Sad. Not some rich, mystical experience, just another bogstandard memory of the womb.
…
Lol gripped the top rail of the gate until his hands hurt. Prof was exaggerating, of course. His material wasn’t that strong.
Anyway, Lol was too long out of it. The most he’d done in years had been occasional demos, for the purpose of flogging a few songs to better-known artists – makeweight stuff for albums, nothing special. It was an income- trickle but it wasn’t a career, it wasn’t a life, and he thought he’d accepted the reality of that a long time ago.
Back in January, he’d enrolled on this course for trainee psychotherapists, the only one he could find still with any available places, up in Wolverhampton. It made a surreal kind of sense to Lol, though he didn’t share the irony of it with any of the other students, certainly not with the tutors.
Without actually saying
‘I can’t believe you waste your time on this! You want to take money for persuading the gullible to remember how they were abused by their daddies, then they go home and slash their wrists? It’s like I say to Simon: you’re just being a vicar for
Of course, Prof knew all about Lol’s history on the other side of psychiatry, brought about by early exposure to the music business – the blurred fairground ride ending in half-lit caverns with drifting, white-coated ghosts and gliding trolleys, syringes, pills.
Medication: the stripped-down NHS was a sick system, drug-dependent. It made sense to Lol that he should be using his own experience to help keep other vulnerable people
Prof knew all about this, just didn’t accept the logic.
‘Listen to me, boy, I have strong contacts these days… people who trust me, who tend to act on what I say, and I’m telling you, you gotta take these songs into the market place.’
‘Well, sure,’ Lol said obligingly. ‘Anybody who wants one—’
‘No! They’ll want
Lol had been backing away into the booth at this point, the guitar held in front of him like a riot shield, Prof pursuing him, hands spread wide.
‘Laurence, you’re older now, you know the score, you know all the traps. I’m telling you honestly: you don’t do this now, you’ll be a very embittered old man one day. Jesus, what am I saying,
‘I can’t… I can’t tour.’ Face it: he couldn’t even
‘Right, let’s see, now.’ Prof went on like he hadn’t heard. ‘It would have to be as support, the first time. But supporting somebody
‘Prof?’ Lol was resting the guitar on his trainers, his fingers among its machine-heads. ‘Be honest – you don’t even know that’s true, do you?’
‘The hell does that matter? Laurence, I apologize in advance if this sounds immodest, but if I’m the one spreading it around, everyone is going to believe it, therefore it
‘I can’t tour.’ Lol stood with his back against the partition wall again, his breathing becoming harder at the very thought of
‘You
And part of Lol did believe him, because Kenneth ‘Prof’ Levin had been down in the half-lit caverns, too – in his case alcoholism, the destruction of a good marriage.
Lol recalled the buzz he’d felt when he’d had the message to call Prof, a couple of weeks ago – around the same time he was concluding that knowing the difference between cognitive therapy and humanistic therapy didn’t make either of them any more effective. In fact, the day after his senior tutor had told him, not with irony but with something approaching pride:
‘All right!’ Prof Levin had finally backed off. ‘Enough. We’ll talk about this again. For starters, we just do the album.’
‘
Prof had spread his arms magnanimously. With his own studio set up, he was at last able to make these decisions without consulting anyone in a suit.
And Lol had thanked him for the offer – very profusely, obviously, because having Prof Levin produce an album for you was kind of like having Spielberg take on your screenplay – but then pointed out, reasonably enough, that he had only four songs: not quite
Prof had smiled beatifically through his white, nail-brush beard.
‘You have the whole summer, my son. This summer… is yours.’
And he had shambled smugly away to his room in the adjacent cottage, leaving Lol to switch everything off before climbing to his own camp bed in one of the old haylofts.
Like he was really going to sleep after this?
Instead, he’d stumbled out, bemused, into the warm night, to commune with the Frome. But the river was already asleep and that was how he ended up following the track running down a line of poplars and out the other side, close to where the hopkilns stood. The sky was now obscured by a tangle of trees, and he was aware of a high, piercing hum that somehow translated itself into
Not exactly the wisest analogy to hang on Lol who, in his late teens, had seen his parents find religion, watched them being swept away on waves of foaming fundamentalist madness, causing them to reject the Godless kid playing the devil’s music – the kid who would always remember coming home one weekend to find that those two small mantelpiece photos of himself as a toddler had been replaced by framed postcards of Jesus. Which was probably how it had started – the alienation.
And then – in just this last year – a surprise development. Lol’s fear and resentment of the Church had been fatally compromised by encounters with a priest called Merrily Watkins who lived and worked, as it happened, less than twenty miles from here… but if this was another reason for coming back to Herefordshire he wasn’t going to admit it, least of all to himself. Their last meeting had followed events so dark that maybe she wouldn’t want to be reminded.
He felt a sharp pain below his knee and stopped, feeling suddenly out of breath. He realized he’d been running, like he sometimes did to try and overtake a dilemma, to put an impending decision behind him. He must have veered from the path and now he was in the middle of an unknown wood and there were brambles tangled around his legs.
Wrong turning, somehow. It was easy enough to do, even in the daytime, even in countryside you thought you knew. In the middle of this unknown, unmanaged wood, snagged with hawthorn, he heard his T-shirt rip, and he stood there, shaking his head.
Lost again. Story of his life.
Knight’s Frome was a scattered hamlet with no real centre, so it wasn’t as if he could look around for a cluster of lights. Or even listen for the river. All he could hear was the humming: a plaintive sound that rose and fell