A Possible Life

by Sebastian Faulks

  After lunch she slept in the hotel, for maybe an hour. She seemed very quiet when we packed up to go to the hall, and fell asleep again in the back of the car. I shook her awake.

  ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Yeah, I took a pill. Rick gave me some in New York when you were away. I was having trouble sleeping.’

  ‘Are you going to be all right for the gig?’

  ‘Sure, let’s just get some coffee.’

  The dressing room was bare and squalid. There was no floor covering, just a slab, and the walls were only part-plastered, as though they’d run out of money. There was a broken hi-hat, some empty drum cases and two painted boards that might have been flats from a student play. We sent the roadie off to get coffee.

  Anya sat on a moulded-plastic chair looking at herself in the mirror. The strip lights were harsh, the glare bouncing off the grey walls. She painted kohl beneath her eyes and put powder on her nose and forehead. She was crying.

  There was a knock on the door and Stephen Lee put his head round it.

  ‘I just wanted to check something,’ he said. ‘Are we still doing the new ending to “You Next Time”?’

  ‘Yup. We take the cue from Anya, when she raises her hand.’

  ‘OK. Is everything all right?’

  ‘Sure. Is it a good house?’

  ‘Looks full. The support’s shit, though.’

  Stephen looked at Anya, who was holding her head in her hands, and raised an eyebrow at me.

  I looked at my watch. ‘We still have ten minutes.’

  Stephen nodded and left. I was wondering what the hell we would do if Anya didn’t come round. We had no back-up plan.

  I put my arm round her shoulder. She was shaking.

  ‘Freddy, I don’t think I can do it.’

  ‘What’s the matter, sweetheart?’

  ‘I’m frightened. I don’t want to do it.’

  I pulled up a chair next to her and put my arms round her. I mumbled a lot of things – feeble stuff, I’m sure.

  She pulled back and looked at me, black streaks all down her cheeks. ‘It’s one thing doing it for you, in the studio. Or on my own. But suddenly I feel – I don’t know what. I’m afraid I’ve done the wrong thing.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘I feel guilty.’ She was sobbing now. ‘Perhaps I’ve used my own experiences and other people’s too. To kind of boost myself. I think they’re going to see through me.’

  There was no point in telling her that she’d already performed a dozen times on tour without a hitch and people loved her music. Stage fright is not a rational thing.

  I had to think quickly and the best I could do was, ‘My darling, you’re a messenger. The people you sing about, you’re giving them a life. Remember when we did “Genevieve” in the studio? You climbed into her skin. Leave Anya King in this room when you go out there.’

  It seemed to help a little bit. She washed her face, redid the kohl.

  ‘I need a drink, Freddy.’ She looked very pale.

  ‘There’s only beer. But any port in a storm.’ I cracked a ring pull and handed her the can.

  ‘Tomorrow I’ll bring gin,’ I said. ‘We’ll get through this. You’ll be fine.’

  She drank quickly, put the can down with a thump so it flooded the dressing table, then loudly burped out the gas. She smiled for a moment.

  ‘Another thing,’ I went on. ‘All those people. They’re mostly kids. Students. They’re just thrilled to see you – a real live star. They’re nothing to be frightened of.’

  She looked up at me and tried to smile, but there was panic in her eyes.

  When the stage manager came to tell us to get ready, I had to pretty much manhandle Anya down the dingy corridor and into the wings. The folkie who’d opened was coming the other way, guitar in hand, and squeezed past us without a word. I didn’t see why we couldn’t have a break between acts, but the venue insisted on pushing us straight in, something to do with local residents’ bedtime.

  The routine was that she did the first two numbers alone before introducing me. We watched the MC, who was a young guy, probably a college kid.

  ‘… her hit album, Ready to Fly, ladies and gentlemen, you can tell your grandchildren you heard her on her first ever tour, the sensational Miss Anya King!’

  I applied gentle pressure to the small of her back. OK, I pushed her on. A powerful spotlight picked her out. College or not, this was a big hall. She paused, as though dazed or lost, then made it to the stool and pulled the microphone a little closer. She was wearing jeans, as she almost always did after the row about the skirt picture. She licked her lips and cleared her throat. She looked about twelve years old.

  She took her favourite guitar off the stand and ran her fingers through a chord. She fiddled with a tuning peg.

  ‘Thank you for coming.’ Her speaking voice was always low, but not this husky. She was supposed to kick off with ‘You Next Time’, the turntable hit of the album, but that was not the intro she began to play. Anya was a guitarist capable of improvising if she wanted to, and after a minute I still didn’t recognise what she was playing. I was pleased that she hadn’t thrown down the instrument or fluffed a note, but I felt my guts churning.

  I took a deep breath and walked on stage early. I sat down at the piano and caught Anya’s eye. She stopped playing. She looked at me lovingly, and with relief.

  ‘This is my friend Jack,’ she said. I don’t think I’d ever heard her use my real name before. Even when introducing me to strangers, she called me Freddy.

  ‘Good evening, everybody,’ I said. One or two people called and whistled in a friendly way.

  I looked back at Anya, but she was staring down at the fret board of her guitar. I took a chance. ‘All right. Now we’ve tuned up, we’re gonna start with a song called “You Next Time”.’

  Then I gave her the opening chord on the piano. Her left hand gripped the neck of the guitar and the fingers of her right began to pick. We needed only the voice. Come on, Anya, come on, little girl. Here it is, here it comes …

  Two years gone, the passion’s still unbound.

  Another life, I’ll know before we meet

  This hill of pain cannot be mine to climb.

  No mistake the second time around,

  I will die and rise, the shadow on your wall,

  My name will be the only one you call,

  Oh, my darling, you next time.

  There was a ‘skull’ note through the final word, ‘time’. She nailed it with a kind of sob in her voice. The crowd went completely mad. I saw people in the front row with tears on their faces. They were on their feet and it was only the first song of the set.

  Anya turned to me, her face a mixture of fear and amazement. For the second song, she came to the piano. I took a guitar and sat close by, but she seemed all right now. Her hands were steady on the keys and her voice grew in certainty. When she struck the opening chord of ‘Julie in the Court of Dreams’ there was a communal intake of breath. These kids knew their stuff. I caught Stephen’s eye in the wings and we exchanged looks. Stage fright was not something either of us had been through before, and we weren’t keen to go back there any time soon.

  We got through the tour with the help of tranquillisers and bourbon. Their respective manufacturers sounded, Anya said, like a West Coast harmony band all their own: Hoffmann, Daniel and La Roche. We roughed out a record they might make called ‘Slow Groove’ with its double-sided hit single ‘Past Caring’ and ‘Out On My Feet’.

  We finished the tour in San Francisco, where we stayed in the same staid hotel as before on Powell and California and had people back to the room and partied till dawn with Henry Fonda ferrying in supplies. Then we went back to New York where we renewed the lease on Seventh Street, because Anya felt superstitious about moving.

  In May, Lowri called me to say she was moving back to Los Angeles and what did I want her to do with the keys to the farm.

  ‘I read the tour wen
t well,’ she said.

  ‘Will you be OK?’

  ‘Yes, I have a place with Candy on Beech Knoll Road and I’ve got work in town.’

  ‘What kind of work?’

  ‘Real estate.’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘I know. But I have to do something.’

  ‘I can send some money from my share of Anya’s royalties.’

  ‘I don’t think I’d like that, Jack.’

  The moment was hanging. I couldn’t let her go.

  ‘Can I see you again?’

  ‘Sure thing. But give me a little time. Maybe a year.’

  ‘I love you, Lowri. I’m so sorry. You know.’

  ‘It’s life, honey. It’s a bummer from start to finish. A total fuck-up. Then you die.’

  I could picture her face, unfortunately, as she spoke. She was beautiful. A complete original.

  ‘Will we be friends?’

  ‘We’ll try, Jack. I can’t promise, but I’ll try. I guess it might go better in another life. The cab’s here. I have to go.’

  Another life, I thought: well, there’s always that.

  In June, Anya and I went up to the farm. Lowri had left everything tidy, the beds stripped, the sheets washed and put away. The pans were hanging on their hooks, the plates were clean and stacked. But her drawers were all empty. There was not a hairpin left behind.

  Anya put her things in the second bedroom, where she’d been before. We went into town for dinner and Anya said, ‘What we need is visitors.’ Our life had been so secluded, so intense, that we barely knew anyone. My friends were in England or in LA. Anya had travelled light. There had been boyfriends, two or three big affairs, but she wasn’t in touch with them, which was fine by me. We began to laugh when we recognised our plight – one moment, in the spotlight; the next, two friendless people in an empty farmhouse.

  So we got Rick Kohler to come up. There was a girl called Sandy at MPR records Anya liked, so we asked her and her boyfriend to come that weekend. Down the road, there was a young high school teacher who was interesting to talk to and an ad-man who’d come up one summer from Madison Avenue and never gone home. He smoked about half a kilo of grass a day. A kind of scene began to develop, and during the long quiet days Anya wrote more songs.

  We lived so close to one another I thought it might be bad for our health. Anya had tactfully stayed in the second bedroom and I gave her that space. I only went in there if she invited me and she never came into what had been Lowri’s and my room. It sounds odd, looking back, but I think it helped. We made love downstairs, outdoors and in my lady’s chamber when she asked me in – which was every night. But we kept to the fiction of separate lives.

  While Anya wrote, I— Well, I kept house, I suppose. I went to the store, I got someone in to cut the grass and do some logging. I wrote a few things of my own and hoped Anya would ask me to help her with her songs. I dreamed of seeing ‘King/Wyatt’ in brackets after a track title on the next record. But she never asked.

  She wrote two songs about the experience of touring. ‘Out On My Feet’, which had started as our joke but turned into a harrowing song about baring your soul for the delight of strangers, and ‘Gate Nineteen’, a wistful number about airports and travelling on before you’ve had time to breathe. She seemed to have material left from older love affairs, from childhood and from the time she’d spent in New York before I met her. And there were the songs about other people, other lives.

  The album Ready to Fly sold well in Europe, mostly in Britain, but also in Germany and Holland, where to her irritation they used the picture of her in the tiny skirt on the sleeve. John Vintello talked of a world tour for the next record, but neither of us was interested. We just wanted to make sure the second album was stronger than the first. It was recorded in December, in New York this time, though they flew over Larry Brecker to engineer again. The Occasional Lover was released in February and there was another tour. This time we had a support act – Blue Ridge Cowboys, Denny Roberts’s band. The Occasional Lover was well received in the business, peaked at number seven in the album chart – five places higher than Ready to Fly – and went on selling steadily. The tour passed without bad incidents.

  In May, we found ourselves back at the farm, rattling round again. The weather was beautiful and I think it was good for both of us to sleep off the rigours of the tour. But I guessed it wouldn’t last.

  ‘Freddy,’ Anya said one sunny day in the ruins of her giant breakfast, ‘we could go on doing this for another, like, decade. Farm, write, city, record, city, tour, back to the farm. By that time you’ll be almost forty years old!’

  I smiled. It was hard to picture, but it sounded all right to me. At the same time, I saw what she meant.

  ‘Shall we go somewhere?’ I said.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘England. I could show you round. Paris. Rome. Greece. Africa. Anywhere.’ Anya had never been out of the United States, except twice to Toronto. I’d seen her virgin passport with the eighteen-year-old-college-girl picture. ‘ANJA INGRID KING. May 24, 19—. Birthplace: N. Dakota, USA. Hair: Brown. Eyes: Brown. Height: Five feet, five inches.’

  So the idea of what she called the Migration began. I had no doubt about why she wanted to travel. It wasn’t for history, language, or art. It was in the hope of material for songs. We flew to Athens in June and found ourselves on a hot island soon afterwards. Greece was pretty unspoiled, though there were American backpackers on some beaches. They carried large books and, for all their naked hippy sun worship, were serious about politics, about Nixon and Vietnam.

  We’d brought sleeping rolls and a two-man tent with a single change of clothes and, in Anya’s case, one cotton dress. Touring had made her despise hotels and she was frightened of losing touch with the people she was singing for. The problem was that it was hard for her to sit round a beach fire at night and listen to someone strum a well-travelled guitar. She was not exactly famous, but she knew she might be recognised if she played.

  There was a single taverna with a bathroom that was in constant use, you took in your own paper; and there was a shower outside. I don’t remember what we did apart from lie in the sun, swim and talk with other people. We slept in the dunes above the beach. Books were passed round. Occasionally you’d make the long hike back to the port for dinner or you could get a boat round the coast for a few drachmas. The taverna didn’t go in for the sort of breakfast Anya liked so she had to make do with yoghurt and fruit, then join me for a big Greek salad at lunch. I force-fed her chips, or Greek fries as she called them, as I thought she’d got too thin. After a couple of weeks like this, we went back to the port and put our tent up in a campsite. Every night we went down to a noisy taverna where there was a whole spitted lamb with pitta bread and salad, wine drawn from a barrel into jugs, and dancing. The locals seemed happy to dance with us and were fascinated when, high on retsina, Anya, for the only time on the island, gave in to the begging of a shy young man who was feeding her Karelia cigarettes and soulful looks.

  She took the beaten-up guitar he offered and stood beneath a lantern hanging from the vines that made a makeshift roof outside. She had one foot up on a straw-seated chair to support the strapless guitar on her thigh. She didn’t make a big deal of tuning it, just grimaced a bit and started singing. Her face was caught by the lamplight and her voice soared through the heat, the vines, the blundering moths. The locals looked on astounded. For Anya, there seemed no thoughts of stage fright, of how it would go across. She sang for the joy if it – ‘Hold Me’, ‘Ready to Fly’, some songs by other writers, one of her own I’d never heard called ‘My Sister’s Room’ and finished with the whole taverna of people in a frenzied Zorba-the-Greek dance as she played ‘Run Me Crazy, Run Me Wild’.

  Her face, tanned by the Aegean sun, was radiant in the night as she threw back her head. Afterwards, I had to pretty much carry her home through the throng of sweating, laughing well-wishers. I had to hold her tight because she said the world was spin
ning.

  I had arranged to go back to America in late summer to discuss a new record deal for Anya. She wanted to stay two more weeks, so I left her in Athens and flew to London, where I met up with my family for a few days before returning to New York. I spent a humid week arguing with lawyers about merchandising and marketing. I was pleased when I finally got back to the farm and happier still when Anya showed up a few days later.

  Europe had changed her. She looked older, more mysterious in some way. It was as though she’d found a new horizon. The songs she played me had more rock and more jazz in them, they were less folky and in some odd way less American. I had to go back to New York again to finalise the contract, and while I was there she called me at the apartment to say she was going to meet her father in Chicago, but that she’d made a tape on the reel-to-reel in the farm of the ten songs she wanted to record for her third album. Would I please listen carefully and let her know what I thought when she got back.

  It was about noon on a Saturday when the cab from the station dropped me off and I went into the farm. I showered, changed my clothes and drank a beer from the fridge before I went down to the music area.

  Beside the reel-to-reel, which was rewound and ready to go, was a piece of paper torn from a notebook with Anya’s scrawled pencil handwriting. Most tracks were familiar to me, but number eight was not. It was called ‘Song for Freddy’.

  I tried to listen to the seven songs before it, but I lost patience and fast-forwarded. I went to the fridge, got another beer, lit a cigarette, sat down and pressed Play.

  It began with minor chords on the piano, yet quite a full sound. Her small hands could barely stretch an octave, and you could hear all the fingers at work. The introduction was repeated, unhurried, until I became desperate to hear the voice.

  When it finally came, it wasn’t what I expected at all. I thought of this magnificent woman, by a long way the most extraordinary person I had met. I thought of what we’d done in bed and out of it, the recording studio, the painful arguments, the grass, the gin, the Pasadena Star; yet she sang this song meekly, almost like a hymn.