Walter was getting angry, but his anger seemed aimless, wide-ranging.
“Did your parents take you to Bern? Jesus Christ! How could they take you to the place where you were born?”
“They know nothing about this. I found the address of the clinic in one of my mother’s books. I told no one. No one knows, except Selena.”
“Who was the father?”
“I don’t know, Walt.” I could hear her misery. “I should never have given her away.”
Walter looked stunned. Clearly he was thinking that Floss must have enjoyed a wild sex life before they married that he knew nothing about.
“Oh, Walt,” Floss protested. “Don’t look at me like that. I mean I don’t know who had sex with me at your wedding. I wasn’t a virgin when we married, but neither was I a wild child. Selena and I always looked much wilder than we really were.”
Oh my God! My panic was ramping up. Has Selena told her I was the father? If she tells Walter, he’ll kill me.
“Who was it?” he was demanding again, more firmly. “Do you know? Surely you must be able to guess?”
She shook her head. Because unlike me, she had no suspicion at all as to who the father of her daughter might have been. Walter’s mood broke, and he drew Floss to the sofa to sit between us and put his arm around her, pulling her head to his chest and caressing her hair.
I breathed a great sigh of relief and put my arms around the two of them as they held each other, both with tears in their eyes. But my relief would be short-lived.
Floss knew nothing about what had happened to her baby. She had been running away from it all for her entire life. She looked at Walter then, shamefaced.
“It was at your wedding, Walt,” she said once more, breaking into body-shaking sobs. “I got completely smashed.”
“As one does at weddings,” interjected Walter, trying to soothe his unhappy wife a little.
“Selena gave me some drug or other. I think it was horse tranquilizer.”
“You’re saying you had sex at my wedding to Siobhan?” Walter was starting to see that this was not a story that would necessarily end so badly if only he could contain himself. “You got pregnant, had a baby whom you gave away. Who adopted the child?”
Floss shook her head again. “I don’t know. My parents met my mother Maud Andréevich very briefly in the clinics when they adopted me, but they knew nothing about her. They had no way of knowing who she was or where she lived. That’s what I wanted for myself. It had worked for me, and for Mum and Dad.
“I don’t know who the father of my daughter was, and I have no idea where my daughter might be today. I’m still not entirely sure I ever want to know. Selena got the drugs from someone else. I always thought it might have been Ronnie, he’d had some ketamine, but he always denied giving it to me. He never wanted to speak about the wedding. He always said it had been a bad and unhappy day for him. He’d never elaborate.”
Oh my God! I wanted to shout at her that I never gave her the fucking ketamine. It was Selena. It was Ronnie. Anyone but me. Not me. Not now. Oh fuck!
Then I heard Floss laugh through her tears.
“On top of the alcohol, it mixed really badly and I passed out. All I can remember is that I woke up with someone carrying me to a sofa. Then I passed out again. I can remember nothing. But I think that person made love to me while I was drunk.”
Walter was quick to correct his wife. “No one ‘made love’ to you, Floss.” His voice was firm, and very angry. “You were raped.”
Walter now knew Floss had been raped by an unknown man at his wedding to his first wife. He did the math: he thought, God! Floss had been just eighteen years old. I had to stand there and nod my head.
“Yes, yes,” I heard myself say, aware that I was the culprit. “Awful, terrible.”
If Floss had really been completely unconscious, I thought, I must have been pretty much unconscious as well.
But a vague memory did come back to me at that moment, of Ronnie being around and Selena too, and I knew we’d all taken a hit of the ketamine I had brought. I’d taken cocaine too, and drunk a fair bit of champagne. At such times I always felt I was merely dabbling. If it wasn’t heroin then it couldn’t be all that bad. More memories came to mind. I had a shadowy, swirling image of the four of us dancing in a circle with our arms linked. We were singing and laughing. I remembered Selena kissing me, and then her kissing Ronnie. I remembered that I was surprised at Ronnie; didn’t gay men find that a turnoff? Did Floss kiss Selena? Did she kiss Ronnie? Did she kiss me?
Then, nothing. No more memories. No images.
Walter’s anger switched to Selena.
“What the hell was Selena doing divvying up hard drugs? Wherever they came from. Jeez!”
I was tempted again to shout out in my own defense, but I couldn’t break my cover. In truth, I had no defense.
Floss tried to quieten him, pleading with him not to be angry. “You know the story, Walt,” she cried. “Selena killed her own father to stop him beating and abusing Siobhan. She was eight years old. That damaged her forever. She’s never had a long-term relationship.”
Walter held Floss’s face in his hands. If ever he might have composed a sonnet it would have been then.
With a sudden flash of comprehension, Walter exclaimed, “Floss!” He was almost laughing. “The baby you gave birth to in 1995 in Bern, she will still be alive!”
A voice screaming over a huge PA system at some massive public event. “Welcome to the gates of hell.” Hell. The inferno. Torture. Flames. The rack. Evil laughter. Bodies being beaten, burned, thudding, falling. A ghastly choir. An electric guitar, strangled, itself tortured. A ridiculous organ. The stupid shouting of a football crowd, an Islamic horde, a Pentecostal congregation. A preacher “casting out devils.” Aspirants speaking in tongues. Crowds of people chanting angrily in many and different demonstrations. Hippy drummers, native drummers, drumming, thundering, a building anger driven by the rhythm, transmogrifying into a driving rock ’n’ roll band of the old school, playing at full tilt. The sound is huge. This is pub rock, meets pomp rock, meets garage punk, meets prog rock, meets God rock, meets road rock, meets hell-on-earth rock, meets acid, garage, rap. This massive, frightening, disturbing soundscape eventually becomes the rap-rock-pop backing track to the worst excesses of stadium rock, festival rock, heavy metal, death metal, MTV, guitar smashing, and all of that puerile shit…
We were all gathered at the side of the stage. The concert was the first time in nearly sixteen years we had seen Walter perform.
An orchestra and a choir were onstage with the band, and behind them a huge pipe organ. Harry Watts was variously playing it or conducting the musicians who were interpreting his orchestrations of Walter’s soundscapes. The lyrics, what Walter called “the libretto,” had beautiful moments. Some of the poetry was excellent, I thought. I still had no idea who Harry had commissioned to write it, and in the program the credit was short: soundscapes conceived by W. K. Watts, music composed by H. Watts, libretto by S. Watts. Was it Walter’s mother Sally who had contributed the words? Was it possible she was as clever a poet as she was a painter?
As the orchestral music rang out, filling the park with ambitious and audacious modern orchestral music and organ cascades, Frank Lovelace looked extremely worried; the audience was not responding as he had hoped and as Steve Hanson had promised.
Patty Hanson waved her tambourine and floated around in her flowing silk dress.
Crow looked tough and detached, but I thought I detected a hopeful gleam in his eye. Of course he knew that if somehow he could get Walter to do his famous “stand” and play his harmonica, like in the old days, all would be well.
Walter stood center stage, singing, howling, and—when his father was at the organ—conducting. The musicians Harry had brought played along with Crow, Steve, and Patty Hanson, and it was really only Walter who seemed to have little to do onstage. But he looked proud, and moved, and occasionally when his voic
e was required he used it in an entirely new way. Instead of singing in his old style, he used his voice like a musical instrument, and when there were lyrics, they were more like poetry than the songs he had written for the Stand back in Dingwalls.
In the past Selena had sometimes described to me the almost invisible ghosts of the hundreds of entities that she saw in visions, and that day, as the soundscapes seemed to open up dimension after dimension, I wondered if I too was seeing them, small shadowy puffs flitting across the sky like smoke, “searching for souls they might occupy,” as Selena might say. The clouds morphed and evolved and I thought I saw a dozen faces that could have been God up there. And what could that be? I asked myself, stretching across the sunset in shades of gold and gray. Could it be Nik’s assembled angels waiting for the Harvest? Was I going back to the days of my old madness, or was I at last experiencing what I had always hoped for in Walter’s soundscapes?
After ninety-five minutes the dark and forbidding music ended. As the last soundscape rang out over the park, Selena was clinging to me tightly, almost violently.
As the sun finally dipped below the fairground in the distance, it felt like an uneven and awkward end, partly because there was a sense hanging in the air that the sound might return at any second.
Nothing had been normal about the performance. There had been music, but also a lot of what many in the crowd no doubt took to be simply noise: disorganized, irritating noise. So when the last song finished, there was an expectant silence.
The silence at the side of the stage, mirroring that of the thirty thousand on the green, was broken when Maud asked, “Is anyone going to clap?” Floss turned to her and smiled, but she shook her head. At that, a few sporadic handclaps did break out, and a few isolated cheers.
There was a gentle rustling. Breathing. I could hear an occasional cough, the clearing of throats, a sneeze. A distant airplane rumbled in the sky. No words.
I asked myself if it was possible that the soundscapes had released, confronted, and redeemed some of the anxieties they reflected, as Walter and I had talked about? Looking at the crowd, at some of the smiling and hopeful faces looking up at the stage, I felt that perhaps something wonderful and significant had happened. Had any of them seen anything like the visions I had seen?
Many in the audience would no doubt have come to hear rock music. But maybe they had been reminded in some way that the music they loved most would always spring ultimately from them, and from what they deeply felt and needed, not just from their musical heroes. Just as Selena described herself as the almost helpless “principal engineer” of all her schemes and machinations, so perhaps the audience were the real engineers of the music they had heard that evening? Although they may have been unconscious that they had elected Walter to the stage that night, they had done so, and he had spoken to them as a true artist—heart-to-heart.
Could any of this be true? I asked myself again. Or were these thoughts just more symptoms of my madness? Naturally, I told myself, some of the audience would not have been touched at all. That was always the way. That is not to sneer at them or imply they were unresponsive or deaf and blind in some way. They may simply have been confused or intimidated, left feeling let down by being cheated of an evening of old-time R&B, but also maybe sad they felt unable to rise to what had been offered.
I looked out into the crowd again. A sense of expectancy remained, but also perhaps acceptance that there would be no more. No more music. Walter was not going to blow a note on his harmonica and break the silence. He was not going to do his famous “stand.” There would be no maudlin closing song. There would be no chorus in the sky.
There would be no “Amen.”
Applause would not break out.
Selena spoke. “The soundscapes were mind-fucking.”
I nodded. She was right. There was no question that Harry’s compositions broke new ground and had certainly created a deep atmosphere.
There had been such beautiful moments in the orchestral sections, but also very disturbing parts. This was music that reflected an entire range of human emotion and fragility.
Selena held me ever more tightly. Her touch terrified me. She had me in the palm of her hand. She could break me. She could tell Floss—indeed everyone—what she knew, that I had raped her best friend. My control over my life for the past eighteen years, the dignity I felt in my recovery, my sobriety, and freedom from drugs all began to crumble. If she talked, I would be finished. My life would be over.
At that moment I felt her left hand move from my arse to my thigh, and then slip around to my cock. She looked up at me, grinning lasciviously, a sly part of me responding, thinking things could be worse.
She waved at her sister who was standing on the opposite side of the stage. I saw that Siobhan was smiling, tears of joy streaming down her face. Selena put her index finger on the program and whispered to me.
“Siobhan Watts,” she said. “‘S. Watts.’” It was she who had written the poetic lyrics.
Walter was still standing in the center of the stage and only a few of the crowd were turning away to leave. There was a kind of buzz in the air, and the lighting monkeys (the operators of the big spotlights up in the gantry) were sweeping the sky.
Selena was in shadow when she looked up at me and said, “You saw the angels, didn’t you?”
I just nodded. I was thinking, Are we united in madness? And with hope flooding in: Does this mean she won’t betray me?
The crowd was now finally beginning to turn away from the stage and leave. But as they did Walter came to his senses.
“Don’t go!” He was shouting. “Not yet!”
People turned back to the stage.
“Don’t go,” Walter shouted again. “I have something I need to say. Something I want to ask you all.”
There was a slight pause and the audience refocused on the stage.
“Is there, in the audience, by any chance, a girl born in Bern in Switzerland in the spring of 1995 who was adopted and doesn’t know her biological parents?”
At first there was no response.
Walter tried the magic words. “Is that girl looking for her birth mother?”
Everyone in the audience looked around at everyone else. What a question!
But incredibly, one by one three arms went up, then four, then finally seven.
Walter laughed. He could hardly believe it. None of us could. What he had intended to be a demonstration to Floss that if her daughter was alive, she would one day be found, had suddenly become infused with genuine possibility. The child might be found. Tonight.
He looked at Floss, who was laughing back at him.
Up in the lighting gantry to the right of the stage, as I learned later, Molly was concentrating on her job. The controlling bar of the huge spotlight she had trained down on Walter was set at a high angle, and she was stretching awkwardly to keep it steady.
Over the earphone communication system she heard the lighting director give her a command.
“Molly, cut your lamp.”
Cut the lamp? She didn’t understand. There were only three stage spots trained on Walter. The rest were spread around the field, another seven “Super Troupers” as they were known. The entire lighting crew was winging it, being inventive, taking initiative. Everything was turning out beautifully.
This time Frank could be heard on the intercom, more firmly. “Cut your lamp, Molly. Do as you’re told.”
She did as instructed and was removing one of the headphones when the director spoke again.
“Molly,” he said. “Weren’t you born the spring of 1995 in a clinic in Bern?”
Every light operator sharing the earphone system in the thirty-man team heard what he asked. A few of them laughed. Molly had not heard anything Walter had asked of the audience; her headphones were still tight to her head. She had only heard the director.
All her colleagues searched the stage to find her.
One by one all the spotlights in the
park found her up on her lighting tower. Nine spots lit her up like a superstar in space.
A girl in a star.
The cherubim hidden in the robes of Nik’s darkest angel.
The crowd began to applaud. It was merely a ripple. They couldn’t know what was going on, but some of them clearly sensed it was something special.
Walter and Floss looked up, and Molly gazed down at them.
Walter beckoned to all the girls who had raised their hands to come forward. But all of us onstage behind him had seen Molly’s face up in the lighting tower. We saw Floss’s stunned smile as she looked up at the girl.
Maud’s face, too, caught my eye as she compared Molly with Floss back and forth—mother to daughter—and I knew then that Molly was Floss’s daughter. My daughter?
Two long-lost children, found within months of each other. I remembered Walter’s visions of a child in a star—was it in one of his soundscapes? By some incredible mischance, or perhaps a miracle, Walter’s visions were taking on new power, especially as embodied in the music that night. Floss’s amazing and tragic life adventures, her own adoption and finding Molly, suddenly took on operatic significance. Could it be a mere coincidence? Maybe… but in the context of the concert, it was full of poignancy and momentousness.
Then I saw that Walter knew what he had to do. He positioned himself like a statue, his harmonica in his right hand ready to play, held in what appeared to be an attempt to keep light from his eyes. His left hand was stretched out as though he were balancing on an imaginary surfboard, his knees slightly bent and turned a little to the right, his body twisted slightly at the waist. When he took up this pose, the audience knew they could soon expect a powerfully explosive harmonica solo, and the girls began to scream and the boys to shout.
It was a night at Dingwalls writ large. Steve Hanson wrote of the event in his autobiography.
At Dingwalls with Big Walter and the Stand, there had always been a moment when we would find some direct connection with the audience. They would as often as not be half-drunk and, if our set had been long, they would be tired. But when Walter adopted his famous “stand,” the atmosphere would transform into one of complete anticipation and wonderment. It was as though we were all waiting for an orgasm to complete, one that had begun but stalled for a moment.
The Age of Anxiety Page 22
