Broken Music: A Memoir (40 page)

The waitress returns and attempts to fill my coffee cup. Red-faced and slightly ashamed, I tell her I can’t afford another. She looks at me curiously.

“Honey, I don’t know where you’re from, but here in America the second cup is always free.”

“God bless America,” I murmur under my breath as the fresh coffee warms my innards and fills me with an immigrant’s gratitude and a thousand songs. “It’s a helluva town.”

Monday night will find us upstate in Poughkeepsie, the gig in a beautiful old vaudeville theater. We walk onstage to face only six people in the audience. They are all clearly as embarrassed as we are by their scarcity, sitting separately, in different parts of the cavernous room. Not wishing to pursue the charade of our fame any longer than necessary, I invite everyone down to the front of the stage and
they dutifully troop down from the gods to occupy the six seats in front of the footlights. I ask everyone’s name and formally introduce them to each other and then to the band. Having broken down the fourth wall, we then proceed to give one of the most blistering sets we will ever manage. Galvanized by the absurdity of our situation, and driven on by an audience bonded in equal absurdity, we will play encore after encore, with delirious if ironic abandon. The entire audience will come backstage after the show. As it turns out, three of them are DJs, and tomorrow “Roxanne” will make her sassy debut on the local airwaves.

In the months that follow we will play every fleapit club between Montreal and Miami, and on the West Coast from Vancouver to San Diego. We will play with equal passion to six people or six hundred, driving ourselves thousands of sleepless miles, loading and unloading our gear. We will mark out our territory, gig by gig, city by city, market by market, and while many promoters and club owners will lose money on their initial investment, every one of them will invite us back and be rewarded for their faith in spades.

The lasting legacy of the band will be the songs, but as well as that, the backbone of our legend will be that we would play anywhere, travel any distance, sleep anywhere there was a bed, give 100 percent and never complain. We were the poor relations who became the dogs of war, and then nothing could stop us.

Within a few years the Police, with Miles’s guidance, would become one of the biggest bands in the world. The songs I had written in the obscurity of our basement flat would become some of the most celebrated songs of the decade, and all of our albums became platinum selling records in every country. This success was confirmed and reinforced by endless concert tours in massive sports stadiums, and all the attendant hoopla and hype of a traveling circus. That the band would break up at the pinnacle of its career when our
position seemed virtually unassailable, surprised everyone but me. I saw my own future very clearly outside of the band, because I wanted more freedom. I couldn’t have played with two better musicians than Stewart and Andy but I wanted to make music that wasn’t tied to the limitations of a three piece band, where I didn’t have to compromise my own standards as a songwriter to maintain what was in truth only the semblance of democracy within the band. One commentator would say that the Police would have stayed together if the other two had needed me less and I had needed them more. And while this is a massive oversimplification I recognize that there was some truth in it. I sought escape yet again and in the face of all conventional logic or even common sense I would follow my instincts into yet another uncharted chapter of my life.

The band wasn’t the only casualty of this frenetic period because my marriage to Frances would not survive either and the demise of the Police would coincide with the break up of my family.

NINE YEARS WILL PASS. FRANCES WILL GIVE BIRTH TO OUR daughter, Kate, but we will be divorced soon afterward. There would follow a season in hell for everyone involved. Trudie and I, desperately in love from the beginning, will have a daughter, Mickey, and a son, Jake. In the interim I will have become famous and ridiculously wealthy. The Police will have broken up by the end of 1983. That I have managed to maintain even a modicum of my sanity through this period is owed more to Trudie’s love, and patient faith in my deeper self, than in any Damascene revelation I might have had. She had thankfully seen enough of a remaining spark in me that she thought worth salvaging. As a consequence, I have been allowed to glean more wisdom from my failures in life than from the giantism of my worldly success, and for that I am eternally grateful.

My mother too is divorced, and now lives in a house less than a mile from my father with Alan, the man she has loved for thirty years. My father lives alone.

Audrey has been working as an auxiliary nurse in a local hospital, but has grown used to living with secrets, so the lump in her chest has gone unremarked, growing in silence, the malformed child of
her sadness. By the time she admits to herself or anyone else that there is something wrong, her condition will have spread to the lymphatic system and be medically inoperable.

Trudie and I and my four children have traveled up from London on the train to say goodbye to her. We sit with Alan at the small table in the dining room of a modest house. This will be the first time and last time I will visit her in her home.

There she is, sitting in a corner of the room by the window, coupled to an oxygen machine that whirs malevolently at the side of the armchair, her face and body cruelly bloated by the drugs and steroids that sustain what is left of her life. She is fifty-three years old. She knows she is dying yet maintains a sardonic humor, joking that they ought to send her to Chernobyl to help with the cleanup, as she is by now immune to the effects of radiation and has nothing else to do at the moment. She laughs weakly at her own joke, but this exhausts her and she tries to catch her breath, inhaling deep into her chest in short desperate gasps.

The children begin to look concerned, but she regains her equilibrium. She still manages a brave smile behind the clear plastic mask secured by a band of elastic that forms a ridge in the graying hair at the back of her head. Her eyes are shining, wet, and still beautiful. Is she resigned to her fate, or is hers just an extraordinary, courageous performance so as not to frighten us with the enormity of what is happening to her? She is drowning far out at sea and none of us can reach her, but she is trying to reassure us. Her instincts as a mother are intact. The children, three of them under five years old, resume playing contentedly at their grandmother’s feet.

I have not seen Alan in thirty years. He has existed in all that time, not as flesh and blood but as a shadow, never alluded to, never acknowledged, never given the oxygen to be more than a ghost haunting the family. He is frail and somewhat diminished by the
weight of my mother’s illness, but still handsome, and for the first time I am shocked to see the similarity between him and my maternal grandfather. There are so many ghosts here, shadows of shadows of shadows. There is so much of the past that has been unvoiced, and now that we are together there is neither time nor a suitable language to even begin to deal with it. The ritual of the meal will have to suffice. Food will be passed silently and cordially between us, like a secular mass, a last supper.

When we are finished, Alan will wash the dishes and I will dry, placing the clean crockery in neat piles on the draining board. My mother, still surrounded by the children, watches us from the corner. Little is said between us, relying on the shared task of passing the cleaned plates from hand to hand. I suppose there is an unconscious symbolism here, belated notions of reconciliation and forgiveness, mundane domestic gestures of normalcy and acceptance. I reassure myself that these are probably more eloquent than any words that could now be mustered. I understand my mother now; I know what she has sacrificed and I am no longer her judge, no longer my father’s grim deputy, and this is the last time I shall see her.

“I love you, Mum, I’ve always loved you.” She is crying and smiling at the same time; we all are. The children kiss her and we say good-bye.

    A few months after the funeral, my father, at the age of fifty-nine, will be facing his own mortality. I have no doubt that he loved my mother to the end. Her death had foreshadowed and signaled his own.

He has been in and out of hospital all year. The cancer, which had begun in his prostate, has spread upward to his kidneys. Specialists,
surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy have all proved fruitless. He has now been committed to a hospice for the days that remain to him.

I’m led into a room there with a single cot against the wall where a crucifix hangs. I haven’t seen him in a number of months and in the bed is a man I do not recognize. I imagine for a moment that they have put me in the wrong room, but the skeleton below me is my father, watching me with the bleak staring eyes of a starving child. The kind nurse who brought me in quietly pulls up a chair.

“Here’s your famous son come to see you, Ernie,” she says.

“Oh aye?”

I try to compose myself; part of me wants to run out of that room like a frightened boy.

“Hello, Dad.”

“I’m going to leave you two alone now. I’m sure you have a lot to talk about,” says the nurse. Then she leaves us.

I have no idea what to say, so I take his hand in mine and gently massage the soft triangle of flesh between his thumb and his first finger. I haven’t held his hand since I was small. They are big square hands, massively knuckled with strong muscular fingers, deeply lined and grooved. My father’s hands are not the delicate, expressive hands of an artist, but they have a kind of elegance, and so close to death they possess an honest and translucent beauty. They are the hands of a working man.

“Where did you come from, son?”

“I came in from America last night, Dad.”

He chuckles. “It’s a long way to come to see your dad like this.”

“You were feeling better a month ago.”

He shakes his head. “I haven’t been the same since your mother died.”

I remain silent, knowing how much that small confession has cost him. I reach for his other hand and begin to massage it, but he winces. I wonder how much pain he is in. Perhaps he needs another shot of morphine. He seems a hundred years old now.

I look from his eyes to the cross on the wall and then down at his two hands cradled in mine. It is then that I receive something like the jolt of an electric shock, because apart from the color, his hands and mine are identical. The square width of the palms, the same carved scars in the folds of the skin, the big wide knuckles wrinkled like the knees of an elephant, and the musculature fanning out from the wrists to the thick and still powerful fingers. I stare at them for a long time, turning them over and over. Why had I never noticed this before when it was so obvious?

“We have the same hands, Dad, look.” I am a child again, desperately trying to get his attention.

He looks down at the four separate slabs of flesh and bone. “Aye, son, but you used yours better than I used mine.”

There is absolute quiet in the room. There is something like a small bird fighting to get out of my throat and I can hardly breathe. My mind is racing, trying in vain to remember when he’d ever paid me such a compliment, when he’d ever acknowledged who I was, or what I did, or what I’d achieved, or what it had cost me. He had waited until now, when his words would be devastating.

His eyes are closed now as if the last few minutes have exhausted him. It is dark outside. I kiss him softly in the center of his forehead, and whisper that he’s a good man, and that I love him.

    I would attend neither of my parents’ funerals. I would tell myself and my close friends that I was afraid that the tabloid press would turn the events into a degrading circus, that my grief was a private matter and not a photo opportunity, that I’d said good-bye to my
parents while they were still breathing, and what possible difference would throwing a handful of soil onto a coffin make to them or me? Part of me still believes this to be true, and part of me knows I was simply afraid. I escaped the ritual in the same way I had escaped my family when they were living, by pleading the pressure of work, where out in the world ambition had been replaced by responsibility, responsibility to honor contracts and concert engagements, to keep a crew of over sixty people working. But would it have been so difficult to have canceled a few shows, sent everyone home for a week or so? Probably not, but the simple fact is that I didn’t want to, because escape and the need to keep moving had by now become endemic in me. I was addicted to work and endless travel and could no more keep still in one place than I could stop breathing for any length of time. Even the idea of attending a funeral had the effect of strangulation; I couldn’t get enough air into my lungs, and so I would shut it out of my mind, brace myself for the next gig, and keep moving.

But there was a psychological price. I couldn’t mourn properly, so I carried the grief with me. I couldn’t cry or reveal my feelings even to myself, fearful I would be overwhelmed, my carefully constructed self-image destroyed to reveal absolutely nothing beneath. It was in this troubled state in November of 1987 that I made my way to the biggest concert of my life, in Rio de Janiero, outwardly impregnable but inwardly broken. And the rebuilding would take the rest of my life.

THREE YEARS AFTER THE DEATHS OF MY PARENTS, TRUDIE AND I will move into Lake House in the Wiltshire countryside. Not more than a mile from the abbey where Queen Guinevere is said to have been banished by her jealous husband, it is a sixteenth-century manor house set in sixty acres of parkland and deciduous forest. The mullioned windows of the house look out onto the green banks of the river Avon, which forms a meandering eastern border to the property, running south to the sea through the ancient, wooded valley. An enormous copper beech, three hundred and fifty years old, from its massive girth to its giddying uppermost branches, towers above the house like a majestic sylvan god.