“There’s a starman, waiting in the sky…”
His clothes were skintight and zigzagged; he looked like some kind of cosmic Indian brave. He moved with supreme confidence, like he was having fun. They all did, even the boy with Donny Osmond hair and a tanktop bopping away in the background. And when the singer ducked his head, turned to the camera and out of the television set, looked with flirtatious mockery from beneath those shadowed eyelids, and sang,
“I had to phone someone so I picked on you…
Hey, that’s far out so you heard him too!”
He was talking to me, out of the television, out of another dimension and I sat there on the edge of the sagging settee, with my mouth open and my beans on toast growing cold.
“He’d like to come and meet us,
But he thinks he’d blow our minds…”
He had already blown mine. And I had no intention of telling my dad what I’d just seen. I wasn’t sure, in fact, whether I’d just imagined the whole thing. I can’t remember who was on after Bowie. Who would? The television set faded back into the little black-and-white box in the corner and the world was grey again.
But in bed that night, I closed my eyes and the purple door opened and I saw that sidelong smile, and that long finger pointing right at me and the starman came. I was standing on the edge of somewhere, a world I’d never seen before, with coloured striated light like fallen rainbows, drifting over the bright ground, and a sky that hazed from azure to green to purple. The sun was a huge crimson ball and someone was walking towards me, holding out a hand. It wasn’t the singer. I couldn’t ever describe them, when the vision had gone, but I know they had golden eyes. I call it a vision: then, I thought it was a dream, but I knew I was still awake and when I opened my eyes, the rain had gone. It was still light in the west through the curtains and the world had the faintest tinge of gold. I thought about my mum, then. It was the first time I’d been able to cry.
When my dad asked me over cornflakes what I’d done the previous evening, I said, “Oh, nothing.”
“You doing your ’omework, what they gave you?”
I nodded. It was the school holidays, but they’d given us plenty of stuff to do.
“Good boy.” He nodded, gruffly pleased.
I barely heard him, barely noticed when he trudged up the stairs to bed after the long shift. I was still thinking of the song. It had burned its way into my head like the last of the light and I knew I had to hear it again. And there was something else bothering me, too: the singer. I knew him. I knew I’d seen him before but I didn’t recognise the name. Bowie, like the knife.
The house was quiet. Outside, the rain had blown through, leaving a brightness behind it, and I went out of the door and down the road to the park. Very tidy, the park, with manicured grass and a bandstand and the kind of trees that little kids draw, like green circles. I thought the park was a bit boring, but today it had a kind of newness about it, as though the rain had left it cleaner, and I walked through it in a daze, with the song running through my head. I looked up into the trees at the blare of the sky and thought of a blue guitar. We might have had a black-and-white telly but I knew what I’d seen.
I traipsed the streets all day, as though I’d been hypnotised. I knew which of my mates had a record player, too, but something stopped me from just buying the single and taking it round to Brian’s house. I knew I had to keep this a secret. The singer had told me. He’d pointed right at me and it was ours, his and mine. I couldn’t tell anyone else because it would have made no sense, it would have been like letting him down.
Dad and I passed like ships in the night. That suited both of us: I didn’t want to be any trouble and I didn’t want to be noticed, either. I bought the single, in the end, and put it under my bed, but I kept hearing the song on the radio, Starman floating out from the airwaves. It had caused quite a stir and I was obscurely proud, as though I’d somehow had a hand in it. I saw him once on the television, too. It wasn’t Top Of The Pops, this time, but something else. Dad had switched on the box for the news, but he’d got the wrong time or channel, or something, and there was Bowie, dressed in what looked like feathers, like a tall skinny bird with a cocked head. I felt my heart give a jolt and a lurch in my chest; I’d never felt anything like it before. My dad stopped dead in his tracks, finger poised over the buttons on the front of the box.
“What the bloody hell is that?”
I said, “I think he’s a singer, dad.”
“He? You’ve got to be joking. Looks like a bloody girl.”
Since that had been my first response, I couldn’t really blame him. He gave a snort and changed the channel. Bowie was replaced by a newsreader in horn rims. But I remembered. And he was still familiar.
The dream came back too, or whatever it was. Every time it faded, it left the world with a little bit more colour in it, a bit more feeling. I still smiled every time I saw the purple door, but the sunsets were golden and red, too, and the skies above the park were blue. It was turning into a beautiful July, until the middle of the month when the weather suddenly broke.
I’d gone to the shops for a packet of tea. We’d run out: near tragic, according to my dad, who being from Yorkshire, practically mainlined the stuff. I’d fancied a walk, anyway, so I’d gone up the hill into Beckenham. As I came out of the grocer’s, there was a crack like the wrath of God in the heavens and a sudden downpour of water, torrential rain, almost a monsoon. I dragged the hood of my parka over my head and made a run for it. The nearest doorway was a pub, a massive black-and-white building, fake Tudor, called the Three Tuns. I cowered in it, clutching the bag containing the tea, but with a growing sense of exhilaration as the sky went black and a bolt of blue white lightning scored the sky.
It didn’t last. The storm swept by, reducing to a summer drizzle, and just as I was thinking of making a move the door itself opened, and two men came through.
“…don’t think, personally, you can have too many guitar players,” one of them was saying, and I stared, because it was the singer. The other man had long hair, a patient hippie face. They saw me looking; I was, in fact, blocking the doorway.
“You all right, mate?” Bowie said to me. He wasn’t dressed in the zigzag onepiece, but something equally weird: a jacket like some kind of electronic diagram and trousers to match. He looked like the static on the black-and-white TV, late at night. He was as thin as a teenage girl. And I remembered where I had seen him before, walking past my school gates a couple of years before, except he’d looked normal then.
I said, idiotically, “I saw you on Top Of The Pops.”
“Yeah, you would have done. But that’s not all I’ve done.” He pointed to the pub behind him, with that long, familiar finger. “That, right, that is where I used to be part of the Beckenham Arts Lab. We did loads of stuff, even if I’ve moved on – light shows, poetry, all of it.” He sounded proud and he smiled, a sharp-toothed smile of a curious sweetness. “You ought to take a look around, soak up the atmosphere instead of the rain.”
“I’m only 14,” I said. I didn’t think I’d be allowed in the pub, although dad took me in the local sometimes and slipped me a bitter shandy: it was the nearest he’d come to corrupting the young.
A shrug.
I should have cringed at what came out of my mouth next. “Your song,” I said. “Did you – mean it? Starman.”
I must have sounded completely incoherent, but he seemed to understand completely what I was talking about. The other man moved away – “See you Sunday, Davy,” he said. To me, Bowie said, “Yeah. I did. I saw one. A ship. You know what? It was the day they landed on the Moon.”
“Really?” It didn’t occur to me that he was winding me up, because I knew he wasn’t. His eyes were unnerving: different colours, and they were looking past me, into somewhere else.
“On the Southend Road, of all places. It was at night. I’d never seen anything so – colourful. D’you know what I mean? It was colours that didn’t e
xist. Like rainbows and lightning. And I knew then that someone was keeping an eye on us.” He cocked his head and smiled at me, dripping with late rain underneath the hood of my parka. “It’s a good idea to keep an eye open. Just in case.” He turned and loped off down the road. I watched him out of sight.
I didn’t tell my dad about that, either. I did mention it to Brian, and he went as round eyed as I’d been, but his mum, who was in the kitchen at the time and herself quite young, although she didn’t seem so to us then, told me that Davy Jones, Mrs Jones’ lad who lived down the Southend Road now, was making quite a name for himself in music and had even been on the telly.
“He’s a bit weird, though. Ever such funny clothes, but then they’re like that these days, aren’t they?” She gave an indulgent smile. I was already wondering where I could get a shirt that looked like static.
I felt like my secret was out, but I didn’t really mind. I knew it was real – not the Top Of The Pops performance, but the whole thing. The world, and its colours. The starmen. That they sent ships, to keep an eye on us. That they were golden eyed and knew us – some of us – for who we really were: not ordinary kids in the grey London suburbs, but people who were other. Starmen, ourselves, secretly inside. That they sent messages through television sets and pop stars. Because I believed Davy Jones, when he stood on the doorstep of the Three Tuns and told me that the starman was real, and maybe anyone else would have thought that I was just a stupid kid, but I never lost the dream.
And now it’s 40 years later and the world’s maybe not so great, but I never did lose it. I see it sometimes, in the depths of the night when everything’s still and I gently close the purple front door in my head and the world of colours that are like alien rainbows is still there, unfolding before me with the curve of the planet sweeping down under the crimson sun, with the host of stars beyond and the wise golden eyes looking into mine.
Between the Notes
- Lavie Tidhar -
First, something made up.
There are nearly as many ways to travel through time as there are of killing people.
I know something about both.
Watch:
February 3, 1959. Iowa.
I fly the small chartered plane. Early morning, Mason City. I wear aviator glasses and a two-day-old beard. Hey, Buddy, I say, a little shyly. He claps me on the shoulder. Man, he says. It’s good to be alive.
I take my seat and they climb on board, Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper. No one talking much, it’s early and the boys had just played a gig in nearby Clear Lake. Buddy’s got shades on, a lit cigarette between his fingers. Sing me something! I shout over the noise of the engine. Buddy smiles, hums a few bars of Not Fade Away and closes his eyes. We take off with a rush of air, riding the wind. The small airfield shrinks down below. I take the plane higher. A tremor in my fingers. My heart, beating fast. Feeling the early morning sun on my face, the fresh smell of the air, hay from down below. Buddy is still humming. I close my eyes. Listen to the silence that lies between the notes.
And I flicker and time-jump out of there, leaving the plane to plummet down to the earth and explode in a ball of flame.
February 3, 1959.
The Day The Music Died.
My first time, anyway.
Buddy Holly, 22. Ritchie Valens, 17. The Big Bopper, 28.
RIP.
Jack the Ripper was a time-travelling serial killer. This is why he disappeared in November 1888, and why he was never seen again in Victorian London. The truth was he surfaced again in 1666 during the Great Plague, killed at least seven other victims that we know of, started the Great Fire of London to cover his tracks, and time-jumped again, to 2325, where he was at last apprehended, but not before three more victims died.
I still see Jack from time to time. There’s a place, and a time.
There are many specific space-time points where time travellers hang out. There’s the crucifixion, of course. A regular hangout of the time-pilgrims, the century-hopping enthusiast historians, the deep-time agents of the Church from the upper millennia, shiny futuristic enforcers safeguarding Jesus Christ at all times. Jerusalem in 36 AD. A shithole, really. I tend to avoid it.
Gilles de Rais. He hung out with Joan of Arc before she time-hopped out of France and the fire and to the late 20th (she called herself Mama Cass, then. Later she hopped to the late 5000s, where they are no longer truly human). De Rais was a truly nasty piece of work. After France in the 1400s he time-hopped to 1890s Chicago, where he called himself Holmes. Then, when his base burned down, he legged it to Boston in the 1960s. Finally three million years earlier, in deep time, Eastern Africa, his reign of terror ended with an Australopithecus female bashing his head in with a rock.
Not a nice guy, really.
We meet in the 1890s, at the Fortune of War pub, on Pie Corner, in Smithfields Market, London. The pub’s frequented by time-local body snatchers, and we can store our work in progress, should we so desire, with ease under the tables. It is demolished in 1910. Jack pops in some times, this is his favourite period, his first. Gilles came a couple of times but nobody likes him, his table manners are disgusting. Gacy, sometimes.
I’m not like the other guys.
They kill to satisfy some inner desperation, some terrible void.
Not me. I do it out of love.
December 5, 1791. Vienna.
I flicker into being in the shadows of his bedroom where he lies dying.
It had not been easy to arrange.
In Prague earlier in the year, I introduced myself to him in the street. You are the famous composer! I said. Wolfgang preened in the face of my adoration. I introduced myself as a medical doctor, from Genoa. We spent a night bar crawling through Prague. I paid for all the drinks. Paying for the drinks made anyone his friend. At last, both swaying on our feet, I led him to a house of ill-repute. He patted his pockets awkwardly. “I’m afraid I don’t,” he said. “It’s on me,” I said, grandly, and he grinned.
I had chosen the girl with care.
When I saw him again Mozart was weakened, sick. The syphilis was eating through him. I offered to help, of course. I was a doctor, and an admirer. He was working to complete his Requiem. I injected him with mercury.
December 5, 1791. I flicker into being in the shadows and approach his bed. His eyes flutter open. “Doctor,” he says, weakly. “Doctor…”
“Let me hear it,” I say, softly. I do not want us to be disturbed. For a moment he looks confused. Then understanding comes into his eyes, and he tries to smile. He sings it for me, with his last breath. It is a slow, dark music, a music like treacle, like poison. It is beautiful. I prep the injection, push it into his arm. All that poison… the notes rise in the air, as beautiful and terrifying as a monster.
“Hear my prayer, to You all flesh will come. Grant them eternal rest, Lord, and let perpetual light shine on them.”
His eyes close. He is at peace and I time-jump.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, 35.
Rest in Peace.
There are many ways to travel through time. There are machines – big clanking steam-powered monstrosities reeking of coal and entitlement. There are DeLoreans, manufactured in the 33rd, retro flying cars with built-in time circuits. In the 35th they have time-travel booths one can go into and use at any time. In the 26th they have a company that takes you back to hunt dinosaurs. There are people who travel by magic; people who utilise alien technology; there are people for whom moving through time is an accident of birth, the act embedded in their genetic code, so that their wives see them, periodically, throughout their own lives. There are astral projectors who travel with their minds, and dream travellers who go back and forth while in the trance of REM sleep. Some people take pills, some use gateways in space-time. Some books are time machines.
I don’t use any of those.
You know how you can listen to a song and it evokes, suddenly and without warning, a moment in the past, so vividly and immediate
ly that it stops your breath? That summer you first fell in love, the music playing on your grandfather’s old radio in his house, before he died, the song playing in the background in the car when you looked out of the window and suddenly realised you were mortal, that you, too, were going to die. The song they played when you were a child and lying in your cot and there was a hush in the room and outside, through the glass, you could see the night sky, and the stars, so many stars, and it filled you with wonder. All of those tiny moments of our lives, filled with half-heard music.
Close your eyes. Listen to the notes. Slow your heart beat. Time stretches, each moment between notes grows longer, longer… time stops. Listen to the silences between the notes.
Nothing around you. The world fades. You stare into the darkness there, that profound silence. A chasm filled with stars. If you could only slip between the notes then you can go anywhere, and you could…
April 5, 1994. Lake Washington.
He is so sad, so alone. He is not surprised to see me. “Boddah,” he says. That was the name he knew me by. I visited him as a child, and again throughout his life. His imaginary friend. He was using heroin. I stroked his hair. Sing to me, I say. He just smiles. I press the button on his sound system and Smells Like Teen Spirit erupts out of the speakers, assaulting us both. “Oh, Kurt,” I say. “Write me a letter.” He starts to write. To Boddah. I had brought the shotgun with me. He looks into my eyes as I press the trigger. I put the gun into his hand, where the pen had been, and stand up, saying goodbye.
I time-jump. They find his body four days later.
Kurt Cobain, 27. Rest in Peace.
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