The Light of Amsterdam (39 page)

‘Pretty good. For an old guy.'

He was going to reply when the opening chords of ‘All Along the Watchtower' started up and he drew back. It was the opening chords of each song that came nearest to sparking some magic. He was pleased that Jack seemed to be enjoying it but he didn't understand why, when he'd no perfect and personal auditory memory to bolster the failings of the sound and with which to substitute the inadequacies of the voice. But then for all he knew, perhaps for someone more used to listening to the screaming Death Pixels this voice was a beautifully modulated baritone. And if he didn't think he'd return to Amsterdam then he suddenly realised with shock that he probably wouldn't listen to his Dylan records any more. He couldn't listen to them any more without replaying what he didn't want. Everything had been inalterably changed in his mind and the more he thought about it the more he realised that he'd damaged some part of himself by holding on too much to things that had reached their allocated span and should have been let go. He should never have gone to George's funeral – it seemed now like the moment when things had started to spin out of his control – and he shouldn't have come to see Dylan. He knew that there was a weakness at his core, a sentimentality that compelled him to find things to elevate and then cherish with his naive hope and admiration. Perhaps it would be truer and a better medicine for him if he listened to the Death Pixels, whoever they were and whatever they sounded like. Listened then spat them out. And the woman in the art college – he saw now that it had been nothing but a shameful bit of sentimentality, coloured by ego and weakness.

He was glad when the concert came to an end. He was looking at his watch but Jack was raucously clapping and at one point put his fingers in the sides of his mouth and emitted an ear-piercing whistle. His own enthusiasm was largely simulated and on a free choice he would have done without an encore, even thought of suggesting they went to avoid the rush, but as he registered the involvement on his son's face and the way it had flicked into a shape and expression he almost didn't recognise, he lent his loudest cheers to the demand for more. He stood up with the rest of the audience and shouted for more but didn't know what he wanted more of, until after the requisite wait Dylan returned to the stage with nothing more than a slight bow of his head but why didn't he speak, turn everything round and just speak to them, even if it was in clichés, telling them what a wonderful audience they were or making some minor expression of gratitude? Why didn't he come to the front of the stage and strap on his guitar and play it as loudly as he'd done that night in Manchester when someone in the audience had shouted ‘Judas' at him and he'd responded angrily by turning up the volume? But instead he went back to the organ that was both an instrument and a prop to hide behind and in his own disappointment amidst the swelling appreciation all around him, he felt like he was the Judas who after all those years was betraying what he had once believed in. He tried to tell himself he felt lighter, no longer weighed down by the need to give his faith to anyone or anything. And he was going to do it, write the bloody paper on the Yellow House and get it published. There was an arts magazine out of Dublin with someone he knew from way back editing it and he'd write a couple of thousand words of abstract pseudo-intellectual rubbish. He'd tell Stan that it had to be shortened for the magazine and he'd have an impressive bibliography of books he'd never read including some psychobabble ones. He'd finally admit in public that he worked on Maggie's farm and he'd do what they all did which was to do and say anything that kept them safe from the new mandarins, the zealots, the administrative Stasi. And just as he felt the bitterness of his resolution he looked up to hear the unmistakable opening chords of ‘Like a Rolling Stone' and even though they were almost drowned out by the crowd's roar that burst forth as if from one throat, and even if they were stripped down to their bare essentials, they still filled the hall and they washed over him as if coming for that very first time out of that tiny red box in his Belfast bedroom and despite all his conviction, his new resolution, he felt transfigured by the power of that memory, the light riddling through the clouded debris of the intervening years. He understood then that memories couldn't be ditched or simply thrown away like unwanted baggage and without them he would stand naked, shivering unprotected against the winds of the world. So even if that moment and all the other moments like it that had followed would later prove at best insubstantial, at worst illusory, then he couldn't deny them or their part in forming who he was. That at least he couldn't betray. And there was comfort in that until the words barking from Dylan's voice and the whispering descant of his own seemed to taunt him with their questions asking him how it felt to be on his own with no direction home. Then the comfort was edged with apprehension and the knowledge that unless he could divert the path his future imagination had shaped, it would lead inevitably to the painting of the old man. The colours of human passion flooded again through his consciousness in a counter-harmony with the music – the red of the mono record player, the vermilion of the front door of the home he had once shared, the black smudges of crows in the painting clamouring upwards against the yellow of the wheatfields and the blue peasant clothes of the old man as he wept on the yellow chair. The blackness of his son's hair.

He didn't hear any of the concluding songs but slumped back into his seat until it was all over and his son was asking him if he felt all right. For some reason, not least because it was true in a way, but also because his son's expression of almost concern carried a welcome and unfamiliar tone of caring, he told him he felt a little dizzy.

‘It's because the music's loud,' Jack diagnosed without looking at him and instead focusing on his mobile phone. ‘It'll wear off in a minute.'

‘So what did you think of Dylan?'

‘Pretty good. A bit like Kurt Cobain but not as good.'

‘Kurt Cobain?' He couldn't quite believe what his son had said. ‘But, Jack, he put a shotgun to his head and killed himself.' He felt dangerously out of kilter and momentarily indifferent to the delicate gauze of compromise on which his relationship with his son was normally stretched. ‘So how's he like Kurt Cobain?'

In reply Jack fiddled with the buttons on his phone. All the house lights were up. The audience was streaming to the exits. He should have let it go but instead repeated his question, turning to stare at his son and disregarding the insistence he heard in his own voice.

‘I don't know,' Jack said.

‘You think Kurt Cobain is someone to look up to?'

‘Yes.'

‘But, Jack, he killed himself and he didn't care or think about the people who cared about him and loved him.' He should have shut up, knew he was only heading into some counterproductive cul-de-sac, but part of him didn't care any more. ‘The bravest thing you can do in life is go on living.' His son's dismissive trawling through old messages on the phone only irritated him even further. ‘Look at Dylan, always on the road, always performing when he could be sitting at home.' He knew he sounded ridiculous and even more so if he had succeeded in formulating something he was trying vainly to compose in his head about he who isn't busy being born is busy dying but he didn't succeed and instead said lamely, ‘He might have made good music – I don't know – but he shouldn't have killed himself.'

‘You can't say that – it's his life and he can do what he wants with it. You shouldn't judge him. Better to burn out than to rust.' He turned the phone over and over in his hand as if it was a worry stone.

And then something boiled over in him, an anger that had never been in the core of him but only glimpsed occasionally like a molten star on the distant rim of his universe, and before he knew what he was doing he had reached out and snatched his son's phone and was making a call.

‘Hello, is that Kurt Cobain? Yes? Well you're an arsehole who didn't deserve all the talent that you'd been given and you should've been braver and stronger and set a better example.' Then as Jack grabbed his phone back he suddenly felt like the drunk in the bar talking about George and the shock sobered him into a temporary shame.

‘It's not just Mum who's having a breakdown, you are as well. You've both completely lost the plot,' Jack snapped, ostentatiously examining his phone for damage then nurturing it reverently like someone who had just rescued a sacred object from the hands of an unbeliever. ‘What's wrong with you?' he asked, scrutinising him with his one unblinkered eye.

‘What's wrong with
you
?' he countered, throwing shame and caution to the wind.

‘Nothing's wrong with me. What's wrong with
you
?'

It had the potential to ricochet back and forth for ever, trapped eternally in its own bitter motion, and reluctantly he conceded that it was futile, so instead of saying as he wanted to, ‘What's wrong with me, Jack, is I'm pissed off and weary worrying about you – I want to worry about me for a while. In fact I'm pissed off worrying full stop and I want everything to be all right, not brilliant, but just all right will do,' he simply said, ‘I was a bit disappointed with Dylan.'

‘He was
OK
. Maybe he's been on the road too long.'

He hoped he had heard some slight conciliation in Jack's voice but wasn't sure. The rows in front of them had all made their way up the aisles to the exits and they were left to stare at the roadies dismantling the equipment.

‘I suppose your heroes are always bound to disappoint you sooner or later,' he offered, buttoning his coat and thinking that they should go. His son was right – he had lost the plot and wasn't even sure any more that there was a plot. He felt washed out, drained, stumbling along his own road too long and desperate to fall into some deep sleep.

They walked in silence to the metro stop. It was even colder now and he wished he was wearing something warmer under his coat. Jack put his hood up and he glanced at him with envy, then as a poor substitute turned up his collar.

‘It's possible Cobain didn't kill himself,' Jack said, his disembodied words seeping from the shaded cave of his hood. ‘They didn't find any fingerprints on the shotgun trigger. He could have been murdered.'

‘Murdered?' So it was to be another exercise in conspiracy theory. ‘Who would want to murder him?'

‘Don't know. Maybe someone in the music business.'

‘Or a drug dealer? He was a junkie, wasn't he?' he asked with the pleasure of feigned innocence.

‘Don't know.'

‘Yes, if I remember right I think he was hooked on heroin.'

‘When he was only eight his parents divorced and he got screwed up,' Jack said with a throwaway casualness then bowed his head to his chest as if in prayer.

He was trumped by his son and they both knew it as they travelled back in silence to the centre of the city. So a future drugs habit, self-harm and any other deficiency of character were to be his and Susan's permanent responsibility. Their divorce was to be a lifetime free pass, an entitlement to access all areas of personal failure with no need for personal responsibility or guilt. He wanted to tell his son who sat with his face angled to the glass that people got divorced every day of the week, and sad and disorientating as it was, it didn't result in people putting shotguns to their heads, but what was the point? He knew by now that Jack needed to hug his misery tight and long enough until he found something else to replace it. And he could only hope that what he found to replace it was something that would do him good. Only part of his son's face was reflected in the glass and the world outside never formed itself into anything beyond a distorted blur. Just before they arrived back Jack turned his face from the window.

‘Are you going back to the hotel?'

‘You don't want to?'

‘It's Saturday night and we could do something.'

‘It's getting late and we've to get ready to go home tomorrow,' he said but finding a flicker of optimism in his son's use of the word ‘we'. He was suddenly aware of how rarely it crossed his son's lips and so he was unwilling to pass on any opportunity that might help sustain what he was keen to interpret as reconciliation. ‘What would you like to do?' It was their stop and they stepped out into the mist that surprised them both. ‘Hell's bells, where did this come from? I've never seen this before – everything looks a bit weird. We need to make sure we don't get run over by something. Maybe we should just go back.'

‘It's too early,' Jack insisted.

‘So what is it you want to do?' But he knew from his son's mixture of hesitation and conviction that there was something already hatched in his head and he said, ‘Jack, we're not going to a coffee shop if that's what you were thinking and as you have to be over eighteen they wouldn't even let you in.'

‘I don't want to go to a coffee shop. I never said I wanted to go to a coffee shop.'

They both stared into the mist and his own eyes scanned the surrounding neon that looked like smeared watercolours, each diluted from its intensity and smudging aimlessly into one another. Jack shuffled a little then rubbed his foot across the pavement as if he was trying to erase some stain.