She’d lived with various men, mostly musicians, been married once, but was now living happily, said the interviewer, ‘alone in San Francisco, in a large, airy apartment on top of Nob Hill, near the junction of Powell and California’. She had had no children.

  I carried on working in the music business. When my second American band folded I moved into production, and when that work dried up I released a solo album. After Another Life, I stopped managing Anya and left her in the care of Rick Kohler, who rose to the challenge, while taking himself pretty seriously as the keeper of the flame. With song-writing royalties from my original British band as well as the two American outfits, I had enough to live on. One night in 1986 I bumped into our old lodgers Becky and Suzanne at a gig in New York. They were insanely excited to see me again, I don’t know why, but I asked them up to the farm for old times’ sake and invited Rick to come along too. We had a hilarious weekend, and a few months later I found myself married to Becky. It could easily have been Suzanne, as Rick never tired of pointing out. Those sisters made my soul sing, after all the years. They made me laugh.

  I was so glad I hadn’t sold the farm in an attempt to purge the memories of Lowri and Anya. I had come very close to getting rid of it in the lowest of my low days, but it was still a wonderful place to live. Becky, who was by now in her thirties, became pregnant almost straight away. We had two little girls, Loretta and Pearl, and Becky indulged me by giving Pearl the second name of Anya.

  I’d been over for my mother’s funeral in south London when I saw the large newspaper ads: ‘Anya King. Last Ever Performances.’ I didn’t tell Ray or Simon or my sisters that I’d be going to see Anya, but I had to leave the house while there were still people there with the sausage rolls and tea and beer. An old person’s funeral is not such a terrible thing, and some of my mother’s younger friends and neighbours were enjoying themselves.

  I bought flowers from a barrow in Soho and took them to the stage door on Great Marlborough Street. I put in a card that said: ‘Good luck. Hoffmann, Daniel and La Roche on standby? Love F x’. Then I went to a pub, because I felt nervous for her. It was full of smoke and tourists and it smelled sweet, of old booze and sweat. I drank a pint of bitter, then switched to bourbon on ice and raised a glass to Anya. There was a man with a grey ponytail who kept staring at me and I had a bad feeling he recognised me from an old album cover. He was probably going to the concert himself and I didn’t want to have to talk to him about what had happened to Pete or Jeff and what Anya had been like in the old days or what had really happened in her ‘missing years’.

  One thing I had discovered, from Rick Kohler, was that when I’d flown back ahead of her that summer in Greece, she’d met a man in Athens. He was an Egyptian, or maybe Tunisian, wealthy, and he’d made a big play for her. He’d told her he had a flat in Paris and it was there that she’d fled when she left me in Denver. I guess that explained why she went to live, as she did, on the Boulevard Haussmann, which, I discovered, is a wide street with chain stores and offices on the Right Bank – not at all her idea of the ‘vie bohème’. The man had a large apartment where she could be alone and write. I tried not to think of when he visited or how he took his rent.

  I didn’t feel much about my mother as I walked towards the Palladium. Perhaps the full force of her death would hit me later, but for the time being I was so intensely anxious about Anya I could think of nothing else. I found my seat in the theatre. The house was full and the atmosphere was charged. Many of the audience were my age, with bald heads shining under the house lights, but there were younger people who must have sampled Anya’s work from her back catalogue and come to like it.

  The stage was set up for a full band with keyboards, drums, microphones for backing singers, as well as guitar stands. This was encouraging. Although I was high from the bourbon and nicotine and half a spliff I’d had on the street, I was consumed with anxiety, not only for Anya but for myself. This woman, the love of my life – after twenty years. Would she be old and unattractive? Would I still love her at a distance? Would it rip me apart? Or would I feel nothing? I saw that my hands were shaking.

  The lights went down and the MC strode on. He was superbly brief. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, for the very last time – MPR recording artist Anya King.’ The audience rose to their feet as the spotlight picked up a slight figure coming on stage left. She wore a knee-length green gypsy dress with boots and big gold earrings. She carried an acoustic six-string guitar, held at arm’s length by the neck. As she made it to the middle of the stage, I noticed that she limped. On a stool, beneath the spotlight, she sat and pushed back her dark hair, cut back to just above the shoulder, thickly streaked with grey. There was no kohl beneath her eyes, but there was powder and lipstick on her face as she turned it up into the light. Without speaking, she ran her thumb down a single arpeggio, leaned forward and at once began to sing:

  Platform lights are furred with cold

  In December’s freezing hold,

  Genevieve, you’ve made your plan,

  Now you must stay …

  Tears erupted from my eyes. Her voice had changed. This was much more than the slight deepening I’d noticed on Another Life, this was a new register. At the end of the song, the members of the backing group came on stage. They included tenor sax, trumpet and two female singers. The next song was the popular ‘The Need to be You’, where the backing vocalists provided the top notes, then came ‘Boulevard Haussmann’, with a clumsy guitar solo that tried to replicate the record note for note.

  At this point, Anya left the stool, went over to the piano and addressed the audience. This was the first time I had heard her speak since lunch at the hotel in Denver more than twenty years before.

  ‘Thank you all for coming tonight. My name is Anya King and this is the last public performance of my life. I guess you can tell from my voice why I think it’s time to call it a day.’ There was some good-natured whistling. ‘Later on I’m going to introduce you to the band, but for the time being just sit back, stand up, whatever you want to do, and enjoy the show. We’re going into a little melancholy mode here. This one’s called “The Doctor From Duluth”.’

  The audience responded enthusiastically, calling out suggestions or ‘We love you, Anya.’ How much I’d missed that voice – that pure diction, the North Dakota accent with a resigned self-awareness that always seemed to put her one step ahead of you. It was the voice that had phrased intimate words to me so many times, the self-same voice that had whispered and sung ‘I love you, Freddy.’ At this point I wasn’t sure I’d make it through the set and had started to look around to see how quickly I coul
d escape.

  The lights dimmed, except for one spot on the piano. ‘This is called “I’m Not Falling”,’ she said. After all this time she had the arrangement she wanted – voice and piano alone. She’d also changed the tempo, slowed it down, so it was no longer a kind of novelty anti-love song that Larry Brecker had liked: it was a self-critical account of her inability to give herself to another person. She blamed what the song called ‘a greater need’, which I suppose referred to her music. She’d written the first draft of the song when she was nineteen, but it was as though it had taken her thirty years to understand it.

  She stood up and walked stiffly back to the middle of the stage, where she strapped on her guitar. ‘All right. Here we go. One, two, three, four.’ Off they went into ‘Forget Me’ and for the first time the band seemed to gel, to pull its weight. Also for the first time, Anya began to look as though she might be enjoying herself. She stayed up-tempo with a light-hearted ‘Ready to Fly’, her voice see-sawing all over it. When she came to the final verse, with its key change, she thrust her hips forward and pointed up to the sky in a very literal reminder to the other musicians. And up they went.

  Then there were introductions to the band, at the end of which she said, ‘OK, for the last little bit of fun, we’re going to do a song which has a special memory for me. And Freddy, I don’t know if you’re out there. I kinda think you must be. So, thank you for the flowers. And this one’s for you.’ I was fearing ‘Song for Freddy’, but the bubbling bass line and the ringing guitars led into ‘Hold Me’. She sang it just as she had in the SoHo club that first night. Her voice was gruffer, but she still managed to convey a sense of excitement when she sang ‘There’s a mighty road to travel/And some dangers I don’t know.’

  Back at the piano, she gave a mesmerising ‘Julie in the Court of Dreams’ and ‘Wolf Point’ with its chilling trumpet solo. She then played ‘Another Life’, and that was too much for me. I put my hands over my ears and waited for it to stop.

  There was another upbeat section with Anya back on guitar for ‘Don’t Talk Spanish’, which featured a fantastic tongue-in-cheek flamenco solo from the guitarist, then ‘City on a Hill’ and ‘Gate Nineteen’ before she thanked everyone for coming and prepared to leave. There was a lot of calling out and pleading from the audience for more.

  ‘Sure, you can have more,’ she said. ‘This is “more”. This is my last song.’

  She seemed to flinch as she straightened up in front of the microphone, and I wondered where the pain was – hips or knees or heart. There came a slow dreamy tenor sax, fizzing cymbals, exploring bass. For a moment, I didn’t recognise the song, then I heard the diminished seventh chord ringing out from Anya’s guitar and the words beginning, ‘Frida, don’t you let them have their way.’

  The song was eight minutes long on the record and I looked down at my watch as she began. It was almost unbearable to think that there were only seven, then six minutes of this magnificent voice left for the world to hear. The audience was motionless as the song unfolded heat-soaked plains, dust clouds, the smell of oil paint, the roar of Mexico City – and in amongst it all the hard-edged voice of a lonely girl from Devils Lake.

  I’d done nothing, I’d played a few things for fun and money, but I felt as she sang then the enormous stretch of what Anya had tried to do – that outreach of imagination, to feel your heart beat in someone else’s life – and I saw how much it had cost her.

  I looked at my watch. There was about a minute left as she entered the final verse with its doubtful ending, ‘Maybe it was more than you could take, my darling,/Were these choices really ours to make …’

  And when the final note faded, she did what she had done the first day I met her at the farm and she thought she’d said enough for the time being. She just shut down. There were no fade-outs, no goodbyes. She took the guitar off and propped it on the stand, bowed briefly to the audience, turned on her heel and walked off the stage – trying hard, I could tell because I knew every pore of her skin so well, to limp as little as possible as she left the spotlight – went into the blackness of the wings and disappeared.

  Becky wanted me to buy a flat in London because she was keen to visit more often, and the next day I went to see a new development near Hoxton, an old Victorian building with its name chiselled above the lintel: St Joseph-in-the-West, once a workhouse or something, now full of saunas and fitness rooms.

  I didn’t really go for it. I didn’t want to be swallowed up by so much history, by the failed existences of others. At my age I’d begun to pity the struggles of the young and I was resigned to all the lives I wouldn’t now have time to lead. It was no longer a matter of envy when I saw beautiful women sharing plans with laughing men.

  So I told the estate agent I’d call the next day, then went and sat outdoors at a pub. Beside me were guys in suits, shouting over lager to female colleagues in their shiny work clothes. I didn’t know their world. They looked fired up and engaged, but I’d never even had what they would call a proper job.

  I was almost sixty years old, but I didn’t understand anything. It all in the end seemed to have been a matter of the purest chance. But for a succession of tiny pieces of good fortune, I might never have had a glimpse of Weepah Way, the farm or Anya King. Yet I also knew that if any of those bits of luck had fallen out a different way and I had had another life, it would in some odd way have been the same – my heart existing, as Anya put it, by a different name.

  I don’t feel I’m the same person as the kid who walked across the park to school each day. I saw an article in the paper the other day that said that at my age I’d have no cells or whatever in common with that small boy. Maybe someone else has his cells now. I look ahead and I can see the years spooling out of me like tape from an unhinged reel-to-reel, spinning out of control, tangling, never to be rewound. And the past seems like something I imagined. The guitarist I was in my first band in England, at the poll-winners’ concert … I remember the grain of the wood beneath my tapping foot; but in what sense was that me?

  Sometimes my whole life seems like a dream; occasionally I think that someone else has lived it for me. The events and the sensations, the stories and the things that make me what I am in the eyes of other people, the list of facts that make my life … They could be mine, they might be yours.

  I’m an actor playing a part I’ve never mastered. I’ve stood here – back to the bar window, beer in glass, slight jet lag, old leather jacket – maybe a thousand times before. And it never adds up.

  So when eventually my hour comes and I go down in that darkness, into the blackness of the black-painted wings, there’ll be no need to mourn me or repine. Because I think we’re all in this thing, like it or not, for ever.

  It must have been forty-eight hours after I’d written my letter of polite refusal to Pereira that I saw the corner of the envelope, still unposted, beneath some junk mail on the hall table. I pulled it out, dropped it in the wastepaper basket, sat down at my desk and began again. ‘Dear Dr Pereira, Thank you for your letter. I should be delighted . . .’

  A week later, I heard back from him; and ten days after that I was on the plane.

  Flights to Toulon were rare and expensive; I dog-legged via Marseille and a boxy hire car to the tip of the peninsula – what Pereira called the presqu’île, or ‘almost-island’ – to a small area where pleasure boats and water taxis berthed. Here I stood outside a scruffy place with a red awning, the Café des Pins, waiting to be collected.

  What reckoning with my past had made me change my mind? I conceded now that looking back over my youth in such detail was probably a way of preparing my defences. Recent research showed that your brain came to a decision more quickly than your mind could do so and fired the relevant systems before your plodding ‘judgement’ took the credit. Overlooking the implications for free will, or the illusion of it, I was happy to accept that that had been the case with me.

  I was going to meet a man who could open a door on to
my past: it made me vulnerable to think a stranger might know more about myself than I did; I needed to make sure my own version of my life was in good order. At the same time, the wretched Annalisa business (such a mess of lust and fear and blocked feeling) had made me admit there were aspects of my character – or behaviour, at least – that not only were self-defeating but also inflicted pain on others. Even in my early sixties, I felt young and vigorous enough to change – to confront whatever I had yet to face; and perhaps a medical man of my father’s generation whose special interest was in memory could be the very one to help.

  I was into my second cigarette when an old woman in black stopped and looked me up and down.

  ‘Vous êtes Dr Hendricks?’ Her accent was strongly of the Midi.

  ‘Oui.’

  ‘Venez.’ She gestured me to follow. Despite her bowed legs she moved at speed. We went down a stone jetty, past the public ferry that had tied up for the night, over a gangway and on to a boat with a white canopy. It was big enough for a dozen people, though there were only three of us on it. The third was a man in the wheelhouse, who opened the throttle and began to edge the boat out into the waters of the bay.

  My French was good enough to ask how far we were going and how long it would take, but I couldn’t make out the old woman’s answers over the noise of the engine, and it seemed to me she preferred it that way. Eventually, I gave up trying to talk and instead looked back over the churning white wake to the port. Twenty minutes later, the mainland was no longer visible; we had left behind the croissant shape of Porquerolles island as we headed away from the setting sun.

  At some point, despite the heave of the sea, I must have nodded off. I was woken by the thump of the side of the boat against a rock. It was dark.