Broken Music: A Memoir (27 page)

During our final season in Newcastle we have lots of gigs, our residencies are thriving, and we’re playing colleges and universities as far away as Sheffield and Leeds. Carol Wilson has even booked us some showcases in London, at the Nashville Rooms in West Kensington, at the London School of Economics, and at Dingwalls in Camden. Although we still have a little left from the ship to keep us solvent, we don’t make much money. The harsh reality is that I no longer have a salary or an institutional safety net, and Frances can’t work at all.

I begin to keep a diary in earnest for the first time in my life, attempting perhaps to elevate my anxieties to the level of drama or poetry
and render them less frightening by fashioning them for the page, as if they were just a story to be told in the security of the future. But I feel like a raw recruit on the eve of a battle, and while the prose may at times be purple, I am not shamed by its intent.

Inside the Newton Park Hotel there are only a few punters in isolated corners of the room. Mondays are always like this, but tonight I am distracted and anxious. I can’t get inside of the music and singing fails to bring me the usual courage. The contractions began early this afternoon, gently at first and then strong and stronger. I’ve left Frances at the General Hospital on the West Road. She seems calm and confident and is happy to let me go do my job, but I know that she has an actor’s habit of appearing unruffled regardless of whatever turmoil there might be beneath the surface. While she assures me she will be fine, I feel uncomfortable. The ward Sister confirms to me that nothing will happen before midnight, and herds me out of the room like an unnecessary hindrance. After the show the others kindly relieve me of my transport duties so I can drive straight back to the hospital. I am terrified and excited and as usual I can’t help myself projecting into the future, to protect myself, as I’ve always done in times of stress, where this ordeal will just be a story, and everything will have worked out fine. I try to imagine how Frances must feel, her body invaded by this other being. Is she certain this is what she wants? Is she afraid? Or has instinct taken over? Are there chemical imperatives that impose the necessary calm and the stoic acceptance of the inevitable, as if in giving birth there is a kind of death, a giving up of the ego? But I’m just a man and I can only speculate as to where such courage comes from; I shall never know.

I know the route to the hospital well enough to get there blindfolded. I used to take this road to school every morning for seven years, and now look at me, I’m going to be a father.

The Sister keeps me in the waiting room for a while; she seems to be used to treating men as barely tolerable nuisances, like children. I see screens being removed from around Frances’s bed and then I’m marched in. Nothing has happened, except that the contractions seem to have stopped, but Frances appears to be in fine shape. She tells me that I look exhausted, and I feel slightly ashamed that she’s going through this ordeal and I’m the one who looks terrible. She smiles and tells me to go home, get some sleep, and come back first thing in the morning. The Sister confirms that nothing will happen until tomorrow. I skulk out of the ward, feeling useless, overwhelmed, and in awe of women.

When I get back the gear is safely stacked in the hall, and Gerry is sipping thoughtfully at a can of beer in one of the armchairs by the fire. He offers me a spare one and I give him the latest report from the hospital. We sit silently with our own thoughts, watching the fire. I suppose because Frances and I are leaving for London in two months, Gerry is reasonably sanguine about the growing population in the house. At first it was just him and me and the equipment, then came Frances and the dog, and now a baby. I’m sure he is as grateful as I am about the feminine touches around the house, but it’s going to get pretty congested around here soon and we are going to have to make compromises. But none of these thoughts are voiced, we just sit sipping our beers in the firelight, as we always used to.

He and I are a strange pair. We are close but not too close; good friends but hardly inseparable. We have been thrown together by our ambition, by a passion to make music, and by expediency, but there has always been a subtle level of tension between us. I know
that there are things about me that annoy the hell out of him, just as there are things about him that piss me off. We are different, that’s all: we think differently, we react differently My dreamy optimism about the future will often fall foul of his blunt, down-to-earth honesty Our agendas may dovetail much of the time but they are beginning to unravel.

I began in this relationship as a kind of apprentice, and now the dynamic is changing. He is without a doubt a better musician than I am or ever will be, and will tell me, only half jokingly, that if he could only sing he’d fire me. But he does have a growing if grudging respect for the songs I am beginning to write, and that I’m finding a voice to express them, and this both delights and frustrates him. I enjoy the competitive edge between us, but maybe that’s only because I seem to be winning. Would I feel the same if things were the other way around? I doubt it. Still, whatever problems we have, there remains a bond of respect and mutual need between us, and we’ll all be living in London soon, and we’re going to make it, and nothing else will matter.

When I wake up next morning, I know there’s something wrong. The light in the room is wrong. I feel wrong. I never sleep in; my father and his milk round cured me of that forever. When the sun rises so do I. It is unthinkable that I would have slept in, but there is still something wrong. The noise in the street is wrong. This is not how the street sounds at seven in the morning. My eyes are now wide in terror, thinking the unthinkable. I turn my head slowly to find my wristwatch on the bedside table. I blink at it disbelievingly shaking it in my hand, blinking at it again. It is five to one. My first thought is that is must be one in the morning, and then slowly dawning logic presents the certainty, and full horror, of my predicament. I have slept for twelve hours, probably for the first time in my life, and I have almost certainly missed the birth of our child.

I leap from the bed and burst into Gerry’s room. It is empty. I rush back, get dressed, and run upstairs to knock on Jim and Stef’s door to use their phone (we still don’t have one). There is no answer. Of course, they’re working. I race to the phone box at the end of the street and feverishly call the hospital. My fingers can barely find the holes on the old-fashioned dial. The phone rings for an eternity. Finally I get through:

“General Hospital, can I help you?”

“Yes, the Maternity Ward, please.”

“Putting you through.”

Another eternity.

“Maternity Ward.” It is the Sister, the one who thinks all men are useless pests.

I take a deep breath. “It’s me.”

“And who might you be?” I can tell that she knows exactly who it is, she just wants to play me like a fish on a hook.

“It’s Frances’s husband.”

“Ah!” This now gives her full permission to torture me like an angler exhausting a heavy catch. There is a long silence as she lets out more line.

“And where might you have been, young man, while your wife has been laboring so?”

I can’t take any more of this. “Sister, please, do we have the baby, are they okay?”

“Yes!” I can feel the tug of the hook in my stupid mouth.

“Is it em—?”

She does not allow me to finish my sentence, or take any initiative in this struggle at all. She answers abruptly, “You have a very healthy wife and son, and it’s no thanks to you. Where were you?”

I ignore her question. “And Frances is okay?”

“She’s fine!”

“Can I come and see them?”

“Visiting isn’t till five-thirty, you know that.”

“Please, Sister!”

Now that she has landed me breathless and humiliated, she can afford some of her largesse. “Get over here right now!”

I race across town to the hospital, double park, and rush down the corridor, bursting through the double swinging doors of the maternity ward like a saloon gunfighter, where I am greeted by a sight that is both joyous and also leaves me slightly chagrined. My brother is in the center of the room, holding the baby, grinning in his usual infuriating manner as if he’s got one over me, firstly because I’m half a day late and secondly because my son looks exactly like him. I am in no mood for his innuendos, lighthearted or otherwise.

Thank God, Frances looks pleased to see me. My brother relinquishes the baby and we have a family moment.

“I’m so sorry. I don’t know what happened. I slept in, and I never sleep in.”

“Never mind. Look at your son, he has beautiful eyes.”

“Yeah, he’s beautiful,” says my brother from across the room, “just like me!”

In the years since then I have tried to work out why a man who is never late for anything, and who rarely lies in bed after sunup, would sleep in and miss one of the most important events of his life, the birth of his first child. I should have slept in the corridor. I shouldn’t have listened when they told me nothing would happen and I should leave. The baby was born only a few hours later, at 1:30 A.M. If only we’d had a telephone.

Perhaps I was truly overwhelmed, and way out of my emotional
depth, and the child within me withdrew into sleep and wouldn’t come out until it was too late. Frances may have forgiven me but I never quite forgave myself.

We bring him home the next night, to the freshly painted room, where I sit and stare at him cocooned in his cot, snug and warm while his mother sleeps. I marvel at the flawless perfection of his fingernails, the lines in the palms of his hands, like details in a work of art, the exquisite ridge between the flaky translucent skin of his lips and the softer wetness of his open mouth. But I am haunted by the image of the dead boy on the street and I try to push it out of my head as I watch my son, but it keeps returning and returning. He too must have looked this way once.

There are delicate blue veins on his closed eyelids, and I listen to the soft air in his nostrils and the drum of his heart beating and watch the faint rise and fall of his chest. I wonder how I should protect him, and I imagine the pack of boys who ran like baying dogs across the bridge must have all looked like this once too, vulnerable and perfect. There is some rain on the window and I close the curtains on the dark street.

    My mother, of course, thinks that it’s already Christmas, the new baby held close to her face. My father rolls his eyes to the ceiling as she starts cooing gibberish at the drowsy child lolling like a drunk in her arms. He is, of course, “dead chuffed,” he just expresses it differently, and being a grandfather for the first time takes a little getting used to.

“I don’t think I’m old enough to be a grandfather, am I?”

“No, Dad!”

I’m exactly the same age as he was when he became a dad, and we are watching each other like two men in a hall of mirrors.
He sees his younger self when he looks at me, just as I see an older version of myself when I look at him, graying at the temples, his hairline receding to a tonsure at the back of his head—though he is still a very fit man, his job has kept him trim and athletic where vanity alone would have failed him. He doesn’t seem to mind that we’ve named our son Joe, after Frances’s father. Ernest, after all, seems far too Edwardian, although the little girl born next bed but one in the maternity ward is blessed with the ponderous, and I would suspect, difficult-to-live-up-to designation of Ms. Chastity Fawcett.

Everyone loves Joe, and his arrival allows all of us to climb out of our trenches and indulge in a rare family hug with the baby as our tribal totem, a conduit receiving and transmitting the affection we would normally find so hard to express or accept. Perhaps Joe also arrived as a talisman, a harbinger of change, because shortly after his birth a meeting occurs that will eventually alter the direction of our lives.

    Last Exit is picking up a momentum that augurs well for our move to London. Gerry and I are feeling more and more optimistic. Two days after Joe is born we begin a whole week of gigs. In addition to our two residencies, we play in Redcar, supporting Jon Hiseman’s Colosseum and acquitting ourselves well, then play an extremely successful gig at Newcastle University, the Polytechnic Ball on Friday, then St. Mary’s College on the following Sunday. Toward the end of the St. Mary’s gig, which is in the college refectory, our only ally in the music press, Phil Sutcliffe, turns up and stands watching from the back of the room with someone that I don’t recognize. After we’ve finished our last few numbers and a couple of encores they come over to talk and I meet the stranger, a
tall American named Stewart Copeland, drummer with the well-known London band Curved Air. He has long brown hair and a handsome chiseled face with a prominent jaw and a confident demeanor. Phil has just been reviewing Curved Air at the Mayfair Ballroom and asked Stewart if he was interested in seeing the hot local band.