by Simon Avery
GOING BACK TO THE WORLD
‘Going Back to the World’, which was originally published in Black Static issue #44, shares some connective tissue with The Teardrop Method. Dave Cook is the journalist who reviews Krisztina Ligetti’s records, and interviews both her and her father John Merriwether for Wire magazine. In ‘Going Back to the World’, Dave takes centre stage and we get to learn a lot more about his life (and death).
1
Dave called Susanna the same night he killed himself. She hadn’t heard from him in a while. They’d been divorced for almost five years now, and while there had never really been any acrimony between them, there was a distance whenever they spoke; that wounded and tentative silence between words after a violent disagreement. Susanna had resolved herself to the fact that little would change between them. Why should it concern her that the only man she’d ever really cared about now only tended to call her at the end of the night and the end of a bottle of Scotch? But it did. Of course it did. She thought she was worth more than that. She thought, deep down, he was better than that.
“Suze?” He made it sound as if he’d called her by accident and was surprised to hear her voice. “Susanna. I should tell you from the off that I’m a bit pissed.”
“Well, that’s a relief, Dave,” she had said. “It saves us from having a civilised conversation.”
“Now don’t be like that,” he said. She could hear him settling into his leather armchair; the one between the window and the fireplace. The crowded bookcase behind him, the books and records bowing the shelves and scattered on the floor beside it. “You’re not getting ready for bed, are you?”
“No, of course not,” she said, “I’ve just got in.” She was in her pyjamas on the sofa with a blanket over her legs, watching a shopping TV channel. He didn’t need to know that.
What he said next surprised her. “I want you to know that I do still love you.” He laughed to himself. “I want you to know that this house and what money I have are yours.” He stalled for a moment, and then said: “After I’m gone.”
“That’s very civil of you, Dave, but you’re fifty-two and you have nine lives. At the very least. You’ll bloody well outlive us all.”
“It’s not that, Suze,” he said. She heard him hesitate and move in his chair, probably leaning back and glancing out of the window so he could see the street outside. There’d be leaves everywhere at this time of year. It had been such a lovely place, that house on the Edgbaston Road, not far from the cricket ground. It probably still was. Trees all down the street, the weeping willow in the pretty little front garden, the three sided bay window with its mosaic stained glass, the welcoming light of it all in the early evening… “It’s just that I did something that I’ve discovered I can’t undo, even though I have tried.” He laughed to himself. “And it’s coming back to bite me on the arse.”
She sighed and rose from the sofa. She’d muted the TV for this nonsense. She wandered into the kitchenette and put the kettle on. One of the neighbours from the flat downstairs was in the backyard staring into the night with a cup of coffee in his hand. He was divorced too. This was where they ended up, in poxy little flats in Moseley. Nursing their wounds and just about getting by on low-income jobs, wondering how on earth anything would change, knowing, deep down, that nothing would. “I’m sure it’s not that bad, Dave.”
“It seems to me that if you yearn for one thing, you have to accept that you’ll have to let something else go in order to have that thing. Do you see?”
“Not particularly, Dave,” she said.
He sighed. “Look, Suze, this is bloody important.”
“You’re drunk, Dave. You should probably be getting into bed, otherwise I’ll be moving my stuff over there sooner than you think.”
But his tone darkened then: “It won’t stop following me, Suze. It’s been fucking following me for six months now. I don’t sleep anymore because I’m terrified of it, of what it’ll do.”
She hung up on him then. She wouldn’t indulge him when he was inebriated. That was not the man she’d once loved and she sometimes only wanted to remember him like that. As a better man that the one he’d become. She un-muted the TV and forgot about it.
And then three days later, Dave was found dead. The cleaner had arrived on Monday morning and found him slumped in that leather armchair with an empty bottle of single malt in his lap and the remains of a cocktail of antidepressants and painkillers scattered across the carpet. He’d been dead all weekend. Susanna had been his final port of call.
2
It rained all day. The one thing that Susanna remembered above all else about the blur of Dave’s funeral was a multitude of black suits, dripping with rain. She hardly recognised a soul; she felt like a stranger there despite everyone seeming to know her name and who she was. Who she had been. The wife of the late, great Dave Cook. The service was perfunctory and quietly dignified. The mourners crowded behind Susanna in the pews and bowed their heads while the vicar talked about Dave. She stared at the coffin on the conveyer belt, and the pale curtains that it would disappear behind at the end of the service, realising that she had known precious little about his activities these past few years. The vicar had asked for some details that she could use in the sermon, but all Susanna could offer were events from twenty years or so ago. In the end she’d given the woman the number of a couple of journalist friends of Dave who might be able to provide a better picture of her ex-husband. But there was nothing else to say. It seemed that none of Dave’s friends or family had seen much of him in the last couple of years. It was as if he’d wilfully cut himself off from the world.
By the time the coffin moved behind the curtains, Susanna could feel tears in her eyes despite herself. She willed them to stay unshed, to dry on her eyelashes so no one would notice them. But she couldn’t help herself in the end; her only partner in these forty-six years was leaving her behind. Soon the long black cars outside the crematorium would pull away with the mourners inside, and there would be nothing left. Just an empty house to sell, boxes stuffed with possessions and an urn filled with the ashes of the dead. Soon it would all fade, she supposed. Soon Dave would be another memory, an ache that faded to something bittersweet and hard to recall, like a dream.
At the threshold of the chapel umbrellas were being extended to greet the rain as it lashed across the cemetery. The black cars were shining. There was a procession of other cars, all the way down the long avenues of the graveyard.
It was time to go back to the world a man down.
3
The house on the Edgbaston Road was much as she remembered it, albeit rather shabby now; the garden, the paintwork and the slates on the roof all needed looking at before she could consider selling the place. She hadn’t been back here since they’d separated before the divorce, but as soon as she got off the bus and walked down the corridor of sycamores that rose to meet each other across the street, through the scattered leaves and past the suddenly so very familiar row of Victorian terraces, it was like she’d never been away. It was a vertiginous feeling, like falling helplessly toward something that offered no safety net.
A solicitor had called two days after the funeral as part of his function as executor of Dave’s estate. Susanna was listed as the sole beneficiary of Dave’s earthly possessions in the will. Apparently there were no outstanding debts and the mortgage had been paid years ago. He had a modest amount squirrelled away in various bank accounts and investments. It was all hers. She’d had to sit down.
That morning she’d stood, frozen in her bedroom, staring at her things, trying to decide what to pack, how long she thought she might be there, dealing with the necessities of preparing the house to be put on the market. She could of course come home at night – it was no more than a twenty-minute bus journey – but she supposed she’d achieve more if she simply stayed in the house and knuckled down until the job was done. Three nights at the most, she decided, and packed a small case with underwear, some pra
ctical clothes she could work in, and toiletries.
The weeping willow was all that remained of the front garden. Dave had torn it up and replaced it with a gravelled drive to make way for his Jaguar. She looked up at the house as if presenting herself to it. Here we are then, five years older. She’d never so much as passed this place in those years, even though she only lived a few miles up the road. It was simply riddled with memories. Returning to the house she’d lived much of her adult life in felt like a return to a deeper kind of loneliness.
She pushed her way through the small pile of mail on the floor behind the front door, gathered them up and placed them on the side table at the foot of the stairs, just as she had hundreds of times before in the past. Muscle memories: how these little things wait forever in your limbs, waiting to be put back into action. She dropped her case and stood for a moment, remembering the oblique light in the hall, how it swept across the walls and the stairs as the morning progressed. She glanced up the stairwell and saw the dust suspended in the slanting light from the stained glass and watched it for a moment, hypnotised by it. When she pushed the door to, the silence seemed to want to swallow her whole. She shrugged off her jacket and placed it onto one of the hooks behind the door, next to Dave’s other coats.
It was then that she noticed the first mark on the house. It was on the wall above the door: a painted symbol that looked like a pentagram or something like it. It was ugly and clearly had been painted in haste. What had possessed Dave to deface the wall in such a fashion?
She found further marks over the kitchen door after placing the carrier bag of groceries she’d picked up to tide her over for the next few days on the counter. And another over the doors in the dining room that led into the conservatory and back garden. There were smaller marks made over each of the windows too, like painted alarms over all of the entrances of the house. But what for?
In the front room, she looked at the leather armchair and the phone next to it. Some of the pills remained, crushed into the carpet. There was a fine layer of dust on everything. The weeping willow creaked outside in the wind, and the leaves scattered into the drive. She was aware of her own breath, her own heart, the blood cooling in her veins, a trance-like sensation of coming to rest.
But it was like breaking and entering. It felt wrong. She expected Dave to arrive at any moment. She shivered and then shook herself out of her reverie. It was time to roll up her sleeves and get to work on the place. After taking care of the groceries and throwing away the perishables from the fridge, she took a cup of tea into the dining room and sat at the table. She would have to decide if she wanted any of this furniture, she supposed. Much of it she remembered buying with Dave when they were younger. Aside from the TV and the stereo equipment, there were very few new additions to the house. If she did keep any furniture, she’d have to put it into storage until she decided what she would do with the money from the sale of the house. There would certainly be enough for a small place wherever she chose. She’d lived in that rented flat in Moseley for the past five years and she’d be more than delighted to find somewhere new. That notion in itself was enough to give her the impetus to get this done and done quickly.
4
The rest of the morning and the afternoon was dull and repetitive work. She began with the mail and then collated the bulk of Dave’s paperwork, so she could sort the outstanding bills into a pile to deal with at a later date. The rest of it she arranged in a pile on the dining table so she could burn it along with any other paperwork tomorrow in the back garden. Downstairs the front room posed the main problem. Here were shelves and shelves of books and a small sample of his vinyl collection. There was, in her opinion, an ostentatiously large flat screen TV beside the complex system of hi-fi separates that powered his record and CD collection. All of these could go, she supposed. She had no idea how much any of it was worth. She’d go through the books and make a selection of the ones she wished to keep for herself; the rest she would place in boxes and contact a charity shop in Moseley to come and collect. She supposed the record collection, which had always been Dave’s pride and joy, would be worth a great deal; she’d have to do some research on the internet to see how best to sell it.
Stymied by that, she instead ventured upstairs just as the light was leaving the afternoon. Dusk clung to the high corners of the landings, crept down into the shadows, and finally filled the rooms with darkness. She chased the darkness away by switching on all of the lights and went from room to room drawing the curtains. Upstairs too were the strange markings over the windows and doors. What had possessed him? There was a layer of dust on all of the objects. It made her feel strangely sad to see it all; much of it as she’d left it five years ago. Like a museum. It was as if Dave had simply abandoned those aspects of his life on the day she moved out and busied himself with other things. Perhaps it was an accrual of the task at hand, or the fading light, but Susanna finally sat on the edge of the bed at five in the afternoon and placed her face in her hands and wept a little. She wasn’t entirely sure why. She didn’t think she’d missed Dave and she’d harboured no secret desire for reconciliation. It was water under the bridge. It was all too distant now, that life, but then, she supposed, being suddenly surrounded by the rooms and things that had constituted the life she had lived for twenty years or so was what had undone her. There was a photo of them both still on the dressing table she had left behind. It wasn’t dusty. This he’d kept clean. She found that difficult to reconcile too. How young they were in that photo! It had been taken on their honeymoon in Venice. Dave had asked a tourist to take their photo in the Piazza San Marco, and, as he had, Dave had swept Susanna up off her feet and swung her round. The other tourists had stopped to stare in surprise, and the pigeons had burst into the air around them. Both of their faces were frozen in delight. She had a copy of it at home. She hadn’t looked at it in years. It discovered fresh tears in her.
Enough. She clenched her fists, pressed her heels together and set her jaw. Enough.
She rose and ventured up to the second floor where Dave had his study. The house was settling around her, moaning and creaking. It made her skittish. There were too many rooms. Even when she had lived here it had seemed too big for the both of them. She was sure someone was downstairs, someone small, scampering like a toddler from room to room, pushing open the doors and peering in, then trying another room. It sounded as if someone was picking books and records up and tossing them on the floor in the room below her. She was hearing things. It was nothing. The house was old. It was the radiators coming to life, floorboards complaining, the doors squeaking as they closed by themselves after she’d left them open.
Dave’s study was in disarray. When they’d first moved in, Dave had bought an antique writing desk, several bookshelves and some filing cabinets for this room. Now she could barely locate those objects in the room. There was a computer and a printer beside it, even an ancient fax machine, covered in a thick layer of dust. And there was paper everywhere: in ring binders, in manila folders, in punched pockets; it was piled up on the desk in front of his computer monitor, stacked on the chair, spilling out of the two cabinets, sprayed across the faded Persian rug. Christ, Dave, Susanna thought, where do I start?
Dave had already been in music journalism for several years when they met. He’d started out in the Underground press then joined the NME when he was eighteen, moved onto Wire in 1986, and ended up with a book contract and a column in The Guardian. It had paid for the house, the car, his record collection, his taste in fine wine and even finer restaurants. He’d started out writing gig reviews, and then graduated onto singles and albums and from there to interviews. He’d arrived at the tail end of the seventies, just as punk began its decline and the New Romantics, 2 Tone and synthesizer bands began to gather momentum. The eighties: he called it the politically and musically bankrupt decade. But he’d been there for the Hacienda and The Smiths and Joy Division; had interviewed Pete Townshend, Debbie Harry, Ian Curtis, John
Merriwether, David Bowie… While many rock journalists disappeared into the mythology they made for themselves, metamorphosing into degraded copies of the stars they wrote (often) disparagingly about, Dave had seen the job as just that – a job. He could leave the emptiness of it behind. And it was an empty life. He’d seen rock stars at their lowest and loneliest. It didn’t matter how rich they were. That rarefied air was too thin for Dave. He preferred to spend the evening with friends he’d cultivated away from all that. He hated to speak about the job. But people only wanted to know about his time on the road with Iggy Pop or Lou Reed. They wanted to know what he hadn’t included in the article; they wanted to know about the debauched aspect of it all. Sometimes he told them about how boring it was, how sad and pathetic. The sex and the drugs just alleviated the boredom.
They had met through friends; a couple who’d subsequently divorced. They had been two strangers conversing over starters in a restaurant in the city. She was twenty-two, he was twenty-seven. He seemed almost impossibly sophisticated and experienced to her, and the very fact that he hadn’t boasted about the more colourful aspects of his job at all made him seem more alluring. She’d managed to coax a handful of stories out of him: he told her about being in the recording studio for a couple of days’ work on Tom Waits’s Swordfishtrombones; how he’d briefly spoken to Frank Sinatra backstage at a gig, shook his hand, sputtered some ridiculous words of gratitude that the great man had taken good-naturedly, patting his cheek as he passed him by. There were a couple of tales where he was clearly simply a fan, and not coloured by the cold actuality of real life.
