I couldn’t hack the Samaritans, by the way. I couldn’t get to sleep afterwards, worrying about the possible endings of the stories that had been started. Maybe that’s why I’m a ghostwriter. The endings have nothing to do with me.
There’s one decent place on the Northern Line, that’s where I’m heading now: Hampstead. The elevator lugs you back up to street level in less than a minute. Don’t try taking the spiral stairs to save time. Take it from me. It’s quicker to dig your way up.
The obligatory silence of elevators. Could be a Music of Chance song title.
It’s a chance to have a think. Even Gibreel shuts up in elevators.
Poppy once said to me that womanisers are victims.
‘Victims of what?’
‘An inability to communicate with women in any other way.’ She added that womanisers either never knew their mother, or never had a good relationship with their mother.
I was oddly narked. ‘So the womaniser wants every woman he sleeps with to be his surrogate mother?’
‘No,’ said Poppy, reasoning when she should be defending, ‘I don’t quite know what you want from us. But it’s something to do with approval.’
The elevator doors open and you’re suddenly out into a leafy street where even McDonald’s had to tone down their red and yellow for black and gold, to help it blend in with the bookshops. Old money lives in Hampstead. The last of the empire money. They take their grandchildren on birthday trips to the British Museum, and poison one another’s spouses in elegant ways. When I worked as a delivery boy for a garden centre I had a woman here, once, called Samantha or Anthea or Panthea. She lived in a house opposite her mother, and not only loved her pony more than me, which I can understand, but she even loved repairing wicker-seated chairs more than me. My, my, Marco, that was a long time ago.
The sky was clouding over, groily clouds the dunnish white of dug-up porcelain. I sighed quite involuntarily, the whole world was about to cry. I’d had a sexy little umbrella last night, but I’d left it at Katy’s or the gallery or somewhere. Oh well, I’d found it lying forgotten somewhere myself. The wind was picking up, and big leaves were flying over the chimneys like items of washing on the run. All these Edwardian streets I’d probably never go down.
The first raindrops were dappling the tarmac and scenting the gardens by the time I got to Alfred’s.
Alfred’s house is one of those bookend houses, tall, with a tower on the corner where you can imagine literary evenings being conducted. In fact, they used to be. The young Derek Jarman paid tribute here, and Francis Bacon, and Joe Orton before he made it big, along with a stream of minor philosophers and once-famous literati. Visitors to Alfred’s place are like the bands that play the university circuit: only the will-be-famous and the once-were-famous perform. Has-beens and Might-bes. Alfred tried to start a humanist movement here in the sixties. Its idealism doomed it. Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament bishops and that Colin Wilson bloke still drop by. Heard of him? See what I mean...
It usually takes a long time before anyone answers the door. Roy is too otherworldly to notice things like doorbells, especially while he’s composing. Alfred is too deaf. I ring a polite five times, watching the weeds coming up through the cracks in the steps, before I start banging.
Roy’s face materialises in the gloom. He sees it’s me, smiles, and readjusts his hair-piece. He shoves open the door and almost shears off the tip of my nose. ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘hi! Come in... uh...’ I realise he has the same problem with names as me. ‘Marco!’
‘Hello, Roy. How are you this week?’
Roy has one of those Andy Warhol accents. He speaks as though receiving words from far beyond Andromeda. ‘Jeez, Marco... You’re sounding like a doctor. You’re not a doctor... are you?’
I laugh.
Roy insists on helping me off with my coat, and slings it over the pineapple-shaped knob of the bannister. I must look up the correct word for that knob. ‘How’s The Music of Chance? All you young things, playing together and inspiring one another... We just love it.’
‘We laid down a couple of tracks two weeks ago, but now we’re back to rehearsing in Gloria’s uncle’s warehouse.’ Due to a chronic lack of anything to pay with. ‘Our bassist’s new girlfriend plays the handbells, so we’re trying to expand our repertoire a little... How’s your composing?’
‘Not so good, everything I do ends up turning into “A Well-Temper’d Clavier”.’
‘What’s wrong with Bach?’
‘Nothing, except it always makes me dream about a team of synchronised tail-chasing Escher-cats. Now what do you think of this? It’s from a wicked young friend of mine named Clem.’ He hands me a postcard of Earth. On the back I turn it over and read the message: ‘Wish you were here. Clem.’
Roy never makes himself laugh, only others. But he smiles timidly. ‘Now. You’re good with your hands. Can you work out how our percolator works? It’s through in the kitchen here. I’ve just been having no luck at all with it. It’s German. They make North American-proof percolators in Germany. Do you think they’ve forgiven us for the war yet?’
‘What seems to be the problem with it?’
‘Jeez, now you’re really sounding like Dr Marco. It just keeps overflowing. The drippy nozzle thing totally refuses to drip.’
The first time I saw Roy’s and Alfred’s kitchen, it looked like the set of an earthquake movie. It still does, but now I’m used to it. I found the percolator under a large head made of chickenwire. ‘We thought it would give a dead machine a little character,’ explained Roy. ‘It also makes it impossible to lose the percolator. Volk constructed it one spring weekend for Alfred.’
Volk was a truly beautiful Serbian teenager with a dubious-sounding visa who sometimes lived at Alfred’s when he had nowhere else to go but Serbia. He always wore leather trousers, and Alfred called him ‘our young wolf ’. I didn’t ask any more questions.
‘Well, I think the main problem is that you’ve put tea leaves into the filter instead of coffee.’
‘Oh, you jest! Lemme see. Oh, Jeez, you’re right... Now, where’s the coffee? Do you know where the coffee is, Marco?’
‘Last week it was in the tennis-ball shooter.’
‘No, Volk moved it from there... Let me see...’ Roy surveyed the kitchen like God looking down on a mess of a world it was too late to uncreate. ‘Bread basket! Say, go on up to Alfred in his study whydon’tcha? I left him reading last week’s instalment of his life. We both thought it was marvellous. I’ll bring up the coffee when it’s done dripping.’
There’s a sad story about Roy. He used to have his compositions published. He still finds old copies of them, occasionally, leafing through very specialist shops, and he shows them to me with glee. A few times they were performed and recorded for the radio. The American Public Radio Network broadcast his First Symphony, and Lyndon Johnson wrote Roy a letter to say how much he and his wife had enjoyed it. That success attracted negative criticism, too, though, and some bitchiness from the music world filtered down to Roy. It upset him so much that he’s never published anything since. He just composes, wodge after wodge of manuscript, with nobody to hear it but himself and Alfred, and occasionally a young wolf from Serbia, and me. He’s on his thirteenth symphony.
He should hear some of the things that people have said about The Music of Chance. Enough to make your bile freeze up. The Evening News reviewer wrote that he thought the world would be improved if we all fell into the giant food blender that our music resembled. I was chuffed pink.
As I reached the top floor I found that my mind was chewing over a conversation I had the first time I met Poppy. Everyone else at the party was unconscious, and a drizzly morning was watering down the night.