The Smile of a Ghost

At first, Lol had thought, He’s too young.

Too young to know the background. Too young to understand how difficult it had been to get anywhere in the 1980s with music that was soft and breathy and woven into a mesh of acoustic guitars, when everything else was shiny and synthesized and nobody had heard of Nick Drake, and the Beatles were archaeology.

Jack Fine sat on the shorter stepladder, his microphone between his knees, wired to a mini-disc recorder in his jacket pocket. He had floppy hair and sulky lips and looked like he could be about nineteen. But then so did a lot of blokes that Lol learned later were in their mid-twenties. A sign of age, but he tried not to worry about this any more. And it became clear that Jack Fine did know the background. Maybe too much of it.

‘So, as I understand it, Lol, this goes back to when this other guy in the band — Karl Windling? — was hot for this groupie, and he roped you in to keep her mate occupied. And they were both under-age, and you got stitched up?’

‘I was eighteen,’ Lol said patiently. ‘I was very naive.’

‘But you were the one who finished up getting arrested and taking the rap—’

‘For something that never even happened.’

Oh God, how many times was he going to have to tell this wretched story? Even Karl Windling was history — dead in a road accident two years ago.

‘Leaving you with a police record,’ Jack said.

Lol nodding wearily. ‘And then my parents… they were tied into this fundamentalist religious sect, and they disowned me. And everything went downhill from there. Got the wrong kind of help, cracked up, wound up in a psychiatric hospital, and… Listen… Jack… I’m not trying to cover anything up or tell you your job or anything, but would it be possible to maybe not go into all this again?’

‘Lol…’ Jack leaned over his mike, his fair hair falling over his forehead and covering up one eye. ‘Look, man, OK, I can gloss over it. I can deal with it in, like, a couple of paragraphs? It’s just that you seem to be putting this experience into a few of the songs on the album?’

Lol sighed. No way round this.

‘The song “Heavy Medication Day”,’ Jack said. ‘The one that goes, “Someone’s got to pay, now Dr Gascoigne’s on his way.” What’s that about?’

‘It was just a particular doctor who was — how can I put this? — liberal with the medication. Anything for a quiet life. And probably so people wouldn’t know what he got up to on the side.’

‘Go on.’

‘Uh-huh.’ Lol shook his head. ‘He knows and I know, and all the rest is… just a song.’

‘There’s real anger in that song, though, isn’t there? Which is unusual for you — it’s usually more sort of resigned. It’s as if this guy did something really bad to you.’

‘Not to me personally.’

‘So, what—?’

‘Can we leave this one, Jack?’

‘Seems to me this whole album is about your journey, through the system… back into the light, kind of thing,’ Jack said. ‘Like an exorcism.’

‘Not exactly the word I’d use.’

Jack grinned, like maybe he knew about Merrily. He couldn’t know.

‘So how did you wind up out here in the sticks?’

‘Well, I… came here originally with a woman. She eventually went off with someone else. And then, um…’ Lol leaned back on his sofa and paused for a few seconds while he worked out what it was best to leave out — like him leaving the village and then coming back, because of Merrily. ‘… Then I met Prof Levin, just as he was setting up his studio on the other side of the county. And I’ve been working there, helping Prof out, doing a bit of session stuff. And then Prof kind of persuaded me to do the album. So I owe it all to him, really.’

Lol got out a copy of the CD and put it on the boombox, and they sat there, amid the paint cans and the dust sheets, discussing the songs and people who’d played on the tracks.

‘Including Simon St John on bass and cello,’ Jack said. ‘That’s a real name from the past. And he’s a vicar now, right?’

‘He’s been a vicar for years.’

‘Cool.’

‘Yeah, he’s cool.’

‘But you’re nothing to do with the Church…’

‘Oh no.’

‘’Cause, like, your parents…’

‘It can put you off, when your parents are… extremists.’

A lorry full of gravel went clanging down Church Street, and Jack was silent for a moment, seemed to be thinking what else he could ask.

‘How long have you been in music-writing?’ Lol asked.

‘Oh, not long. My old man — he publishes specialist magazines now, but he used to be a newspaper reporter when he was young. But my grandad thought this was a really disreputable thing to be and he tried to persuade him to pack it in and get into the management side. My old man’s really encouraged me to go into cutting-edge journalism. Go for it, you know? Don’t look back.’

‘Music’s, er, cutting edge?’

‘I do other stuff. Anything that comes up, really. Anyway, Lol… I mean, you were really fucked up for a long time, weren’t you? It was like with Nick Drake — how long’s he been dead now, thirty years? I mean, like him you couldn’t cut it on stage, face an audience.’

‘I identified a lot with Nick Drake, from the beginning. Hence the name of the band, Hazey Jane.’

‘Huh?’

‘The Nick Drake song, “Hazey Jane”?’

‘Oh yeah, sure. Sorry, I thought you meant… So like, how did you get over that? ’Cause you did this amazing comeback gig… at the Courtyard in Hereford?’

Lol told Jack about all the help he’d had from Moira Cairns, folk-rock goddess, who happened to have been recording at Prof’s. How Moira had literally pushed him out in front of that audience. Scary? Oh yeah, cold-sweat situation. All those lights, all those faces.

‘And you’re still doing a few gigs as support for Moira, right? But you and her…?’

Jack moved his hands around.

‘Oh no,’ Lol said. ‘Nothing like that.’

‘But you’re with somebody?’

‘No, I live alone. A rural idyll.’

‘Right,’ Jack said. ‘Right.’

Still waiting for Eirion, Jane saw Lol and the guy from Q come out of the front door of Lucy’s house and walk up the street to the village centre. They seemed to be getting on OK. She didn’t know why she felt so responsible for Lol. He was just that kind of guy — vulnerable.

The journalist was a surprise. He didn’t look any older than Eirion, for God’s sake. He had a camera with him — a Nikon, digital-looking. Doing his own pictures, too. Jane slid behind one of the thick oak supports of the old market hall as they came onto the square. A few shoppers and tourists were glancing at them by now, and Jane saw that Lol was looking a bit unhappy.

‘’Course I won’t say where it is,’ the Q guy said.

‘Only the market hall’s fairly well known,’ Lol said. ‘Be a give away.’

‘No problem — we’ll face you the other way. Better for the light, too.’

The guy lined Lol up on the edge of the square, with the church in the background and people walking past, and Jane wondered if he was trying to simulate one of the famous black and white street-scene pictures taken for Nick Drake’s first album, Five Leaves Left.

And she wondered, not for the first time, if that was a good thing. Nick Drake’s music was wonderful but he surely represented the old Lol. He had, after all, killed himself with an overdose of antidepressants.

Jane saw Eirion’s car arrive — little grey Peugeot with the CYM sticker, identifying him as a Welshman abroad. Eirion drove slowly around the square to park in front of the vicarage gate, and Jane stopped herself from