by James Meek
‘Sorry?’ said the girl, who was shooting Coke into tall glasses from a hose.
‘I said she doesn’t get it, the song.’
‘Sounded all right to me.’
Tom tapped Ritchie on the shoulder and told him he was on. Ritchie buttoned his jacket, checked his collar and walked up. The yeoman of the karaoke machine ran his finger down his handwritten list.
‘Angels,’ he said. He looked into Ritchie’s eyes, wise and kind. ‘Sure you can handle it?’
The old Ritchie, thought the new Ritchie, could have lost his temper. Instead he thought about it. Could he manage that jump in pitch from verse to chorus tonight? And through it ALL … it was the sort of abrupt jump from comfortable baritone to the high tenor reaches that might leave him hanging out to dry if his vocals weren’t in perfect nick, and the yeoman of karaoke knew this well, bless him. ‘Is it too late to change my mind?’ he asked.
‘Try me.’
‘Do you have Fountain, by The Lazygods?’
Ritchie stepped away and faced the few dozen people in the pub. He had the mike in his right hand and as the first muffled D chords of the intro sounded he groped with his left hand in the air for a mike lead that the wireless age had made obsolete. D moved to G, then to A, and as the drums, bass and synth blazed out in a golden splendour of sound it seemed to Ritchie that the walls and roof of the pub flew off and tens of thousands of faces rippled like a field of human flowers below him. He could feel Karin close to him, his brilliant, beautiful girl, bringing her pick down on the strings and sweeping them all down the foaming river of electric music to glorious paradisiacal damnation. He sang
Sunrise
Is only an hour away
And your eyes
Are brighter than any day
And the path is leading on
In the blue light of dawn
To the forest
And the ocean
And the life-love in our veins
They were with him, the crowd, all twenty thousand of them, the crowd and the band, Karin, Johnny P and The Bat, climbing up to the chorus, building, soaring, with the best always yet to come.
Let’s all go to the fountain
And drink the years away
Cold water
Clear water
To keep the night at bay
Let’s all go to the fountain
And you and I will be
Forever young!
Ritchie had the mesh of the mike up against his lips, roaring the words, eyes tight shut, tears oozing out of them, twisting his body in all his old stage moves, feeling the resistance of his forty-four-year-old bulk and stiffness as a momentary affliction like a hangover he’d sing on through.
Heartstrings
Are what you most like to play
And some things
Are easier to dream than say
But the road will take us there
Where the words are in the air
To the forest
And the ocean
And the life-love in our veins
If you and I get older, baby
Love gets older too
The world needs one immortal love
Dying ain’t for you
‘Listen to me now!’ yelled Ritchie.
Let’s all go to the fountain
And drink the years away
Cold water
Clear water
To keep the night at bay
Let’s all go to the fountain
And you and I will be
Forever young!
Ritchie opened his eyes and looked round, confused to be in a small pub next to an old man with a karaoke machine. Karin wasn’t there. The audience loved him. They clapped, stamped, whistled and whooped. Ritchie welled up again, bowed to the right and left and ran his sleeve across his eyes. He sniffed and said to the yeoman of karaoke: ‘Code of Shame next.’
The old man shook his head. ‘One song. There’s ten people waiting.’
‘Don’t give me that shit,’ said Ritchie with a raffish smile. ‘Did you hear them? We’ve got to give them an encore.’
‘One song,’ said the old man. ‘That’s the rules.’
A young man with tattooed forearms and shoulders twice as wide as his hips came up to Ritchie.
‘I’m Ritchie Shepherd,’ said Ritchie. ‘I’m Ritchie Shepherd, lead singer of The Lazygods. These are my songs.’
‘One singer, one song,’ said the old man. He nodded at the youngster. ‘You’re up, mate.’ The young man grasped the microphone and tried to take it from Ritchie. Ritchie resisted.
‘I’ve got to do an encore,’ said Ritchie.
‘No encores,’ said the old man.
At the edge of his vision Ritchie saw two dark shapes pass swiftly through the audience towards him. They jumped up, two packages of muscle in black overcoats, and tore the mike from his fingers. They dragged him fighting and shouting to the door, cast him out into the night and returned to their station, brushing their gloves. They watched him pick himself up and walk away without looking back, stumbling once.
‘That was Ritchie Shepherd,’ said one. ‘The Teen Makeover bloke.’
‘Nah,’ said the other.
‘What was he saying?’
‘He said, “I didn’t tell her about the heron.”’
‘I thought he said “heroin”.’
‘Heron it was, mate. Totally wasted.’
75
One September Rose packed a rucksack and with the money she’d saved to go to Mecca boarded a flight that took her south. She flew all night. In the morning, when it was light but the sun hadn’t come up, she lifted the plastic shutter over the aircraft window and saw a bruise-coloured cloud rising like a rock pillar into the sky. The cloud stretched from the ground to far above the plane, higher than the highest mountain. It was not a European cloud. She was in the tropics. She was twenty. It wasn’t her first foreign journey. But when she left the plane and damp, warm air closed around her and she smelled a louche odour like distant sewers, and within it another scent, harder to catch, as if fierce sunlight had heated walls made of aromatic wood, she felt she’d travelled.
Bec was waiting for her just past customs, holding the hand of a small white boy and with a tall African man by her side. The boy turned and seemed to pick Rose out. Bec followed his eyes. For a moment Rose saw her through the screen of what she remembered and imagined. The actual Bec was older, heavier, less tanned and more tired than the remembered-imagined Bec. She recognised Rose and smiled and began to walk with the boy towards her. The glad Bec, hurrying forward, now seemed younger and lighter in contrast to the exaggeratedly aged image of a second before. When Bec smiled three tiny crinkles appeared in the corners of her eyes and Rose wanted to congratulate her on them as if they were a tattoo that she too could buy.
‘This is Leo,’ said Bec, and they looked down at her son. They tried to get him to say hello, but he twisted away shyly, honouring Rose with a quick doubtful glance when she squatted down to his height. ‘And this is Ajali. Ajali, Rose.’
‘Pleased to meet you,’ said Ajali, grinning and bowing forward a couple of inches.
Leo had light brown hair and brown eyes like Alex, and Alex was who Rose said he looked like, and Bec laughed and said, ‘Do you think so?’
Ajali turned out to be the driver. He got behind the wheel, Bec strapped Leo into a child seat and they set off. Dar es Salaam was grimy and covered in cracks and mould, which didn’t surprise Rose, but she hadn’t expected to see people so busy and purposeful, charging around on mopeds and yakking into their phones. Everywhere they were selling cans of fizzy drink and sweets. Limes and green bananas and fruit whose names she didn’t know lay in bright mounds by the roadside.
‘No headscarf,’ said Bec. She looked at her and Rose knew she was considering her bare arms. ‘What happened to your pilgrimage to Mecca?’
‘I couldn’t get a visa,’ said Rose. ‘They said I was too young and I had to be accompani
ed by a husband or a male relative.’
‘I’m sure Alex would have gone with you.’
‘A Muslim male relative!’ said Rose, and the thought of Alex standing keenly among the pilgrims and hurling his pebbles at the jamarat made her double up. Leo laughed with her and bounced up and down.
They stopped off at Bec’s office on the way home. Rose was disappointed. It was an ordinary set of offices and labs, with people in suits and white coats, such as you could find in a British city. The only difference was that so many of the people in suits and white coats were black. Rose knew that what Bec did concerned malaria. She’d imagined her aunt in villages of grass huts in the forest, helping dying children with swollen bellies and big eyes. This was like visiting her dad’s work, being introduced to a succession of people who bobbed up from behind computers, whose names and jobs she forgot instantly. But Bec was proud, to the point of tears, of having helped bring this kind of boringness to Tanzania, and Rose pretended to be impressed.
They drove down a broad highway and turned off into a grid of streets lined by well-kept walls painted cream and pink. Bec’s house was inside one of these compounds. From the outside it was forbidding, with a high gate and shuttered windows peeping over the wall. The building inside the walls had a humbler, more amiable look. In the middle of the lawn was an old tree with a thick black trunk, spreading branches and vivid red flowers that seemed to glow in the sunshine with their own light.
Bec picked up Leo and walked through the house, putting her head round doors, searching, trying to hold back a smile, as if there were something she felt awkward to be looking forward to. She found what she was hunting in a small room at the back of the house. It was lined with bookshelves and had a window looking out on the garden. In it were a small old desk, an elderly laptop with the letters on the keys half worn away, papers clumped in disorderly heaps and, on a couch, Alex, asleep, fully dressed, shoes and all.
‘Look who’s here,’ said Bec. Alex opened his eyes, saw the women and swung upright. He got up and kissed Rose on both cheeks. He was tanned and had more silver on his temples than Rose remembered and like Bec had a deep tiredness. Somebody put their head round the door and murmured a question to Bec and Bec introduced her to Rose as Zuri, the housekeeper.
‘Wow, you’ve got all these servants,’ said Rose when Zuri had gone. ‘So retro.’
Bec and Alex looked at each other. ‘If we stay here much longer we’ll turn into real old ex-pats,’ said Bec.
Alex grinned. ‘So let’s go,’ he said.
‘Alex wouldn’t have had time to write if we hadn’t had this life,’ said Bec, and turned to him. ‘Would you? We’re not exiles.’
It seemed to Rose that in that moment Alex looked at Bec like someone fascinated by a quirky stranger, wondering how to strike up a conversation, and she looked back at him in the same way. Rose had the sense that four years after they got together they hadn’t completely understood each other, and that instead of this making them turn aside, it brought them closer. She thought of how it would be if you had to step over all the things you did know about somebody just so you could get to where the things you didn’t know began, and then go on, into the unknown. She didn’t think she’d have the patience for it. Still, they were scientists. She didn’t have much time for science, but she liked watching this.
Alex took Leo from Bec, set him down and asked him if they should get Rose some breakfast and Leo agreed that they should.
‘Rose thinks Leo looks like you,’ said Bec. She stared intently at Alex as if, Rose thought, her comment was conclusive proof in an argument they’d been having; and judging by the way Alex turned his eyes away, straightened some papers and didn’t speak, he knew he’d lost; and judging by the way Bec bit her lip, she hadn’t wanted to win.
Bec took Rose to her room. ‘Alex tries to do too much,’ she said. ‘He’s writing a book, and lecturing at the university, and hanging out with Leo, and when I tell him not to work so hard, he says: “But we’ve got servants.”’
‘You both look tired.’
‘Do we? Are we haggard?’
‘Not haggard,’ said Rose, blushing. Her heart speeded up; a thought she’d meant to keep to herself rushed to her mouth. ‘It’s nice of you to have me after what my parents did.’
Bec looked at her shyly. ‘It’s harder to forgive when it’s family. But Alex isn’t bitter.’
‘That’s what Dougie said.’
‘Oh, you saw him. Here’s a towel for you.’
‘I wanted to ask him if he thought it’d be all right to get in touch with you and he said I should. He sends his love.’
‘I’ll tell Alex.’
‘He always calls me English Rose. I asked him why he’d never been to visit you. He said you had enough parasites in your life.’
Bec didn’t seem to be interested in hearing about Dougie, and Rose sensed that she should pretend to be tired and let her host go. She showered and changed and afterwards found Alex and Leo on the verandah at the back of the house. The sunlight on the grass looked painfully bright but in the shade it was cool and peaceful. Alex was trying to get Leo to eat yogurt.
‘Help yourself to coffee,’ he said. He didn’t look at her, and Rose tried to guess whether he resented her, or was just concentrating on his son.
‘I didn’t tell Mum and Dad I was coming,’ she said. ‘I don’t talk to them much these days.’
She’d said the wrong thing. ‘You should talk to them,’ said Alex. ‘You’ve seen what a family feud looks like.’
She blushed and swallowed and said: ‘It’s great that you’re writing a book. What’s it about?’
‘I don’t want to bore you,’ said Alex. ‘It’s a science book.’
‘I want to know.’
‘Well,’ said Alex, and in between exhorting Leo and controlling his regurgitations and distributions of yogurt, he explained his book. He was right; to Rose, it was boring. Anyway, she didn’t understand it. For thirty seconds or so she tried hard to follow what he was saying. She caught the odd word: ‘pathways’ kept coming up, and ‘cells’ and ‘proteins’ and ‘meta-analysis’. Her eyes were pushing themselves shut with almost unbearable force. She drank her coffee and poured another cup and couldn’t help yawning.
‘I warned you,’ said Alex.
‘It sounds really interesting,’ said Rose. ‘But you should write a book about the things you say. You know, when it’s late at night and you get that expression on your face and you start getting excited about …’
‘About what?’
‘Like when you came to visit us a few years ago. When I came to empty to the dishwasher, and you were sitting by yourself, and we started talking.’
‘I don’t remember.’
‘You were going around the table pretending to be a big bird. I always think about what you said then. I’m always telling people about how we’re on a great migration, and we’re born on the wing, born flying through time.’
Alex said again that he didn’t remember. And yet he looked happy, as if she’d told him something he’d longed to hear. He frowned, and smiled, and opened his mouth, as if he was about to contradict her; as if, being Alex, he was about to contradict himself.
Alex supposed that Bec loved him, although her sudden bouts of temper, over as soon as they began, seemed to him more frequent. He wondered if she was running a diet of anger for him, like a daily dose of vitamins, to keep him alert. The cell was becoming harder for him to visualise: he relied more on diagrams. I can’t concentrate, he thought, and realised that it wasn’t that he couldn’t concentrate on the cell in his head but that he couldn’t be distracted into his inner world as easily as he’d been when he knew Maria was giving him all her attention. Bec didn’t give him all her attention. She kept some back to regard the mysteries that pestered her, just as he did. It seemed to Alex that love thrived in this uncertainty as it had withered in his absolute confidence Maria was his.
He found that once Leo was
born his mania for a natural child came to seem like madness. But he’d been right that he wanted to meet his son, rather than have him. The superstructure of paternal love was not quite the actual thing that touched his heart when the boy was in his arms. The love for their children that people talked about seemed like some quaint, reliable old bureaucracy that existed in order for the father to cheat the system and rig up something that actually worked, a contraption held together by luck and instinct that got them through the dangers and occasionally delivered something like joy.
It’d become impossible for Alex to stay on as head of the Belford Institute after Harry’s body was exhumed. The postmortem was inconclusive, as Alex and his supporters warned it would be, and the possibility of criminal charges faded, but by that time the media had taken Alex’s reputation to pieces. He was reprimanded by the board; he resigned and found that legal fees and an unforeseen tax bill for the benefit in kind of a free house in the most expensive part of Islington had left him broke.
Matthew and Lettie were challenging the will in the courts, and in the meantime Harry’s old house would have stood empty, if it hadn’t been occupied by a group of squatters protesting at social inequality in London. The squatters, young, radical and exhaustively educated, became notorious for all-night parties where they danced, drank, took drugs, screwed and argued over art, religion and philosophy. The phrase Citron Square became synonymous with a male social type, with bearded, priestly young atheists in v-necks and ties and skinny jeans.
Citron Square was one of two phrases the Comrie-Shepherds bequeathed the culture in those days, the other being BabyBjörned. Around the world, wherever two members of the global healthocracy gathered together, one was likely to ask the other ‘Have you been BabyBjörned?’ – describing the experience of Dr Rebecca Shepherd marching into their office with her infant strapped to her belly to demand funding, support, votes or training for an international malaria vaccine complex to be built in Dar es Salaam. They agreed Shepherd was naïve, shameless, vexatiously persistent; yet she got her way, and they shook their heads and laughed, wondering how the boy would turn out. Bec moved back to Dar with Alex, who was grateful, at first, to escape the northern hemisphere.
