by David Keenan
17. Chasing a Twenty-Year-Old Girl Halfway Round the World and Setting Up Shop in a War Zone: Monica Lawson watches Richard the drummer disappear and come back again.
There was a period near the end where Memorial Device played out as a four-piece with no drums; Remy moved to synth, which of course was his first instrument, and Mary Hanna stepped in on bass. By this point they were kings of the scene and the shows were amazing; the music sounded like it was levitating, spiralling, like it was a vertical construction. People bandied about names; Fripp & Eno, La Monte Young, The Velvet Underground. But it was nothing like any of those. Plus it was birthed from necessity rather than any kind of idea or reference point. Richard had disappeared. Or, to tell the truth, he had run away with a twenty-year-old girl for a job as an aid worker in Palestine. Take it from me, Richard couldn’t have told you the first thing about the plight of the Palestinians. He didn’t even know they had a plight. But he fell for her nonetheless. Her name was Lubby, which I think was short for Ljubljana or something like that. She was half Arabic and half German. She showed up at a Memorial Device show; a lunchtime show where they played in-store at Our Price records in Coatbridge. She had never heard of the music before. I was at the show; I met her. I saw her buying records, the first Creedence Clearwater LP, Led Zeppelin II: entry-level stuff. All the time she was taking sips from this oversized can of cider; which was cute, admittedly, and Richard always had a thing for tiny girls with big cans and that is not a euphemism by the way because she was tiny all over, except for the eyes, which were endless and dark. She had a boy’s T-shirt on, a rugby top from some English university, Oxford or Cambridge or something like that, and she wore it with a tiny skirt that fanned out like a Japanese umbrella and suede ankle boots and opaque tights and red woollen ankle socks all scrunched up and falling down. And of course she was sipping from this huge can, which made her eyes seem like dark sunrises, the can like a dolmen or a standing stone, you know, like here comes the summer.
Thing is, Richard wasn’t what you would call attractive, per se. I mean I liked him, etc, I spent time with him, you know, I valued him, of course, but it was more out of loyalty to my life and circumstances than any kind of attraction. We were able to be frank with each other, maybe that was it. Early on there had been something between us but it soon cooled off and that somehow allowed us to be closer than otherwise a boy and a girl could ever be, especially at that age, right? Of course I was a little jealous, that was inevitable. Lubby had such young skin, flawless, such keen, clear eyes, lips that looked like they had been drawn in pencil. I saw them talking and I just knew it; I knew they would end up together, though in another way it was the mismatch of the century. Of course she had a big epiphany about the music, how she couldn’t believe anyone was making this kind of music, how everything had changed, and it got to the point that she was attending every Memorial Device show, always standing down the front, her delicate lips drinking from a huge can, and Richard would be up on stage, you could see him playing to her; he started dressing differently, he started wearing a cap, for instance, a baseball cap, which Patty hated. What is this, he would say, fucking National Lampoon? I had to agree. But of course Richard was going bald, he was losing his hair, and he was overcompensating. The next thing we knew he had grown one of those awful wisps of hair; those little tufty beards that posers grow just beneath their bottom lip. But he was a Leo so it made some kind of sense. Of course his wife never came to any of his concerts. I was his only support from back in the day so effectively he could get away with murder.
I’ve fallen in love, he told me. We met for a Chinese at the weekend; we used to order from the Lucky Star in Forrest Street in Airdrie and then take it to a park further along the road where no one ever went and where I still return to in my dreams, even though it doesn’t exist any more, and in the summer we would lie in the grass and eat our meals with chopsticks out of foil containers and drink cans of beer and debate the future and novels. We set ourselves courses, we had our own club, like, you know, for instance we would listen to all of John Coltrane’s albums in order, one a day, until we had gone right through his catalogue, or we would assign ourselves novels, say all Russian novels, Gogol and Turgenev and Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and Bulgakov (The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov is my favourite book of all time but just so you know you have to read it in the Michael Karpelson translation never the one that Diana Burgin and Katherine O’Connor did where it was like they were making things up for a modern audience really it was sacrilege I couldn’t believe it so the message is: avoid) and Chekhov and Pushkin and Lermontov, and then we would discuss them on our Saturday afternoons, which would inevitably turn to evenings and late nights and sleeping in the park. His wife was a real bitch, she didn’t care, though she was good-looking, I’ll give her that, which was odd, you know, as in what on earth were they doing with each other, and this particular Saturday we had been reading Chekhov, inevitably, and that’s when he told me that he wanted to stop reading, that he had no further need of reading, in fact. I’ve stepped into a novel, he said. I might as well be Rimbaud going off to Palestine. Are you really going to go? I asked him. I want to be adventurous, he said. I want to live. Books aren’t living, he said. Music isn’t living. Staying alive isn’t living. Chasing a twenty-year-old-girl halfway round the world and setting up shop in a war zone: that might be living. It was hard to argue with him, even though I knew full well that books were alive and music was alive. I saw her pussy, he said. That disarmed me, I admit. It wasn’t the sort of thing we usually talked about. Damn it, he said. I saw her pussy. She took her panties down and she let me see it, he said. She didn’t want me to touch it, but she wanted me to see it. I want to show it to you, was what she said. And the thing about it was, it was completely bald. It wasn’t shaven, there was no stubble, no nicks or spots; it was just this bald fact. You know how they say that everyone has a fingerprint that is uniquely theirs? This was like someone with no fingerprint, someone without a curl or a wrinkle or a flaw, and I thought to myself, what the hell, I’ll follow her to the end of the world and that way no one will ever find us.
When the rest of the group heard about it, well, at first there was a big hoo-ha but when Remy suggested getting Mary Hanna in they started coming round to the idea. Patty said, yes, let’s continue, but with no drums, that way when they ask us what happened to our drummer we’ll just say he ran away to Palestine, he left his wife for a twenty-year-old and now he’s somewhere on the West Bank, precise location unknown, and he’s a better drummer for it. It beats dying or going off the ball or being told to pack it in by your wife. He remains a member, Patty said. In fact he’s more important than ever.
It was the moment of his elevation, in the eyes of the band, in the eyes of his friends, in the eyes of the gossips and the bitches and the hangers-on, in the eyes of the commentators and the journalists and the hagiographers to come, though not in the eyes of his family, and I admit that even I was unsure. Throwing it all in with a twenty-year-old was bound to end in tears, I thought. But who knows what the point of tears is?
In the end it was me who drove them to the airport. Richard’s family would have nothing to do with it. His estranged wife had been on the phone to his father and convinced him that he had lost his mind, that it was some kind of crisis, as if any attempt at escape was equated with biology at its most pathetic.
It was an early-morning flight. Lubby had arranged everything. They were to stay with a friend who lived in a suite in a hotel on the shore at Tel Aviv and from there they would make contact with a humanitarian organisation and relocate to a distribution hub on the Gaza Strip; though when I looked at them both in the rear-view mirror they looked more like Jackie O and JFK on their way to Dallas. She was wearing these big dark glasses and a floppy hat so you couldn’t really see her face, which was a blessing, in a way, because it was true that she had the kind of dark eyes that would bring out the high diver in everyone and who knows I might have ended u
p in Israel myself.
Still, the atmosphere was awkward. They didn’t say much. It was like a first date, in many respects, and there didn’t seem to be much of a rapport between them. As we drove along the M8 the roads were completely empty except for some slow-moving trucks and the occasional taxi. There was the sound of birdsong, of the sun coming up. Occasionally I would catch a light in a window, the hopeful glow of a new day in a block of flats or in the high glass of an office in an industrial estate, and I thought to myself that life was beginning all over again, that every day was a clean slate. Everything is forgiven, I said to myself, though under my breath. I didn’t want them to think that I was judging them. When we pulled up at the airport Lubby made a big deal about thanking me and telling me how wonderful I was, to the point where it seemed phoney and unreal but that might just be me, typical me. With Richard, we just shook hands; it seemed more appropriate than a hug or a kiss, you know, like shaking hands with someone that was just about to go over the top. As I watched them walk off, Lubby was walking a few steps ahead of Richard and somehow that bothered me. It made me think of my own bickering parents and the space between them and I felt sad. On the way back home I had the urge to waste my day, to write the whole thing off. At this point I had a job as a cleaner in the eye infirmary in Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow, working nights cleaning the building from top to bottom, part of a staff of three, and I thought to myself, bugger this. Will I really remember, at the end of my life, another dismal day wiping door frames and hoovering up syringes, will I ever recall getting my pay docked and getting served with a written warning? Well, here I am telling you about it, so I guess I did, but whatever. I thought of that character in the Russian novel, the one that Richard and I had read and had talked about in the park, the one that had inspired us to sleep out at night, in the wild, that had made us want to throw ourselves over precipices and flit across rooftops while everyone else was asleep, and it was as if he had finally stepped out of a novel, and I saw my own chance, in a way, though it was chump change, really, small beans, more like clambering out of a paragraph, what was the name of it now, it was the one where someone is writing a diary, a diary that when he comes to read it the next day is filled with all of these miraculous events, all of these forgotten deeds, some criminal, some wonderful, all of which are beyond recollection, even the writing of them, and he comes to the conclusion that he is no more writing his own life than writing his own diary, which results in a great sense of freedom.
It was through writing that we kept in touch, letters with postmarks from all around the Middle East, names like Nuseirat and Ashdod and Hebron and Yatta and Halhul, postcards with clenched fists on the front or children dancing in the street or silhouettes of Bedouin encampments at sunset near the Dead Sea, and I began to feel as if they were writing themselves, like somehow Richard had been swallowed by history, by geography, drowned in distance, and each missive was like a gravestone, each letter like a carving in marble, beloved son, dearly departed, sweet, sweet friend. He wrote about the street food, the view from the window of their room, of his first impressions of Jerusalem, of the sight of the men leaving the mosque after prayer, flooding through the tiny ancient streets (which made me think of fish or sperm), the pressure and volume of which left him pinned against the wall, of meeting a Scottish Rabbi at the Wailing Wall, which seemed improbable, but there you go, that’s the stuff that happens, of the metal detectors and commuter tunnels and checkpoints and of the children subsisting on nothing but dirt and the Israeli raids and the kidnaps and the held-without-trials. I tried to lighten the tone. How’s her pussy? I asked him. Sprouted any hairs yet? But he never took the bait. We’re doing a lot of good out here, he said. We’re changing things for the better. I had my doubts, I’ll admit it. One thing that I did notice was that over time his handwriting improved. It became much neater. At first when he would send me a postcard it was barely legible, like a single flowing line, as if his hand couldn’t keep up with the speed of his thoughts and had just become fed up and stopped trying. It looked more like a cardiograph than handwriting. And when it changed, when suddenly I could read each word without guessing or squinting or moving it back and forth in front of my eyes, I thought to myself, something in his heart has changed.
Meanwhile Memorial Device had been offered a record deal. It was one of these indie labels that were surreptitiously funded by a major and they were looking for a few trophy signings to maintain credibility. At least that’s how it seemed to me, cynical me. They paid for them to go down to London and Patty asked me to go with them, he wanted me to be the band archivist, he said, to document the trip. Plus he had fallen out with their unofficial manager, Miriam McLuskie, on account of her being a mental case. I handed in my notice at my job. I wrote to Richard. I’m going to London with the group, I told him. They’re being courted by a record label. He wrote me from a cafe in Jerusalem. He had started smoking and had shaved his head. I’ve lost a lot of weight, he said. You would barely recognise me. Right now the world of record contracts is another planet to me.
We took the sleeper to London, Patty, Remy, Lucas and myself. The record label had booked us first-class tickets so we had access to the bar and we sat up drinking all night. It had been snowing heavily and the weather had affected the power lines, which meant that throughout the night the electricity would go on and off, leaving us drinking in darkness with the whole world outside the windows illuminated in white, like we were speeding across the surface of a wedding cake. There wasn’t much conversation; mostly we just drank and looked out the window. In the morning we were half drunk and hung over but we got in so early that nowhere was open so we walked to a park at Soho Square and brushed the snow off the benches and tried to sleep. Afterwards we visited St Patrick’s Church and then we had breakfast at a place just off Charlotte Street, where the record company was.
The label boss had his feet up on the desk when we walked in and he immediately offered us some beers. He was trying to be cool. Lucas was on good form and he asked him some spectacular questions, like if we were to exhibit an uncommon degree of zeal during the recording of our first album – that’s exactly the words he used, exhibit an uncommon degree of zeal, I’ll never forget it – could we then take what was left over from the budget and use it to fund a performance in Timbuktu? My mum always said she would send me to Timbuktu if I was bad, he said. I think I’ve been bad enough by this point. The label boss, I think his name was Sidney something or other, seemed a little uncomfortable. Then Lucas asked him about Roger Daltrey. This was a recurring obsession with Lucas. Everyone else hated The Who. I mean, who could blame them? Has there ever been a more depressing vaudeville take on rock n roll to this day? But Lucas loved them, especially Daltrey, and he had heard that Daltrey had never written an original song in his damn life, yet there they were sharing the stage at Woodstock with Jefferson Airplane and The Grateful Dead. It wasn’t even true, Daltrey had written plenty of songs, but there was no point telling Lucas that. Do you know if Roger Daltrey is looking for material? he asked Sidney. I don’t know Roger personally, Sidney said, but I know his publishers, I could certainly put you in touch. Done, Lucas said, and he leaped from his chair and offered him his hand, this huge hand that looked like a flatfish from the bottom of the ocean. Sidney took his hand and shook it gingerly. I got a shot of that. I was crouched by the side of the desk the whole time. I was small enough for no one to take any notice of and I think they all forgot I was there, which made for some great shots, believe me. They were all in black and white; I had the feeling that I didn’t want to make it obvious that it was a particular time – to me it might as well have been a blues band or Southern boppers or a punk group or anything. Plus because I was crouched on the ground all of my shots were taken from below so everything in the pictures seems to loom and to suggest and to be full of meaning, I think.
I was amazed that they didn’t ask more questions, actually. To be honest they seemed a little overwhelmed by the occasi
on. I thought they would have been demanding this and securing that and laying down the law, but no, if Lucas hadn’t been there I doubt they would have asked a single question. Later on, Sidney took us all out for some drinks at this club in Soho where we knocked on a door at the bottom of a flight of stairs and where a hatch was drawn back and a pair of eyeballs appeared. It was quite boring, actually. He introduced us to his assistant, I can’t remember his name now, a name like Simon or Richard Sparks, a name like a daytime radio presenter, and he was just so tiresomely upbeat that it was tedious. At one point he sort of cornered Remy and put a hand above his shoulder, leaning on the wall, so that he had him hemmed in. I couldn’t catch most of the conversation but I heard them debating the merits of fake blood versus real blood, that old chestnut. Then a few girls appeared; Sidney’s sister and her friend Jemima and some hangers-on. Jemima was striking, with long black hair and dark eyes and a freckly complexion and with tight leather trousers and a sculpted, body-fitting top that was turquoise and black and that pushed up her breasts. She made for Lucas immediately and Sidney suggested we all go back to his flat, which was in a block that overlooked the Thames on the south side.
His flat was a state. There were still the remains of the morning’s breakfast on the table. In the distance we could see speedboats and barges and small steamers making their way up and down the river in the dark. He put on The Velvet Underground, Loaded not White Light/White Heat, a safe bet, basically, and then he passed around some joints. No one offered me one; by this point they had forgotten I was even there, insignificant me. I saw Jemima unbutton Lucas’s shirt and slide her hand inside as everyone sat around talking and it looked like there were scars on his chest, or burns perhaps, and that she was massaging them. Lucas kept writing things in his notebook, but surreptitiously, he had a way of doing it that no one else would notice. I looked out at the river and I could see St Paul’s and the Post Office Tower in the distance and in the sky planes were circling, their flashing lights, and the boats moving both ways at the same time. I had this feeling, it’s hard to describe, but something in me was disappointed, in a way it seemed like the same old nonsense, the same old temptations, the same old rotten garbage. I had thought more of the group, and myself. Then I had a guilty feeling, like I was on the run from pleasure, so I lightened up. I stood up and asked for a joint. Lucas looked at me like I had just materialised out of thin air and passed me a stub from the ashtray and I lit it up then lay back on some cushions next to the window and began taking pictures out the window at random and of my hands and of the light fittings above my head that were meant to look like old-fashioned candelabra but were all bent like spider’s legs. All the while Patty had been sitting silently on the couch with his shades on and his battered top hat but then he came over to the window and asked me to stop taking pictures. I’m not taking pictures of you, I said, I’m taking pictures for myself. Still, he said, it’s making me uncomfortable. I should never have asked you to come. I was quite stoned by this point and I think I read it wrong, thinking that he was concerned for me and my values and of disappointing me somehow, and so I said to him, no need to apologise, my dear, we’re all human, but he just looked at me blankly and asked me for the camera, which I gave him, I don’t know why, sunglasses after dark have a power is all I can say.