Runaway (31 page)

‘They were waiting for us after the event that night. A group of psychiatrists from a local mental institution. Throwing themselves on our mercy, they said. But it was no coincidence that the press was waiting for us when we got there. The problem they claimed they were seeking Johnny’s help with was a young woman in a deeply psychotic state. She was locked up in a padded cell for her own safety. Refused to wear any clothes, and hadn’t spoken, quite literally, to anyone for more than six months. They had tried all sorts of shit with her and nothing worked. She was catatonic.

‘So we looked at her through the glass in the door. And she’s sitting there, cross-legged on the floor, staring at the wall. Someone says she hasn’t moved from that position since she performed her last toilet. And Johnny says, “Let me in.” So they do. When the door closes behind him, he starts taking off his clothes. “What the fuck!” they say, and I have to stop them going in to pull him out again.

‘Johnny puts all his clothes in a neat pile in one corner and goes and sits cross-legged on the floor beside her. He doesn’t say a thing. Doesn’t even look at her. Just sits there. Half an hour goes past. Forty minutes. Then after about three-quarters of an hour, I see her half turn her head to look at him. He continues to ignore her. By the time we’re an hour in she’s staring at him. Then suddenly she reaches out and touches his face and says, “What’s wrong?” Within fifteen minutes they are telling each other their life stories.’

The storyteller grinned in the candlelight.

‘Totally backfired on them. Press the next day was full of how Johnny had brought this woman out of catatonia in an hour, when the local psychiatrists had failed to get through to her in six months.’

There was a ripple of delighted applause around the table.

JP tipped himself even further back in his chair and said, ‘I was only after her body.’

Which provoked a roar of laughter. As it died away, so did his smile.

‘Trouble is, most psychiatrists like the sound of their own voices too much. It’s what the patient has to say that’s important. Listening is the virtue.’

And I thought how true that was. Not just of psychiatrists and their patients. But of everyone, in any relationship. And it wasn’t too long before I wished it was a lesson I had put into practice sooner myself.

We never got back to South Kensington that night. We were drunk on wine and high on dope. And by the time we realized the hour, the last tube train had already gone. So everyone went off to find himself a spot to curl up and sleep for the night. Rachel and I were about to make our way up to the roof when Maurie insinuated himself between us.

‘I want a word with Jack,’ he said.

I hesitated, sensing the danger in his voice, then nodded to Rachel. She sighed theatrically and went to wait for me in the common room. Maurie’s voice was low and tight, and his fingers held me by the fleshy part of my upper arm, bruising me, I was sure.

‘I told you, Jack. She’s not for you.’

I looked into his eyes for a long time, trying to find some reason in them for this obsessive protection of his cousin. But all I saw was hostility. ‘Yeah, you did.’

We stared each other out for a very long moment before I pulled my arm free and went off into the common room to find Rachel and take her up to the roof.

The weather had changed during the course of this spring day, a shift of season, and the night air was positively balmy up there. Like a summer’s evening. You could smell the blossom and the scent of leaves bursting out of their buds, and from somewhere the perfume of lilac, sweet and cloying. It was a fragrance I had always associated with the arrival of summer, burgeoning invisibly from the lilac tree that grew outside my bedroom window at home.

We lay back in the deckchairs, gazing up at the sky, and I forced myself to stop thinking about Maurie.

‘What did he give you?’ I said.

‘Who?’

‘JP. This afternoon when you got the shakes.’

I sensed her hesitation in the dark, her reluctance to tell me.

‘I don’t know,’ she said finally. ‘But whatever it was I felt better after it.’ More hesitation. Then, ‘I think he might be an addict.’

I sat up, startled. ‘What makes you say that?’

‘The needle marks on his left arm.’ Maybe she felt my disappointment, because after a moment she added, ‘But who knows? Maybe he’s just diabetic.’

I lay back again in the deckchair and gazed at the cosmos, lost in its vastness, my mind drawn to all those pinpoints of light like a moth to a million flames. ‘You ever wonder what’s out there?’

I turned to see her shake her head.

‘I never do. What’s out there . . . well, we’ll probably never know. And chances are we wouldn’t understand it even if we did. I only ever worry about what’s in here.’ She put a hand on her breast, and turned her head to meet my eye.

‘And what’s in there?’

‘A day or two ago I couldn’t have told you.’

‘And now?’

Her smile was pale and washed with moonlight. ‘You,’ she said. ‘You’re in there. Filling the big empty void that used to be me. Filling it up with something better. Something good.’

While I might have whispered ‘I love you’ in the throes of passion the night before, I knew now in my heart that I meant it. Whatever it was, whatever it did to me, however long it would last, I knew it was what I felt. I eased myself out of the deckchair and took her hand. She stood up, then, and we kissed. And the big furry coat my old headmaster had thrown at me that day in his office got laid out on the bitumen. Our bed for the night, and the cushioning beneath us as we made love again, this time under the stars, as if all of eternity had existed to create only this moment.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

_I

It’s funny how the bizarre nature of that first experience at the Victoria Hall became not only familiar, but routine. In the next month or so we fell into a pattern of time spent between Dr Robert’s house in Kensington and the dafties at Bethnal Green. I use the word ‘daftie’ in that fond, Scottish way that is not meant to offend. Because, in fact, all of us very quickly ceased to think of the residents of the hall as dafties at all. The norm became extended to include what had, at first, seemed outrageously abnormal.

However, smearing yourself and the walls with shit was never going to be acceptable, and everyone at the hall was hugely relieved when JP gave Alice the gift of paint. Using her shit to draw on the walls was, he said, her way of giving expression to her inner self. Literally. But paint very quickly became an acceptable substitute, and across the course of those weeks we saw a marked change in her. Paint became her new medium of communication. JP had acquired from somewhere a huge roll of newsprint, and Alice would tear off great lengths of it to hang from the walls all around the hall and paint. Fantastical, colourful creations with their own narratives. Figures in distress, making love, fighting. Jesus. God. The Virgin Mary.

The hall received frequent visitors – actors, pop stars, writers, artists – and Dr Robert seemed to know them all. He was everybody’s friend. And we were treated as equals by residents and visitors alike. More than once I found myself sitting in conversation with people I had only previously seen on television, or the big screen. As if I were one of them. I saw Richard Burton one time. And Audrey Hepburn another. And had a very stoned conversation with Brian Jones. Gradually I came to see that, for all their fame and celebrity, they were just like us, with all the same fears and insecurities. Knowing that, oddly, had the effect of decreasing mine, and I found myself growing in confidence and maturity.

A BBC documentary crew came and filmed at the hall for several days. I never saw the film they made, but I suppose that somewhere in the vaults of the corporation there still remain some dusty old reels of film, recording for posterity a little of the flavour of that time we spent at Bethnal Green.

The group played often for both residents and visitors, always drawing applause and getting people on their feet to dance. JP himself never danced, but would often stand by the door, watching the dancers with a curious smile on his face.

He asked me once if I didn’t perceive dancing as being a little strange.

I said I didn’t.

And he said, ‘What if you couldn’t hear the music?’

I didn’t see how that was possible. My head was always filled with the stuff.

He smiled that enigmatic smile of his and said, ‘Nietzsche once observed that
those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music
.
It’s a fun thought, don’t you think?’

And I don’t believe I have ever seen dancers in quite the same way since.

Dr Robert promised he would set up a recording session so that we could make demo tapes. Not at Abbey Road, but at a tiny four-track studio above the Marquee Club in Soho where, he said, he knew one of the engineers. But he also said we had to start writing our own songs, just as the young man who might have been John Lennon advised us on our first day in London.

So Luke and I spent hours in the basement flat at Onslow Gardens with an acoustic guitar and the melodica trying to write songs. I suppose that was probably the first time in my life that I really bumped up against my own limitations. We both did. Luke had an extraordinary talent, and I was reasonably accomplished on the guitar, but it was one thing to copy others, another to be original. Writing songs was the hardest thing either of us had ever attempted. It required something else. Something more. Something deeper. And the more we tried, the more aware we became that we simply didn’t have it.

Strangely, it was Dave who came up with the best song during those frustrating, sometimes fiery sessions, when we took our lack of talent out on each other, as if the fault might lie outside rather than inside of us. He turned up one afternoon with lyrics scribbled on a sheet of paper. It was the story of our running away. Unsurprisingly, he’d called it ‘Runaway’. They were simple, narrative lyrics, quite unlike the derivative love-and-loss stories that Luke and I had been playing with.

I never had a lot of friends, truth is I didn’t want them.

Was a lonely kid in my own little world, all I did was suck my thumb.

The whole song was built around three chords. G, C and D, with a repeating chorus of
Run, Run, Runaway, Run-Runaway
.

I can just about remember now how the melody went. But the song itself was never finished, and never recorded, so I have nothing to bring it back, except for the haziest recollection of sun slanting down from high windows in a smoke-filled room, and the all-pervasive smell of damp.

I took JP’s advice and contacted my parents. I didn’t have the courage to telephone, so I wrote them a short letter to say that I was okay. That we were all okay, and that I would be in touch when things had settled down. It was hard to find the right words, and so it was the briefest of notes. Cruel, when they must have been so hungry for news. I had no real sense then of what I was putting them through. Only with the passage of time, and graduating to parenthood myself, was I able to imagine their pain, and realize how selfish and thoughtless I had been.

I just lost myself in Rachel during those weeks. Immersing myself in my obsession for her, burying my head in the sands of our relationship and ignoring the real world that one day I knew I was going to have to face. We made love often, sometimes several times a day. The bedroom with the four-poster bed became ours by default. Dr Robert never mentioned the night that he found us there, but each week when the girl came to clean we would find that our sheets had been changed.

We often lay for hours at night just talking, learning everything there was to know about each other. Childhood adventures, teachers at school, first kisses. Rows with parents. Best friends, worst enemies. Hopes, dreams, jealousies, fantasies. For the first time I felt that I was actually absorbing another person into the very fabric of myself. I got to know every physical and mental contour of this girl who had so bewitched me. We each began to anticipate what the other would say before we said it, and then laughed when we did, both knowing that the other already understood. For perhaps the only time in my life I didn’t feel alone in the universe.

Conversely, my relationship with Maurie was deteriorating almost daily. He could scarcely bring himself to speak to me. Rachel and I made no secret of our relationship, or the fact that we were sleeping together in that upstairs room, and it all came to a head one evening when I interrupted an argument between Maurie and Rachel in Dr Robert’s sitting room. I don’t know where the others were, but I had gone upstairs looking for Rachel. And when I found that she wasn’t in our room, I came back down to hear raised voices. Rachel’s was shrill and distressed, Maurie’s little more than a low growl.