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Last night I swear I felt your touch
The clacking of the wooden window blinds wakes Paul. The windows are open and cool blasts of Scottish wind flow over the grimy windowsill. Dawn has started to break and the distant sound of gulls over the sea increases as the sky lightens.
His chest is burned and tight from smoking so many joints and cigarettes yesterday. His head is dry and crisp from drinking himself to sleep. The slight sounds in the room - Linda moving in her sleep, one of the cats leaping softly onto the blankets - seem to be coming from inside a thick glass jar.
He was dreaming when the blinds clacked and woke him. It was an acute dream, nothing like the blurred visions he usually gets when he stupefies himself into sleep. There was a touch; light, gentle and warm on his body. He recognised the touch. It didn’t come from anyone living in this ramshackle farmhouse.
He closes his eyes, remembering the touch. It was as much a feeling as a tangible thing. He was with John in some confused location - a mix of the George V in Paris and his father’s house in Wirral, plus some other rooms in other people's homes over the years. Golden wallpaper, heavy carpet. Streaks of sunlight making their way through closed curtains. A double-bolted door.
John’s voice: whispering but still clearer than any other sound in the universe. Nasal, sharp and strong even in endearment. “C’mere, lay down, my little bullfrog….every good turn deserves an encore now, doesn’t it?” Himself laughing, unable to stay serious for long under John’s hands and his humour. Doing all sorts of things to each other, no doubt, but all he can remember is the touch. Every hair on his forearm is standing up.
He hasn’t felt healthy in he doesn’t know how long. Every morning for more than a year he has woken to a nuclear wasteland. But it’s only in the last few weeks that he has simply been unable to power past that feeling and get out of bed, go do something, make music, even while feeling sick and dirty, more dead than alive. Now he can’t. He can’t. It’s not a matter of willpower or Do It Now (D.I.N.). He cannot move, cannot speak. He is hidden and swamped by a beard. His body is running away with him, losing its vigour, losing even its ability to move. Anytime he feels a spark of life he stoppers it up with drink and more. Because to feel a spark of life is to feel a spark of hope for the return of that touch.
The blinds sway and clatter. The wind is cold but he does not move to close the window. He tries to fall back asleep, to return to the touch. But reality is ripping through him like a gorse fire. He turns in the bed, looks at Linda. Treacherous thoughts fizz through his mind. Who are you? What have you and your family done to me? He cannot perceive her face even though she is right in front of him. It’s like she has turned into a robot. Do I even really know you? Do you really know me? No, you don’t, because how can you? You can’t know everything.
He briefly dozes, dreams of angry faces over a boardroom table, his own included. The blinds clack and he hears the baby crying. Linda gets up and he hears her speaking to Heather, hushing Mary, moving around the kitchen. She knows better than to try and get him up. The dog barks and he hears the voices of the farm workers arriving, the high-pitched warble of the sheep being moved from shed to pen. He chose all of this and none of it is what he wants. This is crazy and baby it’s not like me.
He feels tears on his eyelashes and wonders when he started crying. The dream-touch is still laying on his skin. He can see John’s lovely eyes gazing into his own, not a hint of bitterness or anger. Then they are changing, full of rage and hate, then changing again, dulled by opiates. That’s the worst of all. John’s darling, expressive face reduced to a thousand-yard junkie stare. That’s the stuff that made him watch Paul blankly from the corner of the studio as Paul tried over and over again to reach him through song, He would see a little bit of feeling come back into John’s face, only for John to visit the toilet and return oblivious to everyone and everything except the other junkie in the room. The bond between them a kind of repulsive counter-facsimile of how Paul and John used to move as one, breathing music between them. How could one man change so much?
Paul is still crying but without gasping or losing air. There are just tears falling out, heedless and wasted. Why am I crying? He cannot tell anyone around him why, not really. He fell to bed one day and didn’t get up because the daily performance of the life he is supposed to be living suddenly stopped being second nature. For most of his life he has been able to live two parallel lives, just as he had been taught. Sure, they crossed over into each other from time to time, but never in a way that would get anyone into real trouble. He didn’t even notice the effort it took most of the time. But now, in extremis, the mental load has fallen off the truck and buried him. When he is able to speak, he tells Linda I’ve lost my job. I feel useless. Because that is all he can tell her. She still thinks he is God. She takes the words of his teachings at face value and to heart. She doesn’t see what he really misses. He doesn’t know if it will ever be possible for her to really see him. She would have to be able to know things that she was never built to know.
You think you know me but you haven’t got a clue. That was what John sang to him the first time he brought her to the studio. Paul wasn’t aware at the time. She was just another hustler, pushy and off-putting. He was sorta blind then. What a line that was. Right after he made barking noises and they changed it from a bullfrog to a bulldog. She thought it was silly. Who asked her? At least they weren’t reduced to traipsing around every hip household in London begging for pin money to hire students to cut chairs in half! Robert said later that he wished he’d never given her the time of day. It was hard not to though. She took advantage of English politeness, the kind that is so shocked by these kinds of relentless demands that it gives in, if only to avoid a scene. John thinks she is a genius. Paul has never seen it, and that’s not just the jealousy talking. John is acting like he’s never met an intelligent woman in his life. Paul knows there are plenty that are more intelligent than her. What she has is what one of his aunts calls silly cunning. She’ll connive to the death and people will let her, but she can be talked in and out of anything by the right kind of manipulation. She doesn’t really see, either. She saw enough to make sure that she got Paul out of the picture, and boy did she succeed. But she doesn’t really know the ins and outs (ha!) of it. She can’t let herself know, so she won’t. Look at John there, walking into the glorious sunshine of man-woman future, safe from the past, from his own longings, from Paul. Ah, how can he blame him? Is what Paul himself is doing much different?
You think you know me but you haven’t got a clue. What a thing to say. What about knowing me, John? Or have you forgotten how to feel as well as think? Everyone thinks you’re the great debunker, the honest truth-teller. Yet you’re the one who got too scared to unfold your love. I would have done it. In secret, but together. I would have! I do know you, and you hate me for it.
The one-sided conversation in his mind is the loneliest experience Paul can imagine. Even in the worst days before the break-up, he could still communicate a little bit by looking at John. Now it’s not safe to be around him anymore so Paul must lie in his stinking bed and try to remember his touch.
I could not put my rider aground
Paul is knocked out by a memory of going to Boy Scouts’ camp for the first time. He was only eight. Mike wasn’t old enough to go yet. His parents dropped him off and he was fine, he played with the other boys, did the activities, had dinner around the campfire. But once he was in the tent getting ready for sleep he was overwhelmed by homesickness. He’d never felt it before. It was a great barrelling emptiness, as though the bottom had fallen out of the world. It’s exactly the same as the feeling he now gets every day on waking. There is no hope.
See, when he was a boy, that was the start of the two lives. There was singing around the piano and collecting jamjars from neighbours. There were snapdragons and lavender in the garden and always a crowd at Christmas. There was music and praise for music done well, there was drawing, there were so many friends. But also there was a loneliness that could hardly become known to him, a feeling that if he didn’t find love he’d die, a knowing that the kind of love he wanted wasn’t right. One day his mother was there; the next she was gone and no one was allowed to say a word. The unseemliness of death, the embarrassment of love. He can remember laying in the bunk bed with Mike in his aunt’s house, after she had come to their room to gently beg them to stop weeping, to think of other people. He remembers the cold feeling that came over his heart. I'm alone. It was just like the homesickness. There is no one, no one to care for me, no god or saviour. Mike still cried a little. Paul became dry-eyed and empty-hearted.
He dozes again. More dreams. His father’s house, no one home, just before everything really took off. Seducing John was a many-months effort. He wanted to be seduced, but he was so shy. People don’t understand that about him. When his poor fragile heart is on the line, he is as timid as a hamster. The blue heart of the night, Paul waking him with kisses gentle as rain. Making himself a flowing river that John could float on. The culmination of their weeks of conversations about bohemian life. About how what was between them needed to become spoken and touchable. Kissable. Let me kiss your silver lips. A brief period where the two parallel lives Paul had been living became one. Long gaps between real encounters, but both of them barely attempting to hide their attachment as they rose to fame, much to Brian’s chagrin. Endless teasing and smiling and touching. Becoming a two-headed monster, mocking those millions of fools unfortunate enough not to be them. The days where it seemed like their own passion was inflaming the whole world.
Back to the blue night. He’s already forgotten much about the first time with Linda, but he’ll never forget the feeling of John’s smooth skin under his mouth, his little sounds of waking, the gleam of his eyes in the half-night, their heartbeats loud enough to levitate the empty house. Then John reaching out a beautiful hand and laying it on Paul - The touch. That was the touch that woke him first. NO. It’s too much. He wants to unseat the memory, like a horse bucking off its rider. What can he do with this memory, here now, unwashed and abandoned, living a parallel life with no alternative? Alone in the universe, a windswept comet, barrelling into cold, empty infinity? He found John and the sun came up, and now it has set forever. All the brief comforts of this farm are like an overcast sky; a simulacrum of real light. John is where his mother went, where his other life went, and all that’s left is Put It There and D.I.N.
Paul is frantic with anguish. Well, what’s good for the goose. Robert was always pushing bags of snortable heroin on him. What kind of man is he, really? There’s one under the floorboards, along with countless other pill bottles and bags. He’s spent the last three years hiding pocketfuls of drugs from various women. Why should now be any different? He lies half out of the bed, his head hanging towards the floor as he pries up the floorboard. It comes fairly easily, he should probably nail it down whenever he is next able to move. He roots around among the pill bottles. The blood is going to his upside down head and he is beginning to feel faint. He hasn’t eaten much in a while. No appetite. It doesn’t seem to be making him any slimmer.
He hauls the bag out, looks back to the bedroom door. Household noises from downstairs. Linda keeps Heather away from him these days. Somewhere, a thousand layers of grief deep, he feels guilt. He pulls out a fingerful of brown stuff, brings it quickly to his nose, and snorts. That was a large dose. That’ll do it. Can’t be fucked down by these memories anymore. I guess this is why you do it, John. He pushes the bag back, replaces the floorboard, pulls himself back into the bed. The numbness is beginning to spread from his toes up. He doesn’t like that part, losing feeling in his extremities. It feels like he’s dying. Ah well, right now, would that be so bad?
love is the king of the beasts (and when it gets hungry it must kill to eat)
The blinds are still clacking. The wind sounds different, it sounds like evening. Paul cannot see whether it’s dark or not because his face is pressed into the pillow. He knows time has passed but he can’t tell how much. Did he sleep? It’s not really sleep, what heroin puts you into. More a kind of floating. Like you’re back in the womb. It should feel good but the proximity of what he is trying to avoid curdles the edges of the nod.
He can’t really breathe. He should move. He will move. He will. The blinds are clacking, a gull is screaming. He is aware of his arms and legs, pins and needles. He’ll move now. Yes. He is hazed with heavy light that is holding him down. Is it really necessary to move? What’s left out there, in the breathing world? Yes, there’s a baby. Somewhere deep in the groggy halls of his psyche he is aware that the baby matters. And not just as something he should live for. But he can’t seem to get that message to his head, to raise it from the sour-smelling pillowcase. Is it worth staying alive for Linda? She has devoted herself to him utterly because that’s what he asked of her. She pays double thrall; to him and to the father and brother she has redeemed herself to by bringing himself to them. She will not leave but maybe that’s because she can’t? Who is she, really? Can he really tell himself that she would have ever looked twice at him if he wasn’t famous? Would have pursued him across oceans, used her daughter as part of the package, if he was just some unlooked-at man living a double life in a provincial city? Who can he trust, really? He thought he could trust her and her family and maybe he can, but why have they contributed to leaving him like this? Why has everyone worked their damndest to break him and John apart? Ah well, he knows why. It was untenable. Not so much for them, but for the world. It has been exploded, partly by things we have done and partly by others. Ah, yes, Paul has his own part of it all as well. He couldn’t tell from one day to the next how he’d be feeling - loving, greedy, vengeful, sly, desperate. And the feelings made things happen, and everything that happened made it all the more broken. Love like a lion, leaping on soft prey and destroying it.
One day soon, all this will matter again: Linda, the baby, the child, the farm, the fixed one-track life that he must live for his own safety. He will get there. He just needs to lift his head from the pillow first. Lift it. Lift it. Still no movement. Air disappearing, his lungs losing it all. Pleasant, light headed feeling. Yellow and white dots behind his eyelids. The gulls sounding fainter. Like the nod. Maybe it’s better not to move. This would be easy. Could even look like an accident. Awful for others, but less so than a rope and a kicked chair. Then, the intent can’t be mistaken. This is just….a sleep that went too far. When he was an adolescent he used to think that sometimes. How nice it would be to simply not wake up. Stay in a blurred, indistinct dream for as long as possible before it is overtaken by blessed blankness. What’s the use in seeing out the whole sorry story to the end?
An animal panic seizes him when his body starts to lose feeling. His head jerks up involuntarily with a gasp. His eyes open, his vision is covered in black spots. It is dark. He turns his head to the left. Linda has left a sandwich on the bedside table. He cannot eat it, but he drops his head to the side, twisting his stiff neck, and looks at the grained, wholesome bread. Is that not love? Keeping me alive? When did we ever bring each other food, Johnny? Instead, always battling. I brought my girlfriend to Paris, you threw handfuls of francs at an invited roomful of whores. You brought your wife to New York, I ignored you in the corridors and on stage until you came frantic to me in Miami. You told me that if I didn’t take acid you couldn’t know me anymore. As if that was even possible! I took it with people I didn’t care about, just to show you. You ran away to the golf courses like the little conformist you really are, and blamed me. I showed off, again and again, everything I was learning without you. I dreamed the perfect song and you punished me for it again and again even though you loved it as much as you love me. I let you know that I can do that, again and again, and ignored you as you rotted among the faux-Tudor beams, showed off how I could make your son love me more than you. Ah, yes, we loved each other, Johnny, but did we ever really say it? Did we ever bring each other a sandwich? Is that not love, too? Love like my mother gave me? I’ll do it now, I’ll bring you a sandwich and I’ll dream you a song, I can still do it. Maybe you will too? Maybe the fire of my dream will burn through your horrible haze, the kind of haze that would make you sell your own children to keep it going. Listen, I’m falling asleep again - can you hear me? Can you feel me?
it held all the answers, like hands laid on
He falls asleep lying on his back, the remainder of the nod slowly working its way out of his body. Halfway through his sleep, his dreams become real again, tastable, touchable, hearable. He dreams it. It’s happened again. It’s the answer, the song that will fix it, get through where lead me to your door and please believe me I’d hate to miss the train and I’ll never make it alone couldn’t, as obvious as they are. He wakes again, abruptly. Linda has got into bed, there is a fly on the uneaten sandwich. He can hear the song in his head, almost audible through a muggy haze. He rolls over suddenly, the fastest motion he has made in days, and pulls open the other bedside table. A receipt, a pencil. He must get it down. The tune is vague, it’s not like last time where the music fell out in one perfect sequence. But it won’t be hard to remember. He writes some chords: A minor, C, D, something like that. The words are what’s important this time. Sometimes getting the words is like mining, drilling through layers and layers of dead stone to find a seam of gold. Not this time. This hasn’t happened since All My Loving. He writes and writes, barely a space between the words, one long run-on sentence but he can see the rhythm.
The burst of energy has dissipated. He finishes writing and falls back down. Linda shifts, talks in her sleep. He thinks he can hear the baby fussing but he’s not sure. There is still some nod left in him and it blacks him out till morning.
The familiar homesick feeling on waking; the bottom fallen out of the world. But no, he remembers - the song. He rolls again, sees the receipt and the pencil. It’s real. The blinds clack with a new identical daily breeze, the maddeningly repetitive gulls keep calling. A patch of sky is lightening, the small whitethorn tree near the window is full of sparrows. He reaches for the receipt, reads.
eid ma clack shaw
It’s gibberish. No real words, no real language. Just sounds and letters, made up words, nothing real to hang on to. Just whatever his foolish hand took out of his stupefied brain. Nothing he can communicate, nothing that will finally, finally say what he really means. The gibberish words are the other life-track, eroding away and leaving only the farm and the babies, the happenings and the talk shows. Nothing else remains.
Paul looks again at the receipt, tries to see meaning. There is none. It means nothing at all.