by John Grant
"Vampire Café" was one of those songs. Even while I'd been reading the lyric for the first time, I'd felt the finished song all around me, holding me. Sitting there in our drawing-room, I was beside the jukebox of the song, the jukebox whose lights "were the lights of hell." If I said now that I deliberately concentrated on adding in all those apparently pointless embellishments to the melody – the way that Alyss's voice hangs on seemingly too long at the end of every line, until you're almost ready to become impatient with it before it suddenly stops, and you realize that, in retrospect, it was held for exactly the right length of time ... Or the way the loudest parts of each verse seem at first to be the wrong parts, the places where the lyric has all the tenderness Alyss put into it so you'd expect gentleness. She'd done the same sort of thing with the words, of course, with that change of tense from the past to the present between the first verse and the second that some pedants objected to so blindly: the point she was getting across was that the past and the present were indistinguishable now for her, the woman at the end of the song. When the second verse starts –
so now we're out and running down the dawn-dark streets,
down the long alleys where the sun never stays
– Alyss is clearly signaling that this isn't just a song about one set of streets, one early morning – one fixed time. She was still running down those same streets: would always be.
What I was starting to say was that I could tell you about how I cleverly manipulated all of those technical tricks in the music, and how Alyss did likewise with the words, but I'd be lying. I can see the techniques there now, looking back on it after I did it; but I knew nothing of them then. I won't say, either, that the tune just came to me naturally, like it'd had always been there and I just happened to be the person it chose to alight on – that's happened to me once, but it hadn't happened to me yet. No, I worked hard on "Vampire Café," maybe five or six hours or so, right through Chris getting home with some drunken girl and Brian phoning up to say he was going to stay out with his. For much of the time Alyss just sat there with me, completely still and soundless except when every now and then she replenished our coffees. She watched as I brought the song into the light.
And then, when finally it was done enough for me to be able to play it to her from front to back, she wept.
I had to sing it again and again for her, until she was joining in with me and then beginning to take over the vocals entirely. Quite often she had to stop singing because of the tears or the way her nose was running. Sometimes I cried, too, I think.
I've never in my life been as close to another human being as I was then. Making love in her bed through the dawn was only a part of it.
~
the first wise man produced his gold,
and the angels cried "hurray"
the second brought out frankincense,
but the angels said "no way"
so the third decided "maybe not the myrrh"
and got his wallet out;
and the angels sang "now there's a man
who knows what it's all about"
~
But "Vampire Café" wasn't the next single we released, even though we all agreed – even Chris and Brian, which amazed me – it was far and away the best thing we'd ever done. We'd been gigging around the country for a solid month since Alyss and I had written it, mixing in a dozen or so new songs (but not "Vampire Café") with all the old junk we'd used to do as the Satin Shirts, and we stopped off in Bristol on the way home. Hawkeye listened to it once in the rough, just me and Alyss doing it together with Chris and Bri watching us, and he pretended to dry a tear from the corner of his eye at the end of it and then told us it wasn't commercial enough for us – or at least not now. Maybe later in our career it would be something we could get away with – have a smash hit with, even – but we were as yet still too young a band in the public consciousness to be trying anything experimental, anything risky like "Vampire Café."
He'd got a much better idea for our next single. There were still three months to go before a sensible release date, but it was about time we started writing and maybe even recording a Christmas number.
Me and Alyss wrote it in the back of the van on the way home from Bristol. The four of us thought "Spend Spend Spend" was hilarious, but there was a lot of bitterness in our laughter on the motorway.
A week later we recorded it and forgot about it. The same afternoon we recorded "Vampire Café" for the B-side, and didn't forget it.
There was a lot of joy in me in those days. All through the tour I'd found myself smiling whenever I was alone. Which wasn't all that often, because Alyss was usually somewhere close to me. No matter how bad the venues, no matter how lousy the grotty B&Bs that Hawkeye had booked us into, I was living in a magical country with her. Most nights the two of us were crammed together into a lumpy single bed, but we didn't need any more space than that. A lot of the time we talked or spent kissing each other everywhere, but we made love often as well, her period no hindrance. The gigs were a part of it all, too. Sometimes they were big halls where we were the support for some other band just as bad as us; sometimes we were the Main Attraction in a pub or a club. It didn't make any difference to me or Alyss: there were only the two of us on the stage, with nobody watching except the spotlights.
But then we recorded "Vampire Café."
She ... changed.
It was sudden. For a few nights it seemed impossible, for some reason or another, for the two of us to go to bed at the same time. Usually I'd go first, and be asleep by the time she came up. I didn't let myself know there was anything wrong until one night we walked down by the river. We'd been drinking, both of us a bit too much for what I now recognize were our different reasons, but now the pubs were closed and we needed the air before the long walk home together.
Tonight, with the moon hanging above the water, she tore her hand from mine.
I reached out for her but she twisted away, avoiding my touch.
"Leave me be!"
"What's the matter? Have I—?"
"Let go of me. Stop clinging to me. Let me free."
I didn't know what she was talking about.
"What's the matter?" I said again, stupidly.
"I don't want you any more. I don't want your bloody band and I don't want you. You revolt me!"
"But I love you," I said, trying to sound soothing. It was all just a thing of the moment. Too much to drink. Gods, but we all go through patches when we can't stand ourselves so we take it out on other people. "And you love me."
"I don't!" Fallopia howled. "I never have! Haven't you got ears to hear?"
I froze where I was. I can remember my mouth was half-open, and I can remember thinking this was what mouths did in similar circumstances in books but that I'd never before noticed my own mouth doing it.
"I love you, Alyss," I said at last.
"You don't!" Fallopia shrieked. "Not me!"
I still don't understand what she was trying to say, then. Anyway, it all seemed insignificant in the light of what she said next, which was something too horrific to be remembered. I find myself unable to force myself to try to recall it. I think this is because it was something very trivial – a gratuitous insult, however close to the quick it must then have cut me.
What I can remember is realizing that Alyss would not wish to say such things, and putting my hands around Fallopia's throat and squeezing until she couldn't foul the air with any words any longer.
It meant, of course, that neither could Alyss speak her thanks to me for the service I had rendered, but that didn't matter. I could, anyway, feel her gratitude in the weight of her shell in my arms.
I waded out into the river until its water was up around my chin before I let the current gently remove the shell from my embrace.
I was dry by the time I'd walked home. Crotchy and Buster were either out or long ago in bed – certainly they didn't disturb me as I set up the cassette recorder on the coffee-table and tucke
d in a cassette and put Crotchy's old Yamaha – he never used it any more, now that he'd graduated to posher equipment – across my knees and sang into the cheap little inbuilt mike the song I'd composed in my head during the walk home.
That's the only recording there's ever been of "History Book," the last and the best of all the songs I ever wrote for the Flaming Ghoulies. I was able to keep my voice unchoked throughout it.
Then I pulled the cassette out of the machine, kicked in the back of Crotchy's cast-off – I enjoyed that in a grim sort of a way – and went up to my doubly empty room and packed those few of my things I wanted to hang on to.
I didn't leave a note or anything for the other two. There wasn't anything I much wanted to say to them. If they needed me, they knew my parents' address, so they could get in touch with me that way.
Which they never did.
Now here's a funny thing: in fact, no one at all from those days has ever contacted me. Maybe no one noticed that Alyss had disappeared, as if she'd never been. I can hardly credit that, but it seems the only possible explanation. Maybe Buster and Crotchy just thought the two of us had gone off together – we'd been so close the past month or so that it wouldn't have been surprising if we had. Perhaps they tried to keep it a secret, because a couple of times over the next few months I saw the Flaming Ghoulies on late shows, and they were using old videos of the band with her still singing up front – and, I couldn't help noticing ruefully, with never a close shot of me, the drummer. It was always that way. Always that way for drummers.
Yes, I can think of reasons Crotchy and Buster might not have raised a hue and cry when we both went. But you'd have thought her parents must have ...
I don't understand it. Sometimes it's as if it was me, not Alyss, that never was.
In my life now there is no Alyss, and all that are left to me of the Flaming Ghoulies are memories that I resent whenever they attempt to intrude. At least, that's true three hundred and sixty-four days of the year (and three hundred and sixty-five in each leap year). Annually, however, on the 17th of September, the day of the night she died and I recorded "History Book," I remember a little more. I experience again the pain, but I experience again also the ecstasy – for there was a lot of ecstasy we shared in those days, and I was able to feel it. As I still can, once a year, today.
Oh, and sometimes briefly at Christmas. I don't know if it's Crotchy or Buster – I suspect Crotchy, because he's always been the more sadistic of the two of them, and besides I don't know that Buster would have the brains – I don't know which, but one or other of them sends me an annual Christmas card, with her name written on it, "Alyss," like a signature, and a cross to mark a loveless (maybe jeering?) kiss, and sometimes the single word "Sorry."
But I chuck it on the fire before Carol or the kid can see it.
~
when Alyss awoke she was all alone
and past all hopes of caring.
the train rattled through a country station or two
with empty houses staring.
she wanted to move, walk up and down for a while
but found that she could not stand.
her sight fastened for a winter's moment or two
on the lifeless book of her hand
(and who could touch her
and who could teach her
that time lies in confusion?
conviction, knowledge and understanding
are all parts of its illusion.)
and then she saw in her leathery palm
the reflection of an angel
its hand upon her shoulder ...
~
He's walking along the side of the river, looking for all the world just like someone else who's out for a stroll on an autumn day. There are ducks on the Exe in profusion, and some swans: if he were down here with the kid they'd have bagfuls of bread to throw to the birds, the kid tossing the pieces high to watch the gulls swopping down and plucking them out of the air. Carol might be with them, watching, eager to leave, wanting to do something. Carol fills her days with doing something.
Today, of course, he doesn't see the ducks and the swans, and nor the way the sunlight makes the disturbed waters look as if they were, each instant, new-formed from sharp-edged glass.
But you see all of this.
Soon the shops and the pubs are far behind. There are still too many people on the towpath; after he's passed the Double Locks it'll get quieter, and eventually he'll reach the stretches where people hardly ever go.
You don't know why it is that you're singing, but you are. No one can hear you, of course: most certainly not Dave. It's "Vampire Café" that you're singing, but he's hearing "History Book," which soon he'll hear for real. He recorded it over and over again onto the rest of this side of the C90, and he covered the whole of the other side with it as well. It was the song he wrote for you, he said; you'll never be able to make him listen to you telling him that it was the song he wrote so he wouldn't be able to hear "Vampire Café."
At long last a place where the estuary is broad and where the only signs of other human activity are on its far side. The ducks gave up following him hopefully along the bank some while ago, the swans even before that.
He spreads out his old leather jacket on the coarse grass and sits down on it. He's been curbing his desire all this time, knowing that he's not allowed to play "History Book" until he gets here. But it's all right now: it's permitted; indeed, the rules are that he must play the song.
He presses the play button, then pulls his knees up to his chest and puts his arms around them. His eyes close as he listens to himself sing.
But now he can see the chopped surface of the water in the unwarming light. This is the way that it's been all the other years, even those times when it's rained or the mist has been opaque. He knows what is about to happen.
And so do you, for you pull yourself free of him, as you do every year, and you sweep out over the river, playing with the air in front of him, drawing threads of sunshine and hues of breeze in towards you until, fifty or a hundred yards from the bank, rapidly weaving your body for yourself, you touch the water.
He sees that touch, watches as the surface is struck by a gust of wind that causes it to start swirling in upon itself. Reeds are torn from their place along the riverbank and are dragged, accelerating, across the oblivious face of the water. There are autumn leaves around him, and now the breeze picks these up from the grass and carries them out towards the place where you're troubling the water. You need the leaves for the color of your hair. The yellow-green of your remembered eyes exists nowhere in nature and so you have to create it specially.
Your body, rising from the brown water, is still not fully formed; the arms and thighs are irregular columns of bundled reeds, the head a blurred, eyed mass. You teeter like an unstrung puppet. But now you are pulling to yourself strands from that ancient recording of "History Book." The plosives of Dave's frenetic voice, exaggerated by the tinny crystal mike built into the cheap cassette recorder he used, become your joints and vertebrae; the stretched penultimate syllables at the ends of alternate lines are appropriated as your fingers; the inadvertent taps of his fingernails on the guitar's soundbox swiftly paint in the details of your face and the lines of your ribcage showing through your smoothing skin; once, twice, there is the sound of his indrawn breath, and your small breasts are pinkly present; his slurred sigh each time your name occurs becomes the v of your pubis and the roll of your hips cradling it; his clumsy strumming is your feet.
Your body finally bound together by the lines of chord progressions, the corners of your mouth quirked into a smile by a D-minor accidentally played where there should have been a D-major, you walk towards him across the powerful, ponderous flow of the river's current.
Time passes. Now you stand, naked and dripping, beside him. You put the palm of your hand on his forehead, and the two of you exchange the substance of yourselves. He can feel you and see you very clearly, even though his eyes are stil
l firmly locked closed, as if shut against a spotlight. His lips are moving soundlessly to the only song he now knows:
~
and who could touch her
and who could teach her
that truth's no one's dominion?
there are no such things as facts any more
(well, that is my opinion)
~
And all the rest of the afternoon the two of you are together, talking and singing together and making love in the warmth of the past.
Here in the place where, fourteen years ago, you lost your life and were born. Here where Dave will never remember the words you screamed in your fury and your despair and your revulsion ... and your pity.
"You can't love me. You're not allowed to love me.
"I exorcised you."
The Dead Monkey Puzzle
It was probably Johnsie who first suggested it, he being either the soberest of the three of them or the least drunk of the three of them – at the time they couldn't decide which he was, and afterwards, of course, it didn't matter.
~
"Say, willya take a look at the knockers on her! Man could die happy suckin on one o they babies."
"Cute ass."
"Too tight."
