Upstate

by James Wood

  Alan now realized that Helen’s restless planning, her fizzing impatience, her ideas about family holidays and magical, unlikely jobs at Oxford and Cambridge probably flowed from a new anxiety about her sister’s future. She could see something that he could not. Perhaps it was obvious to her precisely because Josh had been flirting with her? Helen saw things like that, much more clearly and decisively than he did.

  “I would like to know,” said Alan, looking earnestly at his daughter.

  “It’s just a feeling I got yesterday. And also something Josh said to me seemed ominous.”

  “What did he say?”

  “No, no, don’t panic, it was a small thing, so don’t make too much of it. Maybe I’m reading too much into it. He talked about wanting to live and work in New York.”

  “Well, what’s the problem?”

  “New York City, Dad, not New York State. Because he only talked about himself. He said ‘I,’ not ‘we.’ When I get to New York.”

  “That is a small thing,” said Alan, with manufactured relief.

  “Maybe. But I had two boyfriends—Stephen and Roly, remember them?—whose announced plans always seemed to omit me, and you know where those relationships went.”

  “You have so much more experience in these things than Van!”

  “Well,” she replied, returning to her earlier briskness, “I do things, and Van thinks things. Though I think, too, you know.”

  “I know you do.”

  * * *

  They were the last people at breakfast, their table the last spoiled one amid the prepared perfection. The barman had arrived, was already tuning up his instruments for lunch. The snow was lighter, the flakes had almost ceased: a few frail laggards fluttered down. Alan pushed his chair out, preparing to leave.

  “Dad, before you go: this stuff about leaving Sony … You said yesterday that you might get involved in my new project. Did you mean it, or were you being nice?”

  “Couldn’t it be both?”

  “You know I’m not bullshitting, right? There’s a revolution happening. That book I showed you on the train … The authors say that very soon music will be like water, flowing freely through pipes and networks and plumbing, straight into people’s homes. It’ll be a fact of life. Like turning on a tap. You’ll pay a flat fee for the right to turn on the tap. And that’ll be that. The record companies, though, still want you to buy water in little expensive bottles—Perrier, Evian. Imagine trying to fill your bath with little bottles of Evian! That’s how the big record companies are still thinking. But it’s not the future. The future is the tap, not the little bottle of Evian. That’s what the book is arguing.”

  “This makes sense, I suppose. Though music isn’t as essential as water, of course. The plumbing is supposed to be—what? The Internet?” The more enthusiastic she got, the calmer he would be.

  “Yes, essentially—digital communication of all kinds, streaming and sharing services. You saw yesterday when Josh got so excited?”

  Alan thought: when you both got so excited.

  “That’s because,” Helen continued, “he knows about this stuff, it’s his world. He can see a big change coming. They all can. And I want to be there. Do you know what David Bowie said, in 2002—in 2002! He wrote an article about how the absolute transformation of everything that anyone has ever thought about music is imminent, and nothing is going to stop it. He predicted then that copyright would no longer exist in ten years.”

  “That last fact sounds like a headache, actually, from your point of view.”

  “It doesn’t matter whether it sounds like a headache or an orgasm, it’s what’s going to happen!”

  They both knew that she hadn’t quite intended to say “orgasm.” Alan looked down at his hands.

  “And yes, I do think it’s exciting,” she added.

  “Clearly.” They smiled.

  “So it’s an opportunity. You should understand that. You always used to say that you were good at looking for opportunities.”

  “Did I?”

  “All the time. Well, that’s what it will take—the ability to look for opportunities. We’ll need not to overextend ourselves in the first few years, because profits may be limited to begin with.”

  “We?”

  “But as long as we’re patient and can see ahead, and keep on reminding ourselves that the record business is not the music business, then I think we could build something that is really exciting, which could become a whole factory for a brilliant new generation of British musicians.” Her eyes were dazzling, her chin was thrust up—she was the twelve-year-old girl on Christmas Day, holding her new three-quarter-sized Yamaha acoustic guitar, the crushed wrapping paper blooming on the carpet, announcing with passionate confidence: “I’ll play this properly by the summer!”

  “We,” Helen continued impatiently, “would be you and me and anyone else we can get to commit to the project. I’ll need at least three or four major investors. I have some shares I can liquidate, but that won’t be nearly enough. Tom is being cautious and wary, of course, so he’s basically an obstacle I’ll have to work around.”

  “I promise not to be an obstacle you have to work around. That doesn’t sound like a good fate at all.”

  “The thing is, Dad,” she began. “Look, do you want a bit more coffee? Why don’t I get a fresh pot?” She raised an imperious hand for the waiter. “Here’s the thing. I know I said, on the train, that I don’t need any financial help. That’s quite true.”

  “But not quite true?” he said.

  “Not quite true,” she conceded. Her arm was still raised.

  “In what way?”

  “In the way that a half-truth is also a half-lie, depending on whether you see the glass as half-full or half-empty.”

  “I see. Well, I guess I do.”

  “Of course I need money,” said Helen, “but I would only think of asking you if you told me that you want to be involved. If not, not—you’re totally free to walk away. No big deal. And of course, it wouldn’t be help, but a loan, an investment, a business proposition.”

  “Helen, dear—my love! This is a lot to consider. Let me think about this. Just let me think.” He repeated himself more aggressively than he meant to.

  “I’m sorry that I asked.”

  “No no, please stop that.”

  “Stop apologizing, or stop asking?” Helen was grim, flushed, solid, in a way he recognized.

  “I would like to help. This is an opportunity. But just at the moment—”

  “Well, I’m not asking you to get the checkbook out right now at the table, for God’s sake.”

  “It’s that … just now,” he continued, feeling as if he were trying to make his way up the main street outside, walking straight into driving snow, “things are somewhat up in the air at the company. The Dobson project, you heard me talking about it years ago probably, has just fallen through, so a big loan has to be repaid. Profits are down. We have very little of a buffer. And cash flow is not readily available at the moment.”

  Helen would remember that last phrase, “cash flow is not readily available at the moment.”

  “But surely, it’s in the nature of what you do”—and yet, she realized, she had so little idea of what he really did—“that things succeed and fail, and rise and fall. No? You can’t be telling me that you or the company has no money. That’s just ridiculous. That’s not true.”

  “It’s no business of yours how much or how little money I have,” he said quickly.

  “Fine, and it’s no business of yours what I do with the next twenty years of my life. You won’t hear me talk about it ever again.”

  “I’m sorry, Helen, I don’t want to hurt you. But please listen to me—we’re comfortable rather than rich. You know that. So we need to proceed cautiously. Just give me a little more time.” He sounded like a debtor, and she the creditor. So he rephrased himself, more calmly. “I promise you that we will have this conversation again, in a few weeks, without ange
r, but certainly not in public, all right?”

  “No we won’t.” She rose from the table.

  “Come on, Helen.”

  “It’s okay, Dad,” she said more gently, and grandly, theatrically even, “I absolve you.” She touched his head as she passed behind him, and walked out of the dining room.

  24

  Her father had never understood her music—and so he had never really understood her. That was her conclusion as she went up to her room. Dad didn’t understand, Van had never properly understood. Tom didn’t, really. Who, then? Julian Vereker, her first boyfriend, lovely Jules, the refusenik drummer of Jensen and the Interceptors—who had actually quit their band, comically enough, because, he said, “I’m sick of being the one who is always in charge of ending the songs!” He was a lousy drummer, but he loved music in the same way as she did. They used to lie on the floor, holding hands, between his parents’ ridiculously large Wharfedale hi-fi speakers. Julian reeked of his teenager’s vulgar aftershave … Denim, it was called.

  Music was now her official life; and much more important, it was her secret joy. Because she was really the girl—not Jenny—in “Rock & Roll,” who felt that nothing was happening at all, until one fine morning she turned on a New York radio station and couldn’t believe what she heard. When she was twelve, Helen turned on the radio, and heard—not Lou Reed, but Joe Jackson’s “It’s Different for Girls,” and that was that. Not Jenny’s New York radio; not “Mohammed’s Radio” either (sweet song, that one); but her radio, which played always inside her.

  Music had been far more reliable than friends or parents or lovers. It never abandoned her, it was always there to teach and instruct, console and excite. Songs structured her life. What philosophy was to Van, music was to Helen. She didn’t just like the songs—that was what ordinary people felt—but took them inside her. Joe Jackson spoke to her because she was just beginning to feel, at almost thirteen, that it was definitely different for girls. Four years later, she was actually the girl who left the north for Euston station, with this really ragged notion that you’ll return, as that great Smiths song went. (She never really did return. It was King’s Cross, but close enough.) She once told a cruel boyfriend to try a little tenderness, because Otis Redding said he should. (For years, she had thought Otis’s same old shaggy dress was a shabby one.) At her school, the boy hero, the sporty handsome boy all the girls fell in love with—he is of pure and noble breed—was actually called, no kidding, David Watts, just as the Jam said he was! Her first kiss happened at a party (joss sticks and crimson lightbulbs) while the Human League was clicking out “Don’t You Want Me”—tinny music from tinny speakers, but a real kiss. (She did want, she did.) Long before she experienced an orgasm, she had an idea—no: more than an idea, a feeling right between her legs—of what that event might be like, from the cosmic climax, the stellar come, that the scandalously underpaid Clare Torry screamed out in “The Great Gig in the Sky.” When she went through a phase of political rebellion, “The Eton Rifles” and “Cortez the Killer” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again” gave her the words, lent her the energy and excitement: Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. (And the Sex Pistols, with their stunning aggression and their funny, trilling, Dalek voices.) Radiohead’s “No Surprises” and Ian Dury’s “You’ll See Glimpses”—the best and saddest song of all—always made her think of Van, and of Van’s precarious happiness. (Van, Van!) And when her mother was dying, Helen wept and wept at Peter Gabriel’s beautiful “Wallflower,” and its hopeful coda: And I will do what I can do. (She could do nothing, of course.)

  And for joy and dancing? Martha and the Muffins, “Echo Beach.” Dancing to that song at university, at four in the morning, at that party after the end-of-term gig, when her own fairly crappy Oxford band (Ironic Erection) had played onstage alongside the best-known Cambridge band (President Reagan Is Not Clever). Or even better: the first time she ever heard Tammi Terrell and Marvin Gaye sing “Ain’t Nothin’ Like the Real Thing.”

  Well, there ain’t nothin’ like the real thing, and the real thing was rock music, and she had experienced it.

  Had Dad ever understood that? Any of it? He once said he liked “You’ll See Glimpses.” A big concession. And he certainly implied, more than once, that he fancied “the dark-haired one in Abba.” Ah! Okay.

  Why secret? Why a secret joy? Because rock and roll, as she understood it, wants to destroy the stupid comfort of the world: Search and destroy. That was the atrocious and rather unfunny irony of being a record company suit … Rock music, the rock and roll she liked, wanted to tear down the Sony tower. (Obviously, she could never confess this to anyone, but this faith of hers explained her increasing boredom around the Dave Matthews Band. Where’s the garlic? Frank Zappa’s all-important question. Universally applicable, she felt.) The world had always told Helen to “put away childish things.” Her fancy schools had groomed her for work, for the taming of eros, prepared her to dress in the right uniform, make obeisance to pragmatism, success, and financial self-aggrandizement. Everything existed to be made use of. “Life” was conceived of as entirely pragmatic—work, office nonsense, commuting, relentless haste and fatigue, imperfect weekends, a bit of sleep: that was “the world.” And that was where she had ended up: economics, the “wise” choice at university; days spent inside an office. Life was something else, too. It was endless loss: Mum. Growing up had turned out to be something like the Roman ave atque vale, simultaneously an opening and closing, a welcome that was really a long farewell. There was no help, no protection from suffering. Two things slowed down this steady movement, this laborious death march, two young facts argued against it: children and rock and roll. And really, they were the same thing. “Put away childish things,” said the world, and “come and join the reasonable grown-ups.” But rock opened up that barely tolerated space for childishness, for refusal and resistance, for anti-enlightenment, for juvenile irresponsibility and revolt and blissed-out trance. Childishness, really.

  For you look at your children and think: This is what we once were; and what we should be again.

  The greatest musicians were children, stayed childlike, irresponsible, curiously innocent. They died young, sacrificed themselves, messed up their health and their bodies, so that we can go on living our lives, the long reasonable bourgeois sleep that is our life, tediously tending our bank accounts and dividends, our retirement funds and dinner parties and haircuts and regular dental visits. Rock music is opposed to this. It is the sleep of reason.

  25

  Vanessa was surprised to see her father—he was almost an hour early for lunch. She asked him where Helen was.

  “I don’t know if she’ll join us. She’s being very unreasonable.”

  “Uh-oh—is it my fault? Come in. It’s freezing out there.”

  Alan gave his version of the argument. Helen’s impatience, of course, was characteristically overwhelming—the whole family knew what that was like—and, well, when Alan suggested he’d need time to think about the money, “Helen just blew up. Just blew up.”

  Vanessa, unexpectedly, took Helen’s side. “Dad, you did say yesterday that you might help her”—and seeing his face tighten, because Vanessa knew exactly what Alan was hiding, had intuited what the argument had really been about, she corrected herself, and added, “you did say that you might be able to be involved in some way…”

  “Help, help,” Alan muttered insultingly as he removed his coat and icy shoes.

  “Helen does have such a big temper. She wants so much, and her disappointment is always proportionate, right?” She looked sympathetically, hopefully, at him, as she had always done, always trying to make peace, even in those periods when she was really the cause of the strife. “Would you like a cup of tea,” she asked almost shyly as they walked into the kitchen. “A cuppa?”

  “I’d love one … Good lord,” he added as he sat at the pine table and looked outside, “I don’t know how you manage the winters in this place.” What ha
d been a scattered white freshness in the early morning, when it was still snowing, was now a solid white tedium. It was eleven in the morning, but it might have been four in the afternoon.

  “Before I came to live here, I only understood conceptually the phrase you used to hear about old or sick people—he or she won’t survive another winter. That’s what it’s like here: each winter is some kind of test of survival. And your body seems to know when spring arrives, that it’s gained another lease on life. It’s successfully finished another precarious chapter. You can actually feel yourself unclenching.”

  Alan was worried by this talk of death and precarious survival, though Van hadn’t spoken gloomily.

  “I think I met one of your local ‘figures’ last night. A woman in the hotel bar, very keen to tell me she was a Trask, which didn’t mean anything, I’m afraid. Hello there,” he said as Josh appeared in the doorframe. He realized he had failed to use the lad’s first name.

  “Yep, we know her well,” said Vanessa. “She’s a figure around town, isn’t she, babe?”

  “She has a hip flask to get her through the dry hours. Hi, Alan, by the way!” Josh was fiddling with the coffee machine, and Alan wondered if he had just woken. Hard to tell, when your day clothes and night clothes have become essentially indistinguishable—one continuous grayish habit. Today Josh was wearing dark tracksuit bottoms, and another gray T-shirt, this one with bloodred lettering: GEORGE BUSH AND SON. FAMILY BUTCHERS. EST. 1989. In spite of himself—in spite of Josh—Alan liked the shirt.

  “Poor thing, there’s not much evidence she’s a Trask. It seems to be her fantasy. It allows her to tell everyone her own sad tale,” said Vanessa. Alan felt sorry for the woman he thought of as “the Trask lady.”

  “I like the shirt,” he said.

  “Thanks. It’s a very demure piece, I think! I can’t wait till the end of this dynasty. Asses of evil … I’m glad your guy is going soon, too.”