by Simon Avery
“Dad?” Krisztina said.
There was a silence on the phone that lengthened for so long, she wondered if anyone had answered her call at all. She was about to speak again when he said: “Krissy?”
She’d imagined he wouldn’t make it easy on her. But his voice was different from the last time they’d spoken. Ten years since her mother had died. He’d made the trip into Budapest for the funeral where they’d had the briefest of exchanges. He lingered at the graveside afterward, but come the wake, he was long gone. So much time had elapsed. So much time had been wasted. “Dad,” she said, “I talked to Peter. He told me that things had gotten…” She paused to choose her words. “Worse.”
She had these songs. Eight songs and now what to do with them? She’d called Peter Wright, who’d produced This is Krisztina, and told him she had good quality demos. Probably almost an album’s worth of new songs.
“What do I do?” she’d asked.
“What do you want to do, Kris?” Peter had asked.
Saying I want to make a new record meant calling the record company, pulling together session musicians, booking studio time, setting all of those wheels in motion. It announced that she wanted to be part of the world again. She didn’t know if she wanted that at all. But if she’d been given these songs, these gifts, and she did nothing then surely this past year had been a waste of time. And that would demean Alice’s memory in some way. She’d been so happy to hear that Krisztina had heard new music. Even if it was the sound of her mortality.
But then Peter had blindsided her by saying: “Have you talked to your father recently?”
No, she hadn’t. She knew his illness was terminal and she’d avoided seeing him for that very reason. Ten years since they’d spoken. She’d heard about his diagnosis in the press but she hadn’t called him. He hadn’t been there for her during all the crucial moments in her life. He’d been absent since she was a child; she knew there were reasons for that, but it had been so long. There was so much water under the bridge.
And now things were different. There was good reason not to see him. She didn’t want to hear his song. It would be too painful, too difficult to hear. But then of course, sad as it was, Alice’s song had become a kind of celebration of their time together. Hearing it now made her feel closer to her when the rooms felt too empty. Perhaps she could hear her father’s song, the song of his death, and ignore it.
She wanted that part of her life not to ache anymore. It had hurt for so long.
He’d never lost his American accent or that rich, mellifluous tone that had been so beloved of girls and boys in bedsits in the swinging sixties. It drew you in, seemed to offer more than his manner could feasibly supply. He was not a people person. She’d inherited that at least from him. But there was an edge to his voice now, a palpable chink in his armour that she supposed borrowed time made of you. She only wanted him to say one thing to her then and he did:
“Krissy, will you come and see me?”
Of course she would. Just hearing him call her Krissy was enough.
Of course.
***
Krisztina took the train from Keleti station to Lake Balaton. She travelled first class so there were fewer passengers to crowd her. It cost double but it was worth it for the space and relative quiet and the velvet upholstery. The train had three stops en route and would take just under three hours to reach the north side of the lake. It gave her time to listen to her father’s music on her iPod while the countryside flew past. She had very little of any solidity of her father in her life: a handful of photographs that her mother had kept and which she’d inherited when she’d died, and some faint memories of childhood that she may simply have subsequently invented or dreamed. Krisztina realised that John Merriwether had been absent for so many years that if she wanted to know anything of the man he once was or the man he was now, then his music was the only place she could turn to.
She knew the five early records from the sixties all too well of course. On the surface, the records followed the pattern of MOR productions perfected in the fifties – a deep, rich baritone inflected with melodrama and set against lush symphonic orchestration that, by the third record had evolved into Sibelius-influenced arrangements that sounded utterly otherworldly.
And it was the songs, the stories they told, the imagery they built in the mind of the listener: kitchen-sink dramas and tales of broken affairs, lonely transvestites in bedsits and old soldiers in parks, sailors and their whores, philanderers in faded suits and funerals in the rain… Even now, as well as she knew these songs, there was a strange and beautiful alchemy here that she could not unlock when she studied them as a musician and songwriter. She realised that she never wanted to; a magician’s trick once revealed was only ever disappointingly prosaic. No matter what his shortcomings were as a father, Krisztina realised that in his absence these songs had always been there; a haunting and ghostly mirror of the world she lived in. She could slip inside at any time like Alice in Wonderland and he was there, always there.
His co-producer Peter Wright had posted her a pre-release copy of The Bleed a few months ago. She’d considered it that day – it had been a pretty day, too pretty for the darkness that it proffered – and put it aside, never returned to it. Yesterday she’d dusted it off to transfer onto her iPod, placed the lyric booklet into her holdall along with an issue of Wire magazine that contained a new interview with her father in preparation for the journey. Everything about the new record still unsettled her, even the cover art, which suggested a dark, dense vacuum or the creeping sickness that would ultimately take her father away from her. But it was time for it now, she realised. She couldn’t run away from the stark reality of his mortality anymore; she would have to face it and face it head-on.
The first thing that struck Krisztina was that his singing voice had changed in forty years. Of course it had. But there was something terribly fragile and distressing now about the gorgeous baritone reduced to a quavering and stretched voice in the wilderness of such sounds. The first song, ‘Darkness’, galloped along breathlessly then, midway through, the tone and texture changed without warning, and a solemn organ and drum pulse heralded the beginning of ‘Confession’, which, wrapped in its own arcane sense of drama, began:
I will slip in under your heart
And rattle your ribs
I have come
To hear your confession
It was as compelling as a car crash. The strings when they came were churning, nauseating. The words were pared away until there was no room for light, only awful secrets and truths. During ‘Veronica and Zodiac’, the spaces between the horrifying slabs of sound were uncompromisingly bare and protracted as it described a dictator standing trial for war crimes, and his obsession with the screen idol Veronica Lake. In ‘The Steppe’, a bleak trumpet sounded over ominous drums until gunshots rang out.
The spent bullet casings
I see peasants in blankets in the snow
The dormant wards and nurseries
The walls smeared in blood
Krisztina sensed the album’s title referenced the bleed from one idea to the next, the bleed of lost, forgotten love and regret and shame that lingered heavy in the atmosphere of the songs; of a gradual slide into Hell via snapshots of atrocities. There were no answers offered, no simple twelve-bar passages, and no resemblance to standard song writing techniques. Just impressions and sounds and hermetic imagery; a series of aural imaginings that dragged you into their cinematic world and then slammed the doors shut behind you.
At times Krisztina felt scared for him as he cried out in that vertiginous baritone and the darkness threatened to envelope him. He was too far out, like an astronaut adrift in space. There was nothing to cling to, nothing familiar, nothing good. Only raw nerves and trauma. By the time she reached the final song, ‘Russia is Burning’, Krisztina felt horrified and mesmerised by it all. It was too much to assimilate in one listen.
When she removed the ear buds
, the sound of the train and quiet conversation was jarring; how could life go on, unchanged by that music? She wanted to run both at it and away from it. She looked out of the window and watched the landscape unfold, afraid of finding out what kind of man her father had become.
***
The late afternoon sky was purple with storms as she left the station. The buildings were like phantoms in the fog. Only the cars at the roadside convinced you that you were still part of this century. She passed a faded hotel and a garage with a zárt sign in the window. She didn’t see anyone. She heard a song drifting out of the fog but it didn’t belong to anyone; it was just a radio in a window.
Her father lived near Badacsony, a famous volcanic mountain and wine growing region. The remote village on the northern side of the shores of Lake Balaton was well away from the resort towns that attracted the tourists and music festival goers. It was hard to reconcile the music she’d listened to and the large house she arrived at, with its pretty blue shutters and faded yellow walls, entered by a garden gate in the shade of an alley. There was café table rusting in the little front garden, a coffee cup filled to the brim with rain. Krisztina felt a sudden surge of panic as she reached the door, but as she raised a hand to knock he was already there, opening a gate to allow access to the backyard and she felt like a child again. He stood staring at her for a moment: a thin, bird-like man in faded jeans, denim jacket and sneakers, his eyes peering out from the brim of a baseball cap. She saw his brow furrow for a moment but then he slipped the cap away from his thinning hair and she saw his weathered face properly. It was kinder than the photo in Wire magazine.
He smiled and said: “Krissy…” He came towards her hesitantly and they stood awkwardly for a moment in the yard, uncertain as to what their next move toward each other should be. Finally he shrugged and laughed and took her in his arms, smothered her face with the smell of him and she felt tears spring to her eyes. They were unexpected and she tried to stop them, but when he released her, she saw the same uneasy emotions in his face too.
“Dad,” she began and then words failed her.
He took her hand and led her back with him, into his home.
***
In the summer he would sit on the balcony on the first floor of the house, smoking his now forbidden cigarettes, watching the people from the village make their way up the slope to the stores. Sometimes rain fell on the rusted metal roof of the garage opposite. Occasionally there was the soft clatter of trains carried to him on the breeze. In the evening he would read and hear the waiters sweeping the pavement outside the restaurant, place the chairs up on tables, then walk down the slope home, trailing cigarette smoke in their wake. There was poetry in this simple place but Krisztina had found no trace of it in his songs.
He took her out behind the house, to an empty deck that stretched out into the water of the lake. They were surrounded by forest, the trees dense, bare and snow-covered.
“It’s frozen in places,” he told her. “Usually you’ll see them ice-fishing or ice-sailing out there when it freezes over entirely.”
It was beautiful. It looked like a frozen sea. Indeed, it was the sea to the landlocked Hungarians. There was nothing but the tumescent clouds on the horizon. Krisztina could hear the boats that were tied against the deck creaking against each other. The way her father talked about it to her later, she sensed that this idyll he’d found was what he feared losing the most. He wanted no hospitals, no further treatments. He only sought this peace all the way to the end. Krisztina realised that she hadn’t given much thought to his song. It was this that she’d feared most but it seemed so strangely distant that it didn’t concern her as much as she’d feared. It was an omnipresent rumble interspersed with a distant aria in the trees or across the lake. There was a mournful dissonance to it; she’d expected it might resemble something from The Bleed, and it did, but it was quieter somehow, less confrontational. It was sad and accepting.
It took Krisztina a while to acclimatise. She was used to the sound of a city around her; the people and the sirens and the river raging below her. This calm was unnerving. Even when the fog lifted and the rain came, washing away the snow on the ground, it sounded hollow on the roofs and the lake. As if she was in some glacial scene from European cinema.
Inside there was the odour of cooking and tobacco. The air was warm and oppressive. Her father felt the cold fiercely now, so the radiators were turned up high in all of the rooms. There were books everywhere; he read voraciously and, once he’d filled the multitude of shelves, he’d left them piled up in corners, on the stairs, in the kitchen and the bathroom until the pages curled and turned brown with age. Krisztina saw a cat several times amongst the clutter; it slinked between the tables and chairs, sat regarding her from the window ledges, but never approached her.
They sat in a weathered conservatory which was filled with creeping plants and an ancient TV, and drank bitter coffee. Krisztina noticed the wedding ring still on her father’s finger. She imagined him removing it after the divorce, placing it in a drawer. And then, after her mother’s death and after drifting through the funeral without speaking to her loved ones, without dealing with the process, her father coming home and taking it out of the drawer, putting it back on his finger, angry at his own sentimentality. Or perhaps he’d never taken it off in the first place. She had no right to guess.
After the initial familiarity, a reticence had crept back between them again, and they talked about anything but the subjects she’d travelled 130km to talk about. Krisztina quickly realised that music would have to be their common ground. She told him she’d listened to The Bleed on the train journey here and he initially made light of it when she gave him her thoughts. But then he began to ask her questions about it and she found herself pausing to consider her responses because it seemed important to do so. What her father had created was something monumental: he’d returned as John Merriwether and recorded something utterly alternative, something entirely other. He was years ahead of the game, just as he had been in the sixties. She said the songs evoked Francis Bacon paintings, and Milošević, the holocaust, body horror; the strange geography of shifting borders and dictators being made to stand for their crimes. He nodded and leaned in close with his elbows on his knees. The more he smiled that easy smile, the more she wanted to please him. It dawned on her gradually, and when she realised she had run out of things to say, she rooted in her holdall and produced a CD. She placed it on the table between them.
“You’re kidding me,” he said. “Is this what I think it is?”
“Something new,” she said, and suddenly she realised that she wanted him above anyone else to hear what she’d been working on these past twelve months.
He was delighted. They returned to the warmth of the front room where her father slipped the disc into the CD player and turned up the volume. He shifted some newspapers off the huge soft couch and slumped down beside her to listen as the light left the sky outside and the rain speckled the glass of the conservatory.
Listening to the songs with an audience was a revelation for her. They took on a new dimension; her father paused them frequently and asked questions about the techniques she’d used to make the demos. She felt fiercely proud of the work finally; it hadn’t occurred to her to wonder what someone else might think of them. The record label people listened with different ears, of course; they wanted to hear a single at least. Her father had worked with an independent label to release The Bleed, and they hadn’t flinched once, even when he told them there would be no demos, that the music was in his head and the songs would be constructed with session musicians that he and his producer, Peter would cherry-pick.
When the music was over, the questions asked and answered and their common ground well trod, there was a pause and finally he said: “Peter told me about Alice.”
She nodded, looked away. She wondered if she’d ever really be able to talk about her. Alice had been hers and hers alone. Perhaps she’d always be the catch i
n her throat, the place where words stalled.
“I wanted to call you,” he said. “But I heard a month after the fact. And so much time had gone by since we’d spoke that I didn’t know how to start that conversation with you.”
“You had your own problems,” she said. The rain was falling harder now. She could see it on the lake; see the mist gathering in the mountains and the trees. The rooms of her father’s house were growing dark. She could hear the radiators ticking. “It should have been me calling you.”
“I was never a good father to you, Krissy,” he said after a moment. She sensed he’d been rehearsing this in his head. That there was no longer time to shy away from these subjects. That the words at least had to be said, even if they were rejected. “I know you know that but I want you to see that I’m aware that I failed you for so many years.”
She thought of the interview she’d read in Wire magazine: I was a mean drunk, a bad husband, an even worse father… So yeah, a lot of regrets.
“I was too young and stupid to have a child back then. I’d look at you when you were born and it terrified me. I wasn’t much more than a kid myself. I was still angry at the way things had gone for me, the way I’d handled my career, the way I’d just let it slip out of my hands. All those years of bad faith…
