Beatlebone

Part Three. EVERY DAY IS A HOLIDAY AT THE AMETHYST HOTEL

The suitcase is ancient. It could be out of Lime Street station in 1925. Leather and belted; a stout little general. He wears the dead father’s suit over his high-top purple trainers. The sun is psychedelic in hot streaks across the water. He looks back at himself from the water’s surface. His eyes are glazed with shell-shock and paracetamol. The suitcase is by his feet and contains all of his supplies and somehow his aspirations. He worries a bit about this brown leather suitcase. Open it up and the past might tip out—

on rum parade.

I’m sorry, John?

Nothing, Cornelius. My mind is tipping out my mouth.

That would often be the way. Rum I never drank.

Cornelius rocks the boat free of its berth and aims it over the stones. He mutters blackly beneath his breath and swears vengeance against the waves and world. He pushes the boat out to the water. He works at the ropes and works at the motor—

Bastarin’ fucken thing!

The seabirds hover watchfully with their mad eyes, all wing-span and homicide. He doesn’t know the names for birds. Which is neither here nor there. He kneels down by the water to find his face come closer—

fuck me.

The shock of the age that’s gone in. He looks older than Father fucking Time. Anxiety and fear and weight-of-love — these are the lines of his face.

Cornelius works the boat.

The motor catches and the rope unspools.

John climbs in and he almost falls but rights himself again — he’s awkward as a duck.

The boat puts out to the water.

——

Tell me again, John.

Okay.

You’re going out to this little island to scream?

I may well Scream.

You mean you’re going to be roaring out of you?

It’s certainly on the cards, Cornelius.

Like the crowd on Achill.

Oh?

But what’s it all about, John?

Primal scream therapy was devised by Dr. Arthur Janov.

I never heard of him.

He lives in California. He has a clinic there. I spent three months with Dr. Janov. He taught me how to Scream.

What’s it you’ll be screaming about?

It’s a technique for getting at buried pain and childhood trauma.

Why would you want to do that?

Because it weights you down.

And you want to be lighter on your feet?

Exactly so.

How light do you want to be?

How’d you mean?

What if you took off into the fucken sky?

You’re stuck in your ways, Cornelius. You don’t want to have your little world opened up.

My world’s about as far a ways open as I can fucken handle. What kind of pain have you buried?

Same kind we all have.

On account of being a child?

Well…

We were all children, John.

I lost my father. He went away.

We all lost our fucken fathers.

I lost my mother. She went and died.

We all have the dead fucken mothers.

So tell me how you get by, Cornelius!

It’s simple, John. I listen to what’s around me.

Okay…

And then?

Yeah?

I react.

You listen. And you react.

Because everything you need in the world is there to be heard.

You have my interest, Cornelius.

You can see very little in this world, John. But you can hear fucken everything.

——

He lies down on the boards of the boat as it edges out and moves. He fixes the suitcase for a pillow. He falls back into the grey-blue sky and the day augments itself by patches of cloud and patches of blue as the boat moves out across the bay.

Abroad in the fucking world.

Beg your pardon, John?

He closes his eyes and listens hard — the world is full of hollows — and he is sixteen again and coming down Bold Street — or maybe he’s seventeen — and he wants to fuck everything that moves but he’s in a fat phase and bevvied and he’s headed for the last train at Central station and he bounces off every shop window — a staggering John — and he stumbles and falls into a doorway — Cripps department store — and the sky above the rooftops shows the woozy stars and he heaves and pukes and laughs like a dog as he wipes the sick away and weeps.

He opens his eyes.

The sky rolls out and moves.

He is left to his own private woes and the weaving of his miseries — he’s an expert. Cornelius discreetly averts as John looks out and away, across the islands and the bay, and the boat dips and rises, and the engine judders, and the knuckle of the holy mountain jabs at the sky and the tiny islands are thrown about in all directions. He picks up a piece of dark wood like a baton and turns it — the way it feels snug and murderous in his hand.

The priest, Cornelius says.

For killing the fishies.

Or anything else might come at you.

Everywhere he looks there is another island but not his. All are familiar but none just right—

Well? says Cornelius.

No.

— because maybe the rocks are thrown about wrong or the way a hill runs at the sky is off. They pass another island and he sees a fast blur against the grey of the rocks and the movement is a quickness, a shiver, a silvering of the blood: the hare. They move farther out and the wind comes harder and in whippety slaps and he tunes into the slow boom and drift. The boat draws a curve around the tip of an island and comes on an open stretch of water. Across the colours of the bay they move and the way that his mood has lifted — now he’s beaming and in tremendous good heart, it must have been the hare. He is coming close in.

This feels right.

But in the near distance another boat moves on the water, and draws closer, and there are dark figures in a blur, crouching.

I can see lenses.

Down, John.

He lies flat to the boards of the boat.

Fuckers. Stay down, John.

Cornelius works slowly to turn the boat — it drifts again.

Stay down.

He lies hardly breathing on the boards of the boat.

There’s only one thing for it.

Yeah?

We’ll have to go and see our friends on Achill.

——

Paranoia drifts in white smoke across the sky.

The boat moves.

And here’s Cornelius—

his back to the May sun,

his face dark in shade,

his voice hoarse with soft cajole.

We should have headed here in the first place, John. There are no two ways about it. The Amethyst Hotel would be the very best place for you to wait out the assault.

The fucking where?

The Amethyst, John. On Achill.

Amethyst again? What the fuck is the Amethyst?

Sweet Joe’s place.

Who the fuck is Sweet fucking Joe?

Now on Achill Island generally, John, you’ll find the people are mean-spirited and small-minded and very aggressive. Tough nuggety foreheads on them. Hard lines to their faces. Tight little mouths. But of course this is no surprise in the wide earthly world…

He spits.

…because they’ve been jawing rocks at the side of the fucken road since the Lord Jesus was a bare-arsed child. We’ll have nothing whatsoever to do with the Achill people, John. That’s a promise to you and faithful. But the people where we’re headed are not Achill by the blood. No indeed. They are your own kind.

The boards of the boat groan and sing.

The cliffs of Achill rise up ahead.

Paranoia races its squadron gulls.

Who exactly are these people, Cornelius?

The people, he says, who have taken over the Amethyst Hotel.

Something odd, something familiar — Amethyst?

——

Cornelius works the boat between the rocks. The motor cuts; the boat is tied off. He is helped from the boat by a great knuckly paw. Which makes him feel lady-like and fey and just shy the parasol. They come from the water and climb. They walk an old track hemmed in by singing hedges in the breeze. The feeling near and near-abouts is medieval. The growth everywhere is very fucking alive — it makes a sore pulsing in his throat. On Achill there is the throb of big summer coming and everything breathes. In the Maytime we are untethered and time is not fixed. Or so he believes. The world is in a high, sexy mood. Tiny fists of dread are bunched beneath his skin. He is on Achill Island again — a bad-trip place — and the light is harsh and he is cold with fear.

I’ve been here before, he says.

We’ve all been here before, John.

I’m not talking philosophic. I mean this fucking place. I’ve been here before.

They climb a bit and then some more. They come in quick time to the Amethyst Hotel. It’s a strange hacienda in the Maytime sun. There are armies of insects on the island’s air. And there are voices — listen?

The voices are high, wired, freaky.

I think I’ve been to the Amethyst fucking Hotel and all.

He steps through the pools of a lost dream now — it’s been nine years since.

They pass through an old garden once formal but gone to seed and wild again and there is the feeling of things unseen travelling behind the hedges.

Sweet Joe, says Cornelius, is the gentleman that runs the Amethyst nowadays and I’d have to say he’s an outstanding individual.

John is worried.

Sweet Joe, says Cornelius, would mind a mouse for you on Piccadilly Circus.

I thought we’d said no hotels?

Amethyst is not open to the public anymore, John. As such. It is for Joe and his friends’ use only at this moment in time.

His friends?

The voices come up again. They are loud and desperate. He can hear unwellness and rage. He knows these voices at once and right off for what they are.

They’ll know to expect us, John. We spoke last night. They know we might be stuck. These are your own style of people precisely.

It’s true there are some old familiars on the air—

He can smell the fucking and the freebase.

He can smell the mania.

He can smell the freaks.

——

When he sees high the red letters raised

A M E T H Y S T

on the white gable wall, it comes back to him for sure: he has definitely been here before. It’s the nine years since. Some actors had it back then. They kept a very nice white wine. They had some quite good pot. They made us a picnic here. It was just a sweet nothing day. It was early in our life together.

The picnic was brought to the hills. The hills were scratchy with heather and nettles about the ankles and they sat for a while on a Scotch blanket and looked down on the slow-moving green-into-blue of the bay and ate tiny triangle sandwiches of cheese and pickle and drank the cold white wine—

didn’t we?

— until the rain came in a sudden attack from a very irksome old god and they scurried away again as the sky changed colour quick as love can change and there was rain in their faces and everything was giddy as hell and they were collapsing with love.

There’s another we’ll never have back, he says to himself, being the sentimental Scouse.

——

Inside. The air of the strange hotel is humid and trapped. There are voices upstairs. They are going at it fucking hard. There are footsteps now and a figure at the top of the stair — a dark shade there.

Dips his head for a view—

Sweet Joe, Cornelius says.

The beast grins down the stair beneath a cloud or an aura of bushy auburn hair. He has tiny yellowish pisshole-in-the-snow-type eyes. But otherwise this is a most graceful fatman on the move. The way that he bounces on the balls of his feet as he turns the stair.

Fucking hell, John says.

The way that he has the look of an enormous forest hog — a creature only rumoured, never seen. He wears a flowy Victorian shirt that billows poetically and some kind of breeches—fucking breeches? — and his skin has a high, healthful, vivacious glow. He is terribly fucking alive. He whispers these decorous words—

How absolutely proper it feels to have you here, John.

His voice?

North-of-England.

——

Are you a little cold, John?

His voice — the North-of-England, the wheeze, the husk and Burnley of it.

I’m fine, thanks.

They sit in the hotel kitchen over a brew of nettle tea and fags.

We can get that chill in Maytime yet, the evenings.

There is something old-timey about his voice, as if transmitted from the days long since; there is a static on the coils of it. His face is alive with tics and nervy flutters as if there are small desperate birds trapped beneath the skin.

You’d need your cup of tea, he says.

Common-sensical, also, the tone, like a fucking busman, and there are arcane symbols daubed on the kitchen walls—

Black Sun,

Pentacle,

Evil Eye.

There are voices upstairs — young, unsettled, roaring.

Frank and Sue, he says. They’re in the thick of it just now.

Oh yeah?

They’ve gone deepish, he says. We’d best not disturb Frank and Sue just now.

A rueful, confiding grin, and the words again are whispered—

They’ve been weeks getting to where they are now, Frank and Sue.

One minute they’re roaring at each other, Cornelius says. The next they’re riding each other like dogs.

It could go either way yet, Joe says, for Frank and Sue.

The voices above are pitched high and sorely and break at times to screeches, at other times to screams — John is back in a freakhouse again. It’s been a stretch of time. He sips not unhappily at his nettle tea.

How’s it you’ve ended up out here, Joe?

Oh it’s hardly an ending, really, is it?

A flush creeps up the fatman’s neck.

You can really listen out here, he says. I mean if it’s a Mesmeric you’re after.

Now, Cornelius says, and he tips a measure of Spanish brandy to each of their mugs, the three.

That’ll keep the blood moving, Joe says.

Common-sensical, which is the true note of a madman, or so Peter Sellers said one time, and he’d have known.

Joe moves lightly on his feet to look out the window. He considers the Maytime in the island’s gleeful light. He nods and turns.

It was magic last night, John, he says. You were there and you were not there.

Okay.

And you sang quite beautifully, actually.

I did?

But what a very strange song it was.

A song?

It was odd, Cornelius says, but it was lovely.

Okay, John says.

The night will not come back except in slivers and scraps and dark shapes that hover but will not hold.

On the walls—

the Hexagram,

the Ankh,

the Eye of Providence.

He is here and he is not here; he throws his palms down to slap his thighs, as though jauntily, but in fact for confirmation of flesh and bone, here on a hardback chair, in the kitchen of the strange hotel, in the month of May — how merry, how merry — in 1978.

How do you pass the days out here, Joe?

Exploration, he says. We dig in.

Oh yeah?

They’d be hammering each other, Cornelius says.

It has been there all the while but only now is he aware of Moroccan-type music on a hi-fi but faintly, a sitar, soft padded drums, and Joe smiles and shimmies his fat hips.

We go in hard at the Amethyst, John.

He sips his nettle tea and the brandy’s warm kick comes through; he lights a fag for a prop. It’s 1978, he’s a bloody dad again, and he’s away in a fucking freakhouse?

Where’s it you’re from, Joe? Originally?

Knowleston way.

Where?

But Joe just waddles a grin about his face and moves his fleshy hips to the desert music — languid, his fat rhythm. He looks at John calmly and evenly—

They call me Joe Director, he says.

He smiles, hog-like, and shows the graven palms—

Daft kids, he says.

There are no directors out here, he says.

We are very much a community out here, he says.

Oh yeah, John says, a community?

The Community of the Black Atlanteans.

Of the fucking what?

Upstairs, by now, the noises are unmistakably sex noises—

Hot shrieks.

Chocolate moans.

Livid whelps.

Frank and Sue, says Joe. They’re young still and they have the blood for it, John.

Like dogs on the street, Cornelius says.

Is it just the three then?

There are other young friends who come and go, Joe says.

I bet there are.

But for now? Yes. A family of three.

He’s been set down in a freakhouse; he eyes the blithe fiend Cornelius hard. But Cornelius just beams and aims splashes of brandy to each of their mugs, the three.

We go in deep out here, says Joe, and we go in all the way.

I have you, John says.

No stranger to the screaming himself, Cornelius says.

I understand so. But would this be along the lines of the California technique, John?

Well…

To scream is only the start of it, Joe says, ’round here.

His hog arrogance.

Oh yeah?

In fact we’ve gone a long ways past that ’round here.

Go on?

Around here, John, we get the rants on.

The rants?

Is fucking right. Have you ranted, John?

I can’t say that I have…as such.

Joe Director purses his lips in regret; the bloody Lancashire of him.

The rants bring us all the way inside, John. And that’s where we need to go, isn’t it?

Best of luck with it, John says. I’m just on the way to me island.

Upstairs — the sound of a vaulting climax, and Joe lifts shyly an ear-cup for it.

Youth, he says, and smiles.

This is it, Cornelius says.

The vaulting cry lands; now there is a dull sobbing.

You set some people down on your island for a bit, John?

I did, yeah…years back.

I knew some of those people, John.

You did?

Oh yes, I did.

You by any chance know which island is mine, Joe?

I’d possibly know it by its air, John. I’m to understand from those people it has a very particular air.

Cornelius?

Yes, John?

When are we going to get to my fucking island exactly?

But Cornelius just smiles and shows a palm for patience and sips his brandied tea.

Joe Director gets the kettle on.

I’ll brew up fresh, he says.

The sitars waft. A hurdy-gurdy, too. A clavichord? What’s he mean, fucking particular? John wants to be a million miles from this place and he wants to be sat just where he is.

Outside—

low snaps of wind come from the sea to whip at the hedges and the pines.

In the Amethyst—

the dim jangle and spit of sitars,

the vaulted grunts and spasm breath of the fucking, renewed,

the brown burn of freebase, bitterly.

Tell me more about the rants, John says.

——

The life in New York runs along very tidy lines. He doesn’t leave the apartment much. He doesn’t need to — it’s the size of fucking Birkenhead. He plays with the baby. He’s that good the baby and sleeps like a turtle — he is that sweet in the shell. John looks out the windows. John barks at the cars. John eats sushi from cartons and watches the late movies in bed. Black-and-whites, he does all the movie voices — shut the fuck up, John! He gets eel juice on the sheets. He makes lots of plans. The days sail by and not ungaily. He sits on his backside. He sits in the great fortress high above the plain where the savage injuns roam. He’s the Freaky Sheriff and he has a very beady eye. He bakes lots of fucking bread. The yeast and warmth of the kitchen on a cold winter day with the city under its heaps of dirty snow outside — he’s cosy as a bastard in the womb. He is that happy he gurns and sings. And the days pass by and the nights and he cannot sleep if the wind is high and he looks out to the park and along the treetops the greens of the treetop fairies fly — hello? Words that come from out of the blue — arboreal. Which is lovely. He listens to the birds at dusk and all their newsy chatter. Like biddies at a bus stop. He gets nervous when the days get longer. He watches his weight. He doesn’t drink booze and he doesn’t do dope. He eats brown rice and baked fish and steamed veggies. He is decidedly on the leanish side — he turns side-on to the bedroom full-length for a profile check. He makes lots of plans. He smokes fags. He looks at the rain above the city and the lights caught and blurred inside the murk of the rain as the night comes down and it’s an eerie docklight — he is home again. He develops certain arcane theories. He doesn’t leave the apartment much. He makes certain occult connections. He gets worried about the number nine. He starts to have a thing about the elevator. He listens to strange music. He obsesses about the number fucking nine. He stays up all night. He reads about Stockhausen. He reads about Howard Hughes. He reads about what’s-his-face, fucking Rimbaud. He watches bits of telly. He does all the telly voices. He is Greta Garbo. He is Captain America. He has mad energy sometimes and sometimes he has fucking zero. He is the Peanut Farmer Carter, he is Mao Tse-tung. Strange thoughts come unbidden — the world is full of hollows and the world is full of graves. Sometimes he plays the guitar but not often. He does all the telly voices — he is a cowboy, he is a spaceman, he is a pimp. He sends out for books on the occult. He talks on the phone to California, to Liverpool. He hums and coos and burps the baby — the baby spews. He sends tidy sums to radical causes. He is bone dry in terms of actual fucking songs is the sorry fucking truth of it all. He reads some Aleister Crowley — he’s a right fucking laugh. He has zero fucking songs is the point of it all. He finds a channel that shows Monty Python at five in the morning. Baby spew the sour milk smell the bloody motherhood. He orders in. Bring us your raw fish and your pizza pie. One night he catches himself having a right good weep in front of a Pete-and-Dudley. He sits and looks across the sky and across the park and towers and it means nothing to him at all. He has no fucking songs. He is that happy he wants to Scream.

——

Violent confrontation, John.

This is Joe Director.

It’s the only way to strip it all down and see what lies beneath. We’ve got to peel our skins back.

You reckon?

I do. And it’s never easy. It causes a lot of pain. We’ve got to open up the clam shell. It’s shut so very tight. I mean let’s look at you, John. On the surface? Deviant genius.

Thank you very much.

But deep inside? I’d very much like to know. And I think you would, too, John.

From upstairs a dead velvety hush is loaded with the weight of their listening.

Sometimes it’s difficult, John. I won’t deny it. It can be very bloody difficult. We go in hard and we go to very tricky places. It can be deeply fucking unpleasant. But the rants can soften us, too, and sometimes we move very gently through the process. We can deal with tenderness. We can deal with love.

John fetches another splash of brandy for his mug of nettle tea. The bottle has an odd label in Spanish that shows a black lizard. Okay. The taste of fields in his mouth; the burn of the sexy brandy. Not unlovely.

The rants are unpredictable, John. Especially ’round here.

Joe Director: his grin soft with rue.

Cornelius: his face lit with happy wattage, an idea.

Mightn’t it be the best place for you, John?

I beg your pardon?

I’ll head for the mainland. I’ll see who’s around. I’ll come back by the van and road bridge. I can see at least if the fuckers have cleared.

You’re saying leave me here?

They wouldn’t think to spot you at the Amethyst Hotel, John.

Outside the hills have collapsed into each other and the iron sea moves and he makes for another nip of the firewater.

Cornelius?

Yes, John?

When are we going to get to my fucking island?

Are you telling me you want to be sat there with eighteen thousand fucken cameras on you and the News of the fucken World? A few hours, John. I’ll be back with the van and we’ll be away.

Joe Director aims for a basement stair—

There’s more where that brandy’s come from.

He pauses, a bright notion—

Would you like to burn off some cocaine, John?

And from upstairs a sky-opening Scream.

Did I not tell you? They are your own kind precisely, John.

——

Frank and Sue?

He’s a stunned-looking beanpole with matted blond hair in fag-ash ropes — a honky Rastafari. There is something canine or wolfish. As though born to the dog star. She’s tiny and elf-eyed with busy, travelling tits. Attractive, a-gleam, but distant — an undiscovered star. North-of-England, the pair of them, but they are posher than Joe. There are pockets of coke burn on the air — bitter-grey and teasing — but the Amethyst Hotel more generally has the stale eggy waft of a fuckery. He sits down on the stairs with these kids and they have an earnest chinwag there.

You’re on way to your island then?

That I am.

How big’s it?

It’s nineteen acres.

That’s a spread is that.

Nineteen acres of rocks and bloody rabbit holes.

Not to mention the banshee fucking wind — he lights a fag. He has a sip of nettle tea. He has sworn off the lizard brandy and he has refused the base cocaine. He feels strong, wise, avuncular and glad.

This is it then?

How’d you mean?

Just the three of you here?

There are others that come and go.

I bet there are.

You sound a bit worried, John.

This was Frank.

Why should I be worried?

Sounds like you got the fear in.

Why should I have the fear?

I’m playing with you.

You’re playing with me?

Sue darts a lizard tongue to lick at her tidy, full lips; Sue beams hard the elf lamps—

Why’s it you’ve come here? she says.

I guess I’m running away, too.

From what? Frank says.

From who? Sue says.

From myself, he says. I’m gonna be the first in human history that manages to outrun his own fucking shadow.

They look at each other — he’s dark, she’s distant; their grins are way the fuck off.

What’s it you pair are running from?

I was always going to come here, she says.

And me, Frank says.

It draws you in, she says.

It’s got an air, he says.

Little runaways, John says.

You sound different, she says.

Different how?

Different older.

Well I’m thirty bloody seven, aren’t I?

Posh kids gone west for dope and fucking and screeching — he knows their kind long since.

How’s it you’ve found this Joe?

Their eyes go down at mention of Director.

You go at it hard around here, don’t you?

She looks at the boy — he smiles, nods: they turn to kiss quickly and hard. And now she turns back to John and it is regretful, her smile, as though to say you will never know this taste.

Sue flicks the elf lamps; then—

We get the rants on, John.

——

There is no true dark in the Maytime on Achill — it might be an isle of Norway. He moves about the small dead hotel. There is a haze of blue light in the evening windows still. Frank and Sue weep loudly in a room upstairs; Joe Director is in the kitchen tending with homicidal cheer to a goat curry. John has entered the swim of family life at the Amethyst Hotel. That sweet clamminess. Cornelius has returned to the mainland to fight back the press dogs. There are statements daubed on the walls at the Amethyst Hotel — statements about the id, statements about tide of Capricorn. The carpets squelch underfoot and give off the stale aniseed waft of seawater. He is so many fucking miles from love and home. There are fiendish midges on the air and they swarm to attack his blood. Get it at the neck, get it at the font. He slaps the tiny Nazi fuckers away. Evidence of life, at least. He smokes, sighs. He stands in the doorway porch of the Amethyst Hotel, slapping lazily at the bugs, and he looks out to the half-lit night. Joe Director comes along to link arms, companionably. Joe Director has odd charisma. There is a blush of heat rising beneath the collar of his antique shirt.

Did you know that Mars is about, John?

Well that’s all I fucking need, isn’t it?

It is a dull fire in the eastern sky and now the past in a dark sliver returns: it was here they saw the women dressed in black walk into the sea.

——

Scared but even so he goes for a turn in the half-a-night’s air. Now it is Sue that comes to follow and watch. She is tiny as a faerie that could walk the leaves and not bend a stem but weirdly big up top with those giddy tits and she wears a Victorian brocade number for a blouse and she has her sexy smile on — hasn’t she? — and she sits in the garden and tunes into the far-out stations.

Alright, Sue, love?

A smile, an elf’s — she picks at the flowers. The half-a-night smells of salt and flowers. He watches the sheep for a bit. They drift this way and that across the crooked track that comes up the hills to the Amethyst, and loose sand moves in strange drifts and sings — a grainsong — and he’s emotional — just a bit — and he walks the haunted hotel garden — he wants to get away from the freaky elf-eyes, from the North-of-England girl Sue — and now he is entirely unseen — or so he believes — and he looks down and trips out for a while on the slow-moving waves — birdsong, breath-of-sea — and he watches the salty Dummkopf sheep as they come and go, the way they move like slow daft thoughts, and his go to his old dad again. A flitter in the head and he is back in that place again. The way that he sneaks up sometimes unawares, the way he just appears—

Alright, Freddie? Alright, kid?

And always it’s as a kid, he sees him as a kid in the faraway twenties — Little Freddie, of the Bluecoat orphanage, a gimp, he comes hop-a-long — and he sits on a rusted iron bench by the briars and the beads of the berries of the haunted island garden — treesong, breeze in the leaves, his blues, a midnight yearn — but what he feels beneath the pads of his feet are the stones of the city of Liverpool — as was, Mariners Parade, Fazakerley Street, Hackins Hey — and he watches the city and the world take all its strange forms and shapes through his father’s eyes, and how it must have been for him, and how great the miracle, the zillion-to-one shot that his eyes should fall and catch on a slender girl, his blue-veined love, his Julia.

Dead love stories are what make us.

——

Well.

He’s all stirred up.
Just fucking leave it, John, he says.

By night the old garden is sweet as incense and hollow as a church. There is a great heaviness here. Tang on the air of the summer-come-soon, and with it the years are coming back — windy beaches, freckled youth, the thin reddish-brown limbs of a north-western summer; the summer of his lost anonymous England; Tropic of Lancashire. He speaks now in his old true voice. Feeling lurches; feeling shrieks. He cannot think about his father easily. It causes too much commotion. He’ll have a fag and a brandy instead — tamp all that stuff down. That way you can keep the past locked in. He goes inside again. Sue comes along to follow and watch.

Okay, Sue?

In the lobby he falls into an old armchair. Damp green the velvet, like mosses, as if the world is creeping up through its stones and into the Amethyst again. He feels like a very senior citizen. Sue eyes him darkly as she comes past — like a strange breeze she moves past — and he knows now that maybe he is scared a little of button-pretty Sue.

So where’d you hook up with this lot then?

One minute I’m at Saint Hilary’s, she says.

Saint fucking Hilary’s?

And the next? I’ve met this bloke on the train.

Blokes on trains? Never a good idea, sweetheart.

Turns out he’s Joe Director.

Love and fate, he says.

Why’s it you’re here really? she says.

I’ve been indignantly asking myself that same fucking question, Sue.

From above there is a mighty hog’s bark — the Amethyst is not good on the nerves — as Joe Director goes hard, hard at the boy Frank, and he can hear Frank’s sputtering, and he can hear his cries.

You think this stuff gets you places, Sue?

You leave it inside it poisons and twists.

That’s what I used to think.

Used to?

He turns an eye in to meet its other — a goon-show for the daft kid — and she halfways smiles.

Where’d he really find you, this Joe?

There is an arrogance to her; it’s a kind of shine — the star-of-youth — and it lights the haunts of her elfin or woodland face.

I’ve told you. I was always going to come here.

She goes up the stair. She looks back at him for a slow, held moment as she turns the stair. She disappears into the strange room up there. And the screeches in the room come down to sobs and groaning as her voice goes among the others, and he can hear new, fast, urgent whispers, as of love.

He sits auntishly in the comfy damp chair.

Next, a great manic slam and entry—

Return of Cornelius.

Never a dull moment, the Amethyst.

——

Not good, John. The pressmen are crawling like demented fucken maggots all over the province of Connaught.

Cornelius, hoarsely whispering—

I mean it’s a full circus wagon of the cunts. They’re camped in Mulranny. They’re camped in Newport town. They’re all over Westport like flies on old meat. The place is riddled with them. There’s not a boat moving on the Clew that don’t have a camera fixed to it. There is no earthly approach to the island at this moment in time. They could even be on the island itself…

Throws up the paws in a hopeless flap—

We just don’t know, John.

Who sits in his armchair, cross-legged, harshly executive, with a brandy on the go, a heavy tumbler full of amber sea—

What the fuck happens now, Cornelius?

We’ll need to keep you here a small while yet. And what harm?

From upstairs—

A screech.

A cry.

A Scream.

He swirls his brandy; he inclines his head towards the door.

To the garden, Cornelius. Please.

——

You’ve fucking landed me in it here, pal.

How so, John?

You’ve set me down in a freakhouse!

Ah go easy.

I want away from here and I mean now!

That could be a problem, John.

They are in conference by an old gate down the hotel’s sideway. The five-bar gate sounds its hollows in the breeze. Hedges converse, it seems, the stars whisper, and the dark sea groans.

Get me the fuck out of here, Cornelius.

Through the hollow bars of the gate the breeze moves slowly to play an off-kilter tune — an arabesque.

Would you not go easy on yourself, John? For once in your fucken life?

A strange music in reverb as the breeze comes through the bars of the gate.

I’ve a bad feeling, Cornelius.

But that could be on account of anything at all just floating around the place. Remember you’re a long way off the road when you get to the far end of Achill Island.

Meaning fucking what?

These are pure open-minded people, John.

Cornelius?

Stop. Calm yourself. And listen…Okay?

The breeze plays through the bars of the gate a night-song and Cornelius stands frozen there, his palm held high—

Listen?

Cornelius…

Do you hear, John?

The strange notes that play and turn on the air.

Maybe, he says.

That’s awful sadness, isn’t it, John?

But from where?

Here. Just now. Listen. And you know the funny thing about it?

What?

That feeling mightn’t be your own at all.

It is a sadness that’s ripe and livid on the air. He tries to hum it but he cannot — the notes will not hold or take shape.

Do you see now the way you can fall into a dream with this place easy enough if you’d like to, John?

——

I am working on a way to the island, John. We are not beaten yet. In fact an O’Grady is never beat. An O’Grady could be down on the flat of his back stuck like a pig and the guts spewing out of him like a red fucken river and he’s still not beat. All I need is your patience, sweet John. Just stay hid till the place clears. Give it a day or give it two and the Clew will be clear as light. Patience is the virtue required. This is the best place for you. It’s not like I can leave you with normal kinds of people. These are your own kinds of people. Just relax yourself and I’ll be back again shortly. I will get you to the island, John.

——

A vat of goat curry simmers on the hob. It’s got horn and pheromone and dark magic in. Frank stirs, Frank tastes; Frank looks a bit puzzled. Frank also is the lieutenant in charge of chickpeas.

This lot will feed the regiment, John says.

Frank has a First War face. He smiles weakly and takes up the pot of chickpeas and sets it on the drainer. He twists the end of an ashy rope of hair between a thumb and forefinger. John can see that the boy is in the room and not — his mind is all fucked with and swayed.

You’ve been taken apart tonight, have you, Frank?

It did get a bit thorny.

And how you doing now?

Frank sniffs at the air for a clue; he takes out a lighter and he burns the same tip of hair.

It could go either way, John.

Battle’s never won, is it, Frank?

You’ve got one thing reckoned, he says, another comes up.

It’s like laying lino, John says. Does it get violent in the room up there?

It goes ’round the edges of.

Frank tests a chickpea in his gob — he looks dumbfounded.

What exactly are you doing out here, Frank?

The boy smiles. He has milk-bottle shoulders and a North-of-England mug, that First War face.

Where’s it you’re from, kid?

I’m from Leeds.

A Tommy in a trench — take aim on the alleyman.

I’m sorry for your troubles, John says.

And he can see the sweet dull suburb — dad’s an headmaster, isn’t he? — and the sweet beaming mam; she wears a floral print; it’s the better end of Leeds, this.

I want to change, Frank says.

I’m all for it, change. Every day of your fucking life you’ve got to change. You can’t stand still, not ever. You change or you fucking die. But it’s you that’s got to make the change, Frank. Nobody can tell you how and nobody can show you how.

The boy narrows his eyes.

Now if I was you, Frank? I’d grab young Sue and your satchels and I’d take to the road and bloody smartish.

What gives you the right to say?

Nothing. But I look at you, Frank, and you’re twenty years old or whatever you are and I think it’s a shame you’ve got your head all mangled up by this old hog who’s set himself up as some kind of fucking guru out here, some kind…

No leaders here.

Oh look around you, Frank. Open your dim fucking eyes.

But the boy just shakes his head in sadness and covers the chickpeas with a tea towel.

Grub soon, he says, and leaves the room.

High in a corner of the room a spider rides a breezeblown web and there isn’t even a window open.

A hurdy-gurdy plays somewhere from a hi-fi and from elsewhere there is a dull sobbing.

Not good not good not good.

——

By night he’ll creep in on tiptoes to watch the child sleeping. There is something in the way that he breathes that stops all the time inside. A trace of slime above his lips — a snail’s slime, a silver — and John wipes it clean with an edge of his T-shirt softly as he can so’s not to wake him. The city outside quiet as it ever can be. The black breathing of the park. And the way the past is dropping away. He stays as quiet as he can, he hardly takes a breath — at last the past is dropping away — and the kid unglues an eye — so silently — and has a peep and he takes him up to love and they stand together in the blue of the night above the streets and park, and the city for half a moment is quiet as it ever can be, and they are blue in love and doomed in all the usual ways.

——

Joe Director pads softly across the lobby in his flowing garb. He positively fucking wafts across the lobby. He has a little Moroccan teapot held daintily in the one paw and a small cine camera in the other. He’ll want to watch himself with that fucking camera. He sighs even as he walks, and there is something that changes on the air as he comes across. He has an odd weight on the air, as a ghost has weight.

John-kid, he says. A toppener?

We will sit over our nettle tea together. There is no want out the Amethyst Hotel for nettle fucking tea. We will sit and primly sip our tea in this spell of midnight pleasantness. Joe Director stretches and yawns; he lifts his fat little feet and he kicks them out into the air for a bit and he lets them drop again, wearily.

You’re tired, Joe?

Wall-fallin’, he says.

John can feel his stomach contract. There is something in the tone or note. There is something in the waddling Northern vowels. There is something off. We will sit parked in the lobby like a pair of very deranged guests. Joe places the camera significantly on the floor between them and slowly now he tells a version of himself. He tells of all the mad sisters and all the feral brothers, all packed together like ferrets in a sack, and this was in a nothing house, and this was on a nothing street, and this was under the coalsmoke and Lancashire sky and

— nettle tea, a careful sip; on he drones—

the rancid squats in London town — someplace horrid, wasn’t it Ealing? — and the camp in Spain, and the dogs and the junk and the lizard women, and the babies with stars for eyes

— I beg your pardon, Joe?—

and a black-sand beach for a winter — all the junk — and a lost-time in Morocco — medina whispers — and if any of it is true or not, John does not care, all he wants is to hear the telling, having an interest, as he does, in such arrogant freaks.

We are what we pretend to be, aren’t we, Joe? For a finish?

He does not like this — his smile is thin, grey, cattish.

You’ve been out here for a while have you, Joe?

Been here for years now.

The smile warms; there’s a flip of the wrist.

Feels like nothing, he says. So long as you’re keeping busy.

You know about my island, Joe?

I knew some of the people you had on it for a bit.

The Diggers?

Same as.

I heard there was a fire out there.

I heard as much, John.

He takes out a lighter and wraps a wiry strand of his hair around a fat thumb; he sets fire to the end of the strand.

The high note of its bitter scent flashes on the air.

Joe?

He takes up the camera, and trains it, and sets it with a flick of the thumb to its whirring.

No thanks, John says — he raises a palm against it.

Not even a quick hello, John?

Put the fucking thing down.

——

And might it be out there still — or up there — somewhere, in an old freak’s effects, or on the spidering web, just a few seconds at the end of a reel as the tall man, gaunt with tiredness, holds a palm against the lens and pushes it away firmly, angrily, and the hog-like man chuckles, and it is past midnight at the Amethyst Hotel — are there witches moving on the beach? — and all the stars are out, and Mars is a dull fire in the eastern sky.

——

They settle again to their sipping; they settle again to their talk.

I’ve had some luck in my life, John. I’ve had an angel’s share. But for you to show up at our little place here? Well that’s something very special indeed.

There’s an arrogance to him, and the hoggish smile, and the query comes now just as expected—

Do you want to come up the room, John?

He says—

Joe?

Yeah?

Have you any idea how long it’ll be before Cornelius gets back?

——

Sometimes he’ll walk the streets on the biblical afternoons when a great downpour hits the avenues and it rains frogs and cats and dogs and the people all become strange twisted birds in the hot wind from the tunnels and get sucked down the black maws of the subways and the taxi cabs move through the yellow blur and vapours of the streets and the rain washes the colours of the streets and smears them and he comes down from his eyrie and walks the streets for a while and he is that happy in his old raincoat with the fisherman’s hat pulled down over his eyes — the hat a yellow oilskin makes him look like a cartoon duck — and he roams for a while around the seabed of the city and he has a natter with the crustaceans — hello? — and he goes among the pools of the streets and the mad things — the hat he’s had for three bucks off a Chinese dude that keeps a stall in the park — among the crabs and the mad — he talked to a Turkish boy once who had only the one yellow snaggle tooth and a mouth that’d been opened with a hatchet apparently and a T-shirt that read Galatasary—and for a while it feels like his very own town and place and maybe he can work again and breathe again and write again, and not be locked to the fucking past — that he might play again — not locked to the past — that he can write again — not locked to the past and its same old song—

Lah-de-dah

Lah-de-dum-dum-dah.

——

At table—

There’s Frank.

There’s Sue.

There’s Joe Director.

It is two in the morning. It is early in the Maytime. It is a whispery old dining room. There is a vat of goat curry and a giant wooden bowl of spiced chickpeas with mint and parsley and there are bottles of cold Madeiran wine. Into the grain of the wooden table the words

B L A C K

A T L A N T I S

are carved and from a hi-fi the boozy sitars waft — a dozen years he’s been trying to outrun the fucking sitars. Spoon up the curry from the antique delft. It’s tasty as hell.

Kid, says Joe. Tender as such.

Drink the cold sweet wine — it’s a very nice old wine. Let the night drift out a little. Get looser. The delft shows a little Dutch kid. The finger-in-the-dyke kid. What’s-his-face? Outside the pale night is stretched across the sky.

Black Atlantis, Joe?

Joe Director nods sombrely.

It’s outside the window, John.

Joe Director is a forest hog.

Frank is a wolf.

Sue, an elf.

And John?

I have made my own shell—

I am the clam,

the barnacle,

the brittlestar.

——

Do you want to come up the room, John?

No, I don’t.

Do you want to get the rants on, John?

No, I fucking don’t actually because what I realise right now I’m sat here is I don’t need to scream no more and I don’t need to rant neither because I know who I am and what I am and what I am is I’m a full-grown fucking man. I don’t need to do that stuff anymore.

Come on, John…

Look, he says. After a while you’ve gone and opened yourself up plenty. And you can just let it fucking lie. But you lot do whatever you need to do to get yourselves through the night. Don’t let me stop you.

You want to make a circle, John?

I’m good but thanks.

You want to get the rants on, John?

I’ve said no! I don’t want to get the fucking rants on!

Do nothing you don’t want to do, John-kid.

Well that’s just fucking fine then.

——

He drinks a bit and smokes a bit and drifts. The light of the moon comes through in witchy rays. He thinks—

What if we were to run away for real? Say to Buenos Aires to a secret compound behind high gates with Hector on security detail with his machine gun and his ’tache. Or make it a tiny fiefdom in a jungle someplace — a Kurtz. Or make for the desert. Or what about Berlin in an old factory packed with hypodermic flunkies. Or what about Budapest. Or what about fucking Barnsley. Or say he goes upriver, or say he goes underground, or say he’s a shepherd in Patagonia — of course you’ve got your Welsh down there, bloody Taffs, they get everywhere — or say he just clings to a rock out in the middle of the black fucking ocean

Taffy was a Welshman, Taffy was a thief

on his own tiny Atlantis

as kids we sang, on the street we sang

on his nineteen rabbity acres — or what about a fucking trout farm in Wales — do a Roger Daltrey on it — and let there be no…

You’re on the move, John?

This is Joe Director.

You what?

You’ve left the room, John. You might pretend to be here but you’re not. It can’t contain John, the Amethyst.

Frank and Sue are quiet, smiling, watchful.

Come on up the circle, John.

Fuck off.

What about we do the rants, John?

You’re a bunch of fucking throwbacks.

Come on, John.

It’s 1978!

We could go up the room, John.

I’m done with all that stuff. I’m done with all that open up and bleed.

We could go to the room right now.

Come on, John, says Sue, and she’s up, an elf, and she has his hand in hers, and her touch is so light.

Come on, John, says Frank, a young wolf, and he’s up, and moving.

The time is now, John, says Joe Director. Let’s go inside.