Later we leave our room to find food, Evie wearing the beaded headband I bought her from Carnaby Street. The turquoise a nice surprise against her unwashed hair. Evie entranced, following trails of sounds like a dog on the scent, changing tack when she picks up a new one … clanks and hisses and taxi brakes and stand-up rows in the street … I chase her this way and that. New York, she says, sounds like prisoners banging tin cups on the bars of their cells.
23 Sept
On the bus. Can’t take in much. Way too twitchy, too horny … feeling pretty high from last night, and then there’s this local kind of high I’ve got, right between the legs … Oh Mama! We opened last night. Saw some of the show from the wings but mostly heard it from backstage. Wardrobe duties. D’d rush in, shrug into whatever alien kimono we held out for him, then rush out. A couple of times he got the chance to smoke a fag, too hyped to sit, leaning back instead against the dressing table with one leg folded under him like a long white locust. But Evie. Evie was out there in the audience. I caught the end from the wings, saw the guys take their applause like soldiers home from battle, sweaty and victorious, bloodied almost in the lights, the rest of us standing around like handmaidens. When they came off I caught a look in D’s eyes that made me flinch. The emptiness you get. Hung around backstage as long as I could, waiting for E. She never showed. Went with the others to the aftershow party. I’m getting drunk fast on the champagne and the mood, stumbling around looking for her. Then I spot her. She’s under the piano. Sitting cross-legged, palms on knees guru-style. She smiles up at me then takes tissue paper out of her ears. She’s had it in most of the night. The gig was too loud. But not at first: she dug the idea of this whole alter ego thing, the band stepping out on stage as characters. But then at its peak, during the anthem, staring in wonder at this beautiful alien come to Earth to save the kids with rock ’n’ roll, she catches the eye of a woman in the front row who gave her such a look — ‘she could see I was believing a lie and despised me for it’ — and that was when she had torn up some tissue paper and stuffed it into her ears –
Scribus interruptus. Evie read the first line over my shoulder. Gave me a kiss that nearly made me come, then took matters into her own … fingers. Slipped them into my jeans and into me and fingered me right there under cover of my denim jacket. Wow. Wow. Wow.
24 Sept
Another hotel. E asleep, hair the colour of damp sand. Our things less ours with each new room we move to. On the cabinet between our beds (but we only sleep in one), E’s beaded headband has the look of an object left behind by someone else. Is this true of people too? No. In an unfamiliar room, crammed together in a single bed, we’re more each other’s than ever. No sign of the night terrors. She’s my amulet.
Last night, in bed, after a languorous fuck, stretching our limbs most extravagantly (the luxury of a bed!), I told E about Elvis, since we are in Memphis. She’d only just about heard of him. Such a square! So I held her tenderly in my arms and sang ‘Love Me Tender’. Then I taught her the words. We sang it together, and she recorded it. Like most people with terrible voices, she sings with great enthusiasm.
25 Sept
Travelling to New York. Night. Lying in Evie’s lap, eyes closed, a sleep that itself feels in transit, Evie stroking my hair, me vaguely aware of E and Zed, the make-up artist, talking in low voices over me. Far away and in my head as voices sound when you’re half asleep. E telling Zed about her project. About how, in Memphis, she’d gone to a barber’s to record the sound of a wet shave, the stropping of razor on leather, the slapping-on of foam, the razor rasping skin. Then she’d recorded the sound of the barber ringing up payment in his old-fashioned cash register. That’s when she realized that any sound she chose to record would, at the point of her hearing it, become in some way extinct: she would never again hear the sounds she was hearing right there, right then, in that way.
Evie gently shakes me awake, into that close, womb-like dark that settles over you when you’re driving at night. Look! she says, pointing at the moon. Huge, champagne-coloured, low in the sky. You could reach out and touch it and as I think that, she puts her fingers to the glass. Makes me glad and sad at once to think we’ve reached a point of remembering when she says, Reminds me of the night we drove to Easdale.
28 Sept, New York
They got me doing the statue thing out front for all the freaks coming in. Evie a no-show. Drinking after. Went to sit on what I thought was a chair but turned out to be a cunning arrangement of shadows — a strong grip on my wrist. I was caught in time. Zed. A gymnast’s body and the kind of rolling bow-legged walk of a cowboy. Zed asked about me being painted up like a mime, and I told her my story. She gave me some shit — ‘This’ll make you feel like you’re on stage.’ We spent the whole night talking. Me mostly, about Evie. Her old-fashioned face and tissue paper in her ears and the recording project and the din of herself. Zed told me about anechoic chambers — dead rooms — where all sound is absorbed and all you hear is the blood in your head.
— Evie has just come in and jumped into bed all excited about having recorded some girls singing skipping rhymes in a part of town we were told to stay away from but Evie, she’s an angel who walks unthinking of the harm that melts to let her pass. They just dig her here. Didn’t mention the anechoic chamber.
29 Sept
Monster America! Riding the back of it. An endless spine of road that rolls through rocks and crags and mountains, dark banks of trees as far as forever. The wide, blue jeans sky. We flash by gas stations, small towns, low-roofed barns. We glimpse horses, wind ruffling the pastures and making warm pelts of them. Now and then goods trains run alongside. Different from English trains — more resolved with their long blunt noses. Bull-headed. Evie loves the sound of their horns blaring.
Two hours from Washington we get out at a truck stop and order pancakes. Evie chats to a big-shouldered man on his way to a cattle auction. Asks if she can record him. They go outside into the parking lot. I see her point up at the sky. A single cloud. Can’t hear but I can tell. Auction that, she’s saying. He fixes his eyes on the cloud. Inhales deeply. Launches into a spiel without stopping. A controlled kind of babbling. He looks possessed, eyes rolled up at the sky like that. Evie stands amazed, holding out her mic. He’s finished. For a moment, Evie’s static with shock, then she launches into gestures of amazement.
She played it to us now on the bus. Like nothing I’ve ever heard before. A foreign language. A kind of yodelling. Like the same two strings on a banjo twanged again and again, a rhythm to his babble, and remembering how he looked possessed, I think of speaking in tongues. And then it occurs to me. What Evie is doing with her project. She is divorcing sound from gesture. Opposite to me.
3 Oct (I think)
New York again. Shitty hotel in xx. Our room looks out on to a blackened wall. 5 a.m. and I’ve been lying here since I got in, an hour ago, staring at that wall. Evie not back yet from wherever she went tonight: said she’d go out and record. I had no gig tonight but she didn’t ask me to come. Went out nightclubbing with Zed. Quite a scene here. Everyone a star but me a black one, a collapsed one. Invisible somehow. Afterwards, walking back to the hotel, everything still leaking neon in the early hours of the morning, I had that feeling you get on tour sometimes, of forgetting where you are, your centre. I feel very far away. But from what?