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Los Angeles 1997
In 1997 he had almost knocked on her door. Almost. He had driven on the edge of the speed limit to her house, sat in the car unable to take his hands from the wheel and ultimately decided against ruining her life for a second time. The night previous he had wrestled with the whole idea before grief had returned and overcome him, visiting like a half-lucid dream. When he looked at the clock and it was two in the morning he couldn’t remember exactly why he had been crying for the past hour. Julia had shown him a rough cut of the documentary and reinforced her Mother’s wish that he reach out to Daisy again. He didn’t like that but had hidden it from his daughter who was still tangling with her own grief in a different way; embracing the past to create a future. The truth was he felt like those dying wishes had made the entire struggle of his life seem like the pathetic compromise he had spent years desperately convincing himself it wasn’t, because if it wasn’t a compromise if it wasn’t what he had told himself every time she released a new record or was on the front cover of a magazine, then it was for fucking nothing, and he couldn’t face that. This was bad enough. So the idea of Camila waving her hand and saying that he had her permission to go after Daisy felt…..disrespectful. Not to him, she had long accepted that his heart had something buried deep that often resurfaced, bobbing up when songs came on the radio, but instead disrespectful to Daisy, implying that all he had to do was turn up at her door. He didn’t like that, so he took his time and pondered what to do with his life, going on morning long runs and heading to staid afternoon meetings, keeping in touch with Graham and Julia who kept encouraging him to take the step. Julia had brightened when he had asked her about Daisy’s life, she had a daughter, he didn’t ask who the father was because he found himself becoming more jealous of the men who had gained a place for themselves with her and he didn’t like being jealous, he had enough shit to package and discuss with therapists without adding that to the pile.
The night before the pointless drive, he had watched the documentary again. The part where Daisy said she had been in love but not like it had been with him switched on the waterworks again, he sobbed and cursed himself for being so stupid. Then Teddy came back from the dead in old interviews and that set him off again and he wondered if he would ever go a full week without crying. His therapist had asked him what the problem was with tears but he knew he didn’t think clearly when he was like that and was liable to make bad decisions based purely on doing anything that would stop that feeling. She had also asked him why he wouldn’t want to see Daisy but he didn’t know, he tried but he didn’t know, or at the very least couldn’t articulate it. So when he sat in the car and tore what was left of his heart into ribbons, he wasn’t doing it for himself. He had forced the decision on Daisy in Chicago because he didn’t have the bravery or sobriety to do it, and he could not in all conscience put her through something like that again - he had to make the choice now. She had a daughter and a different life. When Julia had said “You could always maybe just start by being friends, Dad?” he had smiled but inside knew that was impossible. Daisy Jones had done something to his heart that no hourglass could repair, it was shrapnel that could move at any second and end it all. You lived with it, did your best not to antagonise it and tried to forget about the war that put it there in the first place.
She had given his daughter her address and number to pass on, which made it even worse, that she was still there, trapped in irons by him and their memories. He dared not think how that first year had been for her, it would scald him and he could only take so many wounds before one became fatal.
He secretly felt that the documentary was still wrong, everything again had happened because Camila had wanted it, in fact, it had all started when Camila sat methodically going through the keepsakes and forever boxes and Julia had started asking questions. He had left the room, unable to bear the past or the future. He wasn’t proud of the fact that he often resented his dead wife's actions, it made him a more dislikeable bastard of a man than he thought he could actually be with effort.
In the end, he made his decision and he wasn’t able to even open the car door, just twisted the key and drove home, telling himself that maybe one day there would be a way to get through this. Daisy didn’t need his grief in her life, she didn’t need him taking her away from the career she had worked hard to rebuild. He wouldn’t be selfish anymore. If she called him or they bumped into each other then he would deal with it then.
When he returned home and dropped the keys in the bowl that said ‘HOME’, Julia realised what had happened and just gave him a hug. He couldn’t feel anything. No grief, no love, no sadness; nothing. He felt like the run-out groove of a record with nothing left except static.
London 2004
He had been in London for nearly five years, it often surprised him when he least expected it, an American in self-imposed exile who spent his days in the plush reading rooms of libraries looking through old newspapers and magazines. Julia had moved to France in 1998, the success of the documentary meant new opportunities and she had tumbled into a mad love with a director called Patrick who was from a suburb in Paris. Billy wasn’t altogether happy when she had casually thrown in her College plans and bought a one-way plane ticket, an unholy argument at dinner evolved into a cloudburst of feelings he never knew she kept. She forced him to look into a fairly ugly mirror once she had scrubbed some of the dirt off.
You blame everybody else for everything that goes wrong but pretend you blame yourself.
You had all sorts of chances in life, you gave up everything because you couldn’t face anything.
Even when you get a second chance you fucked it up and ran away.
You wouldn’t even tell me the truth about anything, I had to ask your fucking bandmates to find things out.
You and Mom hid everything from me, not because you should have but because you couldn’t fucking face it.
You loved Daisy Jones and treated her like shit.
He sat and watched the previous three years of sickness, diagnosis and grief bleed out onto the table, let her vent everything, he recognised the triggers that opened the faucet.
When she finished and erupted into breathtaking sobs he just moved round the table and held her, smelling the coconut from her hair as he kissed her head and she just said “I’m sorry Dad,” over and over.
He had simply told her he would support her in whatever she wanted to do, and he did. A year later she tore her heart out on the phone to him, betrayed and desolate and still trapped in love. He had got the first plane across, landed in London and met her at St Pancras train station. He wasn’t expecting Karen to be there but she was, giving him a little smile and wave before grabbing him into a hug.
Karen Sirko, Aunt Karen, had been looking out for his daughter and he hadn’t even known about it. Karen was also about to go on tour so handed over a set of keys for them to stay for Christmas and New Year. She made no judgements on the past, there were no discussions on anything to do with the band or the documentary. Graham had never mentioned what had happened between them and he was in no position to judge so they just relapsed into 1975 and it was one-liners and arguments about who was the best keyboard player of all time.
After three months Julia found work in London and he decided to stay, selling off assets that an accountant had burrowed away for a rainy day. Well, it had been pouring and now he wanted shelter. He bought a house, a freehold Georgian detached two-story near Regents Park, which cost something akin to NASA’s annual budget and needed a lot of work, so he set to it with relish. A year later he was comfortable in his home and Julia was securing funding in Hollywood for her next film, leaving him on his own again. A box arrived, stamped so much he couldn’t tell which country it had originated in on a cold January from LA with a bland apologetic legal note attached informing that this had been left for him and due to a clerical error it had sat in a dark warehouse for nearly twenty years. It was a box full of letters and memorabilia from the estate of Teddy Price. Signed acetates, contracts, photos, golden-hearted letters to lovers and biting letters to artists. Teddy who was a forgotten figure those days came back to life that day for Billy. For once the dust settled and he just marvelled that he had known the man and been allowed into his life. He found a letter Teddy had sent to another producer about The Six before Daisy arrived and he did wobble at that.
“I don’t know why but something about this band man, there’s something there. And the kid that fronts them, Billy, has it in spades. He’s honest and driven and wants the best for everyone. I really like him, I think he can do great things. I’m on my last chance here now Bobby, everything that can go wrong has gone wrong. I could sign them but if it goes bad then I’m done.”
There are letters to and from Daisy that stops his breath in its tracks just looking at the envelope and the handwriting. He puts them to one side, unsure what to do with them. He eventually opens one, from late 1982 that Teddy had written late at night a brief half a page.
“You know Daisy, I often wonder if I did the right thing putting you together with Billy, you produced such good work and made each other better but at what cost to both of you? I know what it did to you, but you dealt with it like you dealt with everything. Like you would. You’re going to be a great Mother, don’t doubt yourself, I’ll always be here for you, just pick up the phone…”
That fucking hurt.
The next morning on a run he decided to do something about that lack of recognition for Teddy and decided to write something about him, maybe an article to get it published somewhere. He started with low hopes and a vision of a thousand words but as ever once he got the bit between his teeth he couldn’t stop. He bought a laptop and researched and emailed and by April he had decided to find out as much as he could about the man who changed his life. What he found stunned him.
An ex-wife Billy never knew existed, a child that didn’t survive influenza and three months in jail for assault. He realises that everyone has things they sprint from. There are affairs, there is low muttered talk of payola, there are the arguments and the disagreements and the artists who hated his guts. There is also plenty of beauty, the music, the money he suitcased off to civil rights causes, the love and the sorrow he endured. Billy spends a full week writing a ten thousand-word essay on Teddy’s place and importance in American music and it is printed in a monthly London music magazine. Two months later he is standing bewildered on a Soho street having agreed on a large advance to write a biography.
He works sixteen-hour days, devouring everything. He flies to Memphis and then spends a month back in LA, rooting through paperwork and records offices. At some point, he realises he hasn’t played a musical instrument for a year. He struggles mightily with the chapter on his own devastation, a human earthquake that tilted the man’s life into a heart attack and a path he couldn’t stop walking. He writes a section on Daisy and him in the chapel after the heart attack and almost picks up the phone but Graham calls anyway and he sees it as a sign.
He spends happy days in studios listening to master tapes and interviewing engineers and other producers who all cement his view that Teddy was a decent human being with good deeds in his ledger and a ferocious talent.
By the time the book is printed to great reviews, he is mentally and physically exhausted and Julia is engaged to be married to a civil rights lawyer from Chicago and he prays they won’t get married there. Warren phones in the new year to let him know that one of their mutual friends has passed and tells him he loved the book. So did Daisy.
He picks up his guitar again.
London 2008
He has been seeing Patricia, an actress who is a year younger, full of life and finds his quietness refreshing from the nightly shouting matches she has with actors on stage at the National Theatre. He watches her on stage and wonders at the ability to shed skin and become someone else, she roars her anguish and projects her voice to the back of the place and every word and action is spine-tingling. He forgets it’s her for the last half hour and showers her with praise when she kisses him at the stage door. They walk arm in arm through the blackout sky beside the river, laughing at each other’s stories and how he still gets confused by measurements and weights, ending up with a mail sack full of freshly ground coffee from the Algerian Coffee store in Soho instead of a small bag. Karen had set him up with some of her friends since he had emigrated and he had spent some interesting nights remembering what it was like to claw clothes off and make a woman smile. At first, he was mildly terrified but the guilt didn’t exist and so he flung himself with full force into it, spending weekends at romantic boltholes and a weekend in Capri with a media executive called Janice who bewildered him when she asked him to tie her up. After two years of casual sex, he had realised that his entire love life before London had been set in two positions, three if you counted the earliest fully clothed fumbles up against a wall in freezing Pittsburgh. He found himself wondering if life with Daisy would have been as thrilling as this, clothes disappearing at the raising of an eyebrow. Long Sundays in bed. No matter how much he hid it the loss of something he never had still twisted in his ribs from time to time.
She had married again, Daisy. Some film producer who was on a hot streak. He had read about it in a magazine, catching the picture first, the kiss on the beach. Her daughter was the flower girl, a mirror image of Daisy. Warren, Lisa and Karen laughing away at the happiness on show. He had felt some relief at the fact it was now completely out of his hands and that she, yet again, had made a decision that had settled it. And yet that night as he folded Patricia gently in his arms he closed his eyes and thought of Daisy, feeling ashamed and disgusted with himself afterwards.
Patricia sat with her legs over him one night on his couch, annotating a script when that fucking documentary came on the TV. Perhaps if he had bothered checking his phone or his laptop something would have alerted him to it, but he hated the technology with a passion. He had gone to sit up and grabbed the remote but Patricia held his arm and said, “I want to see it!” She didn’t know much about that part of his life.
Two hours later she did. The documentary and then a half-hour set he had no memory of recording for a TV channel in the UK. His brain rebelled about half an hour into the entire thing, refusing to filter anything out, he just sat, slack-jawed unable to forgive anybody involved in it. Even after thirty years, the whole thing made him feel like he was drunk and on a train that was going way too fast around a corner.
After it finished he felt like he needed a drink. Patricia looked at him softly, full of something that was doing a good impression of pity.
“I didn’t know,” she said sweetly.
“Know what?”
“That you were in that situation.” She is frowning, incredulous that he doesn’t know what she is talking about. She reminds him of Daisy calling him a fucking liar.
“I wasn’t in a situation Patricia. It was a band that went wrong. We were in a bad place.”
“Billy,” she says and rubs his arm. “You were clearly in love with her. You would have to be blind not to see it.”
“I loved my wife.”
“Yes. But you loved her as well. And she certainly loved you.”
He is awake all night until the birds start singing.
London 2010
He had met Karen and her new boyfriend Rory in a Spanish restaurant in Chelsea. Rory was a film director who, as far as Billy could tell, made films that were both wildly popular and critically acclaimed. When he had mentioned it at dinner, saying it was the most difficult thing to do and that he could only really think of the Beatles who had managed it musically, Rory blushed and mentioned he was making a film set in Memphis in 1969 and that he was finding it a ballache trying to get clearance for the music so he was getting new music written.
Half an hour later, Billy was hired as musical director.
As ever he threw his heart and soul into it. He ventured into studios again like he was reaching one of the poles, with a month of supplies, giant balls and a magnitude of preparation. The technology terrified him so he went analogue, moving into Toerag for the first demos. It was an old Abbey Road EMI console and he would just push the faders up even if there was no music, feeling the history and the potential.
The schedule was watertight, he wanted it to be authentic. Everything was live. He wrote six of the songs, the rest were scattered out which he didn’t like. One was written by Karen which was good but needed some work to make it feel suitably retro and one was still nowhere to be seen on the slate and he complained to the film producer, a weed of a man who folded over everything. So he created and arranged and enjoyed working with the young engineers who pumped him for information on old techniques and how they got the drum sound on Aurora.
After a month the song came in and he almost vomited. On the lead sheet at the top, typed in Times New Roman Bold:
Aftermath (D.Jones)
He phoned Karen.
“Hello there William. Do you need a kidney yet?”
“Karen. What the FUCK. You make me produce a song she has written?”
Karen sighed. “The world doesn’t revolve around you Billy. Everybody has moved on.”
“It’s…..Karen…..it’s”
“It’s what Billy? Hmm?”
“You could have fucking warned me.”
“It was in an email Billy. You really should start fucking reading them when you still have your eyesight.”
“I’ve got the laptop open here Karen and there’s no fucking mention of….oh.”
“Oh. I wonder what else you’ve missed?”
By the time he finds the details in something sent a month ago, Simone Jackson has turned up to sing on her day off from a tour. She regards him cooly. He feels like he’s going to be sitting naked in the room and then wake up.
“Billy Dunne. My God, you haven’t changed much.”
The musicians talk through the song and round the piano playing through the sheet music. Billy feels his mouth go dry. Simone pulls him close.
“We’re not going to talk about it. We’re here to do this. Agreed?” He nods. It’s all he can do. “You’re looking good Billy. London agrees with you.”
He works his fucking ass off on it, making it a personal mission in life to make this the best thing heard this year. He treats it like he treated Aurora, with a ruthless devotion, changing a chord sequence round and arranging the instruments into something beautiful. Simone sings well but he pushes her hard, she starts biting back but he smooths it over using a Teddy line and she laughs, a full head-back tilted laugh and says, “OK hard ass,” and goes for it. The engineers clap after it. She gives him a hug after it and whispers, “She’s good. She’s good.” and he holds her for a full minute.
“I’m glad.”
He goes home and writes one more song, a six-verse love letter called ‘Margaret’ to someone he never had, full of apology and unrequited love. He sings it live in a single take in the studio on the last day of recording, just him and his old acoustic. It plays over the end credits of the film and when he watches it in the dark, flickering beauty of the London Victorian cinema he can hear Karen in the seat beside him crying.
London 2014
He’s not sure why he decides to do it but he does. Julia calls him from Toronto, pleasantly drunk and not realising it’s the middle of the night and tells him she’s just been to see Daisy play live. He lets her evangelise about it, tells her she plays three six songs and mentions the work he did on the song that got her an Oscar, dedicating No Words to him and the rest of the band. The next afternoon when he checks his phone there’s a message from Julia,
“Sorry, Dad.”
Then ten minutes later.
“But it was fucking great.”
She plays a BBC special at the Royal Albert Hall in September and he pulls strings to get a ticket up in the Gods. He goes to his favourite pizza place beforehand, gets off the subway three stops before and walks the rest of the way, freshly shaved, skip cap pulled down low.
Nobody recognises him. He feels like he’s waiting for a doctor to tell him he has three months left. There is no support act and when the band comes out without her he can feel his heart rate soar to levels he hasn’t felt since he held her in a shower in Miami.
When she walks out the cheer is unbelievable. When she starts to sing a woman in the row in front of him puts her hands to her mouth and mumbles ‘ohmygodohmygodohmygod’.
She dedicates songs to her daughter. To her husband, the prick who had left her two years ago very publically. She plays two for Teddy. Then it comes. She talks around it in small words, taking her time. He’s on the edge of his seat, hands grabbing at the jeans at the back of his knees.
“I wrote this at a very difficult period in my life. We’ve all had difficult periods in our lives, right?”
The crowd murmurs. It’s quiet. Someone shouts “We love you, Daisy!”
“Anyway, I wrote this for someone very special who changed my life. This is called ‘It Was Always You’”
It’s a different arrangement. She sits at a piano and plays it. You can hear a pin drop. When she starts singing he doesn’t know if he can hold it together. When she comes out for the last encore, her voice breaks, says she wants to play something she has never played and then she plays ‘Margaret’ and he sits enthralled by her, amazed and delighted that he had her in his life even for a short period. It was more than most people could say for a lifetime. He feels pride in their achievements way beyond anything other than Julia.
He goes home before the end, walking the entire way, smelling Autumn and grateful he is in the same city as her. She feels close.
London August 2018
Billy jogs slowly around the outer edges of the park path, ignoring the cyclist and avoiding the dogs running free. It was a glorious morning, that was the one thing he had missed from America, the weather. The winters and autumns here were crisp brutal affairs and it would sometimes go weeks just dreary rain and howling winds but he had grown into it. He had tried to grow into things, but he found it very difficult. Now at his age with more pains in his joints and less breath in him, he had found a life that was settled and content in its solitude.
He gets home and steps straight into the shower, dries off and presses the button on the coffee machine Julia bought him for Christmas. His phone is out of charge so he plugs it in and as soon as it hits five percent it buzzes incessantly.
Twenty missed calls from Graham. Something in him falls over, he thinks of his nephew and niece. He tries to phone but it goes to voicemail and while he’s leaving a message the phone is buzzing with other messages. He starts to panic. The names pop up one after the other, all missed calls and he doesn’t know how to stop the messages before he can read them.
Karen Keys
Jules
Jules
Jules
PittsburghOnThree
PittsburghOnThree
Karen Keys
Graham
Graham
Graham
Unknown Number
Unknown Number
Patty
Jules
Jules
Jules
Jules
Simone J
It’s when he sees Simone’s name that he knows. He knows .
The texts start to ping in after the calls. He just sees words as they overtake each other and he’s crying, he’s crying and he can’t stop and he’s on the fucking floor with his back against the fridge.
‘Sorry…..Billy will you pick up the fucking phone….Billy man you need to call me back are you alright……Dad, please don’t turn on the TV, just call me back……Billy no one can get a hold of you….I’m coming over if you don’t pick up the fucking phone Billy……Dad, can you call me back, please? Don’t do anything stupid Dad. We love you. Xxx, Billy i know we haven’t spoken for a while but I’m sorry….DAD PHONE ME NOW….’
Then the one that does it pops in.
‘It’s Simone. Bad news. Daisy passed away last night. I’m sorry. We’re all in total shock.’
He manages to text Julia to tell her he’s alright and that he’ll be in touch. Tells her to let everybody know. She just sends him back a kiss. He drops the phone hard to the floor and he’s staring at the ceiling, thinking about her. Dead. It’s impossible . Fucking impossible. He doesn’t know how long he sits there but Karen turns up when it’s dark banging on the door threatening all sorts of mayhem if he doesn’t let her in. They hold each other until his arms go numb. He takes nothing in, nothing, he feels like he’s undergone some form of shock therapy. He tries to compartmentalise it and compares it to Teddy, to his Mother, to Camila then thinks what kind of scumbag compares deaths? Then he gives himself a break and compares it.
It feels nothing like it. It feels like his insides have been rearranged and he’s lost the ability to speak. Julia phones Karen and demands to speak to him and he mumbles numbly. They order food, eat nothing and try to ignore the tabloid photographers that somehow seem to have found his fucking house. Karen puts the television on but it’s on the news loop with pictures and videos and he begs her to turn it off. The radio is playing her music nonstop and so that goes off. They sit in the dark and Karen falls asleep in his arms on the couch.
They fly to LA for the ceremony. Daisy’s two kids are organising. The plane hits a bank of turbulence on the approach and drops thirty feet and quite frankly he wouldn’t give a fuck if it just fell straight down. Warren and Julia wrap them in bear hugs when they pick them up and again there are fucking photographers. Billy throws a punch but gets pulled away. He eyeballs the bar on the way past, lights his first cigarette in five years and Julia looks at him with some wearying pity and fear that makes him throw it out of the car window.
The ceremony itself is some hippy weirdness that makes Billy happy because it reminds him of her. They wander to the private garden at the back of Daisy’s house, a giant Malibu pad facing the sea. Graham wanders in red-eyed and crying. Even Eddie turns up and hugs everyone. They all stand in the front row holding onto each other like lost children. Daisy’s kids deliver eulogies that are tales of a woman he doesn’t recognise. Baking cookies, going to sports days. Postponing sessions for proms and appointments for school boards.
Then they talk about the band, about them. How she would talk to them about her life and how proud she was of everything.
He can’t deal with it and makes to leave but Simone appears next to him and links her arm through his, giving him the strength to stay.
It ends and he looks to the California sky, letting in the familiar smell. He hugs everyone goodbye, even Eddie, and asks Jules to call him a cab. Daisy’s daughter grabs him by the arm and takes him aside, tells him that she spoke of him often and lovingly, that he and Teddy were the most important people young Daisy had met. He can’t speak and she laughs, saying that her Mother had said if Billy Dunne wasn’t crying at her funeral then she would come back and die again until he did. He laughs his ass off.
She hands him a memory card.
“She left this for you when she found out how long she had. It’s a video.”
Later he sits in his hotel room on the edge of the bed watching Daisy Jones tell him she had always loved him.