Beatlebone

Part Six. ELEVEN ELEVEN ELEVEN — DAKOTA

At eleven minutes and eleven seconds past eleven o’clock on the morning of November 11th, 2011

— 11.11.11 on 11.11.11—

I stood on the corner of 72nd Street and Central Park West, by the entrance to the Dakota Building, with all the other hunched pilgrims, and it felt like the moment to begin.

It was impossible not to view the scene in a religious aspect: our bowed heads, the air of cathedral hush that pertained even within the city’s yellow-mouthed honk and scurry, the gaudy memorial trinkets for sale across the street in the park. Zola wrote that the road from Lourdes is littered with crutches but not a single wooden leg: miracles, in other words, only go so far, and to feel any true connection or reverb at a site like the Dakota must be so rare as to be miraculous.

The city that morning had the feeling of late summer still. The colours had not caught fire yet in the fields across the park and the trees were almost fully in leaf. Shadows sat heavily to weight an intense, blue-skied clarity, and I drifted in a paranoid sea of numerological speculation. To search for hidden patterns in the arrangement of numbers — in ones, or in elevens, or in nines — is symptomatic of at least a mild disintegration, and I was not unaware of the fact.

I was operating at the usual deep thrum of anxiety and fretfulness. I was worried about both the feeds for my material and how I might subsequently arrange it. But the fact I was worried at least signalled that the work had begun.

I took out a pad and began to make a sketch of the scene. The building itself is a Gotham folly, with dark stones, sombre turrets and an air of bespooked Victoriana, and as I drew I tried to imagine within it occult dreams, and the view across the trees, say on the night of a spring gale, in the soak of an insomniac sweat, as the trees shake out their fearful limbs, and the green shimmers of the treetop faeries move like gasses through the dark. The fact that I am myself tuned to occult frequencies — and frankly I have come to a point in my life where this is no longer deniable — felt like half the battle, but still I had a nagging worry at the edges of my thought, and it was this:

If I was going to make beatlebone everything it should be, I needed to get to the island.

——

Clew Bay is a flooded valley — its many tiny islands are merely a scattered range of drumlin hills submerged at their bases by some unimaginably violent deluge. (Geology: slow, slow, slow, and then quick.) There are certainly not, as the happy legend suggests, three hundred and sixty-five islands; perhaps there are half that number. The knuckle of Croagh Patrick, the pilgrim mountain, rises on the southside of the bay; to the north lies the Nephin range of County Mayo, which has an ominous air; if ever mountains can be said to brood, the Nephin mountains brood. On a lit, clear morning, Clew Bay is an infinitely beautiful place — especially if it is seen from a height above Mulranny, with a springtime light coming slantwise to pick out and give definition to the islands’ shapes — but more often than not the Atlantic clouds swarm in from the west, moving like an invading force, or a slow disease, and the view is uncertain and shifts; the islands appear to come and go in the mist. Among the islands are Freaghillanluggagh and Gobfadda and Mauherillan. There is a Kid Island, a Rabbit Island, a Calf Island. Dorinish is in fact a pair of islands — Dorinish Beg and Dorinish More — linked by a rocky causeway. The local pronounciation would be closer to “Dur-nish” than “Dor-in-ish.” In the 1970s and 1980s this place was known colloquially as Beatle Island.

——

I spent much of the winter watching clips from television interviews with John Lennon, mostly from American talk shows in the 1970s, and I replayed the same lines over and over again as I made rough drafts for voice and tried to get a fix on the intonation.

From our time and perspective, there is already an antique note to his phrasing and tone. There are verbal tics redolent of 1960s cool — many sentences end with a breezy “yunno?”—but these are concurrent with words and formulations — and a kind of pinched melody, actually, almost Larkinesque — that sound like they come from an older England, the England of austere lower-middle-class life in the war years and thereafter. He is suburban. He is a child of the early 1940s, and thus the tentacles of his concern will reach for a time still further back: a shadow-time such as immediately precedes all of our births, the time of the dead love stories, which is such a heavy time. He is quite nasal and often defensive. There is a haughtiness that can be almost princely but his moods are capricious — sometimes he is very charming and funny and light; at other times there is a darkness evident, and an impatience that can bleed almost into bitterness. He can transition from fluffy to spiky very quickly, even within the course of the same sentence. Often during these interviews he was accompanied by Yoko Ono, who very clearly, from this distance, was the tethering fix in his life; lacking her presence, you get the feeling that he might have unspooled altogether.

——

In the spring of 1967, an advert appeared in a London evening newspaper offering an island for sale off the west coast of Ireland. Dorinish was owned by the Westport Harbour Board in County Mayo. It was used mostly for its rocks, which were harvested for ballast by the local fishing fleet. The listed guide price was £1,700 sterling. John Lennon had for a long while dreamed about an island place. He was shown the advert and was taken with the notion.

The cliffs of Dorinish rise against the Atlantic in a way that naturally provides a buttressing effect against the prevailing winds and gives protection to the island’s grasses, which retain their essential nutrients. The pasture here is perhaps the best to be had anywhere on Clew Bay and so it was that a crowd of thirty or forty interested sheep farmers were in attendance when Alistair Taylor, a trusted member of the Beatles’ retinue, showed up at the auction in Westport.

It would not be difficult here to sketch a scene of comic incongruity — a beflared record company freak with hashish eyes amid the slurried ranks — and it’s true that the agricultural west of Ireland in 1967 would have been a distance of decades rather than miles from psychedelic London. But in fact Taylor was short-haired, respectable, besuited, a former Liverpool docker who had worked for the late Beatles manager, Brian Epstein, and who had for a long while been trusted by the band — they called him “Mr. Fix-It.”

In 1964, he had been involved with an attempt to buy Trinity Island, off the Greek coast, for all four Beatles, but the deal fell through. Just a few months before the Dorinish auction, he co-ordinated an attempt to buy the island of Leslo, also off the coast of Greece, and again for the band as a whole — the plan was that the Beatles and their familes would live on Leslo adrift from the everyday world and its dreary, non-psychedelic concerns. A live-work-play structure, modelled on Crystal Palace, was to be built at the centre of Leslo with avenues leading from it to private quarters for each band member. This deal also fell through, but not before the band and their wives and girlfriends visited Leslo on a chartered yacht. John and George spent the greater part of the voyage squatting on the foredeck under the influence of hallucinogens and ukuleles.

Precise details of the Westport auction have not been unearthed, and we do not know the extent of rival bids, but we know that Alistair Taylor returned to London having efficiently secured Dorinish Island for John Lennon at the knockdown price of £1,550 sterling.

——

The writer John McGahern said once that Ireland skipped the twentieth century — it went straight from the nineteenth into the twenty-first. This is almost true. The twentieth century existed in Ireland only for the half hour it took John Lennon’s gypsy caravan to be sailed on a barge across Clew Bay to Dorinish Island, and the caravan is painted all the colours of the sun, and the water breaks and makes up again as the stately barge moves, and the sheets of the water spread out and come to and re-form again, and the water greys, then clears, and then colours again; it wears all the colours of the sun.

——

The sense of an ache or a wound just beneath the skin — almost impalpable but always there — is not uncommon as you move through the sobering ruts of your thirties. Psychedelic experimentation, in my own long experience, will tend to deepen or amplify this sense. Earlier, in the maelstrom rush of your twenties, in the campaign to selfhood and determination — in finding out who you are — the ache can lay buried so deeply and so quietly it might seem not to exist, but it comes back, and it has a definite weight — as though it has lain buried on the dark side of each passing moment, just there — and the urge to Scream, I believe, is by no means an unreasonable response to it.

Primal scream therapy, which is loosely grounded in Reichian philosophy, was initiated by Dr. Arthur Janov at his clinic in California in the early 1960s. Its ambition was to free the subject from the buried pain of childhood trauma. Its techniques included not just screaming but the making of a careful, guided exploration of the self and of the self’s layered and shifting histories. We are each so many different versions of ourselves, after all, and the body by the passing hour can be heaven or it can be hell.

Primal scream had become a popular practice by the 1970s and especially in those places where the children of the previous decade had settled and seeded: the far-flung outposts of Aquarius. There were a number of devoted groups in Ireland, and notorious among these was a collective in Burtonport, County Donegal, on the north-western coast, who named themselves the Atlantis Community but who were more usually known, locally, as the Screamers.

——

Fictional and biographical treatments of John Lennon have tended either towards hagiography or character assassination, and I felt the wisest practice was not to do any traditional research among the texts. I did listen to the music: the Plastic Ono Band album, repeatedly — his “primal scream” record — and The White Album, as ever, a great deal. The voice of Alistair Taylor, incidentally, can be heard on the latter’s “Revolution 9.”

Above all, though, my method would be to try and spring a story from its places, from the area of Clew Bay, and Achill Island, and of course from Dorinish itself — if I could figure out how to get there — and to be guided as purely as possible by the feelings that are trapped within these places, and by the feelings trapped within.

It was on the first of my runs out west that I came across the derelict remains of the Amethyst Hotel.

——

John Lennon made his first trip to Dorinish Island in the late summer of 1967. He was ferried there by a local fisherman. He brought along a cine camera and we can see him turn on his booted heel slowly to pan and sweep up the view as the boat moves out and across the bay, as the boat’s prow bites hard on the water and the slap of the low waves comes infinitely in Atlantic blacks, silvers, lichen-greens. He wears a long Afghan coat, and maybe its flapping is picked up in the camera’s tinny sound recording, and the trace of voices, too — south Liverpool, the west of Ireland — but just barely, at the edges of the film, like voices at the edges of a dream.

He spent a little under two hours on the island. Snide newspaper reports would suggest that he was under the influence of LSD at the time but the estate agent involved said that in fact he was practically minded, and he made enquiries about a drainage scheme for the island. He was determined that building work should commence quickly. He had drawn a plan for a house on Dorinish — it was a fantastical house, a magic palace, as in a child’s fantasy of a palace.

——

He was not alone in this migratory instinct. It had established itself quickly as a freak tradition to settle in the west of Ireland. They came from the cities to take up derelict old cottages down the ends of rainy boreens. The cottages could be had for almost nothing along the Atlantic seaboard. But it was not long, one imagines, before the idyll of a New West was smeared by the great dreariness that Ireland attempts to stay quiet about.

Imagine the near-perpetual assault of rain on a cracked windowpane, down at the shivery end of that dripping boreen — a country laneway, or a little road, dank and sodden between the whitethorn and the haw, places usually possessed in the Irish mythos by savage melancholy — with the veggie patch and the hedgerow wine, and the rising damp, and the nitty children, and the chest infections, and the freaky dogs cowering in the yard as the wind shudders their skinny flanks, and the vast hysterical skies — never light for long, never dark for long — and the low-grade hashish that burns on a slow draw, and nights of occultism, and midnight screaming, because when you live far out there’s no place left to go but deep inside, and there are mean suppers by candlelight at the long tables — the endless lentils, the loaded glances, the blackberry wine — and nerves are taut as the telegraph wires that scratch against the grey sky, and there is a lot of fucking paranoia going around the freaky tables.

——

On the way back from Dorinish, they stop off at the fisherman’s house for tea and sandwiches. The fisherman has a small dog and it yaps maniacally at the hairy Afghan coat, and John is tired, and John is irked — behave, he says — but still the little dog yaps and leaps and mounts and tries to fuck his long hairy Afghan coat, and we can see the sharp nose and the green bewildered eyes, and we can hear the liquid, singular, sniping voice:

I said be-fucking-have!

——

I went to Achill Island by bicycle. Sheep drifted back and forth across the road as vaguely as my thoughts moved — it was in the Maytime; I was stirred up — and my feet turned the pedals slowly into a stiff sea breeze. I didn’t feel like I could reasonably ask the locals where I might find a cave. I just kept going by the nose and crab-savvy. I aimed west and then north for the island’s more desolate reaches, and for an area of its coast I knew was host to a colony of seals, and near the fade of a long day — the May of 2012, clear-skied, bright, cold in the shadows still — I found just the sort of cave that I had imagined in my winter drafts.

It was precisely the correct dimensions — nine steps, east to west — and it had a floor of fine white sand, and I crawled inside and crouched there and for a long, deeply odd moment, I listened to my heart race, and it felt so familiar and true I have great difficulty believing now that I put the cave on the page before I found it on Achill.

It was my intention to spend the length of the May night there, from the last fade of light around eleven to its first return somewhere in the pale moments after four. I sat nervously and I became very anxious as true dark took over the cave. The white sand greyed, my heart beat quickly; I waited.

——

By the time of his second visit to Dorinish, in the summer of 1968, his life was in the process of being recast. The marriage to Cynthia was over, the band was halfway through the chaotic recording of The White Album and starting to crack, and he was in love with the artist Yoko Ono. She accompanied him on the trip. On a Saturday evening in late June, they arrived by helicopter on the lawn of the Great Southern Hotel in Mulranny. A photograph in the Mayo News archive shows the couple smiling on the Great Southern’s lawn as they are greeted by local dignitaries.

He stayed up late to drink in the hotel bar. It was reported in the Mayo News that he played a tape recording of a new Beatles track called “Revolution” and announced it to the bar as the song’s first public airing. The stories of this second visit are legion and the truth has by now blurred into the apocryphal. There is in particular a legend in circulation that he sang Irish rebel songs in the bar that night and that a tape recording was made of this performance.

On the Sunday there was an outing by car and road bridge to Achill Island. A picnic lunch was packed for them at a place called the Amethyst Hotel by the edge of the village of Keel. The picnic was brought into the hills to a spot with a vantage view.

I have spoken to someone who knew someone else who was on Achill that day — a day of sudden showers — and who claimed to have found in the hills an abandoned picnic site — a blanket, a hamper, wineglasses — and the sight was surreal, the way such finery was laid down amid the rocks and the gorse: the fine linen, the fine glassware, the last of the cheeses and fruit.

They went to Dorinish by helicopter. A fisherman working on Clew Bay reported that he coasted by the island and saw a figure sitting serenely on top of one of the cliffs, gazing out to sea, and another figure, lower down, clad in black, a small lady or girl, shaking her fists madly as she was divebombed by terns.

The Great Southern has since been remodelled but it retains its John-and-Yoko suite, a room no bigger or grander than any of the others but with an especially fine view of Clew Bay.

——

A dusty window at the Amethyst Hotel showed its derelict interior and my own face, webbed and tired, as it stared back at me. I had slept only fitfully in the cave, and I was a little wiped, and now it was a greyer May day, and the Amethyst had the feeling of a bad dream revisited. It sat at the far tip of Keel, a strung-out village with a long, beautiful beach. It had been boarded up for some time. I hunched down close to the window and peered inside. Bits of broken furniture lay about, and old phone books, and shattered crockery — there was the sense of a place evacuated at a sudden rush. The Amethyst Hotel was sinking with every moment deeper into its dereliction and fading out of time—

I went around the back and forced a door — it gave easily — and I went inside.

The hotel was built in the late 1880s by John and Eliza Barrett and named for the seam of amethyst that runs through the hills nearby. It was later owned by a Captain Robert Boyd and considered to be at the higher end of the island’s accommodations. The London actor Robert Shaw owned it for a time in the 1960s and for a while it drew a louche crowd to Achill. The glamour of this incarnation did not persist. I believe I may have stayed in the hotel myself, as a child, in the summer of 1980, when we were rained off the nearby campsite.

I moved through the lobby downstairs. Clouds of dust came up as I walked by. I chanced the rickety stair. There were twenty-one bedrooms but in the final years of the Amethyst these had been turned into bedsits. I looked into some of the rooms and there were still sheets on the beds, and mummified food on the shelves. I found the room marked nine. I tried to push open the door but it caught on a scrunched wedge of damp carpet and for a moment it would not give, as if someone else stood behind the door and answered the push. But then with a quiet unearthly whoosh it opened, and I entered.

——

The documentary filmmaker Bob Quinn travelled to County Donegal in 1979 to record the lives and daily routines of the Atlantis Community. The resulting film, The Family, was considered too disturbing to be shown on Irish television, and it sat unseen for almost fifteen years, developing as it did a cult reputation.

The film shows the daily practice of the community, which revolved around primal scream therapy and furious ranted confrontations. The house itself is a large and damp-looking old seaside pile. It is painted with psychedelic swirls. There are symbols on its walls. The house ethos was to confront and to strip bare. In The Family, we see that this veers sometimes towards violent physical confrontation. Repression, of any sort, is taboo — the ranters let it all spill out. Watching the film, they seemed to me to be well intentioned but in a very difficult and fraught way, and their practice must have made for some long and trying nights.

In the mid 1980s, the Atlantis Community left Donegal and relocated to the interior of a Colombian jungle. They are still out there, and they deserve proper notation in the as yet unwritten radical history of the west of Ireland.

——

There was also at large in the 1970s a community of souls said to be shy to the point of muteness — as shy as small birds. They dressed in Victorian clothes. They varied their location between the counties of Mayo, Sligo and Donegal, and they would be seen among the hedgerows, and on the beaches, in white flowing blousons and in breeches, and in high polished boots, in frock coats and stovepipe hats, and they did not speak to the locals ever — not a word — but smiled, ever warmly, when they approached as strangers, and then passed by again, as a scent on the air passes by.

But it was the case increasingly as the decade aged that such esoterica in the Irish west was not uncommon and it quickly got to the point where it could be left unremarked. By the late 1970s, these odd communities had been coming to settle for the best part of a decade. Among the first to arrive, as far as these phenomena can be reliably documented, were the Diggers.

——

Early in 1971, John Lennon summoned Sid Rawle to the offices of Apple Records in London. Rawle was written up in the English press at this time as the “King of the Hippies.” He was involved with setting up alternative communities in the rural fringes. He was among the first of a type that would later be characterised as “New Age Travellers.” Lennon offered Rawle the custodianship of Dorinish Island. He wanted to find out if a battalion of freaks could thrive cut off from the mainstream and from mainstream values. Rawle accepted the offer and began to spread word around likely London enclaves of an imminent voyage. A group of eighteen adults and a baby was conscripted. The plan was to make a six-week summer camp on the island and evaluate its feasibility as a long-term base for free living.

The Diggers landed on Dorinish Island in June 1971.

——

The window of the room marked nine at the Amethyst Hotel was cracked, and a breeze came through from the May afternoon and sang about the room as a low, eerie, strung-out keening. I sat on the single bed that was in the room, its mattress damp and foul-smelling, and I closed my eyes and listened as closely as I could to what might be heard in such a room, at such a time and in such a place. The world was full of sighs, and the sea moved outside and the wind caught in a shelter break of trees and the sea searched out the crannies of the coast with the tip of its green tongue. The seabirds travelled and called. Outside the room then I heard footsteps but it could not be. I closed my eyes; my heart raced; I heard footfall. It moved as a slow shuffling across the old boards out there, and back again, and forwards again — one-two-three, one-two-three — and I could hear above it all the breath-of-sea — one-two-three, one-two-three — and the footsteps moved, as though two pairs moved in a slow, waltzed rhythm, and it was a May afternoon, again, and time moved hardly at all in the room marked nine at the Amethyst Hotel.

——

The Diggers raised a village of tents. They scoured out hollows in the ground to hold their food. They set vegetable patches and raised stone walls for windbreaks. The soil on Dorinish was good and the patches took easily. Once a fortnight, an oyster boat stopped by and brought a delegation to Westport town to buy groceries there. The group stayed on the island for about a year and a half. Most of the original commune remained intact, and there were others that came and went, but late in 1972, a fire of mysterious origin destroyed the main supplies tent and the Diggers started to move from Dorinish in small groups.

Sid Rawle was the last holdout. For the final days of the Diggers’ reign on Dorinish Island he was alone out there. When I later found a fish-farmer to bring me to the island, he told me a story from his father’s time, a story about Rawle being taken from Dorinish. He was cold and starving and close to raving. He was brought to the pub near Murrisk Pier and fed whiskey and sandwiches. He didn’t say much that night but later he would say that Dorinish was heaven and it was hell. He returned to Britain and was soon among the founders of the Tipi Valley commune in the Forest of Arden, the first of the major New Age Traveller encampments; almost two hundred people lived there for the best part of twenty years.

I was seeking a contact for Sid Rawle in 2012 when word filtered through that he had died suddenly at a festival outside Leeds at the age of seventy.

——

Whatever it is that you’re most scared of surfacing in your work, you can be sure that it’s nearby.

I have always been both repelled by and drawn to sentimental forces. I lived in Liverpool for two years and thought it the most sentimental city on earth, with the possible exception of Glasgow. Sentimentality was an enveloping mist that clung to the skin as I walked on a summer night the ale-scented streets; it was there in the timbre of the voices, as the lairy city gulls hovered above, and it was in the watery gleam of the same old man’s eyes that seemed to peer from every pub I passed by. It was a city that seemed nostalgic for its own youth and self, and I wallowed in the mawkishness as though to spite myself.

As a ten-year-old, what I seemed to find most distressing about the fact of a recently dead mother was the seeming mawkishness of having to admit to one. Suddenly unmoored, I needed to accomodate the event within the realm of normalcy, and to do so, it needed to be relegated to the back of the mind, to the dark recesses, and as a child you cannot tell what work it will do once planted back there, you cannot predict the ways in which it will pin you down and mark you always, but neither can you predict the ways in which it will set you free.

Now when I think of that event — her name was Josephine — it is usually to see how I might use it and manipulate it to add depth and resonance to my work but without allowing sentimentality to creep pinkly through.

——

What I mean to say is that I wanted to Scream.

The idea was that I would get to the island and I would Scream, I would Scream until I was hoarse and my throat was cut and ribboned, and I would let out all of the green bile that seeps up in a life — the envy, the jealousy, the meanness — and I would let out all of the hate — especially the hate — and I would Scream to the grey sky above me and Scream to the stars and taunt the night.

I intended to spend three days and three nights on Dorinish Island. I imagined this was going to be an odd, meditative interlude in my life — three days of utter inwardness; an exploration of inner space; a seablown breeze to clear all the webs away — and I would return to report my findings in a mature, honed prose, as clear as glass: this from a man who had never knowingly underfed an adjective.

Early on another May afternoon, I cycled the ten miles from Westport to Murrisk Pier. I arrived just as the fish-farmer docked his boat. I do not have the words for boats. I can say only that it was a small boat with an outboard motor. I felt ladylike and impractical as I was helped onto the boat. I carried an Arctic sleeping bag and a small backpack that contained food, notebooks and a bottle of whiskey. I had a mobile phone for use only in emergencies. We set off for Dorinish. I was boyishly excited but also I felt a little sheepish. The boat slapped hard against the waves as it zipped smartly across the water. Small islands came into view as locket shapes and faded as quickly. There was an island shaped like a boot spur; there was an island shaped like a scimitar moon. It was cold on the water and my stomach looped on the dip and rise and the quick sloping of the boat as it moved across Clew Bay. Once a valley I was among its clouds. The tips of its peaks came into view as knuckles and mounds. I recognised Dorinish at once as it appeared: a pair of sisterly cliffs that rise as buttresses against the Atlantic. The engine cut as the boat was worked with tidy skill close to the stones of the island. I climbed out and made it through the foaming ebb of the tide and onto the shore. The fish-farmer waved as he departed again for the length of three days and three nights.

I was alone then on the island.

——

John Lennon published two books of stories or prose fragments: In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works. His style is built on heavy punning and the formation of madcap compound words that roll out across trippy sentences. At its very occasional best, it has a playfulness and comic intelligence that reads something like Spike Milligan as shot through Dylan Thomas or James Joyce. In fact, he had a teenage obsession with Thomas that persisted into his adult years, and later, when his first book appeared and was dutifully compared to Joyce, he bought a copy of Finnegans Wake, and he read a few pages and loved it — he said it sounded like the voice of an old friend — but he couldn’t be bothered to read any more than those few pages.

His own stories, or fragments, suggest great potential but read like first drafts. His prose writing flitters along the surface of things only, and it is funny and vivid and pacy, but it never slows or comes down through the gears sufficiently to allow moments of tenderness, sadness, love, anger, bitterness, or rancour, all the sweet and thorny emotions he routinely sprang in his brilliant and nerveless songwriting.

——

He wanted to walk out in the world. He began to make odd excursions. In 1978, he visited Japan alone. He flew there via South Africa — he carried just a single overnight bag. He had a couple of hours stopover in South Africa and he asked a cabdriver to show him some of the country. The driver brought him to a park where he just sat quietly for a while. In Japan, he walked into a hotel and for the first time in his life he booked a room for himself. He walked the streets and nobody could see him. He stepped onto a ferry and stood among the crowd of commuting workers on the deck and kept his eyes down and found to his delight that he was invisible there.

——

The first of the famous photographs are from his teenage teddy boy phase in the late 1950s. “Teddy,” of course, abbreviates from Edwardian; the teddy boy fashion of this time was essentially a reprise of the dandyish look adopted by gangs of mostly Irish street boys in Salford and Liverpool in the 1880s. They were at that time known as Scuttlers, and they were very cool and extremely vicious. I came to see him essentially as a kind of Edwardian type: the Melancholy Dandy. It was suggested in the way that he carried himself. And the way that we carry ourselves is dictated primarily, I believe, by the secret airs and reverberations of our places.

——

There is a natural roll or jauntiness to the step when you walk down Bold Street on a busy afternoon. The street is alive with youthful energies; Bold Street is where the cooler kids hang about in their dapper regiments and they have a natural swagger in Liverpool, a kind of haughty belligerence lacked by their contemporaries in London or Dublin. Fashion houses still send scouts to walk the Liverpool streets and report on what the teenage kids are wearing and how they’re cutting their hair.

My afternoon routine was to have coffee at the FACT cinema near the top of Bold Street and then shop at Matta’s Middle Eastern deli about halfways along. I walked daily the roll of the street, and very often I experienced an overwhelming sense of déjà vu, because for all its vibrancy there is an air of otherness or of past times about the street, too. I was not yet aware that Bold Street is the site of more reported paranormal activity than anywhere else in Britain.

——

A time slip occurs on the street. It is usually documented as happening in the vicinity of the old Lyceum post office, by the side entrance to Central station and opposite Waterstones bookstore. A typical report, from 2002, carried in the Liverpool Daily Post, came from a former policeman who went shopping on the street with his wife one Saturday afternoon. They emerged from Central station. He met a friend and stopped to talk for a moment. His wife went ahead to Waterstones. When he went to follow, he saw the name “Cripps” above the bookstore, and he jumped back at the honking of a motor horn from an old-fashioned van with the name “Cardin’s” on its side. Everywhere on the street the women wore full skirts and had permed hair; the men wore mackintoshes and hats. He crossed the street and the window of the store contained not books but old-fashioned women’s shoes, umbrellas, handbags. He felt panicked and he asked a lady beside him, who wore contemporary dress, if this store didn’t sell books. Equally bemused, she said that she thought it did, too, and she turned away. He entered the store and there was his wife among the stacked paperbacks, and he looked outside and the street had returned to the moment again.

There have been more than a hundred similiar reports over the years. Almost all of them relate to the area around the Lyceum post office on Bold Street. All the reports suggest that the time slip that occurs leads into the 1950s.

——

I was removed from Dorinish Island in a state of distress. The fish-farmer brought me back to Murrisk Pier and to the same pub that Sid Rawle had been taken to and in much the same condition. Though I had lasted a day and a half as opposed to a year and a half. I had a toasted ham and cheese sandwich and five glasses of red wine. Weak as a kitten, I felt in no condition to cycle back to Westport, and so I phoned a friend there and asked her to drive out and collect me. When she arrived and saw the state that I was in, she actually shuddered.

How do I look? I said.

Shook, she said.

Very shook, she said.

What the fuck happened you? she said.

I don’t know if I can go into it, I said.

——

By the next morning, however, I felt greatly restored, and I decided to light out for Achill again. I had the sense — perhaps hysterically — that the fibres of the story were starting to knit together. I cycled from Westport to Newport, skirting once more the edges of Clew Bay. Here and there between the trees a view opened up across the water to the knuckle of Croagh Patrick and each time it appeared I raised a knuckle of my own in ritual salute. I hummed little songs as I pedalled along. I stopped for a while in Newport. Anytime I’ve been through the town I’ve entered it in sadness and left in something close to happiness — its trapped feeling or reverb, plainly, is a benevolent one.

There was a café tucked away in a corner of the square. I went and sat there for a while. I made some notes about what might be seen from the attic floor of the hotel in the square. A pair of old farmers came into the café and made their order at the counter. They took a table and talked quietly together; they seemed so easy in their skins. They made light work of enormous sandwiches stuffed with ham and coleslaw and lettuce and there were pots of tea and cream cakes to follow. Then one of them looked over at me and rather sternly said—

Wouldn’t you enjoy your life?

I left the café and aimed the bike due west for Achill Sound. As I cycled along I heard a train that had not passed this way for years, the rhythm of its heavy clanking along the ruts and ribs of the earth, and I imagined all the faces at the windows, in a blur as they went by, and their tiny sadnesses, and all of them were lost again to the years since they’d passed.

The mountains to the north were hardfounded against grey light.

A thin rain descended on the day in slow drifts and sang.

I came at last on a view of Achill Sound — I got off the bike and stood for a while in the drizzle and watched the whitecaps break and each wave as it gave out was the ghost-trace of some lost feeling and a shiver in the blood.

The water moved beneath and slapped against the stakes of the bridge as I cycled across. The streets of the village at Achill Sound were empty as if the world had been about for a while but had moved on again. I took the road by the water and I climbed the mountain by the road and after something less than an hour the road crested and I looked down on the bay at Keel and it was filled darkly as though with blood.

It was the middle of the afternoon when I came to the beach at Keel. I walked it for a long while. I sat on the rocks and was mesmerised by the water. My breath slowed to almost nothing. I saw the women as they crept out of the air in their cloaks of black and waded, and moved out, and screamed their grief to the sky and sea. The shapes of their heavy thighs showed under the wet black of their clothes in the saltwater and the wrack. They screamed and turned finally to face me in their stepped generations and each of them wore my own face—

Lah-de-dah

Lah-de-dum-dum-dah.

——

He believed that the force of a cataclysmic event could smash past a creative block. If such an event placed one in mortal danger and was accompanied by a tremendous crack-up, so much the better.

In the summer of 1980, after heavy weather had sent all of her crew to their bunks with nausea, he was left to sail single-handedly a yacht called the Megan Jaye from Rhode Island to Bermuda. He attributed his even and settled stomach to his macrobiotic diet.

The storm grew more ferocious as the night passed and it looked like the end for a while — the Atlantic was grabbing from all sides — and he was panicked and tearful and screamed for God to come take him because he didn’t fucking care no more anyhow, and then he lost his mind for a long stretch of sea, and he grew frantic and giddy as the seas raved and the skies opened, and he sang his old songs — he belted them out from his lungs as charms — and he Screamed, and after a long hard night fraught with death-fear and the odd hilarity of disasters he made it at last to calm waters and a placid morning — Bermuda — and he believed that it was this event or passage that cleared his mind and allowed him, after four barren years, to create new material and work again.

——

At the small hotel in Keel, I managed to arrange a room and get through the accompanying small talk without mentioning anything about the unsettling vision on the beach. I was watchful of my tone, however — never in itself a good sign — and I worried that I may have been acting overly cheerful or hearty. The young lady at reception was pleasant and told me about some nearby walking and cycling routes. I said I’d see what the old legs had left to give, and I tried to keep the exclamation marks out of my speech. She said I was in room number nine and smiled quietly as she handed over the key. She asked me did I care to dine at the hotel that evening and I said well, certainly, yes, a reservation for one, please, and now I worried that my diction was becoming too formal, in a kind of weirdly over-comma’d Victorian way. Basically, I was all over the shop, and I was anxious again to the pit of my gut: I decided this meant that the story was starting to come together.

——

I established myself in the room marked nine without significant incident. I smoked a little weed for calm, exhaling out the window so as not to activate the smoke detector. Now what we have here, I said to myself, is such an old, old question: how do you bring up the fact of ghosts in reasonable company? Especially in the reasonable company of one’s readers? I was looking out to the hills and the backs of the village buildings as I pondered this — I realised I was actually looking out at the back of the local police station and quickly put my pipe away — and I was feeling much more settled and together in myself, and thinking a little about the story but in a necessarily vague way, just letting it sit at the back of my mind, just there on the ledge of the subconscious where all stories must for a long while sit and season — or so at least I convince myself; no pressure, don’t rush it, and so forth — and it occured to me that the 1970s is by now essentially an historical fiction. True memory of the era — as in sense memory, as in the precise tang on the air of a new morning back then, or the throb and rumble of a great city rising from its fumes in the early morning back then, or the way a lover’s dark hair might splay just so on the sheets, and she stretches — has by now succumbed to time and distance, and what’s left to us is mediated, and it can only be built up again in gimcrack reconstructions, with scenic facade, but if we can get the voices right, the fiction might hold for a while at least.

——

The Liverpool accent, or at least the city accent as it can be heard within, say, a two- or three-mile radius of Lime Street station, is closely related to an Irish accent. There is a type of Liverpool accent that bleeds in particular into the accent of the northside of Dublin. But of course this is an old and storied migration, and one that is stitched into the lore of countless thousands of families: the cities are cousinly.

James and Jane Lennon left County Down in 1848 and emigrated to Liverpool. Among their children was John or Jack Lennon, variously described as a freight clerk or a book-keeper, and also known to be something of a bar-room crooner. Jack married first a Liverpudlian, Margaret Crowley, who died during the birth of their second child. He then married Mary “Polly” Maguire, from Dublin, and they had fifteen children, seven of whom survived. Among these was Alfred, or Freddie, who was John Lennon’s father.

Following the death of her husband — the liver — Polly could no longer afford to look after all the children, and Freddie was deposited in the Bluecoat orphanage in 1921. Later, he is variously described as a ship’s steward or a merchant seaman, and he was also known to be something of a bar-room crooner.

John became obsessed for a while with these Irish roots. He wrote anti-English songs. He named his second child Sean. He consulted the usual books of heraldry and sources of lineage — slow winter nights at the Dakota — including MacLysaght’s Irish Families: Their Names, Arms and Origins, in which he learned that the O’Lennons were most typically from the Counties Down, Sligo or Galway, and were not known to have distinguished themselves in military affairs. Late in his life, he spoke of renewing the planning permission for Dorinish Island and building a magical house out there.