Wonderkid

by Wesley Stace

  In fact, long before I began my career as a road manager, before I was even eighteen, I’d reached the point most people hit in their thirties, when travel stops broadening the mind, when a day off no longer represents a chance to explore a city or even go to the gym, when you can’t even be bothered to leave your mark on another dressing-room wall. And that point is when, frankly, you should stop. But I didn’t because it was where I felt at home; and somehow I pushed through it, broke on through to the other side, and got better. And it was all because of the Wonderkids: I knew exactly what not to do. It’s not only about how many clicks you are from your destination, or being on time; it’s about living a proper life while you’re doing it; it’s about caring about where you are on the map. And reading. And learning. And it was only when I realized this that I became really good at my job. And I am good, as good as Mitchell in his prime. Being on the road is a beautiful thing if you’re not on the run. It’s just that every now and then I’d like to settle down; run the company and have other people do the whizzing about for a while.

  And one thing I’ll say for the job: it’s kept me in cufflinks even through the recessions—my price has never gone down. And it’s kept me moving. You should have seen my apartment when I was ever there; worse than Blake’s post-prison cell. But it all becomes a blur. Funny, isn’t it? Touring with the Wonderkids is as clear as day, fresh as bread. And everything I do now, I remember because I write most of it up for my blog. But the middle years? Sixteen or seventeen of them! I mean, I remember the bands, I’ve moved with the technology, but they’re not in the hard drive.

  I saw the Terrys recently. Old Terry can’t remember if he’s had dinner, can’t follow the plot of the TV show he’s watching (unless she continually reminds him), can’t even remember if he’s turned the radio down or not, but he can talk about his childhood as though it happened yesterday. Though of course, that’s a bad simile, because if it had happened yesterday, he wouldn’t remember anything about it at all.

  16

  “Don’t you have anything you could be reading?”

  BLAKE LIVED NEAR THE VILLA TENNYSON, LEAR’S HOUSE IN SAN Remo. At first, there were postcards. The entirety of one early arrival was “Hello!” but the signature encouraged me: “Chakonoton the Cozovex Dossi Fossi Sini Tomentilla Coronilla Polentilla Battledore & Shuttlecock Derry down Derry Dumps.” Communication was patchy. Perhaps he was gambling away his ill-gotten gains at the Casino: unlikely. No more the long letters, the Ballad of Normanside Prison, soul-searching from his cell. I mean, it was a breakdown, wasn’t it? He’d probably grown a beard. The postcards became more occasional, hastily scratched, often showing the same stretch of San Remo beach, as if he’d bought a job lot, generally consisting of only one word: “writing” said one; “breathing” another. Then finally, almost a year later, he really let the ink run free: “Coming home.”

  Blake looked healthy, tanned, shaved, surprisingly slim with his shirt tucked in. He did a good impression of being happy to be back, but was no more forthcoming about his missing year than he had been by mail. There was a pile of pages to show for it however, and this continued to grow on the side of his desk. It was more or less the only thing that changed in his room, so you noticed.

  He moved his old stuff into a new place, which emptied mine out though I was hardly ever there. He went out drinking with Greg—that was his one regular appointment—but the new focus was a book deal, for which he’d fly under his own flag: James Lewis. Greg had much advice on the subject, about which he knew as little as I did, including “Yeah, don’t have it by Blake Lear, because it’ll look like you’re related.”

  Blake wanted to know how my new job was going, and why, of all things, I wanted to be a road manager: “Stop organizing other people. Do your own thing.”

  “I like doing something I’m good at. I like being in charge. I always admired Mitchell. I took notes.”

  At the mention of Mitchell’s name, he looked up: “God, is this all my fault?”

  “This suits me. I feel like I’m putting knowledge to good use.”

  He asked about girls, but I never had much to say. Despite my good albeit unconventional education, I was always a bit awkward that way, up to quite recently. Maybe I wanted it to be as easy as it had been, all Disneyland and Monopoly, and it wasn’t. It was the initial bit I found difficult. The road isn’t conducive to lengthy relationships, but it’s good for one-night stands, which aren’t conducive to lengthy relationships. Don’t have sex with people you’re on tour with. That’s the basic rule. Don’t even ask them on a date until the tour is over: so embarrassing if they say no.

  As I was closing in on this girl’s hometown once, I sent this text: “What you got on?” It’s perfectly acceptable British textage for “What are you doing today?,” a casual way of inviting her to the show. But she took it the wrong way, was in fact offended, because she was American and thought I was asking what she was wearing, assuming I expected the response “nothing but a smile” or “a nurse’s uniform.” She wasn’t having any of my excuses and that was that. Another time, a woman replied to a casual text of mine with “I’m busty.” Much as I wanted to take it literally, I knew it was a typo.

  So back then, I didn’t have a girlfriend. I didn’t want a girlfriend. I was the most, least experienced twenty-year-old in the world. I asked Blake whether he had one. He answered obliquely: “Lear, you know, proposed twice to the same woman; she was nearly fifty years younger than he was. She refused twice and that was that. None of his friends came to his funeral, not one. I don’t want to end up like that.”

  How Pleasant to Know Mr. Lear, Blake’s novel, was finally finished. He handed over the manuscript, an imposing overly thick, single-spaced doorstop, with the sole remark: “Well, it isn’t nonsense.”

  I am not a literary critic. I do a bit of paid writing occasionally for those who ask, generally friends or acquaintances or those who have read my blog (gentlemanoftheroad.com), and I read a lot, but I assumed a lot of it was over my head; Blake was the expert. I told him I enjoyed it, but I can’t say I did. I remember a sinking feeling when I looked at the pile of read pages and realized it was still smaller than the pile of unread pages. When they reached equality, I was ready to be done, and there was still a long way to go; well, halfway I guess, but a long half.

  Besides the fact that the book wasn’t terribly exciting, it was hard to tell whether it was a novel or a biography (I’m pontificating; that was one agent’s criticism, verbatim). Most depressing of all was that Blake sought to explain away all of Lear’s nonsense. None of it was allowed to be simply nonsense. Lear was gay but couldn’t face it, therefore his work is full of images of impossible relationships (owls and pussycats, nutcrackers and sugar tongs, etc.). Lear’s health was bad—he was an epileptic; he had bronchitis and chronic asthma; he was a depressive; later he was partially blind—hence those quarantined freaks, the Pobble, the Dong, the Quangle Wangle. His lack of money explained one poem; his fear of matrimony another; his antipathy to noise, perhaps due to tinnitus, another. I’m not saying that biography can’t or shouldn’t inform literature; I’m just saying that the book actually ruined Edward Lear for me forever. That can’t be good.

  Perhaps How Pleasant to Know Mr. Lear is just what his college Monsignor wanted all those years ago when Blake instead chose to hand in his own nonsense. Perhaps Blake finally wanted his First from Cambridge. As Blake explained away Lear’s nonsense, so Blake explained himself away. He wasn’t putting his own nonsense down to illness or unresolved sexuality; he was saying that nonsense couldn’t just be nonsense, perhaps thereby challenging anyone interested to discover the reasons behind his own. Well, I wasn’t going there. He couldn’t have children, therefore he chose to entertain other people’s: that’s pretty obvious. So, it wasn’t just that the book wasn’t objectively good—though nicely written, even I could tell that—it was that he’d spent almost three years on a project that was, more or less, the burial of the Blak
e Lear I, we, loved.

  There were interesting bits, but mainly for what they told me about the author rather than his subject. Edward Lear too found himself successful, almost overnight, in a field far from the one he had originally envisioned. He had intended to make his money as an ornithological illustrator, but ended up a famous Nonsense writer, rather as Blake, too, had ended up a children’s entertainer by mistake. There was Lear’s childishness, what one critic called his “Peterpantheism,” his fear of “the demon boredom,” his travel fetish. I bet he was a fidgeter, too. Though I’d never associated Blake with the feelings of manly inadequacy to which Lear was prey, it made you wonder about his lack of permanent girlfriends, his scant interest in the peripatetic art of the one-night stand. I remember once looking at an oil painting with him in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, an amazing Eastern landscape called Mahabalipuram; tall elegant green trees either side of a ruined temple. Blake asked me the painter, and I read the little plaque: “Edward Lear. Is that the same Edward Lear? Can’t be, right?” He didn’t answer. When I looked, he was crying. I guess there was a period when he cried a lot, and I should have paid more attention.

  If his book had been a success, if he’d ended up chatting on The Book Show, and been asked to write a Top Ten List of Nonsense Poetry for the Guardian website or whatever you did back then, perhaps this would be a different story with a different ending. But the book wasn’t published. And when the wearying, slow-motion process of rejection was complete, when the cycle of phone calls to people who don’t call you back, so you call them again but they don’t take your call and you instead talk to their brusque assistant (who is polite but firm and to whom you realize you may sound a little desperate), when you realize you’re hurrying them to say “no” and that no amount of phone calls will elicit an enthusiastic “yes,” and may in fact ensure a hastening of the final, regretful “no,” when all these things were done and the last name on the list had been crossed out, Blake gave up.

  He was afraid where nonsense would lead him; but sense wasn’t doing anything for him either. He couldn’t record under the name Blake Lear; he couldn’t write under the name James Lewis; he couldn’t teach because of his flirtation with the dark side. And because he couldn’t do any of those things, he became a ghost. Blake Lear only haunted us from hereon. He was there; he was around; he floated about in our orbit; he occasionally clanked his chains. He had to find something else, but what can a ghost do? He is insubstantial, not of this world. Society, as Blake once said, it seemed to me rather dramatically, had no place for him. It was right around now that his shirt untucked itself again. He “went floaty,” is, I think, the phrase. His waistline expanded. The adrenaline was no longer keeping him slim. In what I can only assume was some kind of drunken stupor, he decided to put the band back together. About this futile reunion, the less said the better, beyond the fact that it wasted two years.

  What can ghosts do? They can ghostwrite.

  Jack and Rita had their first child, Charles, aka, to Barry’s disquiet, Chuck. (No one mentioned the paternity suit kid, apparently female, though she exerted a financial toll on Jack that spoke for almost all of his American royalties, siphoned in her direction before they had a chance to cross the Atlantic. In fact, for various reasons, no one made a lot of money from the Wonderkids except the record label, managers past and present, and lawyers; funny that.) Jack was a good dad to the kid in his own front room. He griped about it, but he was generally happy, even when Chuck squirted nappy rash cream into the sound-hole of an old Gibson. Suddenly all the amps were moved to some rehearsal studio and guitars hung out of reach. I helped his new band out every now and then, when I was free and couldn’t be bothered to do nothing. His ultimate compliment: “Nice to work with a professional.”

  And then a year and a half later, there was another kid, Johnny, a dark-haired boy to match the earlier fair-haired model. I enjoyed being Uncle Sweet (technically Cousin Sweet, but we were and would remain an unconventional family). I’d been educated into the role, and I knew what to do, but Blake, the man who was born to it, got little out of the experience. Gone were all the games and the card tricks, as if he’d forgotten them. He didn’t even get down on his hands and knees. It was Barry who surprised the family with his willingness to get his cuffs dirty. He also turned out to be a hysterical prognosticator of a child’s future profession: “Perhaps he’ll be a footballer,” if the kid so much as swung a leg; “I wonder if he’ll be a comedian,” when the kid smiled. It was an obsession with Barry: “I think he’ll be a musician, just like his dad.”

  Rita was great. Sure, she and Jack met in odd circumstances, but they’re still married. She once told a joke: when the masochist says “beat me, beat me,” the real sadist says “no.” And Jack presumably never said no. So who’s in charge? Their bedroom door was always firmly closed. Just as well. I wouldn’t have wanted to discover any hooks and pulleys or nooks and crannies in the walls.

  Jack remarked on the kids’ development with grumpy wonder: “why does color matter so much? Chuck has to eat off a blue plate. If it’s not blue he won’t touch it. Maybe he’s color autistic.”

  “Would you play a pink Stratocaster?” I asked.

  “No, but that’s totally different.”

  One Christmas, he was sifting through a set of twenty-six animals, the first letters of which corresponded to a letter on a particular play mat: “Urial and ibex, what are they? Are they new species? Can’t they come up with something better? I mean, granted they’re in trouble with x, and x-ray fish is the only option, but urial and ibex?”

  “What’s wrong with unicorn and imp?” asked Blake. “Like in the old days.” It was the funniest thing he’d said in about three years. At the pub, he was always happy to listen to Greg make the old gags.

  “It was always iguana for i,” said Barry, after consideration. “But I don’t remember what u was. Certainly not Urial or Unicorn. It’s political correctness gone mad.”

  Blake and he were uneasy together but nothing ever came of it. It simmered, a bit like me and the Terrys once upon a time.

  “And how are you keeping yourself busy, Jimmy?” Barry would ask. “Idle hands, you know, idle hands.”

  How on earth did Blake fill his days? He’d got into electric trains, I knew that, inspired by Neil Young, who had used to inspire him in other ways. When Blake flipped the switch, his attic became a whirr of activity, scale models zipping around a labyrinthine layout to a futurist soundtrack of chuffing and puffing, perhaps reminding him of the distant days when he was planning his own theme park. Did he spend all his time up there? He took me up once or twice, to show off his new points or something, but never invited his nephews. It wasn’t for kids.

  As daft adult hobbies went, even therapeutic ones, one might have hoped for something a little steamier. I honestly had no idea what he was up to apart from perfecting his impression of the Fat Controller.

  The first thing I knew about Judith Esther’s The Dark-Headed Clock Trilogy was the first thing most people knew about it. It was everywhere.

  You probably had a better idea if you were in primary school, chatting in the playground, or reading a trade journal. But for the rest of us, the ones without children, those outside the publishing industry, there was nothing, a vacuum. And then there was The Dark-Headed Clock.

  At first, there were stacks of the first volume on the front tables of bookshops, cheeky Gothic cover luring you in; then its spine started appearing on the shelves you least expected, in friends’ houses, on Greg’s bedside cabinet, behind the prime minister’s head in an interview on TV. Apparently, the first volume, The Toll of the Dark-Headed Clock, was one of those books enjoyed by both children and their parents alike, similar to the Pullman books and the Harry Potter books, of which the Judith Esther book seemed to me—paying the scantest attention—a great rip-off (though I’d never read the Potters, and only seen two of the films, both as hotel pay-per-views, purely as a sleep aid).

&nbs
p; Then there were posters in the Underground advertising the second in the trilogy, The Shadow of the Dark-Headed Clock, which morphed imperceptibly into posters advertising a movie of the first volume, featuring many stars, mainly British, directed by a recent Oscar-winning Yank. Waiting at a bus stop in autumn, one looked down to see a frantically ripped-open and then rapidly discarded wrapper from some Dark-Headed Clock trading cards. Christmas would bring Dark-Headed Clock sponsored Christmas decorations down Regent Street as surely as, beneath them, Hamley’s window would bulge with fake snow and Dark Clocks of various shapes and sizes made in China.

  In reality, this took a few years, I suppose, but in life as it is lived time, it happened overnight. It was like someone said “Let there be Dark-Headed Clock,” and there was Dark-Headed Clock, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. It was one of those phenomena that is felt everywhere, in casual jokes on TV chat shows, in the pop charts, in Halloween costumes, in questions in the Houses of Parliament, and in comment, for and against, in the newspapers; some liked its message, some didn’t.

  The Dark-Headed Clock Trilogy consisted of the classic Toll, the superior sequel Shadow, and the climactic Midnight in the Dark-Headed Clock, the biggest seller of them all, whispered by some to be a disappointing finale, though the franchise had by now reached critical mass and couldn’t possibly underperform. And I will also remind you that it was about twin boys, one with blonde hair, Bill, and one with dark, Ed, their father conspicuously absent in fine fairy story fashion, who discover (Toll), confront (Shadow), and battle (Midnight) a secret cadre of scientists perpetrating an enormous and terrifying fraud upon the general populace for their own selfish gain.