Breaking Faith

by Jo Bannister

  Nor was it an hotel room, this place where he was now. The best of them had a certain smell; the worst of them were bigger than this, and came equipped with mini-bars and trouser-presses not wall-sized posters of the night sky. When he opened his eyes and saw stars, his first thought was he’d passed out in a ditch. That wouldn’t have been a first either.

  But he was definitely indoors: sprawled on a bed with a lamp nearby banishing the shadows to the corners of a grey and white room. Though cold he was out of the rain and seemed to be safe, so Fry lay still and waited to see who wanted his babies this time.

  Though he’d seen some pretty plain groupies before, the girl with the yellow hair, thick glasses and round, frankly simple face came as a bit of a shock. Only when Daniel told him to sit up and drink some orange-juice did he realise his mistake.

  Fry hadn’t realised how thirsty he was until he started. He drained the glass and it was refilled. He peered again at the face, its edges blurred by the opiate still in his bloodstream, and his brow corrugated with the effort to remember. ‘I know you.’

  ‘Yes. I’m the one who freaked out at your party.’

  ‘You got a name?’

  ‘Daniel Hood.’

  ‘Where are we?’

  ‘My house.’

  Fry looked round again. There were two windows, two doors. ‘All of it?’

  Daniel laughed. ‘A significant proportion.’ He pointed. ‘The bathroom’s through there, the living room’s through there. Get cleaned up and I’ll make some supper.’

  ‘Screw supper. Get me a drink.’

  Daniel wasn’t sufficiently interested in celebrity to be awed by it. If he’d had Patrick Moore hung-over on his bed he just might have felt a frisson, but a popstar was just a man who made noise for a living. Jared Fry had been kind to him when he needed it and he was returning the favour, but that didn’t include fawning on him. He knew Fry was feeling fragile and sympathised, but only to the extent of providing what he needed, not what he wanted.

  ‘Finish the orange-juice. Or there’s water in the tap. Or, if you ask nicely, I’ll make a pot of tea. Anything else can wait till you get home.’

  People didn’t often speak to Fry that way. He was unsure how to respond. ‘So drive me home,’ he growled.

  ‘What’s the magic word?’

  Fry regarded him in disbelief. Of course, he didn’t know Daniel was a teacher. His eyes, deeper and darker than always, smouldered and crackled. Daniel headed for the door.

  ‘Please drive me home?’ said Fry. It was like pulling teeth.

  ‘I don’t have a car,’ said Daniel pleasantly. ‘I can call you a taxi.’

  Fry was sober enough to know he wasn’t sober enough to make that a good idea. ‘I’ll call Eric, he can come for me.’ He patted his clothes but there was no sign of his phone.

  ‘Use mine,’ said Daniel.

  Fry didn’t know the number. Defeated, he slumped back on the bed. ‘I’ll stay here, then.’

  ‘You’re welcome,’ murmured Daniel.

  He made tea and toast and carried it into the living room. He didn’ t wait for Fry, but within a couple of minutes the demon rocker appeared looking both fresher and steadier, and took one of the mugs, drinking fiercely.

  ‘It must have come as a bit of a shock,’ said Daniel, making conversation.

  ‘What must?’

  ‘Moving into your new house only to have the builders unearth a body.’

  ‘It’s bloody inconvenient, I’ll tell you that much,’ grunted Fry. ‘God knows when I’ll get my pool now.’

  Daniel said nothing; and when he kept saying nothing, Fry finally realised it was the silence of disapproval. ‘What?’

  ‘I know she’s nothing to do with you, that she’s been there a lot longer than you have. But she was a human being, and someone ended her life and shovelled dirt over her, and he probably did that because she was bloody inconvenient to him too. It’s not much of an epitaph. It’s not much of a reason to die.’

  Fry thought. ‘People die for stupid reasons all the time. You can’t bleed for them all.’

  ‘You’re a poet. You’re supposed to bleed for them.’

  Fry stared as if he’d been accused of something unnatural: giving to charity perhaps, or helping lost dogs. ‘A poet?’

  Daniel hadn’t expected an argument. He gave the word some more consideration, then nodded. ‘You weave a structure of words that conveys more than the words themselves. What’s that if not poetry?’

  ‘I write songs,’ said Fry.

  ‘A song is a poem to music. Why do you think it’s different?’

  There was a longer pause as Fry ordered his thoughts. Daniel suspected he wasn’t used to engaging in discussion, not just about poetry but about anything. Giving orders but not talking. ‘Because there was a time when I wrote poetry or something like it,’ he finally said, his voice low. ‘And now I don’t. So yes, I know the difference.’

  ‘What changed?’ Fry didn’t understand, shrugged. ‘You were a poet, now you say you’re not. What changed? Do meaningless songs sell better? Your fans get all they need from the album cover, songs that say something would just confuse them? So you beef up the obscenities and dumb down the content, and that way you can write a song in a day and still have the afternoon free. Is that how it works?’

  Fry was familiar with sycophancy, with envy and with fear. He wasn’t accustomed to having to justify himself. He wasn’t sure why he felt the need to now. He had nothing to gain. In the unlikely event that he made a fan of Daniel Hood the effects on his career would be microscopic. Hood wasn’t a music journalist, a record producer or a DJ; he wasn’t a booking agent, a festival organiser, even a fan club secretary. If he went out and bought every disc Souls For Satan had ever cut, the benefit to Fry’s fame and fortune would be negligible. He didn’t matter. So what if Hood thought what he did was trivial? Fry could buy Hood and everything he owned, and everything he’d ever done, with the small change from his pockets.

  In spite of which, he found he did care that Hood considered him a fraud. It was because, while it might be true now, it wasn’t always true and Fry remembered what it was like to have real talent. Part of him would have given back the money to be writing now the songs he wrote when he was twenty. So he tried to explain.

  ‘Now that’s pretty much exactly how it works. All the creativity is done. I have a name; the band has a name. People buy a Souls For Satan album, they know what’s going to be on it. That’s what they want. They’re not looking for a challenge: you want to please them, you keep recyling the same stuff. The same themes, emotions, ways of expressing those emotions; the same obscenities. The perfect new release is as close to the last release as you can get without using the same title. And yes, it takes about a morning to write. Allowing for a coffee-break.’

  A distance opened in his eyes that was quite different to the vacancy of drug dependence. ‘I used to write good songs. Hell, I used to write great songs: songs that sent a shiver up your spine, that brought the sweat to your brow. Before I had a name. When I was writing for me, and people like me – people who listened to the words. Nobody cares about the words now. They care about the volume, the make-up, the stage set and the video. Get those right and you could sing the phone-book for all anyone cares.’

  ‘Are you sure? Don’t get me wrong,’ Daniel said quickly, ‘I know nothing about rock music. But if the words matter to you, what makes you think they don’t matter to your fans?’

  Fry gave a bitter little laugh. ‘Experience, that’s what. You think I haven’t tried? You think the first record deal I signed, I threw away my pen and stopped trying to say things? That I was happy to write to a formula from then on? I wasn’t; I’m still not. But any time I try to say something important the industry says, “Gee, thanks, Jared, that’s … interesting, it’s really cool you’re still writing this stuff, but basically we’ve got a million fans lined up who don’t want to have to think too hard. So what do you say, Jare
d? You gonna give us another take on vampire lovers?” So I do. I’ve been doing it so long I’ve forgotten how to do anything better. So maybe I was a poet once but I don’t think I am any more.’

  ‘The way you talk,’ Daniel said softly, ‘you could still write anything you wanted.’

  ‘I’m not interested in writing songs that no one buys,’ Fry said shortly. ‘It was never a hobby, even when I couldn’t make a living at it.’

  ‘No. It was a need.’

  Fry glowered at him. He didn’t understand how someone he didn’ t know could know him. ‘What do you know about it?’

  Daniel gave a little smile. ‘I have no skill with words. None. Little kids get the better of me in a fair argument. One of my friends is a Polish woman who learned English off a Rumanian with a speech impediment, and even she expresses herself better than I do. Because she isn’t afraid of words. She fires them off like a scatter-gun, and if they don’t do what she wants she fires off some more. I try too hard. I think so long about what I want to say that by the time I’ve got the right word the conversation has moved on. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve come up with the mot juste only to find everyone else has gone bowling.’ He blew out a sad little sigh that lifted his front hair.

  ‘Numbers are different. Numbers I can do. There are no nuances, no room for debate. They always and only mean one thing: you can’t twist them to mean something else. The smartest mathematician on the planet can’t win an argument with a snappy nombre juste. They’re the perfect means of communication for the anal retentive. An equation is either right or wrong: a quick thinker can’t cheat by slapping down a number no one else knows.’

  The scowl had vanished from Fry’s face, leaving him attentive, trying to follow almost as hard as Daniel was trying to explain.

  ‘How you feel about words, I feel about numbers. They light up my universe. The kids I teach see maths as a hurdle to be overcome, not a beauty to be owned. For most people it’s like Latin: an anachronism. If you pay attention you might get a grade that’ll let you study what you’re actually interested in – anything from veterinary science to astro-physics. But when it comes to practical applications, a pocket calculator is your best bet every time.’

  He did the gentle, self-deprecating smile that melted the backs of Brodie’s knees. ‘But not in my head. In my head it’s a ticket to the cosmos. It takes me to the stars. The telescope in the corner there, it shows me pretty pictures – but I know what the pictures mean because of mathematics. I know how the world began, and how it will end, because of mathematics.

  ‘I’m a pretty dim guy,’ he admitted wryly. ‘There’s a lot going on around me that I don’t understand. I’m running so hard to stay in the same place I haven’t time to notice that actually I’m on the wrong escalator. It worries me, that all this stuff is going on and doesn’t make any sense to me. But numbers I understand. Numbers keep me safe.’

  Jared Fry said:

  The guy upstairs is playing too loud

  the music of the spheres.

  My plea to him to turn it down

  has fallen on deaf ears.

  He’s riding on a beam of light

  out where the planets play

  and never thinks his taste of joy

  is ruining my day.

  Daniel gave a delighted chuckle. ‘Who wrote that?’

  ‘That poet we were talking about. A long time ago.’

  ‘It’s not very demon rocky.’

  Fry shrugged. ‘I was more original then.’

  ‘Did you record it?’

  ‘Even then, putting the General Theory of Relativity to music was considered a minority interest.’

  ‘I’d have bought it.’

  ‘Hey, I’d have been rich by now,’ said Fry, with an irony that only seemed to emphasise the weariness of his soul.

  Inexplicably, Daniel found himself feeling sorry for the man. He was rich and successful; he’d scaled the peak of his profession; and for all the pleasure it gave him he’d have been better working in a carpet show-room and keeping his songs for a few friends in bedsits.

  That may have been largely his own fault. Maybe it was part of the drugs package, that compared with that chemical high even the achievement of a lifetime ambition seemed banal. Maybe long days on the road and long nights on the stage had burned him out. Maybe even talent is finite: the faster the river flows, the sooner the lake empties. Daniel didn’t know enough about drugs or rock music, or talent, to be sure.

  But he knew about disappointment, and Jared Fry was a disappointed man. Still in his twenties, he believed his best days were already behind him. ‘Why do you do it?’ asked Daniel.

  ‘What?’

  Daniel lifted one shoulder in a delicate little shrug. ‘Sing; write music; take drugs. Put so much effort into the things you like least about your life that you’ve nothing left for what matters to you. What’s your motivation? If it’s the money, why isn’t it making you happier?’

  ‘Happy?’ Fry spat the word out. ‘Jesus, Daniel, where do you get your ideas? If there’s one thing demon rock is not about it’s happiness.’

  Daniel’s tone was dismissive. ‘Demon rock is what you do, not who you are. It’s a performance: even I know that. And if the performance doesn’t make you happy, and the money doesn’t, I’m even less sure why you do it.’

  From the look on Fry’s face, he’d never been asked before. That he was looking for an answer was due in part to Daniel’s trademark brand of gentle, obstinate persistence, and in part to a vein of honesty in his own character. He hadn’t wondered till now, but now he wanted to know.

  ‘Because the songs want to be heard. They’re not just scribbles on paper: once they’re written, once they’re right, they have an existence of their own. They make demands. They want to be acknowledged. If gods become real by being prayed to, songs become real by being heard. The more people who hear them, the more real they are.’

  He struggled to explain to someone who thought numbers the apex of creativity. ‘When you first write a song you think you’d be satisfied if you could get somebody – anybody – to listen. But when you do it isn’t enough. Even a busker at a bus-stop expects a few coins. If the songs are good, people should pay for them. It’s a way of showing respect.

  ‘So you keep working at it. And because the songs are good, and you’ve worked hard, and you’ve been lucky, eventually the offers start coming. A gig in the back of a pub. Warming up for somebody more famous. Finally you get a recording contract.’

  Fry leaned back on the sofa, hands behind his head, legs stretched out on the rug, eyes closed. His cheeks and the hollows of his throat were sunken, sucked in by the vacuity of his existence.

  ‘But there’s a price to pay. As other people get involved there are more demands to be met, more needs to be satisfied. It’s not just the songs now, it’s the accountants. And the bigger the market for your work, the bigger the risk: if you crash you crash big-time. So everyone’s telling you to be careful. Stick to what worked last time. You’ve all these people making a living out of you – it’s not just you now, if you go down other people are going to get hurt, and they’re never going to forgive you.’

  His voice grew bitter and oddly helpless as he spoke. ‘And the more you listen to them, the less you heed the songs. And songs are jealous gods. If you don’t flatter and feed them, and do their bidding, they go away. They seek out new talent, teach new songwriters their craft. Make them hungry for success, because that’s what gets the songs heard.

  ‘Songs are parasites. They infect their host, suck his blood till he’s weak, then move on. All they leave behind is a husk, a burnt-out singer who’s spent ten years getting where he is and can’t remember why.’

  Daniel didn’t know what to say. If Fry thought he’d lost his skill with words he was mistaken.

  ‘I think you’re tired,’ Daniel said at last. ‘You need a break. Not just a few weeks between tours but a couple of years doing something else
. Recharging your batteries. It’s not enough to be able to write if you’ve nothing to write about. If your whole life is about singing, what do you write the songs about? You need to get grounded again.’

  ‘And live on what?’

  Daniel blinked. ‘Jared, you can’t possibly have money problems! You’ve just spent two million pounds on a new house!’

  ‘Two and a half,’ growled Fry. ‘And it still doesn’t have a swimming pool.’

  ‘There are salt-waiter baths in Dimmock, you can buy a season ticket for twenty quid! Focus on what’s important. This is your life we’re talking about, and it looks to me you’re flogging yourself for the benefit of people who don’t know or don’t care what matters to you. Let them wait. If you’re as good as they say they’ll still be there in two years’ time: if you’re not you’d be finished by then anyway. Take the risk. Maybe you’ll never again make the kind of money you’re making now, but you don’t need to. You’ve done that. Use the time it bought to do what makes you happy. Write your songs. Your songs – the ones that matter to you. If you’re not doing that, I doubt the rest of it is worth doing.’

  ‘That’s easy for you to say,’ gritted Fry.

  ‘Well yes,’ admitted Daniel, ‘perhaps it is. I haven’t a talent to my name. I had one once. I was a good teacher. It was never going to make me rich but it felt good. And then … well. I can’t do it any more.’

  ‘What happened?’

  Daniel side-stepped the question by answering one that hadn’t been asked. It wasn’t lying. He was just tired of telling the story, of the shock and sympathy in the eyes of people who would never again see him as a whole person. ‘You’ve seen what happens. I panic in crowds. You do that in front of thirty twelve-year-olds, somebody takes you aside and says that, for you, the summer holidays are starting early.’

  ‘Will you get back to it sometime?’

  Daniel flicked him a fragile smile. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You miss it?’

  Again the one-shouldered shrug. There was something wistful about it, although in purely practical terms it was the legacy of a broken collarbone. ‘It was my song.’