So far the weather had been dull and overcast but bright sun over the south-west had been forecast for the following day. As Freddie and I tucked into a five-course meal at the hotel that night, he said that in the circumstances we were virtually obliged to take off to some coastal resort and spend the day lying on a beach, eating ice-cream and making up answers to the questionnaires. The next day we did a few interviews and then caught a train to Teignmouth where we’d arranged to meet Carlton. By lunch-time the three of us were on the beach, jackets folded up in plastic shopping bags, sipping cold beers and using questionnaires to keep the sun out of our eyes.
‘Paradise,’ said Carlton, speaking for all of us in a voice that was drowsy from the heat and the beer. ‘Three quid an hour for doing fuck-all.’
‘Not quite fuck-all,’ I said. ‘There’s still the questionnaires to make up.’ Inventing answers was not as simple as we thought; it was very easy to make some little slip which had your imaginary respondent making an impossible journey or travelling on a non-existent ticket. In a way, as Freddie explained from his deckchair, it was a bit like writing a noveclass="underline" you had to invent a character — a retired school teacher, a business executive — and think yourself into his itinerary and probable opinions.
‘We’d better leave it to you in that case then Freddie,’ said Carlton, as we rolled up our trousers and paddled in the grey-green ocean.
026
We had only been back in London a few days when I got a call from Freddie. He sounded a little strange and said he wouldn’t be coming over that evening.
‘How come?’
‘I got my head beaten in last night.’
‘Oh no.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Where are you?’
‘Home.’
‘Have you been to hospital?’
‘I went this morning.’
‘Are you OK? I mean. .’
‘I suppose so.’
‘How. .? Hey listen, I’ll come over late this afternoon.’
‘That would be nice.’
‘About four or five. Is there anything I can bring you?’
‘No.’
On the way to Freddie’s I stopped at the record stall in Brixton market and bought an Art Pepper album. Freddie took a while to come to the door — I heard him shuffling along the corridor like an old man — and when he opened it he just nodded slowly. He was wearing dark glasses. His face looked puffed up and purple in places.
‘Freddie,’ I said, feeling tears pricking my eyes. I put my arm around his shoulder. I closed my eyes tight a couple of times and then stepped back.
Freddie took off his glasses and in the bright sunlight I could see the harm done to his face. One side was swollen out around the cheekbone and badly discoloured; the other was livid and bright-looking. There were small cuts on his forehead and cheek. One eye was swollen shut and purple; the other was bloodshot but basically OK. His lips and nose were swollen. Both nostrils were filled with hard black blood. His voice came out thick and bubbly because the inside of his mouth was smashed and swollen. He looked so bad it was difficult to imagine his face ever healing again.
We walked to his room and Freddie lay on the bed, propped up on pillows.
‘I’m so sorry Freddie.’
‘Me too.’
‘Are you going to be OK?’
‘Yeah.’
It didn’t matter that this was all we said. It didn’t matter that we didn’t hold each other and sob, that words adequate to the situation were not there. Tenderness is a matter of inflection, not vocabulary.
‘I’ve brought you a record,’ I said. ‘I thought getting something for nothing might cheer you up.’
‘That was kind of you. .’
‘How d’you feel?’
‘I’ve felt better. My head aches, I get dizzy when I stand up, my nose hurts, my mouth is sore. My ribs hurt. .’
‘What happened at the hospital?’
‘I spent the whole morning there. I was sitting next to a bloke with a big bloody bandage round his foot, tucking into a bag of McDonald’s burgers. Have you been to a hospital recently?’
‘No. .’
‘It was like a DHSS waiting-room. The same atmosphere: people driven there as a last resort. Everything old and worn out and not even clean-looking. All the doctors and nurses looking like they were going to drop dead from exhaustion at any moment. I tell you, I’m going to join BUPA.’
‘What did they say?’
‘They took a whole load of X-rays. Basically I’m alright. My teeth are still all there, my nose and jaw aren’t broken. My eyes don’t seem to be damaged. .’
There was a loud knock at the door.
‘That’ll be Carlton,’ said Freddie. I let Carlton in and made some tea while he went in to Freddie.
When I returned with the tray Carlton was very gently dabbing Freddie’s face with something.
‘It’s arnica,’ he said. ‘It brings the swelling down and soothes everything. How’s that feel Freddie?’
‘OK. Nice.’
Carlton continued very gently putting this thin cream on Freddie’s face. Again my eyes nettled with tears. I poured the tea while Freddie — he couldn’t drink, his mouth was too bad — told us what happened. He’d just come out of a party when a young guy asked him the time. Freddie said he didn’t have a watch and next thing the guy was hitting him all over the place. He didn’t even take any money.
‘I don’t remember much else,’ Freddie concluded. ‘Except that just after I’d fallen on the floor he kicked me in the chest but I had a book in my coat pocket and that took the brunt of it.’
‘What was the book?’
‘Rilke poems funnily enough. It’s made me regard him in a whole new light.’
A few moments later Carlton said, ‘Did you get a look at the geezer?’
‘Not really. I hardly saw him. Just a young black guy, short hair, leather jacket. About twenty I suppose. Younger maybe.’
‘Would you recognise him again?’
‘No. You know, he was just some guy who was so pissed off he wanted to beat somebody’s shit in so he’d feel a bit better,’ said Freddie. ‘It could’ve been a lot worse. I wasn’t stabbed. Nothing’s broken. . Once in six years, you know? It happens.’
We stopped speaking and listened to Art Pepper. It was a recording of a gig he played a couple of years before he died, the music of someone who’d learnt to cherish what he did. Pepper was an alcoholic and a junkie; he served time in San Quentin, but he didn’t squander his ability by getting as fucked up as he did. He had to waste his talent in order for it finally to flourish. As an artist his weakness was essential to him; in his playing it became a source of strength.
The room filled up with hurt pity and the tenderness of scarred hands. The music cried out but there was no appeal in it; it had to find its own consolation.
I was still at that age when you do not form friendships but are formed by them, when there is no difference between having good friends and being a good friend. I’d known Freddie for a long time, six or seven years, twice as long at least as I’d known any of my other friends. I hardly ever kept in touch with people for more than three years — Freddie was the only exception I could think of. After about three years of knowing a group of people your identity becomes fixed by their expectations, you become trapped by your shared history; your range of responses becomes more and more limited. After a certain point there’s no room for anything but the most gradual alteration in your identity. The past suffocates and restricts and the only way you can breathe and move again is with completely new circumstances, new people. With Freddie it was different. My affection for him exerted no pressure. I mean the kind of pressure where liking someone makes you want to be like them — this was exactly how I felt about Steranko — and then, after a while, that turns into its opposite: you begin to dislike them for not being enough like you. I say ‘you’; I mean ‘I’.