Thirty-One

Tragically, we filed out of our meeting in Jem’s hotel room in Yokohama, in time for a couple of minutes’ reflection in our own rooms before going down to the van to take us across to Seaside Park, and to our evening performance at the WOMAD festival. With grave ceremony, in my darkening room, I rolled up my stage trousers and shirt in one of the bath towels. I stood for a second or two, wondering if and how I should mark the event, but ended up, as was my custom, patting my pockets for picks, pass, fags and lighter, tucking the rolled towel under my arm and leaving the room.

Throughout the gig I was torn between, on the one hand, solemnising the occasion of firing our singer by keeping my movements to a mournful minimum and, on the other, in deference to the audience, pretending that nothing had changed and showboating as normal. Either way, I was incapable of not stamping my foot, jerking my body to recapture a wayward accordion strap, or wobbling my head in time to the music. Whenever I did, though, I thought everyone else in the group might think I was faking it or was just crassly insensitive. In the end, I thought, fuck it. Despite having little desire to loft the accordion skyward or descend to my knees at the final flourish of any of the songs, I did it anyway. I wasn’t indulging in the occasion. I wasn’t pandering to the audience. I wasn’t rallying the troops. I wasn’t unaware of the significance of what we’d done. I flung the accordion up and twitched my head. I pounded the boards with my heels and tried things on – ridiculous and inapposite Tex-Mex lines, couplets reminiscent of music hall, slathering glissandi with my fingernails – because I made the assumption that these last remaining gigs in Tokyo, with Osaka and Nagoya yet to get through, were the last I was going to do with the band.

On stage, we could barely look at one another. Darryl, in his youthfully stripy T-shirt, half of it tucked into his jeans, stepped back and forward with his bass, avoiding looking at Shane. His hair was long now and fell over his face in tatty ringlets from the swimming pool. The expression on his face was one of brooding anger. Despite our concerns that he simply had not been cool enough to replace Cait as our bass player, a nobility seemed to have attached itself to Darryl. I loved his authority and kindness, his indefatigable enthusiasm and his quintessentially English eccentricity.

Now that he had grown his hair long, Andrew, sweating behind his drum kit, looked like someone from the Iron Age. He had tied his hair into a rudimentary ponytail. He stared too at nothing, distracted and dissociated, but played with just as much heft as he always had, the sticks held awkwardly in his otherwise craftsmanly hands. I could have wept at the tribulations he had suffered and still did and would likely for years to come, but he looked indomitable, elemental, hewn from granite. I loved his dependability, the ruminative rhythm of his utterances and the pastoral tranquillity which came with him wherever he went.

Spider, in a shirt open to his waist, cast sidelong looks at Shane, full of betrayal and anger, but regret too. I remembered Spider and Shane’s riotous exchanges in the kitchen at Burton Street, their explosive cackling in dressing rooms, on buses, on stage. I lamented their broken brotherhood. Though I hated the way Spider had exempted himself again and again from the bother of the consequences of what he did, I cherished him. I looked at his blotchy and swollen face. Part of me feared that before long – in the next couple of years – I’d get a phone call from Jem to tell me of Spider’s death. Another part of me knew, though, that Spider was too inventive a guy for such an outcome.

Terry at first seemed to have been untouched by the events of the afternoon. He stood where he always had, in his cheap black suit. He played as he always had, lifting his head now and again to a patrician angle. When he wasn’t looking at his tiny fingers on the frets of his cittern, he studied, with the intensity of a shill, what my fingers were doing on my keyboard. Throughout our set he avoided looking at Shane. If he happened to, I saw him look away.

Despite having barbarously lashed my ears for years and maddened me with the sanctimony of his experience, I loved Terry too. It might have infuriated me that he never played the same thing twice, was incapable of keeping to the book and made a meal out of the simplest lines, but I loved to play with him, so attentive was he to what I played. I basked in his sometimes lofty and avuncular goodwill towards me.

Philip, in a misshapen blue suit and plantation tie, hair tousled by the wind coming in off the Pacific Ocean, stared most of the time at the floor. He played his guitar with little exaggeration and avoided throwing shapes. I owed so much to Philip. If it hadn’t been for him I would have stayed cemented to my position at the far side of the stage like a post, resentful of the attention I wasn’t getting. Despite his hangdog yearning for me and his virtual imprisonment of me during those first couple of years, I admired his perseverance and his loyalty.

Jem hung back behind the line of microphones next to the flight case on which his hurdy-gurdy stood. Though often detached at the far side of the stage, he and I, now and again, in the course of a gig, would exchange a look prolonged both by the distraction of playing our instruments and by our fondness for each another. Tonight though, Jem had isolated himself behind Darryl. When I looked over at him he was staring into the middle ground, his eyes wide and sad, his lips protruding. He played gazing out, seeming not to take in the audience, which bounced in front of us, impulsively ebbing and flowing, orange from the lights: the bobbing black heads of hair, the seemingly uniform faces. It was an expression I had seen on Jem’s face many times when the unpredictability of circumstances and people conspired to frustrate his idealism and inventiveness. Tonight, his face was unbearably sad, resigned, full of fear, angry and resolute.

Guessing that circumstances would prevent me afterwards, I longed for the opportunity to convey to him how grateful I was to him – my best man, my counterpart – to let him know how much I loved him. He did not look back at me. I looked away.

Philip came up to sing ‘Thousands Are Sailing’. He stood sad and stern at the microphone. A frown knitted his brow. His scutiform face was handsome, his lashes lush. Behind him, the blue vaguely zebra-print banners began to snap in the wind.

I had always adored his song. Now, the events of the afternoon imbued it with such significance that tears filled my eyes. I knew the song was not specifically about the band’s circumstances, nor about those of any particular member, not Shane’s, nor mine. The fact, though, that in a couple of days, like the addressee in the song, I would be making a similar transformative trip to America caused the lines to turn round to address me and my circumstances.

The words of the song always had, but tonight they devastated me with their ghosts haunting the waves, the old songs taunting or cheering or making you cry. I knew, when it came time to go to my empty room at the end of the night, I would close the door behind me and look out over the lights of Yokohama Bay and the ocean beyond. I supposed I would cry too.

As Philip sang ‘Thousands Are Sailing’ I caught sight of Shane, sitting next to Charlie McLennan on a flight case in the darkness in the wings. His arms lay slack on his lap. His crippled hands clutched a plastic glass. His face in dark glasses was inscrutable.

I didn’t know much about Jewish teaching but I did know of the creation myth. As Adonai contracted to make room for the physical world, the vessels containing the divine light broke, letting the light out. It crossed my mind that my life with Shane so far had been a matter of watching his breakage. The gratitude I felt for him at that moment outweighed my feeling that, on his path of self-destruction, he had just betrayed us.