Beatlebone

by Kevin Barry

  JOHN Heroin, Charlie.

  CHARLIE At the very least, John.

  JOHN Speedballs, Charlie.

  CHARLIE We do need something.

  JOHN A crate of vodka. It sounds fucking cracked in there.

  CHARLIE It does a bit.

  JOHN It sounds like a fucking nuthouse. And not in a good way.

  CHARLIE It’s going to be a challenging piece of work.

  JOHN They’re going to do me up like a fucking kipper, Charlie.

  CHARLIE Well there are no songs. As such. I mean song-type songs. Is the thing of it, John.

  JOHN You think this is news to me, Mr. Haimes?

  CHARLIE I’m not saying it necessarily needs song-type songs. As such.

  JOHN There are nine fucking pieces.

  CHARLIE But do they flow? As such?

  JOHN Flow, Charlie? What do you think this is? Fucking Supertramp? We’re breaking the line.

  CHARLIE We’re certainly doing that.

  The morning lifts across the city. The first scratches of life are on the air; the first of a summer Thursday’s railyard aches and rousing groans.

  CHARLIE The thing about the fuzzbox, John?

  JOHN The thing about the fuzzbox, Charlie, is I don’t know how to operate the fucking fuzzbox.

  The throb of the first trains from deep as the sun comes slowly higher. It’s going to be a blinder. John beads his eyes and sucks on his fag and turns a significant look on the sound engineer Charlie Haimes.

  JOHN “Family Of Three” is getting there. The business with the theremin aside. A single, maybe?

  If it had a bloody chorus, thinks Charlie Haimes.

  JOHN It’s been a long six weeks, Charlie. But another two and we’re done. Or possibly three.

  CHARLIE Which would make it nine for a finish. Incidentally.

  JOHN Yeah, well, the thing about the nines, Charlie, is I’m blue in the face from the fucking nines. I’ve been seeing the fucking nines everywhere. I’ve been reading the nines into situations. I’ve had it up to here with the fucking nines.

  They are running on fags and cold tea. John exhales slowly to the morning. Now he turns and considers with fresh interest the sound engineer Haimes.

  JOHN Where is it you’re from, Charlie? Originally.

  CHARLIE Douglas way.

  JOHN You mean Isle of bloody Man Douglas?

  CHARLIE Same as.

  JOHN A Manx?

  CHARLIE Brine for blood.

  JOHN Do you think it’s coming through, Charlie?

  CHARLIE The which?

  JOHN The point of it all.

  CHARLIE Well…

  JOHN Okay.

  The air is warmer by the moment. The city’s ripe odour is rising. It’s like Delhi on a bad day, thinks Charlie Haimes, whose gut has not been right. He’s done time in Delhi has Charlie. The charas hashish. Never again with the squidgy black—never again with the charas hashish. One night he’d thought there was a bird talking to him. Another time a chair.

  CHARLIE What does her nibs think?

  JOHN Well her nibs is off the fucking record, isn’t she?

  CHARLIE How is that situation by the way? Thaw?

  JOHN Thaw is a strong word, Charlie.

  John looks up to the sky and considers the plain white and blue of it—as if there might be answers written up there.

  JOHN What it’s about? Fucking ultimately? It’s about what you’ve got to put yourself through to make anything worthwhile. It’s about going to the dark places and using what you find there.

  John flicks his half-smoked fag. He leans his arms on the bars and his chin on his skinny arms.

  JOHN Here’s an odd question, Charlie. Is it, in effect, some kind of occult fucking jazz thing?

  CHARLIE That’s definitely a way of looking at it, John.

  Morning climbs the white-blue sky. The sound engineer Charlie Haimes wishes that he was at home, in the farmhouse, with Dora, and the nippers, having a spliff and thinking about getting his tomatoes in. There isn’t much Charlie Haimes needs telling about tomatoes.

  CHARLIE At least we’ve binned the Irishy bits.

  JOHN There is that. That fucking fiddler?

  They have a laugh about the fiddler again. This cuts the tension. The fiddler was five foot nothing and smelt of whiskey and had the eyes of a haggard masturbator. John reckoned he’d been sneaking in the loo to have one off the handle.

  JOHN Used to play with Van Morrison, apparently.

  John, hawk-faced, spluttering, one traumatised 4 a.m., had said: Right then! We’re done with the fucking fiddles! And I mean in-fucking-toto, Charlie!

  JOHN Maybe I’m not whacked out enough anymore, Charlie. Maybe I’m not as far out my own self as the fucking record is supposed to be.

  There isn’t a great deal Charlie Haimes can say to that. The sun comes through the backs of the buildings across the way. John’s skin is night-work pale in the morning light.

  JOHN What I heard in that cave, Charlie?

  CHARLIE Oh yeah?

  JOHN I’m not even going to say how good it could have been.

  John reaches over the rail now and he looks down below. He sighs in long suffering. He slides to a sitting position.

  JOHN I do think that’s where they’re at, you know? The dead ones. I think they get together out on the water. Else how can you explain all the lonely mopers stood about on the shore?

  This is heading into odd country is the view of Charlie Haimes. Though there was the time in Llandudno he’d had a weep about his nan.

  CHARLIE I had a weep about me dead nan in Llandudno one time. On the promenade.

  JOHN Oh?

  CHARLIE I think it was a Sunday. I found myself stood on the prom and bawling out the tears.

  JOHN You were close to your old nan, Charlie?

  CHARLIE That’s the odd thing about it, John. I never liked the old witch. She was the tightest woman in Douglas. Which is saying bloody something. She gave me four sausage rolls when I done my Holy Communion.

  JOHN Moony types get drawn to bodies of water, Charlie. They always have done.

  CHARLIE Is what it is.

  JOHN If you wanted me to be fucking French about it?

  CHARLIE Go on.

  JOHN It’s because when you look out to sea, you’re looking at a fucking infinitude.

  CHARLIE Of?

  John joins his hands to make a seashell—a conch?—and blows inside and opens his hands again—puff—as though to free a dove.

  JOHN An infinitude, Charlie, of nothingness.

  CHARLIE Heroin, John.

  JOHN At the very fucking least, Charlie.

  CHARLIE You want to go back in?

  He doesn’t answer. The silence that holds is easier now and London is pinkly waking. They’ve been through a lot together. The rattling of the bones; the squalls and the screeching; the occult shimmers; the lonely airs; the sudden madcap waltzes; the hollowed voices; the sibilant hiss; the asylum screams; the wretched moans; the violence, love, and tenderness—beatlebone. The first of the buses goes past at a sprightly chug.

  JOHN Have you ever Screamed, Charlie?

  CHARLIE I have a bit. So happens. In my day.

  JOHN And what did you find, Charlie? When you went inside?

  CHARLIE Not a whole lot to write home about, John. As it turns out.

  Charlie Haimes could be enjoying the slow life. He could be tending his veggies and having his puff. But the call came in. Have you anything in the book, Charlie? Not till Kate Bush in October. Well, John’s in town. John? John. Do you mean John-John? The same.

  JOHN Are we going to make a record then?

  CHARLIE I daresay we’re going to make something.

  John pockets his fags; Charlie watches closely.

  JOHN Do you ever think about being a kid, Charlie?

  CHARLIE Sometimes. You see things in your own and it makes you think back.

  JOHN When were you happiest in your life?

  CHARLIE Probably rig
ht now.

  JOHN You mean this minute? That’s very kind, Charles.

  CHARLIE I mean where I am right now.

  JOHN Wales, isn’t it?

  CHARLIE That’s right.

  JOHN Doesn’t Roger Daltrey keep a trout farm there?

  CHARLIE I believe he does.

  JOHN I tried the countryside. I went off my fucking bean. I tried the city. I can take it or fucking leave it.

  CHARLIE What about this island then?

  JOHN Turns out the thought of it’s the thing, Charlie. The reality is slippery rocks and freezing fucking sea and creamy fucking gull shit. Not to mention the banshee fucking wind.

  A summer day gets up and about itself. It’s going to be a meat-spoiler. It’s going to be pig heat in this old, old habitation. He’s got the faraway look on. He—John—has gone off to the vaults of darkness again. As if all of it can make no difference, as if each time he opens his mouth it’s just a scream to pierce the moment against the darkness that’s coming, the void.

  CHARLIE QPR are a lovely young side. They could go well this year. Is my feeling. A very capable young side. Do you follow the football, John?

  JOHN I went to art college, Charlie.

  The sound engineer has been around a share of these type blokes in his day. What it is, if you ask Charlie Haimes, is a case of arrested development.

  JOHN You never get past what happens to you when you’re seventeen.

  Charlie Haimes tries to remember when he was seventeen. 1961? Not bloody yesterday. He was possibly already in Brum by then. Which wasn’t without its excitements for a Charlie Haimes, seventeen, fresh fish out of Dudley.

  JOHN I’d be coming down Bold Street. Is the feeling that I get. And I was that fucking sharp, Charlie, you know?

  The morning is tight as a drum now. The first of the traffic sends out its snarls. The air becomes heavier and tastes of oil and poppers.

  CHARLIE There’s always the possibility you’re breaking new ground here, John.

  This goes down very well.

  JOHN As in maybe this thing is ahead of its fucking time?

  CHARLIE Careful, but.

  JOHN It’s a very pretty thought.

  John stands up and stretches. He groans from his years—he groans from deep inside.

  JOHN I’m getting old, Charlie. And I think I might be getting a bit fat again.

  There’s no odds in engaging here, thinks Charlie Haimes.

  CHARLIE Italian caff won’t be long opening. We could get a couple of sausage sarnies in?

  JOHN Ooh…

  John looks wearily now towards the studio door. The drear fucking repetition of it all. It’s never a picnic, this.

  JOHN Maybe a trout farm in Wales is the way to fucking go.

  CHARLIE They get lice, trout.

  JOHN Which is neither here nor there, Charlie.

  In the studio a tape spools and resets and comes to life again—a sudden squall, a half-rhythm.

  JOHN The fuck?

  CHARLIE I dunno how that’s come on.

  John stands up to listen; Charlie sits and listens. It’s got a low slithering thread, a half-rhythm with a chanted beat, an arcane air.

  JOHN Charlie?

  CHARLIE I know.

  JOHN You hearing this?

  CHARLIE I think I fucking am.

  And now the beaten hollows of a chest, and a theremin’s loops, and the squall of a fuzzbox, and there are white horses riding the sea. John fishes out his box of fags and he pops one with a squeeze of the box and he lights it. A peregrine falcon crosses the sky.

  JOHN Here’s a question for you.

  CHARLIE Okay?

  JOHN In some of this stuff we’ve put down, right? Is there a weird kind of sex heat coming off?

  CHARLIE A sex heat?

  JOHN A kind of sex feeling. A kind of…clammy feeling?

  CHARLIE Can’t say as I’ve noticed, John.

  Ever the diplomat, Charlie Haimes, who’s been six weeks in the studio trying to look the other way.

  JOHN But fuck it, you know? All that matters is that it’s a fucking masterpiece and that it’s better than what the rest of the whey-faced cunts are coming up with.

  Kate Bush is going to be a walk in the park, thinks Charlie Haimes. And he—John—leans out across the rail and looks to the new morning across the bone-dry city; London hasn’t had a drop for weeks.

  CHARLIE I wonder if we shouldn’t knock off for now? Come in fresh tonight.

  JOHN Nonsense, Charlie. We’ll push on through.

  They both stand and turn to look at the steel door that leads to the studio.

  JOHN Care less. That’s the way to go with this thing, Charlie. Don’t you think?

  CHARLIE Now you’re talking.

  JOHN I mean have you heard what Scott Walker’s been up to? With his plinkety fucking plonk plonk?

  CHARLIE Avant-garde, John. Is what it is.

  JOHN My peasant arse. This is going to make Scott Walker sound like the Mamas and the fucking Papas.

  I quite liked the Mamas and the Papas, thinks Charlie Haimes. Those were very lovely, those harmonies. Between the backs of the buildings—the laundry, the Turkish restaurant—there’s a sliver of street to be seen, and it’s Tottenham Street, coming around from Goodge Street station, and here’s the old Italian prowling by, always first about the street. He must be tipping eighty, an old-stager, and he’ll have the café open any minute now. Charlie’s stomach rumbles. He could use a bacon sandwich and a mug of scald.

  CHARLIE We could line our stomachs, John?

  JOHN I’m good for now. But you look after yourself. I’ve eaten a pig and a half this last six weeks.

  They stay on the fire escape. It must be going on for half past six if the old Italian’s about. The heat is building.

  JOHN There are times I wish I was a geography teacher in fucking Woolton.

  CHARLIE Patches on your elbows and a broken mug for your pipe cleaners.

  JOHN Saturdays? I’ll nip out for an hour. Teatime. Two and a half pints and a read of the pink. Some peace from the kiddies.

  Charlie Haimes hears a stack of newspapers slapped down on Tottenham Street. A shutter rises with a jaunty screech. There is a maniacal holler, indecipherable, from the vicinity of Goodge Street station.

  JOHN It’s going to be a stinker, Charlie.

  CHARLIE It’s going to be a tar-melter. You want to go in?

  JOHN Let’s give it half a tick.

  They’ve been in since nine the evening before. It’s going to be another twelve-hour run with a squall of broken notes to show for it. A tubby kid goes by on Tottenham Street with his bucket of paste and the last of his posters. He’ll have been plastering the town half the night. Elvis Costello. The Slits. African Head Charge in the Hackney Empire.

  JOHN You notice the way it’s the last hour we often get something?

  Ever the optimist, thinks Charlie Haimes, who’s been having his tinnitus again—a worry—and that’s not to mention the bloody piles. A tub of salt, apparently, tipped into a lukewarm bath. Is the way to go for piles. Charlie Haimes has a farmhouse to pay off. The plan is to pack all this in and stick to the homestead on a three-six-five basis. Run the place as a donkey sanctuary. He has a thing for a donkey has Charlie Haimes. There’s something about them that’s spiritual, kind of. And Dora had two as a kid—Billy Joe and Dixie.

  JOHN I’m going to do some words, Charlie. Just roll a tape and I’ll do some words for this fucking thing.

  The story has been coming through in odd scraps all summer. He talks about the island and he talks about the cave. Some bloke with one ear—a badger had his other. Charlie Haimes has mixed feelings about badgers. Tuberculosis. Spread of. Or so they say.

  John sings a bit in American—an old jingle-type snatch:

  JOHN “Everyday’s an holidaaay, at the A-me-thyst ’otel…”

  Amethyst? Like a jewel? Like a gem? Colour of a bird’s eye in the rain? He slaps his hands together, John. He pouts a
kiss for the sound engineer Charlie Haimes. He pushes through the steel door.

  JOHN In your own time, Charlie.

  CHARLIE I’ll be with you.

  JOHN He’s gonna make a hames of it!

  CHARLIE Tell me one I’ve not heard.

  JOHN He’s a proper Charlie!

  The morning sun tips over a rooftop. The sea? In fact he was never gone on the sea was Charlie Haimes. Give him a nice placid lake any day.

  John sticks his head out again.

  JOHN The way I’m thinking, Charlie, is I’m going to utterly fucking transmute myself.

  CHARLIE Careful how you go.

  Charlie counts the fags in his box. Nine. He’ll have to nip out for fresh. Cornershop’s open for seven. Can show his face in the Italian caff, too. The old-stager will be at his rituals. Wipe the coffee spout, leave out the grease traps. Get your wireless on. Hasten slowly. You make the moments of a day and a life is what you do.

  This story that’s been coming through? The room marked nine. The crows like Gestapo. The voices in the trees.

  JOHN I’m going to turn myself inside out. I’m going to fucking express myself, Charlie. I’ll do the fucking words for this thing. About what happened to me on the island.

  CHARLIE I’ll roll a tape, John.

  JOHN Finish your fag first.

  CHARLIE Alright then.

  JOHN And do not lose this fucking tape, Charlie.

  He pushes the door out and Charlie Haimes is left to himself for a last few morning moments. It is the Thursday of the week, with a Thursdayish air. Not unhopeful, actually. The emptiness of the street is framed by the shunting of the trains for Goodge Street station. Now a post van slides past and beyond the steel door John is singing—he’s lah-lah-lahing—and Charlie stubs his fag on the rail of the fire escape, and inside John is singing—he’s hah-hah-hahing—and the coil of the morning tightens and turns.