CHAPTER 95

 

 

 #6: CURVE

"Ten Little Girls"

from the E.P. Blindfold

Released: February 1991

 

 

It was hard after she died. It had been hard before she died but this time it was harder still. He eventually realised that he would die if he didn't get out of Oxford. You wouldn't have wanted to know him if you saw him in the city at the weekend. You would have run several miles from him. In the week he remained Mister Professional and did all his hours and too many additional hours besides. The basic rationale was the same as before but entirely different in nature; he wanted to minimise the time he spent at home which by now could scarcely be called a home. He came back late, ate and slept, then got up and cleared out early. The less time spent there the better.

He had to get the fuck back to London; everybody knew that. There was a Friday evening when he went to see The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser at the National Film Theatre, and walking back towards Victoria, crossing Waterloo Bridge in the illuminated darkness, he glimpsed to his right at St Paul's and knew that this was where he had always belonged.

It wasn't easy. Most vacant accommodations available were unsuitable flat shares with people young enough to be his nephew, grumbling about oh here comes dreary wheezy old man to ruin our fun. Or they were deeply dodgy in other ways. Yet he persisted, and eventually found a decent place with a landlord who knew his story and recognised that he needed somewhere quiet to think.

He left Oxford for good on Saturday 3 December 2001. Her family came by that morning because they had told him to let them know when he was moving out so that they could take the coffee table. Her younger sister took a long time saying goodbye. On their way out, down the stairs, she kept standing there and glancing back at him with a mixture of pity, dread, compassion and what had to be desire. Yes, he thought to himself, you could change all of this now, make it all stop, but you won't, you had a curious marriage, possibly an act borne out of the impossibility of getting me, and now you're stuck. He never saw her again and only had one brief, inconclusive conversation with her on the telephone after that which did not betray elements of a lost love.

Half an hour after they'd gone, his friend from work, the one mentioned in the second part of the previous chapter, turned up with her husband and a white van into which he would pack most of his things and travel back to London. They were all cheery and accommodating. On the way out of Oxford they stopped to call in on some friends, possibly relatives (it was over twenty years ago), who had two baby daughters, reminding him of what might have been. Then they drove out. He took one last look at the Oxford skyline - this entire life, a generation long, that he had been compelled to leave behind - and she quickly said something lighthearted to take his mind off it because I was fucking breaking down and she knew it and if it had just been him and her well you know. But they swept into and around Marble Arch and down Park Lane and he thought, yes, for better or worse, and it has to be better because what's the point otherwise, this is where you belong. Welcome back.

Not that the early weeks or months or even years were easy because they were anything but. The world and its people move on and his mourning and grieving just snaggled things up and got everybody else knotted up. He made so many mistakes and probably should have for a little while been sectioned for his own and everybody else's good.

One thing he was advised to do, however, by this psychotherapist he was seeing for counselling sessions in West Norwood, was to start writing. He had been some writer in his very young days, which proved to be the cause of more pain than joy because his parents expected him to become famous and therefore win the familial bread.

In between then and the best part of thirty years later, however, there was nothing. Music journalism but he wasn't cut out for that at the age when it would have mattered - he tried three times and on every occasion was answered by a dully-photocopied matey fuck-off standard rejection letter. Start a fanzine? You needed friends and contacts for those.

He became a moderately prolific letter-writer to various musical magazines but the offer of even slight work was never suggested to him. Not that this especially bothered him financially because he had established an excellent professional career for himself which at the time of writing has been going on for just over thirty-eight years. But it was not until she died and he had to do something, even persuade himself to listen to music again, that he took, at an age in the close shadow of forty, to writing again. 

So he wrote about music in this blog which because it was in the very early days of blogging when it was all still the Wild West and nobody really knew what they were doing became surprisingly popular and maybe even influential. For maybe eighteen months he had nearly all of it to himself. Then the ambulance chasers, the monied careerists, closed in and it was basically all over less than two years on.

Nevertheless the blog got read and absorbed everywhere around the place, because the internet covered the world. One reader, herself a blogger, in Toronto came across his writing and changed everything, but that is already the subject of a published book.

He was convinced, however, that most music writers wrote wrongly about music. He thought of this amazing barrage of a record from a decade and lifetime before and how nobody who said they liked or loved it was apparently able to describe exactly what the song was about or how it worked as a record. It consists of endless motorised stabs at the fatal chimera of maleness, delivered in the calmest of rages, in escalating tandem with a rapper who now sounded rather of its time but a dozen years previously - when this thing had not been heard before - had resembled an explosive. 

He finally realised that his mission as a writer was to do his best and right those affable wrongs. So subtly would he achieve it that his words would be read by nobody yet by everyone.