Chapter Text
Liverpool, 1956
Paul had come back home over the summer with sunburn on his nose and a Bill Haley record he’d scrounged up from God knows where, in the bum end of rural Wales.
They put it on in George’s front room. They had to sit close to hear it properly because Harry and Peter had friends over in the kitchen. They played it twice through and Paul wrote down the chords they could make out in what had once been his History workbook.
“I’m in a group now, by the way, Geo,” he had said, as George knelt up to put the needle back down on the first groove.
“Did ye do that in Wales too?” George had said.
He wasn’t particularly impressed: it wasn’t hard to be in a band, George had been in two already, although they weren’t very good and they hadn’t managed more than four shows between them.
“No,” Paul had said, loftily. “It’s a proper one. The lead singer’s dead good. You’ll prob’ly meet him soon.”
“Alright,” George had said, peaceably. He didn’t have much interest in meeting Paul’s friends; they were mostly less interesting versions of Paul, with starched collars and fastidious parents.
His name’s John, this new friend.
It takes about a week for George to be intrigued – Paul’s stories of an older art student who gets in fights on the street, sags off school in favour of bus trips to Blackpool, who had the nerve to meet Jim Mac for the first time while bevvied, who lets a parade of oddballs and intellectuals into the ranks of his band for a performance or two for a laugh, none of this sounds like Paul’s usual fare.
Then it becomes slightly irritating: Paul’s committed now to the Ted look he was flirting with over the summer, the white sports-coat comes out even when they’re only running down to the chippy, he can’t pass a mirror without checking his hair’s greased back proper. George has a faint suspicion that Paul’s worried about meeting this John person out, while looking like a Jim Mac mini-me in his old brown jumper and pressed trousers.
And George was Paul’s friend first. It’s always John nowadays, John this, John that.
George thinks, sure, it’s very likely John is cooler than good old Paul with his ironed trousers and his uniform shirts but George was Paul’s friend first.
And you’d think John and Paul had invented the bloody guitar, the way Paul goes on about their jamming, swapping chords back and forth and never mind that it’s only been four months since George agreed to hitchhike all the way to Wallasey to learn a B7.
Right pair they make, by the sound of it - John thinks a guitar’s the same as a banjo and Paul has to play it back to front.
A few days before Christmas, Paul cycles over to George’s house at lunch-time bringing a little bottle of brandy with him. George thinks it's just to show off because John had given it to him and he is so inordinately pleased about it, he’s already told George the story three times.
But he did let George share it with him: George has had brandy before and liked it, or at least liked it enough to drink it in front of Paul.
At George’s house, they’d sounded out a riff Paul had heard on the radio last night on his guitar. Then they went out. They went to look at records they couldn’t afford and then they wandered over to the cinema but the film showing wasn’t anything on that either of them really wanted to see, so they carried on past it, swapping the bottle between them and now George thought he might be drunk.
He thought Paul was definitely drunk, although as long as he could get home alright, he could let himself in and go to bed without Jim noticing. But George’s mum would sniff it out, and he’d never hear the end of it, he’d be doing all the worst chores until April.
So he was beginning to get a bit moody as they tripped along back towards Speke and George’s mum with her bloodhound nose and Paul’s bike, when there was a shout from the other side of the road:
“Oi, Macca, that you?”
They both turned round. George didn’t recognise them but he could guess immediately, even before Paul cried -
“Johnny!” and took off down the street towards the three boys coming the opposite way.
Even more glum now, George traipsed towards them.
He knew he’d been right – all three of them were dressed in the sorts of clothes Paul had started to wear, with their hair greased like Elvis, heavy jackets and upturned collars and drainies. George knows who John is immediately – even before he swings an arm around Paul’s shoulders. Paul’s been waxing lyrical for months, George could probably have pointed him out in a line-up just from the descriptions he’s been hearing.
“Who’s this then, Macca?” John asks. “Your brother?”
“John, this is Georgie, I was telling you ‘bout him,” Paul says, beaming up at him. “He’s the one who plays guitar.”
“Oh, aye,” says John. He gives George a precursory glance, up and down. He’s got a wicked look, squinting eyes like he wanted to start a fight. “Bit little, isn’t he? What are you, eleven? Twelve?”
“Fourteen,” George says.
“Four-teen,” John says.
“Almost fifteen,” George says, defensively, but that seems to make it worse as the boys next to John explode into laughter.
“He’s a kid, Macca, what are you on,” says John.
Paul’s face screws up. It’s an expression George can immediately translate as Paul getting stubborn about something.
“John, c’mon mate, it’s freezing,” says one of the other boys.
“He’s a proper good guitarist though,” Paul says.
John makes a face.
“How good can he be when he couldn’t walk or talk six months ago.”
“I’m fourteen, I’m not a fucking baby,” George says, irritably. “Paul, can we go?”
“Yeah, yeah,” Paul says. “But really Johnny, he’s proper good.”
“Paulie’s a kid himself, Johnno, been saying this for weeks,” says the boy on John’s left.
“Rod, shut the fuck up,” John snaps. “I’ll get rid of you before we get rid of Paulie, yeah?”
Paul preens. Rod scowls.
“You a better guitarist than him, Greg?”
“It’s George,” George says, through gritted teeth.
“George,” John drawls. “Are you better than our Paulie?”
Our Paulie, he says, like he’s got some kind of claim on Paul, with his arm still round him like that.
George knew Paul first and all.
“Yeah, loads better,” Paul says. “He can do the licks and everything.”
“And does he speak for himself?” John says, ruffling Paul’s hair. “Alright lad, well, when you’re out of nappies, you can give us a call, yeah?”
George bristles.
“I’m going home, Paul,” he says, and heads off down the street, shoving his hands in his pockets. He can hear Paul calling after him, throwing out a goodbye Johnny, I’ll see you tomorrow, yeah? and then his feet on the stones.
“George! Wait up!”
George waits. Paul catches up.
“Hey Georgie, I’m sorry, he’s just like that sometimes.”
“Seems like an arse to me,” says George.
“No, no,” Paul says. “He’s alright. He’s proper clever, cleverest I’ve ever met, and he likes all the same music we do and he lives up in Woolton, his house is gorgeous.”
“Why does that matter? He’s not the one payin’ for it,” George says, unimpressed.
Paul laughs.
“No, Georgie, I swear. You’d like him if you met him properly, honest. He’s so clever and he’s really funny, you’ve gotta hear him sometimes, the way he talks and all, it’s so funny.”
George doesn’t say anything. He thinks if any of what just happened was supposed to be funny, Paul’s gone soft in the head.
“I thought maybe it’d be fun if you joined the band,” Paul says. George looks at him, disbelieving.
“And when were you gonna ask me if I wanted to?”
“I’m asking you now, aren’t I?”
“With him, and that lot back there?”
“Yeah,” Paul says. “Yeah, we’re good, y’know, but I’m not half the guitarist you are. And you really will like John –”
“Nah, you’re alright,” George says.
“We’re good, y’know? You’d be doing it right, not like before.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. We’re gonna be really big someday, bigger than Elvis, that’s what John says.”
“Oh, well if John says it.”
Paul elbows him.
“Would you be up for it?”
“Not sure you’ll change his mind,” George says. Paul scoffs.
“Course I will. Come on, Georgie, say you’ll do it. When I talk John round.”
George rolls his eyes. But he doesn’t really have anything better to do, so he thinks he might as well.
“Bigger than Elvis, then?”
“Oh yeah,” Paul says, swinging an arm around George’s shoulders now. Briefly, George wonders how many of the little mannerisms he’s noticed over the past few months Paul has actually taken from John. “Bigger than anything, mate.”
Liverpool, 1957
He’s woken up by a pillow to the face and his brother’s voice -
“Your friend’s outside. Tell ‘im I’ll bloody ‘ave ‘im if he does that again.”
“Does what?” George says blearily, sitting up.
“Chuckin’ pebbles at the window. Go on.”
“Pebbles?” George echoes. He hasn’t heard from John in four days but it must be him, no one but John would do something that daft.
“Go on, piss off, don’t wake me when ye come back or I’ll tell mum you went out.”
“Psssht,” George says but he climbs out of bed anyway, struggling into his trousers and a jumper in the dark.
He opens the front door quietly but the figure perched on his bike on the other side of the hedge twists round anyway.
“‘Lo,” George says. He’s surprised to see Paul by himself and half-expects John to leap out at him as he approaches. “What’s happening?”
“Nothing,” Paul says. He looks strange, almost grey in the dim light - George hadn’t checked his alarm clock for the time but it’s late enough that the streetlamp on the other side of the road has been extinguished.
“Nothing?”
“John’s mum is dead,” Paul says.
“Shit,” says George and thinks strangely that he’d had the same reaction when he’d been told about Paul’s mum.
He'd only seen Julia a week ago, sat around her kitchen table while she cooked runny eggs and chattered over the radio - she was going to bring the girls to one of their shows and didn’t they like her new dress, she’d got it dead cheap because the shopkeeper fancied her and hadn’t Paul lost too much weight already, couldn’t she tempt him to have another slice of toast or maybe a bit of bacon (burning in the pan behind her), which last had made John start laughing so hard he’d spat his mouthful across the table and that had set them all off with him.
Impossible, to imagine her dead.
“What happened?” George says.
Paul seems to go even greyer.
“She was hit by a car.”
“When?”
“A couple days ago. Ivan told me yesterday.”
“You haven’t spoken to John?”
“No,” Paul says. He’s wearing his coat over his pyjamas.
“Why not?”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“What do you –”
“I don’t know what to say to him.”
George squints at him.
“Well,” he says, carefully. “Aren’t you – I mean, aren’t you the best person to talk to – I mean, you have – You know what he’s goin’ through, and all.”
“But I,” Paul says and stops and clears his throat. “I don’t know – He thinks all sorts of terrible things about himself, because of her, you know? And now she’s gone and he only just got her back – I don’t – Georgie, I don’t –”
He scrubs a hand over his nose. Then he does it again, which is when George realises if Paul was anyone else in the world, he’d probably be crying.
“Oh, Paul,” he says, awkwardly.
“What?” Paul says, angrily.
“You know he – I mean, he –” George scratches his head, embarrassed to try and explain that he thinks John would probably rather sit in silence with Paul than anything else.
He wonders if Paul has been told the terrible things John thinks about himself or if they’ve spent so much time together that Paul (pigheaded, oblivious, well-meaning Paul) has picked up on it himself because, George thinks with a little spike of shame, he hadn’t realised at all.
“I only thought,” Paul says, keeping his gaze levelled deliberately over George’s head. “Y’know, you were about the only person I wasn’t – You and Mikey and – I wasn’t angry with you, you were – You were just there.”
“Me?” George says, surprised and slightly pleased.
Most of what he remembers about the weeks after Mary passed is sitting in his bedroom while Paul messed around with George’s guitar and George tried to do his homework or sitting in the front room at Forthlin Road with the radio on and the lights off, sometimes going full hours without talking.
“Yeah,” Paul says. His eyes are very bright. It makes George’s stomach drop. “What if I can’t – If I can’t – I want to but I can’t –”
“Don’t be daft,” George says. He wishes his voice was stronger.
“I’m not –” Paul says, thickly. “M’not, I don’t – ”
“I don’t want you to be sad,” George says.
It sounds immediately ridiculous, small and afraid and childish and so stupid he could die of embarrassment but then Paul hiccups and starts laughing.
It’s a reflex to reach out and pull him into a hug, just like he would if it was one of his siblings half-crying in front of him, although he has to stand on tip-toe to be big enough to get his arms properly around Paul’s neck and it’s quite uncomfortable with Paul’s bicycle between them.
He does realise – when Paul is frozen awkwardly against him – that fifteen years old is too old to be hugging anyone, except a crying girl – Certainly, John and Paul don’t hug and George has been taking his cues from them since he started trying to grow up about a year ago.
But then Paul puts one arm around George’s shoulders and squeezes.
“I’m sorry,” he says, muffled, against the side of George’s head. “I’m alright now, Georgie. Honest.”
“I can go with you to see him, if you want,” George says. “Tomorrow. The first time you see him, if you want.”
Paul doesn’t say anything but he squeezes a bit tighter. George pretends not to notice, rubbing a circle between his shoulder-blades like his mum does when he’s sad.
Liverpool, 1963
He steps out of the club and someone punches him in the face.
There are so many people around that as soon as he’s realised he’s on the ground, he’s being lifted off it by anxious girls. He tries to smile but there must be blood in his mouth because it makes them flinch.
“Are you alright?” one of them asks.
George nods, trying to wipe his face clean with his hands, which stings worse than he'd thought it would.
“You’re very brave,” one of them says, admiringly.
“Yeah?” he says.
The skin round his left eye is hot and tender already, so making eyes at her maybe looks more like squinting because her shy smile morphs into an expression of concern –
Then there are hands on his shoulders, spinning him round.
Paul must have followed him out, just slow enough to avoid being any proper help, bloody git. Not that he’d be much help in a fight, never one for confrontation is Paul, the passive aggressive sod.
“Iris said you’d been in a fight!” Paul says, anxiously. He’s still pink-cheeked from their set, his hair damp around the collar. “Georgie, who was it? Does it hurt?”
Or maybe someone had gone back into the club to look for help.
“Calm down, Christ,” George says, trying to detangle them.
“Does it hurt?” Paul asks again, quieter. “Is it broken? Your nose? Can you still play guitar?”
“Well I don’t fuckin’ play guitar with me nose do I,” George says, thickly. He spits onto the pavement to clear it out and it comes out red and gobby.
“C’mon, Georgie,” Paul says, and puts an arm around him and steers him back into the club. “’Scuse me, we’ll only be a sec,” he says, and bypasses the queue for the toilets entirely, shoving George in first and shutting and bolting the door on the angry protests of the people outside.
George squints at his reflection in the grimy mirror. He’s got blood between his teeth and smeared over his chin. He prods gingerly at his nose.
“Don’t think it’s broken,” he says.
“That’s good,” Paul says. “C’mere.”
He has to lean over George to turn the tap on and dampen the wedge of toilet paper he’s balled up in his hand.
“Look up,” he says.
George does. He hisses when Paul pats at the blood drying around his top lip.
“I barely touched you,” Paul says, mercilessly. “You shouldn’t have goaded them, y’know.”
“I didn’t goad them,” George says, outraged. He tries to say it, anyway, but his nose hurts and Paul’s scrubbing at his mouth so it comes out like hmm-ha-hmm-hmm-hemm.
Paul seems to understand it anyway because he quirks his eyebrows, looking unimpressed and worldly.
“They were being rude to Ritchie,” George says, when Paul has started wiping up his chin. “It was that lot, those blokes at the back, they were being rude to Ritchie all through the set –”
“Ritchie can handle himself,” Paul says. “You shouldn’t get yourself hurt.”
“I didn’t get myself hurt,” George says. “I could’ve taken ‘em, but they snuck up on me.”
Paul smothers a smile.
“What?” George says, irritated. “I could’ve.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
“Don’t patronise me.”
“I’m not patronising you,” Paul says. He meets George’s eyes and says, seriously, “I’d back you in a fight over anyone.”
“Even John?” George asks.
“Oh yeah, you could take John. He’s blind as a bat, he’d never see you coming.”
George smiles and his top lip splits open.
“Ow.”
“Don’t move, I told you.”
“Yes, mum,” George says. He shifts his weight from one leg to the other and Paul leans back to scowl at him. “Sorry.”
Someone bangs on the door and shouts at them to hurry up. Paul kicks it twice in return, loudly, and yells for them to calm the fuck down and go piss in the alley.
“Stop making me laugh,” George whines. “My lip hurts.”
“Stop being a baby,” Paul says, dismissively. “There, good as new.”
He steps back so George can examine himself in the mirror again.
“I’m gonna have a proper shiner,” he says, unhappily. “Me mum’s gonna kill me.”
“Probably,” Paul agrees, cheerfully. “But all the girls will think you’re dreamy.”
“Fuck off,” George says. Paul cackles. “But ta, Paulie.”
Paul shrugs. He shoulders George out the way a bit so he can fuss with his hair. George touches his split lip and watches him.
“I keep tellin’ you, the fancy shit John uses doesn’t work half as well as Vaseline.”
“Hm?”
“When you get ready at John’s, your hair looks like shite at the end of the night.”
“D’you want another black eye, George?”
“Like you could land one on me,” George scoffs. “M’just saying.”
“It’s just gel, what John uses. It's not fancy.” He gives up fussing with his hair. “What, have you got some of yours on you?”
“Yeah, I just scoop it out of the jar and put it in my pocket. No, I obviously don’t have Vaseline on me.”
Paul laughs. Someone thumps on the door again and tells them they better have a girl in there or he’s gonna rough them up.
“Better go, then,” Paul says. “C’mon, they’ve gone down the road. I’ll buy you a drink.”
They’re three steps into the pub when Ringo flies at them, throwing one arm around George’s shoulders.
“I’m so sorry!” he says. “Shit, son, look at the state of you.”
“You should’ve seen the other guy,” Paul says, nudging George companionably. “Hari held his own and all.”
“Course he did,” John says, over Ringo’s head. “Tough as anything, our lad. Want a pint, Geo?”
“On me!” Ringo says. “For the rest of the night!”
“Rest of the month, I think,” John says, winking at George. “Look at that shiner.”
“He’ll drink you out of pocket if you agree to that, Ritchie,” Paul says. “Come on, I’m freezing here, didn’t you get a table?”
He chivvies them into a booth at the back and then he and John disappear off to the bar, bumping shoulders.
“I really am sorry,” Ringo says. “I feel awful.”
“Ev’ryone gets hit now and then don’t they? Anyway, I told ‘em to find me. Brought it on myself, really.”
“Ay?” Ringo says. He drums out a beat against the table top. “Well. Thanks, anyway. For stickin’ up for me. Tell you the truth, I didn’t think they’d hate me –”
“They don’t hate you,” George says, in his best Paul-voice, the don’t-bother-arguing-with-me, I’m-right-I’ve-never-been-wrong voice that drives them all crazy. “They’re just nuts.”
“They like Pete,” Ringo says, mournfully.
“Yeah, ‘cos none of them have any idea what rhythm’s supposed to sound like. D’you know how many of our numbers speed up because he can’t keep time?”
Ringo doesn’t look convinced. He glances over at the bar, at John and Paul.
“We did sound good, didn’t we?” he says. “I thought we did.”
“Yeah, proper good.”
“I was looking forward to playing with you again.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” Ringo says. “You’re a gear guitarist.”
“Oh,” says George. He’d thought Ringo meant you, John-Paul-George, the band. “Oh. Thanks.”
Ringo grins at him.
“And modest, too,” he says, teasingly. “Birds must eat that up.”
“You’d be surprised,” George says, darkly.
“I do feel awful, ‘bout your eye.”
“Shurrup.”
“I do!”
“It doesn’t hurt or anythin’. Looks worse than it is. Paulie patched me up and all. Stop going on about it.”
Ringo sucks at his teeth.
“Ay, alright. Are they gettin’ a round? I’ll get you, if not.”
“Who knows,” George says. “They might forget we were with ‘em, and just leave.”
“They’ve never done that,” Ringo says.
“No,” George says.
Ringo laughs so George doesn’t tell him that it’s almost happened twice. It's probably best not to scare him off.
“Watchin’ you all in the studio, in London, I told me mum I was comin’ straight home. I didn’t understand half of what you were saying.”
“No one ever does,” George says. At the bar, Paul is trying to fix John’s collar. “They’ve got their own language. Sometimes they don’t even bother talking, they just know they’re thinking the same things and then we do that.”
“No,” Ringo says. “Well, yeah, they’re something else. Bloody mental. But I meant, all three of you, you’re on the same page about everything. Three Blind Mice, or something.”
George blinks at him. He doesn’t know what to say to that. It’s been John-and-Paul (and George) for so long, since the day they all met. He’s gotten so used to it, he isn’t sure he’s even pleased that Ringo sees it differently.
“Three Musketeers,” Ringo says, shaking his head. “Not the mice. The musketeers.”
“What’s that?” John says. He sets one pint down in front of Ringo and drops into the seat next to him as Paul slides in beside George. “What are you talking about?”
“You,” George says, flatly.
“Get off,” John says. “You’re lookin’ for another fight to lose, are ye?”
“Me against you isn’t even a fight,” George says, placidly. “It’s annihilation.”
“Big word that, Hari.”
“Macca, me or George, who’d win.”
Paul rolls his eyes and doesn’t say anything, disappearing behind his pint.
“Paul,” John insists.
“C’mon,” George scoffs.
“It’s a moot point anyway,” Ringo says, cheerfully. “’Cos I’d have all three of you laid out in a heartbeat.”
“Why does it matter?” Paul says. John sneers.
“You’re only saying that ‘cos you know you’d go down first.”
“That’s true,” George agrees and although it hurts his lip, he grins back when Paul laughs.
Cheshire, 1965
He already knows Paul is alright when he opens the bedroom door but seeing him lying in bed, asleep, with the curtains drawn – it gives him a little bit of a fright.
He doesn’t think he’s seen Paul so still in years.
The phone call he’d received from John – clearly off his head, rambling about omens and Eddie Cochran and the fact he hadn't said goodbye before hanging up the last time he spoke to Paul – has been ringing round his head all morning. Eventually, he’d gotten in the car and come over, thinking at least if he saw Paul alive and well, it would put his mind at ease.
He’s never noticed how young Paul looks before. When they were growing up, Paul hit seventeen and then stopped changing but it’s Paul, who lords the age difference over George even worse than John, far worse than Ritchie, so George has never really noticed the effect of it.
But here, it’s something about his soft features or his round face – he could put on their old school uniform and be completely the same, how strange.
“Are you watchin’ me sleep, Georgie?” Paul says, blearily, so unexpectedly that George jumps. Paul laughs at him, scraping one hand across his eyes.
“Many would pay millions,” George says. “It’s gonna be the next film, didn’t they tell you?”
“Piss off,” Paul says. “What are you doing here? Come closer, you’re making me nervous, looming over me like that.”
He pats the mattress beside him so George goes over and sits beside him. Up close, it looks worse, the slightly crooked stitches through his top lip and a little chip in one of his front teeth.
“I was visiting my parents,” George says. “I was close, is all. John called me in a right state. He seemed to think you were at death’s door.”
Paul hums.
“He was threatening to drive up here himself,” he says. “I’m glad he sent you, he’d only make fun. D’you think people will notice?”
“Yes.”
“Oh sod off,” Paul says. George laughs.
It doesn’t seem worth the effort to point out that John hadn’t sent him, that he’d come of his own accord. He thinks it would seem silly, somehow.
“What happened, then?”
“I took Tara down the Wirral,” Paul says. “Lost control of the motorbike.”
“You can’t drive on four wheels, what were you doing on two?”
“I am an excellent driver, what are you on about?” Paul says, outraged.
George says nothing; he makes a face, pointedly sceptical, because it will wind Paul up. It does.
“Pssht, what do you know,” Paul scoffs. And then, with a turnaround so quick it would give anyone else whiplash – “How was your Christmas, Georgie?”
“Ay, alright,” George says. “Yours? How long’ve you been up here?”
“Only a couple days,” Paul says. “It’s been a bit strange, being with me dad and all and not in Forthlin.”
“I almost drove straight there,” George admits. “But everything’s different now, isn’t it?”
Paul shrugs.
“Everything and nothing.”
“Very cryptic.”
“Well, some things don’t change, do they?” He nudges George companionably.
George doesn’t really think that’s true. He thinks only Paul could possibly believe it.
A few weeks ago, he’d looked over at Paul, curled up on the other end of a sofa in John’s house, picking out a snatch of music on a borrowed guitar, and he’d wondered out of the blue if they met now, would they be friends?
He’d drawn a blank. He wasn't immediately convinced- Did they only get on now because they had to?
But now, Paul’s elbow wedged against his hip, he laughs at himself, yeah, of course we'd be friends.
He thinks even with his haircut and his girlfriend and his big house in London and their fame and fortune, even with all that, it’s still Paul sat next to him and he hasn’t changed so much, not really.
It’s not surprising, for example, that Paul pushes himself further up against his pillows and says,
“Did you bring your guitar, then?”
“No,” George says. “I can get yours, if you want to jam.”
“Ay, alright,” Paul says, breezily, as though George might believe he doesn’t care.
So George gets up and fetches his guitar and the old one on the stand beside it.
They tune up in silence – if George doesn’t look up, he could believe he was back in the front room of the house he grew up in, fourteen or fifteen. When Paul’s done, he zips through the opening of Day Tripper and then peers up at George.
“Pretty good that one, don’t you think?”
“Do you?” George says. “And it doesn’t hurt you to say so?”
“Sod off,” Paul says. “Let’s do Twenty Flight Rock.”
“I dunno if I remember that,” George says, amused. “Oh, go on then."
They stumble through Twenty Flight Rock once, then again, faster, grinning at each other as they hit the chorus. Turns out George does remember it. Turns out something you played for five and a half years sits somewhere inside you and waits for the opportunity to come out.
He’s about to suggest they try Raunchy – for old time’s sake, when Paul claps a hand over the neck of his guitar, quieting it.
“George," he says. "I dropped acid last week. Or the week before, I dunno.”
“You did?” That is surprising. “Why didn’t you say?”
“I dunno,” Paul says, vaguely, which means he does know but he doesn’t want to explain.
“What did you think?”
“It was,” Paul says, “it was – ” He picks out a bit of Yesterday and then stops. “I’m not sure. It was alright.”
“Alright,” George repeats. He’d been expecting - well, a reaction. “Did you do it right?”
“Of course I did it right,” Paul says, frowning at him. “How could I do it wrong?”
“Did you do it with John?”
Paul shakes his head.
“No."
"What did he say?" George asks. He doesn't imagine it was good.
"I haven’t told him I’ve tried it yet," Paul says. "I thought he’d – Y’know, he’d want us to do it together.”
“Would that be a bad thing?” George asks, confused. “It’s good, doing it together. I mean, it connects you on another level.”
“We’re already,” Paul begins and then he shakes his head again, cutting himself off. “Anyway, I just thought I’d tell you.”
“Well,” George says. “Ta. I s’pose.”
He watches Paul stare at his guitar for a moment, the new slash across his top lip, his young face.
He thinks about asking Paul if he'd consider it with George but the words won't come without sounding childish even in his head, embarrassing, daft.
“D’you want to stay for tea?” Paul asks. “It’s only egg and chips but –”
“I better get home,” George says, awkwardly. Neither of them move. “But maybe – If your dad and Angie don’t mind –”
“Course not,” Paul says. He adjusts his fingers on his guitar. “Hey, remember this?”
“Raunchy!” George says, at the second note. “How could I forget?”
“Made you a star, kid,” Paul says, in his terrible American accent.
He strums back and forth, which George recognises too and they launch into the song at the same time, both of them doing an impression of John – Oh Maggie, Maggie Mae, they have taken her away –
“Keep it down!” Jim shouts, from below them.
George catches Paul’s eye and they dissolve into laughter.
“Doesn’t he knows we’re stars?” George says, still doing John.
“Sta-hs,” Paul echoes, snickering. “Millions would pay millions, son.”
“Bigger than Elvis,” George says, nasally.
“Toppermost of the poppermost!”
London, 1968
“Alright Paul,” George says, flatly. “Why don’t you tell me exactly what you want me to play and I’ll play it and then when you change your mind, let me know and I’ll do it differently.”
Paul’s fingers squeak on the strings of his bass but he still doesn’t look up.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m sure I’ve done something terrible, wanting us to sound the best we can. You can talk about me later once I’ve gone, I’m sure you were going to already but let’s just nail the track now.”
“What take is this, then?” George calls up to the sound booth. “Seventy? Seventy one?”
One of them – John or Ringo – whistles lowly through their teeth. Probably Ringo, he’s practically found a catchphrase – c’mon lads, stop, there’s other people here – But there’s always other people there, that’s part of the problem, right – George Martin in the sound booth with his head in his hands, Geoff Emerick staring at the piano like he’s imagining setting fire to it, Yoko watching Paul disinterestedly from her perch and John sat beside her, one hand possessively on her leg, the other around the neck of his guitar.
“Whenever you’re ready,” Martin says, tightly.
They don’t even get past the first eight bars before Paul’s saying,
“No, no, no, no.”
Ringo drops his drumsticks back onto his tom-toms so hard he catches a cymbal with his elbow. The crash makes John jump.
“Oh my God,” Emerick says.
“What now?” George snarls.
“I’m so fucking bored,” John announces. “I’m going outside.”
“Do not smoke!” Paul cries, rounding on him. He sounds like a child, shrill and desperate. John rolls his eyes. “Do not, John, I need – we need you to be here with us, okay?”
“No, not okay, love,” John says, giving Yoko’s knee a goodbye squeeze. He could at least take her with him. “You just want me here to agree with you but honestly, it all sounds the same to me.”
Paul looks like he might start shouting, or crying, or throwing things. He looks on the verge of doing something that will upset someone, probably Ringo, because Ringo seems to be the only other person still checked in.
George is already upset, he’s been upset since he walked in this morning. No, since he got out of bed – No, since they came back from India and he stood shoulder to shoulder with John in the airport, the others long gone home, watching their plane wheel around on the tarmac and a thousand girls screaming on the other side of the door and felt something strange, like the jolt of a guitar string snapping and then a still and curious grief totally at odds with the dry peace they’d found in Rishikesh.
He watches John as John bounds out of the room and then he watches the door as it creaks shut again. Any moment now, he thinks Paul is going to start talking again, but he doesn’t and when George dares to look at him, Paul is watching the closed door too, his shoulders drawn up, looking lost.
“Can we just leave it and –” George begins, trying to make his voice a little kinder. At the same time, Yoko says,
“I think it was better the first time you did it.”
Paul’s shoulders pull up even further.
“Did you?” he says, faintly. Watching Paul talk to Yoko reminds George of the way his mother used to get when he was younger and fighting with his siblings: it’s the same cultivated patience and the same thin, impatient lines around his mouth. “Alright.”
Something else that is upsetting – irritating – setting George’s teeth on edge - about Paul at the moment is his inexplicable effort to keep the peace with Yoko – not John and Heaven forbid not George, but Yoko, although they’ve still not received a sensible explanation for why she’s there.
“Just try again tomorrow, maybe,” Ringo says, before anyone else can. Paul pushes his hands through his hair.
“No, I don’t want to do it tomorrow.”
“Well, I don’t want to do it for the nine hundredth time today,” George tells him. “I’m fucking sick of it.”
“That’s really interesting, Geo. Unfortunately I couldn’t care less what you think. From the top please.”
In the sound booth, the technician stands up again with a new reel of tape.
Sometimes George isn’t even sure he’s real. Or maybe it's that he isn't sure Paul remembers that he's real.
“No,” he says. Paul glances over, just a glance, before returning his attention to retuning his bass.
“What do you mean, no?”
“You don’t know it? You say it often enough. No.”
“George, come the fuck on.”
“No,” George says. “You can’t talk to me like that just because you’re upset with John.”
The bass almost slips out of Paul’s hands.
“Sorry, with John? John’s not here, John’s never here, it’s you –”
“Like shit it is.”
“You think you can do better? Is that it? You think you can make this absolute load of – bollocks – sound better, is that it, Georgie?”
“I’m not a fucking child, Paul,” George says, calmly.
Paul stares at him. Then he stands up, he sets his bass back down on its stand, he picks up his coat and bag and he leaves. The door slams.
“Why did you do that?” Ringo says, into the ringing silence. “You know he’s –”
“He’s being a prick,” George says, flatly. “I’m fed up of it. You are too.”
Ringo shifts uncomfortably but he doesn’t have to agree right now – He won’t, he’s too good, with the engineers gawking on and Yoko about to report everything back to John. George knows anyway.
It doesn’t matter either because whatever George is feeling – it’s not quite triumph but it’s close, a little more bitter, like the reassertion of his pride but he has been trying to be better-tempered, more at peace – shrivels up into itself when the door opens again.
It’s not Paul but John, smelling strongly of pot.
“What happened?” he asks, looking around at them before his eyes stop on Paul's empty chair. His lip curls. “Did Paulie have another tantrum?”
An hour ago it would have been funny but without Paul there, it just seems mean.
“Don’t patronise him,” George snaps. “Why won’t you just talk to each other, instead of taking it out on me?”
John snorts.
“You don’t exactly help yourself, Georgie-boy. I don’t think you’ve got the right notes in the right order once in – How many takes was it, Martin?”
Silence.
George looks up to the sound booth but it’s empty and the lights have been switched off.
“They left about ten minutes ago,” says Yoko.
London, 1969
Paul answers the door a full two minutes after George has rung the bell. All the lights in the front of the house are off; George has backed down the stairs to peer upwards at the top floor windows when Paul suddenly appears, unshaven in an unironed shirt.
“What are you doing here?” Paul says.
“You look like shite,” George says. He half expects Paul to slam the door in his face; he moves, abortedly, but it’s only to sag against the front door, his forehead pressed briefly against the edge.
“I left you a message,” he says. “I don’t feel well.”
“Yeah?” George says, suspiciously. “When was the last time you ate? Or slept? You look like shite.”
“You said that already,” Paul says. He straightens up. “I’m not sleeping well, that’s all. I haven't in ages, not properly. Anyway, I left you a message.”
George frowns at him.
“I didn’t get a message.”
“Well, I left one.”
“Did you leave it after I’d gotten in the car and driven twenty fucking miles –”
“Fuck off Georgie, it’s not that far. You didn’t have to come if it’s such a hassle for you.”
George breathes in, deeply, and exhales. He learned that from Paul first, then again in India, but from Paul first. It used to drive John crazy, Paul breathing in like that, his most melodramatic display of gathering patience.
“I’ve got you a present,” George says. He holds it out – unwrapped, an old Eddie Cochran record he knows Paul doesn’t have because he’d gone looking for it the last time he visited.
Paul’s expression flickers, briefly interested.
“Well,” he says. “Ta for that.”
He doesn’t move to take it. George stands there, holding it out, for far longer than he should. He lowers his arm.
“Are you not going to ask me in, then? Shall I just get back in the car and drive –”
“Fuck's sake,” Paul says. It’s not really an invitation and he’s already stomped off down the hall but he’s left the door open and if it comes to it George can make himself a cuppa, he knows where everything’s kept.
So he follows Paul into the living room.
“Is anyone else here?” he asks, moving a pile of books to sit down. He sets the Eddie Cochran record on top of them.
“No,” Paul snaps. “And no one's coming. I told you, I left you a message.”
“Well I never heard the bloody message,” George says. “I'm only asking - I thought – ‘Cos we didn’t see you on your birthday – I thought the others would be coming by too.”
Paul turns abruptly away from him. George watches him light a cigarette. He can guess what the message says.
“John’s not coming, then?” he says. “Is he?”
“Fuck off, George.”
“So what, he’s a cunt, what else is new?”
“He’s not, he’s just being –” Paul says. He turns, exhaling smoke. “What?”
“What? I didn’t say anything.”
“No, you’re just looking like that, just say it.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“What you’re thinking, I can see you’re thinking it –”
“Oh you can read minds now? Is there anything the great Paul McCartney can’t do?”
“Just fucking come out and say it!”
“I’m not thinking anything, mate, turns out some of us are still capable of thinking about the world like it doesn’t revolve around you.”
Paul drops heavily down onto the sofa opposite and puts his head in his hands. His cigarette drops ash onto the carpet.
“It smells awful in here,” George says. Paul hunches over further, shifting his head into the crook of his arm. “Can I open the window?”
He takes Paul’s silence as a yes. From the window he can see the garden, the gloomy shapes of its hedges and unkempt flower beds in the gathering dusk. It strikes him that everything is very quiet, for Paul’s house – quieter than quiet. Empty.
He wonders how many people Paul had to ring to cancel after John decided not to show.
“Why isn’t John coming?”
“Why?” Paul says, muffled by his arm. “You want to know what I did so you can add it to the list of reasons you hate me too?”
“Self-pity doesn’t suit you, son,” George says.
Paul scoffs, straightening up to fix George with a filthy look. He really does look terrible – the skin under his eyes bruised purple, unshaven, his hair greasy and in bad need of a trim.
“I’m not stupid,” he snarls. “I’m not so self-absorbed or whatever shite you’ve both been saying about me that I don’t notice –”
“Yeah, you’re not paranoid, either,” George says.
Paul cuts himself off with a strange sound, sucking in a breath too fast. He reaches over to crush his cigarette out into the ashtray balanced precariously on the arm of his chair. He pulls the carton out of his back pocket and flicks the lid open. It’s empty - George can see that from his position at the window and surely Paul saw that when he took it out last, but he stares at it for a moment, apparently bewildered, and then he hurls it across the room.
Or he tries to, the throw is vicious and his expression is horrible but it’s not a heavy box and it doesn’t make it far at all, dropping unimpressively to the carpet on the other side of the coffee table.
George doesn’t laugh. John would have laughed but he would have gotten away with it.
But it stops being funny when Paul takes a deep breath like he’s about to lose his temper properly and starts crying instead. It seems to surprise him as much as it does George.
“Oh – Macca –” he says, embarrassed, but Paul turns sharply away, swiping at the tears streaking down his cheeks with an impatient palm. They don’t stop though and George can’t watch him sob without doing anything – he comes round the table to sit on the sofa next to Paul. “It’s okay,” he says. “It’s okay, I’ve got ciggies. I’ve got a lighter too.”
Paul says,
“I don’t – I don’t know what – What I did –”
“It’s okay,” George says.
“No it’s not –” Paul leans heavily into George for a moment and then seems to think better of it, pulling back. “Christ, I’m sorry – sorry, I don’t know why I’m –”
“It’s okay,” George says. Paul nods. “Do you want a ciggie?”
Paul sniffs, shakes his head.
“I do,” George says. He takes one out and lights it for something to do. Paul glances over at him.
“John smokes Marlboros,” he says.
George frowns.
“I know,” he says. “I know him. We’re in the same band, Macca.”
“Yeah,” Paul agrees. He leans in again suddenly, puts his head on George’s shoulder and stays there, breathing deeply.
George briefly considers shrugging him off but it’s Paul, and this is as close as Paul is likely to get to admitting he needs help. He lets him be, brings the cigarette up to his mouth again and watches the smoke curl up towards the ceiling.
“Y’know John thinks the world of you,” he says, awkwardly. “You’re not like anyone else, for him. This is just – I mean, whatever’s going on between the two of you. It’s just – John being John. Or you being you, I don’t know whose fault it is.”
Paul doesn’t say anything.
“Paulie?”
He peers down. Paul’s eyes are closed; his breathing has evened out. He’s fallen asleep, probably for the first time in days by the look of him.
George wonders if it’s possible to eyeroll oneself into an aneurism. He sits there until he’s smoked his ciggie down to the filter. Then he eases himself free, guides Paul’s head and shoulders down onto a cushion and heaves his legs up onto the sofa.
Paul doesn’t wake up.
George leaves the Marlboros on the table.