by James Meek
PART TWO
17
The word on Alex Comrie, the drummer in Ritchie’s first band, had been that he possessed some kind of genius, and not for drumming. But Alex kept good time and Ritchie wondered how he’d picked up a nice sense of rhythm on the drummer’s seat without getting the ability to dance as part of the package. On the dancefloor Alex squeezed his lanky body into a narrow tube, clamping his arms to his side and his legs together, and when he should have been moving his body to the music he only waggled his hands, bobbed his beak of a nose and waddled rapidly across the room like a penguin hurrying to the sea.
He came to London, to King’s College, aged seventeen, from a stern monoethnic comprehensive in Scotland where the teachers wore pleated black gowns and punished children for small misdemeanours by beating them on the hand with specially made leather belts. Alex’s mother Maureen, a middle-class English immigrant, wasn’t sure whether to be appalled by the savagery or pleased her sons were being exposed to a pain-based native initiation rite like the Satere Mawe of the Amazon, where, she read, boys had their manhood tested by gloves lined with stinging ants. But only the younger of her two children, Dougie, the more popular, was belted. Alex longed to feel the bite of leather on his palm and the acceptance that came with it, but was too beloved of the teachers to earn the grace of cruelty. He was well enough liked, and had a peculiar intensity that attracted the shy, Gothic end of girlhood, but he sat out school dances, and never learned to kick a ball.
The band, Gorse, only lasted a few months. It was called Gauze but when Ritchie first met Karin, buying guitar strings on Charing Cross Road, she misheard him and told him how she loved the yellow flowers. From that moment Ritchie said it’d always been Gorse, and believed it. They gigged in pubs and student venues before Ritchie dropped out of university and formed The Lazygods with Karin. Alex, who of all the ex-Gorsies seemed to Ritchie the least like a musician, was the only one he kept in touch with.
Alex could handle the sticks as well as any multidextrous boy with tolerant parents, a room of his own and energy to burn who’d been given a drum kit on his twelfth birthday and watched Top of the Pops and Whistle Test. When he went to King’s to study molecular cell biology he’d taken the drums with him, wary of the role of gauche autist he was expected to act out by choosing science. Might his vocation, poking into the atomic codes of life, breaking people’s molecules and putting them back together again, make him unfit to live it? He saw his peers turning into blinkered fetishists of pinhole-narrow specialisations, and wondered if it would happen to him. He turned himself into the pulse of a rock band to show fate hadn’t put data points where his passions should be.
By day the monkey of curiosity on his back drove him to journals, equations and algorithms. He learned. He outpaced his coursemates and teachers. In his head the human cell became a place whose workings he could wander through like a world. At night, with the band, he staked his claim to a rebel heart and a gypsy spirit, the attributes he supposed artists were born with. He punished the drums till the sweat ran down his back and his wrists ached.
At the dozen small gigs Gorse played, the crowd moshed to Alex’s falcon silhouette tyrannising the skins and cymbals at the back of the stage, his pinked mop of straight black hair bouncing off his forehead in 4/4 time, but he couldn’t lose himself in music as Ritchie did. It seemed he surrendered to the beat, that the life measured by the count of his heart and the life made by the music became, for the duration of a set, one and the same, but it wasn’t so. He couldn’t drown his intellect. He couldn’t just be. He doubted and feared like any eighteen-year-old, but examined his doubts and fears as if they belonged to someone he didn’t care about. The student haunts burned incandescent with want and need, and so did he, but in him why and how dropped through, cooling the embers of the pile.
He misunderstood. The divide in him wasn’t between scientist and artist but between focused and distracted. When he drew together all the scattered lights of his attention and turned them on a woman, she was gripped. Later she’d find how easily his mind strayed. Over the years successive girlfriends, walking and talking to Alex with his arm around them, felt their affection suddenly rendered equal in status to such momentary fascinations as the ubiquity of legless pigeons, the meaning of letters on drain covers, the social significance of corduroy or a change in car number-plate design. If the menage survived she would find how naturally, when it suited him, Alex stripped their togetherness down to the functional so as to concentrate on the teetering arc of biomathematical bricks he was assembling in his head. He did his best work when a small part of his mind was engaged in a steady, practised physical activity, like cycling along a familiar route or snapping his fingers. Drumming never gave Alex the temporary personality of the unselfconscious artist he hoped for, but as an elaborate form of fidgeting, it helped him think.
Gorse lived on for a few weeks after Ritchie left. Study ate into Alex’s time and he gave up practising, then quit the band. Ritchie’s ascent to fame was steep. The two men would have lost touch if Ritchie hadn’t kept the connection going, and if Alex hadn’t met Bec.
Alex was twenty-five, his PhD freshly inked and rolled in a cardboard tube; Bec was seven years younger, just started at Cambridge. Ritchie introduced them casually, without a thought of attraction, assuming generic scientific babble would flow easily between them, like current through a joined-up cable. He forgot his sister wasn’t a schoolgirl any more. He could sense arousal in others yet was blind to the interest of men in his eighteen-year-old sister. His sense of her lagged several years behind the actual Bec. Unconsciously he thought of the fullness of her breasts and curve of her hips as if they were a kind of late childhood illness that had swollen around the fourteen-year-old girl and would eventually subside, returning her to fourteen again. He projected his lack of sexual interest in her freely over the rest of the male population.
Once, when she was seventeen, he’d seen her about to go out in a t-shirt and mentioned that Karin had bangles she could borrow and she’d seemed so uncomprehending that he babbled: ‘Nobody goes out with bare arms any more.’ The scars on her wrist will make people nervous, he thought. People would think she was a cutter and wonder if it ran in the family.
The bitter smell of her own skin burning, accompanied by an intense, clear and unambiguous pain, had eased Bec’s heart when she was a small girl, angry with her father for dying and for leaving her to pity the loneliness of his last hour. She twigged early that there might be something sarcastic about young skin: how pleasurable to spoil it! But the scars weren’t big or ragged when she started university, or as noticeable as they seemed to Ritchie. Bec hardly remembered they were there, more embarrassed by their neatness than by having made them.
Alex had been surprised to be invited to the launch party for The Lazygods’ second album, Windfallen. In seven years his mind refashioned the memory of the teenage Ritchie according to the star his friend became. Alex felt he should have noticed Ritchie’s talent at the beginning. He remembered Ritchie as confident, energetic and generous. If he also remembered his ordinary voice, crude guitar style and plodding way with songwriting he thought it was he, Alex, who must have been wrong, not the millions of people who’d bought Fountain. When Alex abandoned regular drumming to be a biomathematical traveller in the unmapped human cell, and Ritchie dropped out of university and got a recording deal, it seemed they’d moved into worlds whose spheres couldn’t intersect. No matter how many times Ritchie called him, contrived to mention him in interviews or invited him to mix with musicians at events like the launch, Alex expected it to end.
The party was in a new luxury hotel opposite Hyde Park. Alex walked into the lobby in a pair of jeans ripped at the knee, Converse trainers, a t-shirt and a black suit jacket, the way he’d dressed as a teenage drummer and a style he reckoned drew the undergraduates’ eyes now he was Dr Comrie, cell biologist, junior researcher, with a desk of his own at King’s and students to teach. The t-shi
rt was a relic of Primal Scream merchandise, the black of the Screamadelica mask’s eyes faded to grey, the red to pink. The jacket was new. He’d been walking around campus for a few months with a badge on his lapel reading Isn’t life RNA-ic? but just before heading out he’d swapped it for the old badge from the days of Gorse, stating I Am Nico.
Hope lurched upright in him when the pretty girl on the door found his name on the list of invited guests and waved him into the bar of the Metropolitan, glittering with guests and booming with talk. His was one name in hundreds on a printout yet he felt recognised as belonging to the people of music. He’d thrown in his lot with the caste of cell biologists, and they wanted him, but he was disenchanted by his peers. If only, he thought with his heart jumping, the musicians could see the savage beauty of the sub-microscopic seas. If only they could understand their songs of love, death and sorrow weren’t debased by being embodied in adenosine triphosphatase.
His thumb and fingertips smeared the fog on a glass and he registered the surfaces in the room as if dumbly reading through the list of ingredients in a packet of breakfast cereal: fuzzed jaws, gelled curls, heel-stressed calves, dark glasses, tattooed calligraphy, bare shoulders, big rings. In the room he knew only Karin and Ritchie, who were talking to the guitarist-songwriter of a band that’d had hit after hit, the last number one a couple of months earlier; it’d taken the death of a princess to knock them off the front pages. Alex went over to them, determined not to care what his famous friends’ famous friend thought of him, and Ritchie and Karin greeted him and introduced him to famous Noel.
‘Why are you always talking about how much you love the Beatles?’ was the first thing Alex said to Noel, with unintended aggression. ‘You’re asking to be judged according to how good someone else was.’
Noel’s shaggy eyebrows ratcheted up a micron.
‘Alex says what he thinks,’ said Ritchie.
Noel laughed. ‘What is it you do again?’ he said.
Alex’s mouth grew dry and he took gulps from the champagne glass, angry with himself for being familiar with a celebrity, for wanting to impress him, failing to impress him, not getting a hearing, bothering to come.
A man and a woman Alex didn’t know joined the group. Alex wasn’t introduced and found himself looking down at the floor. The feet of the six of them formed a circle that reminded him of the cell membrane. He watched the other ten feet creeping away from his, millimetre by millimetre, the circle opening to eject him, like a vesicle packed with waste molecules being popped from the phospholipid layer, and closing again with his feet outside. Shoulders were in front of his shoulders, blocking him out.
He stepped back, ruminating on the ballet of the proteins, forgetting he’d been angry. He wanted to sit and think. Close to a curving bench that ran along the far wall a young woman’s face caught his eye and he remembered the greedy hope he’d felt when he came into the bar. The woman inclined her rosy cheeks and mass of wavy black shoulder-length hair towards a man in a suit and tie. Alex resented not being the one who was being listened to and smiled at and looked at with wide dark eyes. It seemed to Alex that the man, though better dressed, looked much like him, and she’d obviously just met him. He felt a punch of jealousy that he hadn’t seen her earlier.
Then Ritchie was next to him, saying: ‘Come and meet my sister. She’s a science type.’ He took Alex over to the woman he’d been looking at, introduced her as Bec, and steered the other man off.
Bec smiled at Alex, too, in a way that seemed trusting and for a moment, as if he’d stepped out onto the high ledge of a tall building and found the expected barrier between him and the view wasn’t there, he felt dizzy.
‘Brilliant,’ he said.
‘What’s brilliant?’ said Bec, tilting her head to one side.
‘I have a theory of conversation that when you meet someone you should say the first thing that comes into your head and open it up for discussion. If the other person doesn’t want to talk about it, it’s their problem.’
‘I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone with a theory of conversation. So the first thing that came into your head was brilliant?’
‘The first thing that came into my head was, how could we quantify the things about us that tell people here we’re not rock stars? And then I had this insight that I should try getting the other person to say what they’re thinking. I thought it was a good idea and I couldn’t help saying so out loud.’
Bec considered this. ‘We might be stars,’ she said. ‘I used to be able to play Just Can’t Get Enough on the recorder.’
Alex took the message from her eyes on his that he couldn’t exhaust her attention. She’s prepared to take anything seriously, he thought, and demonstrated the attractiveness of his personality by talking to her for half an hour without stopping. He summarised his career, bullet-pointed his family and shared his ideas about the evolution of multicelled organisms. It was going well, he felt; her raised eyebrows showed interest, the way she folded her arms signified concentration. She interrupted to ask if he knew where the drink was. Alex promised to get her a glass of wine and when he returned from the bar he couldn’t find her. It seemed she’d been called away.
In the days that followed he brooded over what he’d done to make her evade him and wondered how he could reach her. She was young, but he was only seven years older. He obtained her postal address from Ritchie, saying he’d promised to send her an article, and wrote her a five-page letter with a point by point dismissal of everything he remembered telling her. ‘As for my family,’ he concluded with what he considered a nicely humble flourish, ‘they are, of course, of no interest.’
She didn’t reply. He felt he’d learned of the existence of a new form of space – an extra dimension or an additional continent or a kind of human cell governed by different laws – that he had to explore, but it was contained uniquely, bafflingly, within one person, and he couldn’t get to her. And she had seemed so open to him. She didn’t have a phone, said Ritchie; he was giving her a mobile for Christmas. Alex guessed that Cambridge would have given her an email address, and sent messages to r.shepherd and b.shepherd and becshepherd and shepherd.r and a dozen others @cam.ac.uk asking if they could meet. He got a testy refusal from a random Professor Shepherd of classics and a week later Bec wrote to say he was the first person who had ever emailed her. She was sorry not to have replied to his letter, she was very busy, and she hoped he was well.
The essence of what society demanded in practical romance, it seemed to Alex, was to do something surprising that was at the same time derivative. Music would be the lever of her seduction. He would show Bec that he could play in the theatre of the passions as well as any poet.
He had his mother’s old car, a little white Peugeot with a dent on one corner where she’d backed into a low bollard ferrying Amazonians to the One Earth Festival in Stonehaven. He bought a Cambridge street map and drove there to case Bec’s digs. Chance had given her a room in a house with a large front garden, well covered by trees, bushes and other serenade-friendly foliage.
He did an Excite search and identified the next full moon, on a Thursday in mid-October. At ten that night he packed his gear into the car and drove out of London, reaching Bec’s house just before midnight. The clouds were thick over the city and there wasn’t the ghost of a moon. Autumn had banished the nightingales and slain the roses. The leaves had fallen and those that remained were thinly spread and yellow.
One by one Alex took the pieces of kit out of the car and laid them on the pavement against the low wall that marked the edge of the garden. The street was quiet, with little traffic, but dense with student lodgings. Alex whistled, hummed, clicked his tongue, snapped his fingers and rounded up his stray thoughts, racing in all directions, with the Asda jingle, All the prices are low Whenever you go That’s Asda price. He slapped the change in his pockets. Cha-ching-ching. Students passed by on foot and on bicycles, chattering drunkenly. They looked down at the drums, glanced at him and
moved on. Each time the street cleared he hoisted a piece over the wall. Gradually he transferred the stripped-down kit, snare, bass, ride, stands, pedal and throne, gave a last look round and vaulted into the garden.
He found a dark spot under a chestnut tree, partly screened by shrubs from the road and the path to the front door but with a clear line of sight to the upper windows. He set up the kit, pushing the base of the pedal into the wet leaves to find solid ground, his fingers numb with cold. He was almost ready, and was dragging the throne into place, when he heard voices and feet on the path. He saw two women walking towards the front door. One of them was Bec, wearing an old overcoat and a peaked cap. Alex stood still, feeling his juddering heart about to come loose.
Bec stopped, turned towards him and peered into the darkness. ‘Who’s there?’ she said.
‘What is it?’ said her friend, skinny with short blonde hair and her hands in the pockets of a belted raincoat.
‘There’s somebody in the bushes.’
‘We should go inside,’ said Bec’s friend, grabbing her elbow.
‘Who’s there?’ said Bec again.
Alex wondered if he could stay perfectly still for hours and not be seen.
‘We should go inside,’ said the friend. ‘We don’t want to get raped.’
‘You won’t,’ said Alex. The women yelped and tottered back. Alex stepped forward a few paces so that they could see him, the toes of his shoes parting the wet leaves with a slithering sound. ‘You won’t,’ he said again.
‘What are you doing here?’ said Bec.
‘She knows me,’ said Alex to the friend.
‘You brought drums,’ said Bec.
‘I’m going inside. Will you be all right?’ said her friend.
‘He knows my brother,’ said Bec, and the friend went into the house. Bec folded her arms and came to where Alex had set up.
