Later, Fraser took a photograph of them all. It shows the room littered with clothes and newspapers, a message scrawled on the wall in felt-tip pen in Keith’s handwriting: CALL YOU tomorrow. On the left, Anita is reclining in a chair with a cigarette held near her ear. Across from her, Keith is sitting on the arm of the couch reading one of the tabloids. Anita’s crossed legs are resting on his knee. From the other side of the couch, Mick is looking at her with bored aversion. Large paper sunflowers droop from the wall behind him. On the right, Brian is standing in front of the couch, drinking a mug of beer. He’s still dressed in his odd, clownish array of clothes. Whatever is going on in this picture, he is oblivious to it, unable to see it from behind his upturned glass.
Three weeks later, they met up in Marrakech. Nothing had gone as planned. The only people who ended up going by car were Brian, Anita, and Keith, chauffeured by the band’s assistant, Tom Keylock, in Keith’s Bentley. On the first day, Brian started coughing in the back of the car, a wheezing asthmatic gasp that got worse and worse, until he couldn’t breathe. It was much worse than his usual attacks — they had to check him into a hospital in the south of France when he started coughing blood. When the doctors insisted he stay there for five days, to be safe, there was an awkward few hours by his bedside, no one sure what to say. Eventually, he was so ashamed that he told Anita and Keith to go ahead without him, that he’d meet them in Morocco.
They were staying at a modern hotel outside the old city of Marrakech, its beige front hidden by palm trees. He arrived at night and took a cab from the airport. In the room, Anita’s bags were opened on the foldout stand and there was a candle burning on the dresser, casting a bronze glow on the bedsheets that had been neatly turned down by the maid. They had five rooms on the tenth floor, all in a row, but he hadn’t heard any sound coming from down the hall. The more he thought about it, the more difficult it was to reason with himself that they were just in town, enjoying their holiday.
He went out onto the balcony and breathed in the strange, thick air. Then he saw a few small lanterns burning on tables by the pool. He could just barely make out their forms in the darkness and hear the timbres of their different laughs: Anita and Mick and possibly Robert Fraser. He heard the muffled, out-of-phase sound of an acoustic guitar.
He went inside and poured some whiskey into a glass. On the bathroom mirror, he now discovered, there was a message scrawled in red lipstick, written in Keith’s handwriting: COME DOWN to the pool! His face looked absurd behind the lipsticked words, tired and pale from a day of traveling. It was his asthma, his weak, ridiculous body, that had kept him away these five days, and now he told himself to be buoyant and relaxed, but the letters on the mirror were garish and somehow overexcited and he took a Mandrax tablet with the rest of the whiskey before going downstairs.
It was cooler by the pool, and the air felt good on his face, along with the first flush from the drink. In the darkness, Anita was sitting next to Keith on a lounge chair, smoking a cigarette while she watched him leaning over his guitar. Across from them, Mick and Marianne were sitting in a similar arrangement, wrapped up in a blanket. When she saw Brian, Anita gave him the wry smile of a hostess, embracing her knees in her arms. She seemed weirdly proud of him, or proud of herself for arranging this poolside greeting, but it was Marianne who stood up and gave him a kiss, asking him how his trip was.
“Look at the sky,” she said. “The moon. It’s perfect.”
He looked up and saw what she meant. In the dark sky was a crescent moon that sat high above the silhouettes of distant minarets. It was a view you couldn’t look at without admiring the fact that you were in Morocco.
“Come here,” said Anita.
She wore a man’s purple caftan and a single bead on a leather thong around her neck. She reached her hands out to him, leaning into her knees and almost falling forward out of the lounge chair. He grabbed her by the fingertips and held her up.
“Was it all right?” she said, looking up at him.
“What?”
“The flight. Everything. We’ve been worried about you.”
“Yes. Fine.”
She leaned into Keith and he barely moved. He was playing a B7 chord, filling in the bass line with his little finger, a difficult maneuver he kept attempting without getting it to come out cleanly.
“I’m feeling much better,” Brian said.
“Good.”
Mick rearranged the blanket around his feet as Marianne sat down beside him. “There’s a pack of journalists arriving tomorrow for a press conference,” he said.
He let go of Anita’s hands and folded his arms across his chest. “Are you kidding?”
Keith finished with his chord and smirked up at him in welcome. “Why don’t you have something to smoke?” he said.
Brian scratched at the corner of his eyebrow with his forefinger. “A little joke,” he said.
“Yeah, right, a little joke,” said Mick. “Just catching you up, sweetheart. Anyway, I thought you liked talking to the press. Rambling to the press.”
“I like it when you stop poncing around long enough that I can get a word in.”
There were bottles of wine on the pool deck. He picked one up and took a sip and then held it in his hands. Anita watched him, then burst out laughing. She put her hand on Keith’s shoulder and pressed her face to his sleeve. Keith turned his head toward her and put his hand in her hair.
“I’m glad you’re having fun,” said Brian.
She smiled at him from behind her bangs. “I am having fun.”
“I’m sorry I’ve been away for five days missing all this fun.”
He took another sip of the wine and licked his lips. No one said anything. Finally Tom Keylock leaned forward in his chair and tossed him a joint. He caught it awkwardly in his cupped hand and looked down to make sure that it was there, then he took another sip of the wine and reached into his hip pocket for the lighter.
He lit the joint and took a long, slow drag. There was nowhere obvious to sit, so he took the wine bottle and found a seat at one of the tables where a lantern burned beneath the folded-up umbrella. Keith had gone back to playing his guitar. Anita leaned her shoulder against the chair back, holding her knees to her chest, looking thoughtfully out at the swimming pool.
In their room, she sat on the edge of the bed and spoke calmly, reasonably, with the self-assurance of someone who took Pleasure in confrontation. They were just having fun, she said. He knew that they were friends, and he and Keith were friends, so why was he making things up in his mind? They weren’t old people who based their whole lives on appearances. She wanted them to get along, like they did before, but he kept making it harder and harder when he was so jealous and paranoid and strange.
He poured himself another glass of whiskey and went into the bathroom. There was the lipsticked message — COME DOWN to the pool! — the letters slanted and thick in the light from the yellow bulb. He added some bottled water to his glass and now he could picture the two of them laughing together, Keith fumbling in her bag for the lipstick, the two of them exaggerating their enthusiasm, or maybe not exaggerating it at all because he wasn’t there.
“You’re not telling me what’s really going on,” he said.
She turned to him, exasperated. “What do you want to believe is going on?”
“I want to know whether or not you’re fucking him.”
She stood up from the bed. She crossed her arms over her chest, slowly massaging her elbow.
“You’re making accusations, but you’re not thinking about what they mean. You’ve been away for five days and then you come back and expect everything to be exactly the same as it was.”