Light Perpetual

by Francis Spufford

  A love unknown

  A seed not sown

  May grow someday into a flowering tree

  Next time’s the charm

  No fire alarm

  To smash the spell uniting you and me

  Then the chorus, with the momentum that’s gathered so far dialled back into high, wistful to-and-fro. Almost throaty, almost raspy, the feeling near the surface; and as she works on that, pushing deep down away from the surface, as far into irrelevant oblivion as she can manage, where it can’t mess things up, the distracting thought that she might (of all things) have stolen part of the tune from Ray Charles singing ‘Makin’ Whoopee’. No, no, no. Shut up, mind, and sing.

  Hanging on

  next time

  Depending on

  next time

  And all because

  this time

  And then some muscle into the voice: not too much, a marker for how strong this line’s going to be when the chorus comes round again, and she’s shifted into full-throated angry-woman lament. But some. A change of gear. A filling-out. A gain of force. And naturally a platform for the clever things her second self will be singing against her, here.

  … you left me singing solo harmonies

  Leave a gap, a longer gap than seems natural, to accommodate whatever layering will go in there on the other tracks. If it’s too long she can always trim it in the edit. And round again into the verses, but now with power continuing in the voice at a level only a little lower than the last line of the chorus. Push, Jo. Let the diva out. Push rage and heartbreak into the night. Make the silver and the grey, ring; let the brown resound.

  Pouring rain

  As you explain

  We’re better off divided, you and me

  A moment’s hush

  And then the rush

  Of this time crumbling into history

  Something into history, anyway. Crashing? Folding? Drifting? Fading? This time the thought snags her too insistently, and just like that pulls her out of the necessary mood. The song crashes, folds, crumbles, drifts, fades. And into its place the anxiety she’s been holding at bay comes irresistibly. Shit. Press Pause. Her watch says she’s out of time anyway. Rewind; label the tape NEXT TIME #1 and put it away in the row of others, that little library of ideas for which (it seems to her when she’s down) she’s always running out of time, or missing the moment, or finding her enthusiasms have moved on from. She will finish this one, she swears. And she has also sworn, she reminds herself, that she will make herself make Ricky listen to something here, while he’s in reach. Her fingers dance nervously along the shelf. NEXT TIME isn’t ready. He’s never, never hearing LOST SOUL. She picks out NOBODY’S FAULT, four-fifths of a piece of cheerful funk about earthquakes.

  And after a quick shower, and a brief confrontation with her face in the bathroom mirror as she dolls herself up, she’s away, heading down-canyon in the Beetle with the windows wound open all the way. When the night air goes sluggish and stifling here, you can either hide indoors in the aircon, or move through it, making your own breeze. That must be some of the reason why the freeways are busy almost till midnight, these August nights, and at the stoplights on the boulevards there’s always a revving, impatient queue. It’s not that people have anywhere to get to, they just can’t stand staying still. Hot gusts, sage-smelling, blow on her as she corners and corners and corners again on the bends of the canyon road, washing-machine whirr sounding from the engine compartment, headlights skipping and sidling across trashcans, mailboxes, adobe walls, pine roots, the crazy-paved barrier at the edge of the drop and, nearly at the bottom, the carcass of a piano someone dragged outside to be nested in by jays. It’s a kind of boundary stone, that piano. It seems to have been there, bleaching, for a decade, since the canyon’s hippy glory days. It declared the beginning of the freaks’ kingdom, to those going up. The end of it, going down. Beyond, the road straightens and the grade eases, and after only another minute she’s crossing Sunset and has joined the red/white flow of the automotive pilgrimage to nowhere. The light streams carry her. The tropical neon swallows her.

  The restaurant is in Beverly Hills. Now and again, Ricky will conceive a fancy for really obscure ethnic food, or for some Mexican place that’s been written up for its challenging authenticity, and they’ll all obediently troop off to Long Beach or Culver City. But for the most part he has a taste for unironic, dependable luxury. He likes cocktails, and steak, and valet parking, and beautiful waitstaff, and maître d’s who know who you are and who seat you where you get the right combination of privacy and admiration. So Jo pulls up a manicured drive between uplighters styled to look like Japanese stone lanterns, and has the VW sneered at by a boy who looks like a dilute version of the young Tony Curtis. And then is hastily grovelled to, once it becomes clear that she is somehow part of the entourage. She finds them all in a private (or ‘private’) room beyond the pool, a long low teak cabana blue-lit by reflections from the water, and safely out of earshot of the other diners but so latticed and louvred that rock-star still lifes in various poses are sure to be on view.

  She’s the last to arrive, or nearly the last. The table is already cluttered with glassware and food, and Ricky is seated halfway up, Last Supper-style, flanked by a gaggle of people on his left and a gaggle on his right, all leaning slightly in towards him and paying attention, even as they rabbit on to each other about other things. She doesn’t know any of them very well, though they’re now into their second week of working together. There’s Si, Ricky’s new manager, and Si’s plus-one, a blonde girl trying hard to fall out of a halter top. There’s Johnson, a gruff bassist from Watts whom she rather rates. (He has been responding to Ricky’s attempts to soul up the mix with silently rising eyebrows.) There’s Rubén, the producer provided by the label; there’s Ricky’s own favoured producer Ed, present to keep things territorially complicated. There’s Ricky’s PA, Melissa, a size-6 New Yorker. There’s the engineer from Aurora Studios, invited along every night since the second one, on Ricky’s principle that you should always butter up the sound guy, and his assistant, a crop-haired lesbian with an opiate pallor who is well worth listening to when she isn’t locked in the toilet. Further out, there’s the nightly altering crew of session musicians, in whose number Jo technically belongs, except she doesn’t. Closest in – in fact stuck to Ricky’s right side like five foot ten of bronze draught excluder – is his current girlfriend, twenty-two-year-old Angeline from Buenos Aires, delivering another instalment of her surely exhausting one-woman show Continuous Minx. She shrugs, she pouts, she rolls her eyes. She dibbles in his shirt front with her almond-shaped scarlet nails. The man himself is tapping his fag ash into a half-drunk flute of Dom Pérignon and twiddling his expensively spiked platinum hair.

  ‘Wotcher, Frogface,’ she says.

  ‘’Ello, J!’ he says, looking up. His voice after seven years in America has morphed into a kind of generic expat cockney. It would be easier to deal with him if she could concentrate on how ridiculous that is, and not notice that his face still lights up with reliable pleasure when he sees her.

  ‘What is this, this “frog”?’ enquires Angeline, scowling.

  ‘’S just an old joke, sweetheart,’ says Ricky. To Jo: ‘All right, then? Thought you’d stood us up.’

  ‘Just trying to finish something.’

  ‘Right, right,’ says Ricky. He doesn’t ask what; he never has. ‘Gotta have you here, though, babes. Can’t do without you, you know that.’

  What is it in her he can’t do without: that’s the question. What she does for him, what she means to him. All that seemed obvious, once. During the golden year that Racket broke America for him and they toured month after month across the continent, the music was something they were doing together. She was with him constantly, on the stage and off, sharing a bed in every hotel from Nashville to Seattle, a bed which was their bed not his bed. In Atlanta they went to a black church together on Sunday morning to drink gospel from the s
ource. In a lodge among redwood trees in Oregon they played with a mandolin all through a mid-summer night, till dawn came through the calm red columns in green beams. In the Wichita Hilton he tickled her so unmercifully that she actually wet herself. That year she was … something unnamed. But something more substantial than a rock star’s girlfriend. Collaborator, musical best friend, sounding board, sharer in the ridiculous adventure of his fame: from San Diego to Boston, almost as inevitable and central a member of the band as him. Only not on paper, and not with any songwriting credits, which turned out to mean that it was easy for her to fall all the way out of the band when she got pregnant (Bangor, Maine, a blizzard day) and he panicked, and needed her to make the threat of permanence go away, and then suddenly couldn’t bear to have her around.

  But he couldn’t bear to let her go completely either. She had her viable small-scale West Coast life, never near the headliners again yet never short of work, and on he went into full-blown celebrity, adding glam-rock sequins to his original white-boy blues. But when he had a record to make, and sometimes when he didn’t, when he was just in town, he’d leave a message on her answering machine, chirpy and wistful; and then she’d find herself in a studio with him, or in a bed, and for a little while they would inhabit a painful echo of the past that neither of them seemed quite able to refuse. It wasn’t just nostalgia. It would have been easier to resist if so. Reduced, ragged, something still reliably awoke between them. Unfinished business with a long half-life, getting fainter on a slow clock.

  Last week, when they’d been working on a raspy crowd-pleaser that she found almost completely synthetic, a piece of plastic soul worked up to make housewives throw knickers at him, he’d caught the scepticism on her face.

  ‘Don’tcha like it?’ he said.

  ‘I dunno. It’s a bit … leopard-skin trousers, isn’t it?’

  ‘Oi! What’s wrong with leopard-skin trousers?’ – grinning, joking, but with a touch of real anxiety in there, too. Her judgement still affected him. He still wanted her approval. He wouldn’t do anything at her say-so that he wasn’t already planning to do; but he wanted to be reassured about it. It was like being, in this one narrow respect, his wife, with the power to make him feel okay, or not.

  Tonight follows a familiar pattern. Food and drink and bullshitting and a line or two, and a swim in the electric blue of the restaurant pool with much look-at-me splashing from Angeline, and a blowjob-length disappearance by her and Ricky, while Si flirts awkwardly with Jo. He has picked up that she is important to Ricky but cannot work out how, exactly. She is not inclined to help him out. Sometime towards 1 a.m., they make the move over to Aurora, Ricky trying to urge her to ride in the stretch limo, she insisting on puttering along behind in the VW. (Jo’s principle: never be without your own means of departure.) Another burst of high-jinks before they settle, the transition being marked by the ceremonial playback of last night’s completed track, the disco-fied number that put Johnson into the state of silent irony. Then, finally, they can get to tonight’s work, a relatively simple ballad-ish thing which, thank God, has the potential to be genuinely touching if done right. It’s not by Ricky; it’s a cover version, but one chosen quite cunningly to suit his voice. He’s always been able to survey his own talent with a detached eye. It’s one of the things she finds admirable about him. He puts on the cans, shuts his eyes and becomes serious. She falls into her own familiar groove when working with him, in and out of the picture as required of her as a backing singer, but otherwise without comment becoming part of the little group around the engineer in the control room. When she makes a suggestion to Ricky through his phones, when she stops him and tells him his phrasing’s off, he nods contentedly.

  By half four they’ve essentially got the track. Angeline is bored and yawning as they listen to the playback. They need a retake on part of Jo’s rising wail in the third verse, and she heads back through the soundproof doors.

  ‘Someone come and give me a note?’ she says, and she is surprised, but not totally surprised, when Ricky follows her through, and sits down at the piano, alone with her on the players’ side of the glass.

  Pling-pling-pling, he goes, on the C above middle C. She finds it, she gives the thumbs-up to Ed, the engineer rolls tape, and she pulls up from her diaphragm, if she does say so herself, just the quiet banshee ripples which will resonate unobtrusively with Ricky’s voice. He listens, smiling. Beyond the glass Angeline scowls. She is not without basic radar, even if all her brain cells are devoted to controlling her hips, even if she has no idea why it should be the cranky, uncharming woman of nearly forty who is a rival here. Jo points.

  ‘You’re pissing someone off,’ she tells Ricky.

  ‘Yeah?’ says Ricky.

  He makes eye contact with Angeline, poises his hands over the keyboard, and without warning starts pounding the ivories in full-on honky-tonk pub-piano mode.

  She was a beauty queen-ah!

  From down in Argentin-ah!

  Angeline doesn’t know much, but she knows when she’s being mocked. She flounces out of sight.

  ‘Can you turn off, please, Ed?’ says Ricky into his mike. The green lights wink out.

  ‘That wasn’t very kind,’ says Jo.

  ‘Do you care?’ says Ricky.

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Didn’t think so.’

  ‘I was wondering—’ she begins.

  ‘I was hoping—’ he says at the same time.

  ‘What?’ says Ricky.

  ‘No, you first.’

  ‘Well,’ Ricky says, looking down and playing soft chords, ‘I was hoping …’

  She knows what he means. She knows what it will be like if she says yes, based on all the other times she’s said yes. Twenty-four tempestuous hours of expensive hotel, good sex (because they know their way round each other really well), more or less coke depending on the state of Ricky’s habits, and almost certainly some highly pleasurable messing about together on guitar and piano. He always gets a suite with a piano. ‘Hey, Liberace,’ she’ll say, and he’ll chase her around the bed. It’ll be fun. And it will end with protestations, and with him sending her home up the canyon in a limo she does accept. And they’ll have been pretending, both of them. It will have been a tiny visit to what might have been, which only works because they look away from the difficult stuff, and ask no questions, and part before the pretending becomes unbearable. And maybe she will do it anyway, because she misses it so. But now it will look as if what she wants to ask him is a quid pro quo, a favour in return for a favour.

  ‘What about …?’ she says, nodding towards the sound booth.

  ‘That’s not exactly serious.’

  And what are we? she wants to say, but doesn’t. He sees her hesitation, and doesn’t press the point. He has his delicacies.

  ‘What were you gonna ask me, then?’

  ‘D’you ever miss London?’ she says, chickening out: but chickening out into a subject that really has been on her mind.

  ‘God, no,’ says Ricky, looking surprised. ‘I was there on tour in the spring, and it was grim, grim, grim. Dirty and miserable and kind of, you know, defeated-feeling?’

  ‘So far as you could tell from Claridge’s.’

  ‘So far as I could tell from the Dorchester, darling. Why?’

  ‘Oh, nothing much.’

  ‘You’re homesick, aren’cha,’ he says, with a sharp, diagnostic glance.

  ‘Well, maybe.’

  ‘I get that. I do! But not for London. You gotta remember, it was only somewhere I stayed for a bit, mostly in bloody bedsits. But Bristol – yes, I miss Bristol, moy lovurr.’ A quick trill on the high notes. ‘Not often, but sometimes. I’ll be in a hotel somewhere, doing my stuff, click-click, flash-flash, hello darling, and I’ll realise, shit, for hours and hours I’ve been walking through Filwood in the back of my head. Like a very slow slideshow, you know, going on behind everything else? And it gets you, doesn’t it, under here.’ He pokes himself under his ribs. ‘B
ut you wait, and it goes away again. You just have to wait it out.’

  ‘You don’t ever want to go back for real?’

  ‘Can’t, can I? ’S not Filwood now I’m walking through, whatever that’s like; it’s Filwood then, and the postboxes are taller than my head, and I’m on my way home with a Lonnie Donegan single; and that’s the point. That’s all gone. Except in here.’ Tap-tap. ‘I wouldn’t find it if I got on a plane, would I?’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘You can’t go home, babes. You can’t go back. You gotta go on. Think about it. What’s waiting for you, if you get on a plane?’ His voice has gone gentle. ‘Not your mum, love. Tea’s not waiting on the table.’

  ‘There’s my sister.’

  ‘The one who’s married to the actual Nazi.’

  ‘That’s the one.’

  ‘Tempting, highly tempting. You could go and help them sing “Deutschland, Deutschland” on the streets of Lewisham.’

  ‘Bexford.’

  ‘Same difference. No! Stay in the sunshine, love.’

  He plays end-of-a-tune chords – dum, dum, du-dumm – which make it clear that he’s ready for the conversation to be over, and for him to get an answer to his question. And something about this, and about his obvious pleasure just now at being given a chance on easy terms to be wise and kind, tips a balance inside Jo, and makes it possible for her to say what she meant to in the first place.