Gods Without Men

2008

Oh baby oh what you want went down to the crossroads got down on my mojo black cat whatever. In Nicky’s opinion, the whole Americana thing had gone beyond a joke. He watched the lads sprawled on the big leather studio sofas. Lol in his trucker cap. Jimmy trying to play slide on his shiny new National, making gravelly noises in his throat like he was some old bluesman instead of a skinny Essex electrician’s son with a smack habit. You’re all wankers, he told them. Uh huh unh unh, went Jimmy. Ned was on the phone to his accountant. No one looked up. Fuck it, he thought. Fuck this and fuck them.

Out in the car park the sun beat down out of a boring blue L.A. sky. Nicky smoked a fag and watched the Mexicans hanging about on the corner, same as every day. According to the engineer they were waiting for someone to come past in a lorry and give them a job. Gardening. Carrying stuff on a building site. What a life. Think about it, he’d said to Lol. One roll of the dice and it could have been us, know what I mean? Not me, went Lol. I’m too tall to be a Mexican.

What happened? Three years ago they’d been running round Camden, blagging into shows, doing crap speed in the bogs at the Good Mixer. Not a care in the world.

And now look.

Of course most people would sell their grandmothers to be in a band like theirs. If you get the big tap on the shoulder, hit singles and telly and that, then start moaning about how it’s not all it’s cracked up to be, you shouldn’t be surprised if you get treated like a mental case. You’re living the dream, right? So shut up. He’d learned pretty quickly to keep certain things to himself. Smile and talk bollocks to journalists. Don’t tell them you lie awake at night wondering why you aren’t more happy. Klonopin, Ambien, Percocet, Xanax. He ought not to point the finger at Jimmy. His own bathroom was like a chemist’s shop.

He was leaning on Noah’s car, a lovely old Merc convertible sprayed with multicolored hippie swirls. You could tell which one was the studio by the cars. All the buildings on the block looked the same: big gray bunkers with metal doors. Only one had this collection of motors outside. There was his own orange Camaro, rented back when they first arrived and he was excited by America; Jimmy’s Porsche, skewed across two spaces, big scratch down the passenger side where he’d scraped it against a pillar in a parking garage. Jimmy couldn’t drive for shit, even when he wasn’t twisted. Nicky wasn’t a hundred percent sure he still had a license.

So what was he going to do? Go back in and be a good boy and try and write songs with the bunch of cunts who used to be his mates? He couldn’t picture it, couldn’t see the point. Oh there were millions of points, of course, about two and a half million ones for him alone if you counted straight-up advance money, before you got into all the crooked record-company arithmetic and everything vanished again. They were supposed to be in L.A. making their West Coast record, the one with Sunset Strip and Laurel Canyon good vibes sprinkled over it like fairy dust. Instead, in three months, all they’d done was bicker and buy stuff and get wasted in bars full of people who looked as if they’d just been unwrapped from their packaging, all shiny and expensive, like audio equipment. People who came with curls of foam and polythene bags and cable ties.

Three fucking months. Break America? Other way round, mate. At first him and Jimmy thought all they had to do was drive up and down and absorb it and they’d suddenly channel the Byrds or someone and make good music. They drove up and down. They made crap — worse — crap that didn’t even sound like them. They’d have been better off in London, even with all the bullshit — Jimmy’s dealer hanging about, Anouk, the tabloids. In L.A. Nicky felt like a tourist. What was he going to do, write a song about palm trees? About lawn sprinklers? Bikram yoga? He told Jim he was homesick, but Jim didn’t want to know, went on about the nights back in Dalston when they’d got high, playing Gram Parsons and banging on to one another about cosmic American music. He was just beginning to get into the scene, he said. He wanted to shag actresses and go to parties in big glass houses where you could see the lights down in the valley. All Nicky really wanted was a kebab.

Sometimes he got wasted and went to bed with someone. He wasn’t exactly chuffed with himself, but at the end of the day, Anouk only had herself to blame. He wouldn’t have done it if she’d been around. He’d told her to come over, but there was a job in Moscow. Then another one, a TV ad in Phuket. The next time it was Paris fashion week. It was always fucking fashion week.

Don’t whine, she told him. She didn’t like it when he whined.

Nicky had a rule: Never get sentimental about birds. After all, half the world’s gash, at the end of the day. But Anouk was different. She didn’t fall for his act. In her funny, bored way, she saw right through him. He hated putting the phone down on her, but you had to play the game. Never let them get the upper hand.

After the fashion-week conversation, he did what he always seemed to do nowadays when he had a problem — worked through the minibar. First vodkas, then gins, whiskies, then whatever was left. He watched bad telly and looked at YouTube. He could feel himself spiraling into the dark place. Her voice had sounded so flat. Who was she with, over there in Paris? Most of the blokes in fashion were queer, which, if you were going out with a model, was a mercy, but there were always more than enough straight ones sniffing about. Photographers, for a start. Lecherous bastards all. And those fifty-year-old rich geezers you only seemed to see at fashion parties, the ones with orange tans and a thing for teenagers. Sick industry, when you came to think about it.

Not a good night. Not proud of himself the next morning. Terry gave him a lecture, said the hotel weren’t happy and did he realize how much it cost to keep the police out of it. Nicky told him it was his fault for putting him in a crap room. He ought to have had one with a bigger balcony. The look on Terry’s face. A day or two later he made it up with Anouk, but it was obvious he’d have to get along without her for a while. He sent flowers, wrote lyrics, thought about sending her the lyrics, tore them up.

L.A. was a nightmare. The place was so uptight. Everything seemed to be inappropriate. Sorry, sir, this is a nonsmoking environment. Sorry, sir, we don’t permit English people talking loudly or having a laugh with their mates in our poncey white-painted restaurant. He wanted to walk to the corner shop. He wanted to get on a bus. Valet parking? What was that about? How were you supposed to get home when you were pissed in a city where there was no such thing as a cab? No one could even understand his accent. I’ll have the tuna sandwich. Cheena? I’m sorry, sir, what is cheena? One day he was trying to get a glass of water. Water, he said. Water. The stuff that comes out of the tap. The waitress was getting shirty. I don’t understand, she hissed, what is it you require? Noah had to intervene. Water, he said. Wah-dah. They sat around repeating it. Wah-dah, not wor-uh.

He phoned Anouk.

“Drop everything. I’ll tell Terry to put you on the first plane.”

“I can’t. I can’t just ‘drop everything.’ ”

“I need you, babe. It’s serious. I’m not pissing about.”

“I have a job.”

“Fuck’s sake, Nookie, you don’t work in an office. Turn something down for once, eh?”

“Nicky, you decided to go and be out there. You left me, not the other way round. It was your choice.”

“I didn’t leave you.”

“You could have found a studio anywhere. It’s just a room with a lot of stupid black boxes. Not even any windows. What does it matter where you are?”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“No, of course not. I’m so stupid. I’m just stupid and good for fucking and being on your arm to have your picture taken.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“You’re a selfish asshole, you know that? A spoilt little boy.”

“So I’m a little boy? Who’s the man, Nookie? Who’s the real man in your life?”

“What?”

“I know you. You’ve got someone. Who is he? Tell the truth, Anouk.”

“You’re being ridiculous. I don’t want to talk to you if you’re going to be like this.”

Click.

He stood in the car park and thought about Anouk and tried to work out if the sick feeling in his gut meant he was in love with her. He wrote love songs, or what passed for them. But what did he actually feel about her? When he wanted something, he hated not being able to have it, that was all. He tried to think of reasons to go back into the studio. A pickup stopped on the corner beside the Mexicans. The driver gestured and some of them climbed on the back. He wondered what would happen if he got on too. Where he’d go. What kind of life he’d lead.

Maybe if he went for a drive. He leaned into Noah’s car and tried the catch on the glove box. Not locked. He flipped it open. No keys inside, but there was a plastic bag full of little brown disks, like crinkly coins. He knew what they were, though he’d never actually taken any. One of Noah’s favorite riffs involved finding your spirit animal and entering the crack between two worlds. Behind the bag of drugs there was something else, wrapped in a cloth. He reached in and picked it up. A handgun. A big blocky gold-plated handgun with ISRAELI MILITARY INDUSTRIES written on the side. The sort of item you’d find in an African military dictator’s Christmas stocking.

It had taken Nicky a while to work out that Noah was a psycho. He was more famous than they were, at least in the States. A few years older, pushing thirty, he made freak-folk albums which sold by the truckload to hipster kids who wanted a little taste of freedom — the light filtering through the redwoods, sitting in a hot tub under the stars — all the stuff Londoners like Nicky fantasized about in their damp basement flats. Noah channeled all that longing into breathy vocals and squeaky guitar strings, overdubbed some crickets in the background and then rinsed the lot in strange electronic quasi-sitar drones which made his songs sound like they’d just been radioed in from Mars. The band thought he’d be the perfect producer.

The first time they hung out was at his house up in the hills. It was exactly what Nicky expected: a sort of deluxe log cabin mummified in ethnic fabrics, with girls lounging around wearing beads and headbands, smoking spliff and looking like designer Red Indians. Noah was high on something that made him trip over his words and jig about irritably on the deck. You Brits don’t know shit, he told them. You Brits still think it’s like, the 1800s and you guys are in charge. Nicky didn’t really give a toss. In a way, it was what they’d hired him for — the Americanness. But Ned was getting aerated and started to argue back. Nicky nudged him and told him not to bother; Noah wasn’t listening anyway. Holding a sarong round his waist with one hand, he was toking on a joint with the other, stabbing it in their general direction while he made an incomprehensible point about destiny and the frontier and Jim Morrison. You want to see something, he said suddenly. You really want to fucking see, man? He took them into a back room, made a performance of undoing locks and bolts and switching on the lights. Around the walls were glass cabinets full of guns. He had pistols, rifles, shotguns, old flintlock things like out of a pirate movie. He had a chrome-plated AK-47 he’d bought off some special-forces guy in a bar.

They shot them off the back porch. Noah had his squaws line up bottles on a wooden bench, like the beautiful assistants in a game show. Don’t you get it? he was yelling. Living free, baby! Living free! Nicky didn’t really understand what living free had to do with blasting the shit out of empty Coronas, but it was a laugh. Eventually the cops turned up, blue and red lights flashing in the street. Earl sorted it out. Earl was Noah’s equivalent of Terry.

After that night Jimmy and Nicky decided Noah was cool. Lol agreed. Lol always agreed if Nicky and Jimmy did. Ned didn’t like him, but then if Ned hadn’t known Jimmy at school and been basically the only drummer in Billericay, he would have still been working at Phones4U, so his opinion didn’t count. Noah became their guide, their guru. They bought clothes and instruments in the places he recommended. They did bongs first thing every morning, because he said they needed to loosen up. Jimmy even tried meditating. In the studio they pissed about with Tibetan temple bowls and rain sticks and Jew’s harps, chanting in darkened rooms, sitting on the floor writing tosh on bits of paper and cutting it up to make word associations. Burroughs did it, Noah told them. He was a pioneer of consciousness. Who’s Burroughs? whispered Lol, squirting glue on the rug. Some cunt off children’s telly? Noah was impressive, but he wasn’t good for the band. As far as Nicky was concerned, pop music ought to be instinctive: You just put your head down, made a noise, then stuck some lyrics over the top. Now here they were, throwing the I Ching to find a rhyme for “baby.” Everything they came up with sounded pretentious. Nicky couldn’t even pick out a tune without second-guessing himself. Jimmy was the same. Whatever else happened, the two of them had always been able to write songs together. Now, because there weren’t any songs, they began to argue. Words were spoken. Nicky moved out of the band house into one of the hotels on Sunset. He worked in his room, Jim in the studio. For a while they only communicated by fax, but neither of them could be arsed to write stuff down so they gave up and starting talking again.

If only Anouk was around.

One day Nicky thought of a lyric:

Oh go to sleep

you’re too much

when you’re awake

It felt like the beginning of something. Noah was hunched over a four-track in a corner of the rehearsal room, chewing on his beard. When Nicky asked him what he thought, he just went hmm.

“What do you mean, ‘hmm’?”

“Nothing. It’s just … Well, it kind of lacks bite.”

Nicky had always tried to act as if he could take criticism. The lyric was about a time when he and Anouk had been up for two days, speeding and ordering room service in a hotel in Berlin. Nookie was really tweaking, and he’d been on at Terry to get them some Valium. Despite how it sounded, it was sort of a happy memory.

There was an awkward silence. “OK,” said Noah eventually. “I’ll show you what I mean. I think it needs something more, um, striking.” He walked up to the mike and sang:

Go to sleep

little frog

you’re too much

when we touch

“She’s not a little frog. I don’t think of her as a frog.”

“OK, man. Whatever. She could be, I don’t know, a squirrel.”

“Or a leech,” said Lol bitchily.

Nicky walked out. What else could he do? He stayed away for a couple of days, spent the time drinking with some lads who had a custom-car place in Venice. He reckoned he had Noah’s number. Geezer was third-generation hippie aristocracy. His grandparents ran some Hindu healing center up in Northern California, sort of like the place the Beatles went to. His dad had been a singer-songwriter who’d OD’d after one album. According to Noah, he used to live in a dome out in the desert, just jamming with his band and looking for UFOs. Once he played them the LP, which had a picture of a pyramid on the front and was called The Guide Speaks. It was rubbish. All the stuff which once seemed so amazing about Noah was basically just him being a chip off the old block. Nicky’s old man had given him a lot of solid information about Spurs and cavity-wall insulation. If he’d grown up doing Zen calligraphy and going on horse rides with Leonard Cohen, things might have been different.

He should have knocked it on the head after the night of the hot tub, should have got on a plane. They were over at Noah’s, and despite himself Nicky had managed to get into the swing of things. There was this bird Willow and they were in the hot tub with the bubbles on and he was just beginning to get to a place where Anouk was totally off his mind when Noah bounded up, stark bollock naked, brandishing a pistol. Willow made a little noise in her throat, scrambled out, and ran off to find her clothes.

“Now look what you did.”

“Fuck her, man. You and I need to talk.”

Noah leveled the gun, holding it with both hands like he was on a firing range. “It’s weird how it concentrates the mind. You can feel it, right? The prickly sensation on your forehead? Think: What would it be like if I actually got shot? All that mush spurting out. All my brains.”

“I’m not being funny, mate, but if you don’t put that down I’m going to ram your teeth down your throat.”

“I’m not being funny either, mate. I’m serious. See my serious face? I’m not happy, buddy. I think you and your band might be wasting my time. You might be wasting my fucking life. Do you actually want to make a record, or do you just want to smoke weed and ball chicks in my hot tub?”

“You’re off your nut.”

“Time for answers, Nicky. Clock’s ticking. Seems to me like you don’t have any ideas. Seems like you don’t have any creativity.”

Willow must have told the others, because at that point Earl ran up and wrestled Noah to the ground. Noah was furious, shouting about how he was filled with cosmic pulsating life and Nicky was sucking it out of him, but eventually Earl got the gun off him and persuaded him to go inside and have a lie-down. Terry offered to drive Nicky back to the hotel, but he didn’t want to talk to anyone. He drove himself, so high and freaked out that he was barely able to see the center line.

He rang Anouk. It went straight to voicemail.

That should have been him done, back to Dalston, kebab in hand, pack of Marlboro Lights, six Stellas for a fiver and L.A. just a bad dream fading in the rearview mirror. Turned out the bastards weren’t going to let him off so easy. The next day he got soothing calls from Terry and Earl and the record company and the management in London and a concert promoter in New York who had no business knowing anything about the situation at all. Then a courier arrived with a big cardboard box, supposedly from Noah but most probably from Earl, with a cowboy hat inside wrapped in tissue paper and a note saying Neil Young had been wearing it when he made up “The Needle and the Damage Done” and Nicky ought to have it, as he was the true inheritor of that spirit blah blah blah. Nicky didn’t like to be soft-soaped. Twelve hours in the air and he could be having a pint in The George on the Commercial Road with the rain pissing down outside and some dickhead bending his ear about how Ronaldo wasn’t worth the money. Sheer bliss.

He told Terry he’d had enough and Terry did something he very rarely did, which was to sit him down and say no. Nicky reminded him it wasn’t his job to say no, his job was to say yes. Terry said he knew that, but sometimes what Nicky thought he wanted wasn’t what he actually wanted. The record company needed a record, and if they didn’t get one in L.A., they were going to consider the band in breach of contract. Fuck it, Nicky said. Breach the contract. We’ll go to another record company. Terry sighed. It didn’t work like that. A lot of money had been flushed down the toilet. He asked Nicky to imagine men in little cubicles doing sums. Men in suits. Nicky imagined. He didn’t see Terry’s point. Terry put it another way. If they didn’t make the album, the record company would take all their money. They’d be broke. Nicky asked if he had a choice. Not really, said Terry. Not having a choice was one of Nicky’s pet hates.

He finished his cigarette and ground it into the hot concrete of the studio car park. Make the record or be broke. Or steal Noah’s drugs and his gun, leave town and hope that by the time the others find you, it’ll all be sorted out. There was always a choice, if you knew where to look for it. He got into his car.

Driving was almost the only thing that felt natural in America. It was traditional. It was patriotic. When you accelerated, you could almost hear the crowd cheering you on. The Camaro managed about a hundred yards to the gallon and sounded like a tank invasion. It was a 1970s orange fireball of environmental doom and if he had to spend his globally warmed old age on a raft or trudging through the ruins of Billericay eating dog food, it would have been worth it.

L.A. faded away into a thankless dead landscape. You couldn’t call it desert, really. It was waste ground, the city’s backyard, a dump for all the ugly things it didn’t want to have to look at. Warehouses and processing plants. Pylons, pipelines. Broken things. Junk. There were whole junk towns, San this and San that, fuck all to them except concrete: concrete boxes to live in, concrete lots in front of concrete malls for all the little junk people to go and buy things. He was happy to pass through without stopping, to see those places as blurs by the side of the highway. A water tower, a wall painted with the tiger crest of some high-school sports team. He didn’t care that his phone was ringing every few minutes. He didn’t care the radio had nothing on it but Bible preachers and dinner jazz. The road was white as a bone, the sky was airbrushed blue, and he was on his way to the emptiest square on the map. Nothing mattered except keeping it tight, slotting into a space between speeding cars, peeling off at a junction, swinging round and over and under and back, leaving disaster far behind.

How long did he drive for? Three, maybe four hours. The car didn’t have air-conditioning and the wind blasting through the open window was hot and gritty. His brain was starting to sizzle in his skull like an egg in a pan, so he pulled in at a petrol station, stuck another sixty dollars into the tank and bought a big jug of water, most of which he poured over his head. As his poor swollen gray cells relaxed back to their normal size, he looked at the phone. Eleven missed calls. Several from Terry, a couple from Jimmy, even one from Noah. He didn’t bother listening to the messages.

Whatever he was doing, it wasn’t about the band. The only person he wanted to hear from was Anouk. He willed the phone to ring again, for her number to appear on the screen.

Call me, babe.

Come and get me.

The gaps between the junk towns grew bigger. Soon the only signs of life were rows of giant white wind turbines and billboards advertising casino resorts. An outlet mall rose up at the roadside like a mirage. Then nothing. Miles of rock and scrubby bushes. Eventually the light began to fade. Sparks were darting about at the edges of his vision, little comets he kept mistaking for overtaking cars or bats flying towards the windscreen. He was coming into a town whose name he hadn’t caught when he saw a motel sign. There were dozens of these shabby places along the route. Desert this and palm that. This one was called the Drop Inn. He was too tired to go any farther.

Reception was no bigger than a cupboard, a little box with a desk, a bell, a rack of postcards and a clattering screen door. The woman who emerged from the back room had bigger hair than he’d seen on a real person since he was thirteen and found his mum’s cache of eighties workout videos. She was wearing a purple jumpsuit, which might have been hot (or at least ironic) on a twenty-year-old, but on her it was sort of sad, an outfit fixed at the fashion moment when its wearer last felt beautiful. He couldn’t tell how old she was. Forty-five? Her mouth had little lines round it. When she wasn’t talking, it shaped itself into a tired grimace, as if she’d spent too much of her life saying things she didn’t mean.

She told him to call her Dawn and insisted on giving him the full tour. He said he was tired, hoping she’d just give him the room key, but she was having none of it. She chattered away as if he was the most exciting visitor she’d had in months (which might have been true), pointing out all the details, the “touches.” The “rec room” had a coffee machine, a shelf of dog-eared books and a board with takeaway menus pinned to it. Outside, the “landscaping” consisted of a few flowering bushes poking up out of the dust, sheltering some little plaster foxes and bunnies. All the animals were painted purple. The corrugated-iron fence which screened the kidney-shaped pool was purple too. So were the fraying covers on the loungers, the doors to the rooms and the tiles sunk into the dirt to make a border for the concrete paths. “We turn the spa pool on between five-thirty and ten,” she told him, as if this was information which might influence his decision to stay. He nodded, trying to keep his eyes open.

As Dawn demonstrated the spa pool’s various jets, he looked out beyond the peeling fence. It was hard to say where the motel property ended. It sort of petered out. Behind the pool was a shed and a couple of plastic lawn chairs lying on their sides in the dirt. Behind the chairs, the broken ground stretched away into the distance until it hit a line of barren hills, a jagged black outline against the evening sky. He wondered what it would be like to climb them. Impossible during the day. Scrambling, panting, the sun beating down. It would be a penance, a quick way to kill yourself.

“We don’t serve breakfast here,” said Dawn. “But you can get coffee in the rec room anytime you like.”

“Can I see my room now?”

“Sure.”

She didn’t move, just stood there, staring up at the sky, her arms folded across her chest as if she was suddenly feeling cold.

“You can see a lot out here,” she said eventually.

“The room?”

“Oh, pardon me. This way.”

Later he lay on a bed that stank of lavender-scented detergent, listening to the sound of cars going by on the highway. His body felt like lead. His stomach was growling and he had a headache. The room throbbed with purples of various shades and intensities. Mauve bedclothes, lilac carpet, violet curtains. It was like being trapped inside a bruise. He dozed for a while, the TV jabbering in the background, occasionally jolting him awake with canned laughter or sudden bursts of gunfire. He finally had to admit he wasn’t going to sleep until he’d eaten. He peeled himself up, put on his trainers and went to the office. The woman didn’t answer the bell. Eventually he found her out the back near the pool, sitting in one of the lawn chairs, peering up at the stars through a telescope.

“What are you looking at?”

“Oh, nothing in particular.”

He told her he wanted to get something to eat and asked where to go.

“There’s a diner just a mile or two down the road. You can’t miss it. It’s all lit up.”

He didn’t leave immediately. Her mouth hung open slightly as she screwed one eye against the telescope. She seemed tense, expectant. He had a sudden picture of what she might have looked like as a child. Happy, optimistic. She sensed him watching her and frowned.

“Tell me something,” she said. “Are you out here looking for lights?”

“No. Well, yeah, I suppose. Maybe. I’m just trying to get away from things, you know?”

She gave him an appraising look and turned back to the telescope. He went to get his car keys.

Driving into town, he passed a sign marking the turnoff for a Marine base. A grid of lights glowed in the distance, covering an area much bigger than the little strip of Main Street. A video shop, a 7-Eleven, an off-license, a couple of bars. There was a barber offering “military and civilian haircuts” and a house with three neon signs in the front window, one saying NAILS, a second MASSAGE and a third offering CHINESE FOOD. The diner was easy enough to spot. Like Dawn said, it was lit up. She hadn’t mentioned that it was also built in the shape of a flying saucer. He parked outside and went through the door, up a little concrete ramp that had once been painted to look like metal. The UFO Diner had seen better days. Its curved plaster walls were cracked, and sections were dark in the band of red neon decorating the saucer’s rim. The leatherette booths and battered chrome stools must have been there for at least thirty years. On the walls were posters from sci-fi movies, faded by the sun to pastel blues and yellows. Darth Vader was a ghost, E.T. the faintest fetal outline. Nicky was shown to a table by a fat teenager who handed him a menu and went back to chatting up some lads who were hunched up in one of the booths. Five of them, tattoos, buzz cuts, all staring at him, and not in a good way. It was possible that lemon-yellow skinnies, a cutoff T-shirt and spray-painted eighties high-tops weren’t a look most residents favored out in San wherever the fuck this was.

Nicky tried to act nonchalant as he sipped his Coke. He wasn’t a fussy eater. On tour he happily scarfed down greasy-spoon meals that would turn most people’s stomachs — fried eggs swimming in fat, sausages made from bits of pig they didn’t even have names for. But however bad the food was in Britain, at least they didn’t put sugar in everything. He’d ordered the Mothership Chicken Basket, and the whole lot — meat, bread roll, chips, salad dressing, even the lettuce, far as he could tell — was sweetened. No wonder the waitress was a pig. He got some of it down — he was hungry — then had to give in. He pushed his chair back and slapped a twenty on the table. The young Marines gave him the evil eye all the way to the door.

There was a queue at Dee’s American Eagle Liquor Store. More short hair, more tats, more staring. Two blokes even came out to watch as he got back into the car. A six-pack of Coronas and a bottle of tequila — frankly, it was going to take at least that much booze to calm his nerves. He drove round the corner and stopped in the car park of a Taco Bell. He would have gone in and got a sandwich, but there were more military nutjobs inside and he just couldn’t face it. The paranoia had woken him up, and he didn’t want to go back to his purple cave quite yet. Fuck it. He had everything he needed. He should just get on with what he came for. He could spend the night outside and wait for the sun to come up. It was still over eighty degrees. It wasn’t like he was going to get cold.

So he drove on, and after a couple of miles found a turn signed NATIONAL MONUMENT. Up ahead the sky was clear, blue-black. As he swung round, the headlights caught the shapes of huge cacti at the roadside, reaching their hands to the sky. He followed the road for half an hour or so, then stopped and switched off the engine. The sound of insects rose up in the darkness, an industrial sawing and scraping. He sat on the bonnet and drained a beer, gradually feeling his heart rate slow. He threw the empty bottle out into the darkness. It made a little thud as it hit the dirt.

He fished the plastic bag of peyote out of its hiding place under the passenger seat and ate a couple of the buttons. They were so bitter it was all he could do to keep them down and he swigged tequila to take the taste away. Bad idea. After he’d spent almost a minute trying not to retch, he had to give in and spit a nasty mess out onto the ground. Silhouetted against the sky was a rock formation, a huge rounded boulder that looked like the back of a big sleeping animal, topped with three teetering stacks of rock. It didn’t seem so far away. He wiped his mouth, dropped a few supplies into a plastic bag and started walking in its direction. In the bag the gun clinked loudly against the bottles and he had an idea it might accidentally go off, so he fished it out and tried to fit it into the waistband of his jeans. His trousers were too tight as it was and with the gun in there he had to walk like a constipated person. If he broke into a run, he’d probably shoot himself in the arse. He ended up just carrying it.

After ten minutes the rocks didn’t seem any nearer. He hadn’t brought a torch, and he kept stumbling. There were these little furry cacti dotted around, all at about knee height. They were very hard to see and he kept walking into them, getting spines stuck in his jeans. Despite himself he was beginning to think about snakes. And weren’t there wolves out here, or coyotes or whatever? Don’t be a pussy, he told himself. You’re the lead singer of a band. You’ve got a gun. You are Jim Morrison. You are the hero of your own adventure.

No one knew where he was. No one in the world. But then again, wasn’t that the point of coming out to the desert? You had to get lost to find yourself. Which sounded like the sort of thing Noah would say. Fucking Noah, it was all his fault. Checking the ground carefully, he sat down and had another beer, following it up with a few shots of tequila. So what if no one knew? How did life feel when people did know? No one really cared anyway. He had another go at the peyote, swallowing big lumps of it, trying to chew as little as possible. Something bright and white raced across the sky. The stars were like pinholes in a cloth. You could believe you were seeing through to some incredibly bright world on the other side of the darkness.

But the thought kept going round in his head. No one knew. No one knew. He took out his phone. He still had bars. She probably wouldn’t understand, but he called her anyway, just to hear her voice.

She picked up, sounding hoarse and sleepy.

“Baby? It’s me.”

“Nicky, it’s the middle of the night. I have to work in a couple of hours.”

“I wanted to talk to you.”

“I have a really early call. Phone me later, OK?”

“What’s wrong with now?”

“I’m going to look like shit.”

“And that’s all you care about.”

“It’s my job.”

“Where are you?”

“Paris.”

“Again? Are you with someone?”

“Jesus, Nicky, not that. I’m asleep. Leave me alone.”

“What’s that supposed to mean, leave you alone?”

“You sound drunk.”

“Not really. A little. I phoned to say I love you.”

“That’s nice.”

“I need you, baby.”

“Mmm.”

“I mean it.”

“Nicky, what’s going on? I had a call from Terry. He wanted to know if I’d heard from you. Has something happened?”

“I don’t know. No. Maybe. I walked out of the session.”

“Why?”

“It’s complicated. I didn’t want to be there.”

“Where are you now?”

“No idea. In the middle of nowhere.”

“Where in the middle of nowhere?”

“The desert. Listen.”

He held the phone up so she could hear the insects.

“Isn’t that amazing?”

“What desert, Nicky? What are you doing out there?”

“Thinking about you. I want you to come. There’s nobody here for me, Anouk. Only you.”

“How can I come? I don’t have a magic carpet. What about the others? What about Jimmy? Or Terry? Why don’t you call Terry?”

“Because I don’t give a fuck about Terry. It’s all turned to shit, Nookie. You’re the only thing that matters. I mean it. You have to come and get me. I’m near a place called San — something. Get on a plane to L.A., OK? I’ll let you know where to come after that.”

“Nicky—”

“OK?”

“You’re not listening to me.”

“Just say you’ll do it. Just come, Nookie. You’re all I’ve got.”

“That’s not true. You’re just being dramatic.”

“Don’t tell me what I’m being. I’m serious.”

“I don’t understand you. Why do you always have to be this way?”

“Come. I want you to come. Just get on a plane. I’ll meet you at the airport. I love you.”

“Why now, Nicky? Why are you saying all this now?”

“Because it’s true.”

“You’re only saying it because you’re afraid. You think you’re going to lose me, so you say these dramatic things.”

“I mean it. If you don’t come, I don’t know what’ll happen.”

There was silence at her end. He could hear her sigh, shifting position in bed. He imagined someone else beside her, another man kissing her neck, stroking her hair.

“Anouk, I’m serious. If you don’t come I tell you I’ll do something stupid.”

“You’re always doing stupid things, Nicky. You’re a rock star. You get to do stupid things.”

“I’ll kill myself.”

“No you won’t.”

“I will. I’ve got a gun.”

“You’re full of shit, Nicky. I’m hanging up now.”

“Wait. You think I’m full of shit? Listen.”

He held the phone up and fired the gun out into the darkness. There was a deafening bang. He didn’t expect the recoil to be so strong. It jerked his arm up and he stumbled backwards. The phone went flying.

“Oh, fuck. Nookie? Nookie, can you hear me? Shout if you can hear me. Shit.”

He had no idea where the thing had landed. The screen had gone dark. He kept shouting her name, then listening for a reply, shuffling around on his hands and knees like a dog. What had he done? Fuck fuck fuck. He took out his cigarette lighter, scouring the ground in little five-second bursts, flicking the thing off each time his fingers started to burn. He wondered if the phone had gone under a rock, turned one over, then thought he saw a snake. In a panic, he jumped to his feet and fired at it. This time the recoil made him step backwards and he tripped over one of the squat little cacti. The pain was excruciating. The calf of his left leg was now covered in spines, some of which had gone in quite deep. Even if he’d been able to take them out himself, he couldn’t see a thing. He had to get back to the car. At least in the car there was a light.

Keep your head, Nicky. Whatever you do, don’t lose your head. Picking up the plastic bag of booze, he hobbled back in the direction he thought he’d taken, but after a few minutes he lost confidence and retraced his steps. He could still see the big rock formation. Logically he ought to walk away from it. He just wasn’t sure. The ache in his leg made it hard to think. Under his feet, the ground felt spongy. Was he going to die? Mate, he told himself, you really need to get a grip.

His mouth was dry, but he had beer. He could drink a beer. His hands were shaking as he fumbled with the top. Him and his plastic bag of booze, out in the desert, with all the stars smeared across the sky. The ground was breathing. That was odd. The whole desert was slowly inhaling and exhaling and he was just a little wounded animal, standing on its back. The giant rattle of the insects pressed down on his ears and he began to sweat. Every rock, every grain of sand, was pumping out all the heat it had taken in during the day. The cacti raised their arms up to heaven. He wondered about joining them, praying for forgiveness. He felt sick. Would Anouk forgive him? What about all the others? He got down on his knees. Sorry, he whispered. I didn’t mean anything by it.

He vomited on the ground, clutching his sides. His head was throbbing. Oh God, he was all alone. He ought to have been with someone. He was a rock star. He could have anyone. The worse you behave, the more they want you. They humiliate themselves, lose the plot when you walk into a room. Men get jealous. Girls go down on you. It happened in toilets, in dressing rooms, in the little curtained beds on the tour bus. What they got out of it, he didn’t know. It used to make him happy, until he realized they weren’t really blowing him at all. Making it with a rock star — that was the point. Not Nicky Capaldi. When he came, they got points. They were blowing an idea, blowing fame. They were proving they could make fame come.

In the distance he heard his phone ringing. He stumbled towards the sound, which stopped as he got close. He used the lighter, tried to spot the place. Then, just by his feet, he heard a triplet of short beeps. Voicemail. He scooped up the phone and hugged it to his chest. His hands trembled as he called Anouk.

“Baby?”

“You’re alive!”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

“You bastard! You selfish bastard!”

“It was an accident.”

“You think that’s funny? You think it’s a joke, pretending to kill yourself?”

“I didn’t do it on purpose.”

“You’re actually crazy, you know that? A crazy person.”

“I dropped the phone.”

“I’ve had enough, Nicky. I’m not doing this anymore. You stay out in the desert and play with your gun. I don’t care. I don’t want to know about it. It’s over between us. Don’t call me again.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“Don’t you dare tell me what I mean. It’s over, Nicky.”

“But I’m hurt. I fell over.”

“Mummy, I fell over. I’m hurt. You’re a little boy. A selfish little boy.”

“But I love you.”

“No, you don’t. I’m sorry, Nicky. You don’t love anyone but yourself.”

“That’s not true. Nookie! Nookie?”

There was no reply. She’d hung up. He called back, but she didn’t answer. He couldn’t believe it. This didn’t happen. They didn’t leave him. He left them, they didn’t leave him. His head spun. His leg throbbed. He drank more tequila and the desert breathed and the ground sucked at his feet like quicksand. Now he really thought of shooting himself. The gun would split his head apart like a watermelon. How had it got like this? When did he start hating himself so much? It was a mystery to him how other people ran their lives. What if he’d done more normal things? Washing up, cooking? He had no clue what was in his bank account. Did he have savings? People had savings. They saved up for things they wanted, things they couldn’t have straightaway.

Little by little, the heat went out of the air. He sat and shivered and held the gun out in front of him like a cross to ward off vampires and his mind skipped from one thing to another. His mum crying when she saw him on telly, Jimmy’s dad driving them to their first gigs. His kid sister, who got all the backstage passes she wanted, who did all the gak and drank all the Cristal and hung around China White’s trying to get off with footballers. Did she love him? What about his mum? He’d bought his mum a house. Finally dawn arrived, a thin sliver of orange that spilled over the hills, lightening the sky until he could see some way into the distance and realized he’d been just a few hundred yards away from the car the whole time.

He drove back to the motel very slowly, along an empty road which seemed to writhe beneath his wheels like a snake. By the time he got there, the sun was over the horizon and his leg was broadcasting pain in great red waves. He limped to the pool and sat down on a lounger, still holding the half-empty bottle of tequila. When he shut his eyes, there was redness behind the lids, a hot, sick, heavy redness that smothered everything.