Some Kind of Fairy Tale (19 page)

But he was modest and he never stole the light. He was always expected to offer a guitar spot, either solo or accompanied by a couple of grizzled and fossilized old hippie musos he’d known for years; and even though his playing was way superior to most of the guests, he always made sure a visiting act concluded the evening’s performance. Unless they were awful, and that night the guest band, three kids called The Dogs, were atrocious. Richie salvaged the evening first by appearing to approve of the boys by joining them onstage, and then rounding off with a glittering smoky blues-and-folk medley in which he found himself showboating.

Showboating because his headaches were getting worse and he thought that if he could lose himself in his music, then the pain might recede. Meanwhile, he was self-medicating with chasers of beer and whisky. It didn’t matter: stone-cold sober or in his cups, he could always put an audience in a spell.

These live performances somehow never quite carried over into his recordings. And there had been recordings over the years. He’d knocked out three vinyl albums with major record labels. The first two albums had bombed, despite healthy reviews in the national press, so his third album was “fly or die.” It died. He came back a few years later, by which time almost all recorded music had migrated from vinyl discs to CDs, with a couple of releases on a smaller but respectable label. He mixed genres. His stuff was a moody and eclectic blend of blues and rock that he’d translated into the synth-rock world but with growly vocals. He was always missing the wave.

Between all this he was often in demand for sessional studio-work, and more than once he added memorable licks or riffs to some pop diva’s limited ideas. He spent a lot of time doing what he called “polishing turds,” only to see the polished turd rocket into the stratosphere, trailing silver, gold, and celebrity stardust. His only acknowledgment might have been a modest kill fee. Session artists didn’t get royalties.

One time he polished a turd so lovingly it spent twenty weeks at the top of the singles charts. He’d added a catchy intro and a complete
bridge to a lame three-chord trick brought dead-on-arrival into the studio by a well-known egomaniac with an orange tan and huge floppy bangs. The song got picked up by a major movie and sold in the millions all over the world. Richie got none of it.

He’d had enough. He got the support of the Musicians’ Union and gathered together enough money to mount a court case to claim some royalties from all this success. The floppy fringe lied shamelessly in court and so did the record label. Richie lost, and even though everyone knew that the real work was his, the failed action left Richie busted and broke.

Thereafter, a decline of ambition set in. You can be an aging rock star, but you can’t be an aging wannabe rock star. All that was left for him to do was focus on being a damn good musician.

A
PART FROM THE FLASHES
of migraine, the evening had gone well after The Dogs had been ignored off the stage. Richie and his accomplished fossils had pulled the audience back into line with a sparkling and versatile set mixing standards and classics and some of Richie’s own compositions on a theme of lost love, all of which, though none but Richie knew, were about Tara and the losing of Tara.

There was just a single fly thrashing in the ointment. All night, one member of the audience had been giving him the evil eye.

When he was a young musician Richie had learned to blank out the audience, or at least to see it as a homogenous creature, a multiple-eyed many-tentacled lumbering beast there to be tamed and charmed. But now, with his musicianship being so expert and so relaxed that it seemed effortless, he had plenty of time to look around, to note nuances in the audience response, and to check out individuals. It became an interesting hobby: watching people watch him.

And there was this one scruffy weather-beaten dude who had spent the entire evening squinting with malevolence at him from the side of the hall. The man sat alone at a table, nursing a single pint of ale for the duration, exuding disdain. Richie knew professional cool when he saw it: A&R men from record companies who refused to be impressed by anything, watching sullen and unsmiling
and unmoved. This was not professional cool on display. This was something else.

The man was expressionless but somehow hostile. He wasn’t interested in the music. He wasn’t attracted there by the drink, or by the company of the audience. He just seemed to fix his neutral but chilling gaze on Richie.

Even for the pro that Richie was, it was unnerving.

When Richie concluded his shimmering big blues finish at the end of the evening he earned rapturous applause from the hundred and fifty people in the hall; but from this sullen, staring man, nothing. Not a flicker of interest. Just a baleful gaze.

Richie set his guitar down on its stand and stepped offstage. Behind the stage was a shabby hallway that passed for a backstage green room. It did no more than give the performers a place to appear from and retreat to, and the audience the illusion of a dressing room area.

There Richie found a towel and the glum consortium of The Dogs, three lads with stubbled chins and tousled hair. It seemed to Richie that the dress code of the kids was exactly the same as it had been when he was starting out.

“That was something special,” one of the boys said.

Richie nodded and wiped his face of the sweat induced by the stage lights and the overcrowded atmosphere of the pub. “Thanks. Praise from another musician is the best kind.”

“We were shit and you know it,” said one of the other boys.

“You weren’t shit; some of what you did was good. You just lost the audience, and once you’ve lost them it’s very tough to get ’em back.”

“Got any advice for a young band?” said the first.

“Don’t look at me, ’cos I’ve fucked up everything I’ve touched. Here’s good advice: do what I don’t do.” He picked up a sports bag stuffed with CDs. “Now I’m going out front, and if I can flog a handful of these I might eat this week.”

Richie went out again and set up the CDs on a table near the stage. He could usually sell ten or a dozen copies at a good knock, and that helped bulk out his slender income. He always mentioned the CDs two or three times during the evening, so there were a few people waiting by the stage with ready cash.

Someone wanted his CD signed, and Richie was happy to snatch off the cellophane packaging and sign the cover; otherwise he would pocket the flat ten pounds he charged for each copy, offer a handshake, and look to the next person in the line. He sold a few copies and then turned to a young woman in dark glasses and a leather jacket who had already picked up a CD from the table.

“Of course I want it signed,” the young woman said.

“Fuckin’ hell,” he said, “fuckin’ hell.”

He just hadn’t expected her to turn up at one of his gigs. That was not how he’d imagined it after Peter had said that Tara would want to see him. His hands trembled. He needed a glass of something.

She didn’t take off her dark glasses. Even though the venue was dark, he could see her looking shyly but evenly from behind the tinted glass. Her lips were slightly parted. “Well?”

“Okay,” Richie said. “Look, go through to the lounge bar. It’s quieter. I’ll finish up here and come over.”

She looked at him again, quietly placed the CD back down on the table, turned, and went.

Someone else wanted a copy. “Nice set, Richie,” a disembodied voice said. Money changed hands. He signed a couple more copies. More money changed hands. He hardly knew what he was doing. He nodded and smiled but his heart thumped and his migraine was splitting his skull.

Then there was just one more person wanting a copy. It was the man who had been giving him the evil eye all evening. “Sign one for me,” said the man.

Richie looked into the stranger’s eyes. There was no recognition. As far as he could tell the man was a complete outsider. “What’s your name?” Richie asked.

“Just sign it.”

Richie signed the copy and accepted the ten-pound note that was pressed into his hand, and the man slipped away through the noisy crowd of drinkers.

“He looked like a wrong ’un,” said one of the boys from The Dogs.

Richie blew out his cheeks, shook his head, and gathered up
his bag of CDs. He planned to come back for his gear later. Squeezing through the drinkers, he accepted a few pats on the back as he went. “Nice one, Richie.” “You ain’t lost it, son.” “Lovely stuff, Richie, mate.”

Then he went out of the room in search of Tara.

T
he lounge bar of The Phantom Coach was the oldest part of the pub. It had a low ceiling with exposed oak beams, and horse brasses on the brick walls. The room winked with reflected light on copper and brass. Richie found Tara sitting at a table in the corner, a delicate hand resting on the empty table. She was still wearing her dark glasses.

He asked her what she was drinking, and she asked for a snakebite, a cider and bitter mix with a shot of black currant, a ridiculous concoction they used to drink when they were kids. Drinks at The Phantom Coach were on the house for Richie. He ordered himself a more sensible pint of bitter and a whisky chaser.

Setting the drinks on the table, he sank down beside her. He tried to look into her eyes behind the dark glasses. He thought she blinked. She picked up her cloudy glass of snakebite and took a sip before carefully replacing it on the table.

“I’d like you to take those glasses off.”

“The light hurts my eyes.”

“Could you take ’em off anyway?”

“Why?”

“So we can talk.”

“Talk with your mouth. Not your eyes.”

Richie didn’t answer.

Tara sighed and took off the dark glasses, folding them and placing them on the table beside her glass. Her eyelashes fluttered. She squinted at him.

Christ
, he thought,
Genevieve was right
. She did look incredibly young. “What’s a-matter with your eyes, then?”

“I’m sensitive to light.”

“Seen a doctor? Optician?”

“No.”

“You should. Get it sorted.” He took a sip of beer and the foam left a trace mustache on his upper lip.

“Maybe I should.”

“Don’t leave it. That’s when things go wrong.”

Richie tipped back his whisky and he winced, not because of the taste of the scotch but because of a flash of migraine. He tapped his whisky tumbler on the table and looked at an elderly couple almost canoodling near the door. He and Tara had been thrown out of this very pub twenty years ago for a bout of overexuberant kissing.

“You don’t seem to have much to say,” he said.

“No. I don’t.”

Without knowing it, Richie instantly fell back into the rapid dialect he might have spoken with Tara twenty years earlier. “I mean, Peter tole me, like, he tole me all abart this fuckin’ story you giv’ ’im. Christ, that’s precious, that is, precious. Comin ’ome wi’ that on yer back. Teks some trunk, Tara, it teks some trunk and I always knew you ’ad a beautiful imagination, burra would nerra guessed that you’d think anyone else would cop a story lark that. It’s soo bad it’s good. It’s soo far aht it’s.… what can ah dream up that is sooooooooo off the wall they’ll atta believe it, double-bluff, kind o’ thing, shit or bust.”

“Right.”

He came out of dialect again. “Twenty fucking years, Tara. Twenty. And I almost got banged up in a prison cell for doing you in, but you know what? I have been in a prison cell. I have.” He tapped the side of his head. “In here. Twenty years, hard, breakin’ rocks.”

The elderly couple by the door looked up as Richie raised his voice.

Tara reached across the table to stroke Richie’s hand but he snatched it away.

They sat in impossible silence for a while.

“Your playing is incredible now,” she said.

“Yeh?”

“Really. I can’t believe how different it is.”

“Well, you’d hope for a little improvement after twenty years, wouldn’t you?”

“But it’s like you reached your goal. You’re as good as you wanted to be. Better.”

“Where you been, Tara?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yeh? You don’t know?”

“No, I don’t know. I’m not pretending. I just don’t know. I can account for six months and then there’s a gap of nineteen and a half years that’s missing. I’m seeing a shrink. He’s going to help me find the missing years. And before you say anything, I don’t expect you to believe me. I don’t expect anything except hurt, anger, contempt, and puzzlement. Now can I put these glasses back on, because this light is really hurting my eyes.”

Richie looked hard at her. Her face didn’t seem a day older than it had been when he’d last seen her. She had a pleasing tan now that she’d never had, a tawny or golden hue that suited her. When he looked into her eyes he saw hurt, but he also saw youth, the crystal fountain. He thought there were tiny, silvery laughter lines around her eyes that hadn’t been there before. There was something in her demeanor, however, that had never been there before, something that sat on her shoulders. It might have been wisdom, but whatever it was, it was new.

Richie nodded and she slipped her dark glasses back on. It occurred to him that she might simply be hiding behind the shades, using them so that her face couldn’t be read properly. Sore eyes were a convenient cover for people who didn’t want to be seen. “You really don’t know where you’ve been? What are you, like an amnesiac?”

“Apparently. Except for six months. Which are very clear to me.”

Richie glanced away from her again in exasperation, but as he
did so he spotted someone glowering at him through a small glass panel in the door to the lounge. It was the man who had been staring at him throughout his performance that evening.

He mouthed back at the figure: “Want my ass, do ya?”

Tara had to turn to look over her shoulder in order to see whom Richie was scowling at, but she was too late and he’d gone. “What is it?”