The Light of Amsterdam (38 page)

The lights went down but it was only the warm-up band and there was nothing about their music that suggested any connection with the main act, everything sounding self-conscious and inconsequential, and he began to think that the concert would be a repeat of the Van Gogh visit. It wasn't a great start and two songs in he glanced at Jack to see that he was wearing his earphones and listening to his
MP
3. Despite the paucity of the music it seemed incredibly rude and then he was frightened by the thought that he might do it when Dylan was playing and risk the disapproval of the fanatics all around them who would see his son's actions as sacrilege. He didn't know what to do so he did nothing and hoped he would take them off when Dylan appeared.

The lead singer of the warm-up act sounded embarrassed as he introduced the songs as if he didn't really understand either why they were there. When they tried to kick a little ass it sounded half-hearted just like the applause that greeted it and he turned to Jack to tell him that they weren't very good even though he knew he couldn't be heard. One of his son's eyes was curtained by a drop of black hair that looked colour-coordinated with the black of his jacket. It would have pleased him to lean across and brush it lightly away. But instead he joined the polite applause when the set ended and then the emptying stage swarmed with roadies, tracking and testing, all of them conveying the good roadie ethos that their time on view should be as short and unobtrusive as possible, their dark clothes helping them blend into the backdrop. And for the first time he wished his son was somewhere else, with his mother and Gordon putting a spoke in their freewheeling loving wheels, or even back at home with Jasmine playing grown-ups. This was a special moment for him and he knew that it was going to be diminished by his son's presence, a constant mental distraction, and as he watched him take his euros out of his pocket and count them he thought of him as a moneychanger in the temple.

‘Do you need any money?' he asked.

‘No.'

‘No thanks,' he said, unable not to give some vent to his irritation. ‘No thanks.'

‘No thanks.'

But his son's voice wasn't dripping with sarcasm and that surprise made him wonder if he and Susan should have been firmer, less accommodating, less ready to make allowances for everything. He thought of telling him to sit up but was unwilling to push his luck. And the talk of money reminded him that he hadn't yet bought any of his family their Christmas presents. The best thing to do with Jack was to ask him but it would probably sound as if he was trying to buy him. Perhaps there was something musical he could get him, a new guitar perhaps or an amp – he'd talk to Susan about it. In the past she had seemed to have an inside track to his thinking but he was unsure whether such a thing existed any more.

Jack appeared to be momentarily interested in what was happening on stage as roadies set guitars in place and tested microphones. He was sitting up and had taken his earphones out. Suddenly his face had assumed a childish curiosity.

‘I'm really looking forward to this, Jack.'

‘That's good.'

‘He was such an important part of my growing up and such a big influence on so many things.'

‘When you were a hippy?' His son was laughing at him but he didn't care.

‘I thought I was. Like I said, I only played at it for a while.'

‘And you never took drugs, not even once?' There was disbelief in his voice as he gave the subject a second going over.

‘No, never, and if you really want to know I've never been drunk either.'

‘Everybody's been drunk – you must have been some time.'

His son was scrutinising him, weighing up whether he was spinning him a line, and his unshaded eye narrowed and hardened as it tried to burrow into the truth. But it was important that he didn't make him think he was offering some Sunday-school lesson or holding himself up as a moral template by which he should live his life. At least for this moment Jack seemed interested in knowing this stuff and as the roadies finished their preparations it felt like the briefest of opportunities that he would regret not taking if he let it slip away.

‘You know I grew up in the church and there were pretty strict rules about everything and what life was about was spiritual things, their idea of course of spiritual things. Now gradually I came to believe in other things, things that were spiritual but in a different type of way. Do you understand?'

‘What sort of things – you don't go to church.'

‘No, I don't. Things like art and music, I suppose.'

‘You think they're religious?'

‘Yes, in their own way. Anything that's to do with the spirit, the soul, or whatever you want to call it, is spiritual. When you play your music, your own stuff, you must feel sometimes that it's to do with your spirit, that it's coming from somewhere deep inside yourself.'

Jack nodded without much conviction but it didn't matter because he had his own animation now, the words spurred on by the intensity of memory and the need to explain himself, if not to his son, then to himself at least.

‘Well, when I left all the church stuff behind and was in what the church would call the world, then I didn't want some of those things the world offered.'

‘Because you thought they were sinful or something?'

‘No, I didn't think they were sinful, just that they hadn't any real meaning.'

‘Maybe you were just scared or some kind of good boy,' he suggested but his voice wasn't completely laced with scorn.

‘Maybe I was. Maybe you're right and I was just scared.'

‘Scared of what? Getting into trouble?'

He paused as he tried to think of the answer. Around him the audience had started to rustle in anticipation. Someone let out a loud whoop.

‘Scared of damaging something that was important.'

It was all mangled up in his head now and he didn't have the words to explain about the beauty of holiness that wouldn't make it sound embarrassing for both of them and inexpressibly wet and soppy for his son but just before he slumped back into his seat and admitted defeat, he said, ‘So I ended up living in two worlds, neither one or the other. A kind of limbo.'

Then Jack was saying something to him, blowing away the smudge of hair from his eye as he spoke, but his words were lost in the roar of the crowd as the house lights went down and on to the still-shadowy stage strolled a series of undefined figures.

He heard himself clapping loudly, his heart racing on the pulse of having spoken to his son and having him listen, of being in a place and time which would help him know that the world he was trying to talk about was as real and tangible as the touching flesh of his palms. And there, after all those years there he was, inevitably smaller than anticipated, wearing a black hat with a little feather in the band, black-suited like some Amish farmer, black-suited like a Victorian undertaker, and from the moment he stepped on the stage he wasn't really there but dissolved into particles of memory and re-formed in the iconic images from the albums, the most famous of the photographs. So in an instant he was the coy boyish figure with the upturned sheepskin collar and the corduroy beatnik cap, or with wild electric hair, the scarf, and the serious frown and hooded eyes, and now right before his eyes he metamorphosed into the freewheeling young man with the girl on his arm in the middle of a New York street huddling together against the cold. He couldn't look at him in those first few moments and see him in any way that was constant or confined to the tentative shape on stage that hadn't acknowledged them or taken his eyes from the organ at which he was standing. Instead he was watching a chameleon flicking his changes through the back pages of his memory, each image slowly dissolving into the next and nothing that could ever be gauged or bound in a fixity of time. And something was always hidden, always camouflaged so that the centre couldn't be fully known or commandeered, couldn't be set in stone, always changing. He found himself edging forward on the seat wanting to stand and he thought of Stan and wished he was there in the seat beside him and how they would both find some renewing flame from this experience that would fill their bellies with fire so together they could slay the policymakers and the accountants, the bureaucrats and the administrators whose stony philistine hearts had never known what it was to be alive like this. He felt high. High and almost happy. Even Jack looked alert, craning his head eagerly forward as if the electricity of the moment had flicked him into animated life like all those around them.

Then on the count-in of his head the band started to play and it was ‘Maggie's Farm', the audience applauding their own talent for recognition, but immediately he knew there was something wrong, something wrong with the sound system. And then as he stared at Dylan who was standing sideways to the stage at the little organ that looked like something a kid would get for Christmas, he realised that what was wrong was indeed the sound, but the sound of the voice because what he was hearing was a distant, crumbling echo of what he knew. It was a rasping bear growl, grasping at the words from somewhere dropped far below the pitch of the melody, a hoarse bass counterpoint to the band's replication of the original. He looked at Jack, frightened to see some withering sneer of scorn, but his son was staring intently at the stage and all around them the audience was clapping and whooping its encouragement, singing along when he reached the refrain and everyone insisting they weren't going to work on Maggie's farm any more. But it sounded like a man singing into a beer bottle, half-spoken, half-sung, the familiar words slowly separating from the sound memory was playing in his head. He was shocked, immeasurably shocked – the voice was gravelled, shot to pieces – but he couldn't look away or relinquish any of the fascination he felt in the presence of this man he thought of as a shaman, the truest and most poetic chronicler of the age, of someone touched by genius. He struggled with his confusion as the songs tumbled out in the same, unbroken style, the band delivering the songs in their slick, effortless performance, buoying the singer up on the current of their playing, carrying him and creating little cameo spaces for him to fill.

He hadn't spoken to them yet and didn't look like he was going to and apart from a scrunch of the shoulders or a slight dip forward was almost motionless, a dark totemic figure blending with the backdrop. When he played ‘Don't Think Twice, It's All Right' he reached for the harmonica for the first time but now there was no angry discordant blare of sound, just a vague contribution that got lost in the backing. He didn't know what to think. The music had always felt like the songlines of his life, mapping out and patterning his existence, but now each new tune felt nothing more than an historical artefact, devoid of meaning other than the one constructed by memory. Gradually he realised that it wasn't possible for him to hear anything independently so it no longer mattered about the voice because what he was hearing come tumbling out was the past.

And there he was with Stan marching with their rather superior, arty placard to Ravenhill rugby ground to protest against the appearance of the apartheid-era Springboks and there he was picketing the American consulate in Queen Street about their imperialist involvement in some South American country he couldn't remember. But he had never been a real radical – unlike Stan he had been too scared to try and invade the pitch that afternoon. It was more an infatuation with radical dreams that had his support – he was never a true believer in the reality of the politics, just fleetingly drawn to anything that seemed to offer a romantic sensibility, a seasonal Guevara T-shirt wearer, rather than a card-carrying signed-up member of anything. And when the Troubles arrived and there was no room for play politics any more he'd done what everyone else had done – dug a deep hole and climbed in. So he was only counter, only underground, only radical in his wishful imagination and there was no part of his life that he could ever think of as freewheeling. The closest he came to that, and inevitably in spirit rather than in body, was the first time he arrived in Amsterdam. His own summer of love – unreciprocated and unconsummated but a memory that was special to him and which in this concert hall felt like it had now reached a moment of finality. He thought it unlikely that he would ever return. If truth be told he'd spent his life working on Maggie's farm and as he listened to Dylan croak the start of another song that blurred almost seamlessly into the previous one, it seemed as if the city had cast him off for ever.

Perhaps he had been unworthy of it, perhaps it was just one more thing rooted in his own peculiar and only half-understood need and which he had constructed purely from his own desire. So now as the band seemed to be locked in an interminable blues rhythm that made them sound like a weekend backroom combo, he thought only of his family and how it was splitting and rippling ever further beyond his reach. He turned to Jack who for some reason he couldn't understand was engaged in what was happening on stage and hadn't put in his earphones or played with his mobile phone even once and as the song chugged to an ending his son was clapping with what appeared to be sincerity.

‘All right, Jack?'

He couldn't hear him so leant over and spoke into his ear. ‘All right, Jack?' It was the closest physically he had been to his son. Close enough to smell the leather of his jacket, close enough to catch that musty scent of his body. ‘So what do you think?'