‘Other people’s eggs have two yolks.’ Bulgarian proverb
After some unspeakable business at Goole Arts Centre, we head for what the promoter proudly introduces as ‘the best restaurant in Goole’. I default to the chicken bhuna, which turns out to be a kind of artificial mycelium woven into a chicken effect and drowned in luminous chemicals. Throughout the meal the promoter recites his own poems from memory. I return to the digs. In the hotel bar the wall-eyed landlord carefully inscribes a perfect arse in the foam of my Guinness, which promptly evaporates before my eyes. I retire to a tiny bare room built around an irregular nonagon, or rather accidentally formed by the unequal pressure of several other rooms; through one of the many walls a couple, possibly human, are making love, though it sounds more like someone is killing them with alternate blows. I attempt to make a cup of tea. The two tiny UHT individual milk-pots are both sour. I hear a low and long intestinal gurgle, the sort of sound that heralds the onset of tropical giardia. I assume it is coming from me, but then the plug pops out of the little washhand basin and raw sewage foams up to form a little pulsing brown wellhead, and the room quickly fills with the smell of hydrogen sulphide and death.
A recurring dream. Hours of inaccurate Pali chanting and 150cc of Macallan concealed in a Volvic bottle finally sees one of the hell-planes’ of my nightmares (the DC 10 with its bolt-on engines; the lopsided Fokker 50) dump me unceremoniously on the ground again. The heat or the cold slams into me like a door, and I stagger down the steps onto the melting or icebound tarmac. I pass through customs as through the lower bardos, and am led to the waiting car by the gentle psychopomps of the British Council, as a man to his doom, which always takes the image of himself, of his own book.
Exeter. After a tolerable meal of egg and broccoli quiche and beansprout salad in the cafe – there being no meat alternative – my friend Michael Donaghy and I do the reading. We also throw in a little music. Mildly euphoric after an evening which contained no major disasters, we retire to the dressing room. Michael produces two bodhrans, an instrument for which I have no gift, but an obscure and persistent enthusiasm. Iron John was heavy in the air that year, and we drum and sweat a whole bunch in our vests. We lose track of the time. We walk to the digs. The building is in darkness. We have no key. No amount of ringing and banging will raise the landlady. We return to the venue, which is now also in darkness. We resign ourselves to a night in the car. It is now bitterly cold, and ice is forming on the windows. We find one tiny tartan blanket in the boot. We try to sleep, but the beansprouts are starting to talk – for me, at least, the promotion of raw vegetables beyond their decorative role is something of a novelty. At least, MD philosophically observes, these eruptions have the effect of raising the temperature briefly; but since opening the window is not an option, the trade-off eventually proves too difficult to stomach. Heartily sick of each other, we separate at 5 a.m. I leave for the station to wait two hours for the nine-hour journey home, while MD heads off, I vividly recall, for no reason – to Redcar. I sit on the freezing platform and watch the dawn spread in the east, like blood beneath a shirt.
I have been booked to address the Penang Poetry Society on Open Mic Night. I am playing music elsewhere in the country (a tour that will culminate in a concert in the Bornean rainforest, where we will be met with a silence beyond mere human indifference: the whole Earth fell silent, as it did for Orpheus. As our last number died away I heard only the cry of a rabid monkey fifty miles upriver, the dead thump of a falling breadfruit.) A Malaysian lady, spotting the bodhran – the bodhran, the last refuge of the charlatan, the instrument which should always stay at home – insists that I accompany her reading. She clicks her fingers to give me the tempo. I lay down an acceptable 4/4 shuffle with a hint of a backstick. She looks at me with a kind of blank contempt. Then she closes her eyes, composes herself, and begins to shout. ‘Fred’s dead/in his bed/hit his head/in the shed/then he bled/got all red/in the shed/Fred’s dead …’
At the interval I leave the superchilled striplit room, and go outside to try and revive my circulation in the hot night. Moths the size of giant pigeons are swarming under the palms. One lumbers towards me. I think, for some reason, of the little cabbage-white alighting on the racket of the young and shyly pretty Chris Evert at Wimbledon, and how the whole game stopped while its tiny blessing was conferred. I realize I cannot open the doors of the venue to get back inside. I start thumping on them frantically. The giant moths start to dive-bomb my head. On their backs they carry the faces of demons.
Soiled underwear in the guest bed is a popular motif in reading stories. In the long years before they learned to say No to all offers of ‘hospitality’, most writers will have encountered this at least once, especially when the bed has been vacated by the host. Though once, in a hotel in Telford, I found some red silk thongs under the pillow, rolled into a little torus; I found this rather touching – it was almost as if they had been left there as part of the turndown service, along with A Belgian Chocolate For Your Dreams. But experience means you no longer dare stretch your toes near the very foot of the bed, where the grubby Ys and jockeys hastily discarded in passion are most likely to be wedged. Nothing, though, could have prepared me for the cardboard-stiff ‘special pants’ I once found jammed under the headboard of my student host.
We are often put up in children’s bedrooms; I have frequently woken crapulously to ant-farms and terrifying ranks of My Little Ponies, and more than once to the ejected child standing silently above me at 6.30 a.m., their expression balefully fixed on the very old and ugly Goldilocks before them. The Worst Bed was in Wivenhoe: a shapeless, single fold-down foam chair lined with a kind of 70s olive-black fake newt-skin. I was so exhausted after my long journey I would happily have fallen into it, though, had it not been in the centre of a living room where the organizer had thoughtfully decided to throw a party for his students. I finally crawled into it at 4 a.m. and woke three hours later, my skin stuck everywhere to its plastic hide with beer and vodka, and my hair full of ash.
Weeks spent in a van full of other men – where the social highlight of the month has been a brief encounter with a Hilton hand-towel – can leave you, like, in a really bad way, man. Hence most itinerant male musicians’ familiarity with that early-morning manoeuvre known as ‘coyote arm’, named for that most pragmatic of animals, who will gnaw off a limb to free itself from a snare. I suspect, though, that there are far more one-armed women walking the streets: confused and disarmed by the magical fug of smoke and candlelight, they have mistaken the saxophonist’s fluent choruses for conversational urbanity and his suit for linen, only to wake beside a drooling and twitching beast identical to the one she has left at home. I’ve been lucky in the friends I’ve found on the road. I have never had the experience, as others have had, of retiring with a lady who turned out not to be, or being talked into wearing a gimp suit, or being introduced to the husband upon arrival at the flat (cheerfully), or suddenly realizing that my partner’s wild orgasm was in fact a grand mal seizure. But the contract between such international lovers always states that you must never meet again. It is an understanding both parties must honour. (Dishonesty in this regard is a Very Bad Thing – for either party. Musicians, remarkably, get hurt too.)
I was back in an East European town I never thought I would see again. Last time, I had given a reading there; this time I was back, guitar in hand, for the annual Jazz Festival. I was already badly bruised from a kind of Oedipal showdown: I was supporting an American guitarist called Ralph Towner, a musician from whom I have derived my entire playing style, and a guitarist so wholly superior to me in every department I can barely claim to play the same instrument. I was positively eviscerated by the experience, and hit the bar.
And heavens, there she was again, that pale, pale face … Oh. She was with the Americans. Worse – I quickly registered – with the bass player. Bassists are the fastest workers in the ensemble. As everyone knows, all jazz musicians play with a deeply pained Jazz Face. (For the record, this look is 3% affectation and 97% concentration: jazz is a tightrope with absurdity on one side, and disgrace on the other.) True, the sound the bassist produces often resembles a series of low raspberries, but because of the beautiful big instrument he wrestles it from, he is the only musician whose Jazz Face looks like lovemaking. This is a fine way of advertising yourself. Compared with the rest of the band – who appear to be flailing around in a welter of agonized constipation, memory loss and recent bereavement – he always presents a figure of attractive self-possession.
The bassist was obviously relating some incident that had happened onstage that night. She threw her head back and laughed her laugh, that perfect little staccato arpeggio, three ascending fifths ending in a squeal; she had one white arm held out before her, and the other raised above her head, like a flamenco dancer. I realized she was cradling an imaginary bass, fingering – uh – its imaginary headstock. I approached her. She’d obviously missed my set, and had no idea I was in town; she looked at me with that vague repulsion you feel when you encounter a thing in the wrong element: a fish on a lawn, a bird on the road, a fully-dressed man face-down in a swimming pool. We talked, while the bassist looked on with a perfect expressionlessness. (Very clever. This is how you play this one: you shut down your aura.) I addressed her by the shortened form of her name he had yet to learn; I reminded her of a joke we’d shared, which we clearly no longer did; I even – all fake-innocent, but cruelly, unforgivably – asked who was looking after her child that evening. I took the hint. I somehow managed to effect a slow dematerialization, and reappeared like a spectre at the bar again. From there I watched the whole lovely negotiation; I couldn’t hear a word, but knew it well enough. Look. Bottom line. I go to Padua tomorrow, Stockholm Sunday, back to Chicago Monday morning. You and me both know there’s more chance of lightning hitting us now than us two ever … and so on, until…but we’ve got tonight. Then her even more lovely mock-disbelief, amused shrug, coy acquiescence. They disappeared into the dressing room and emerged fifty minutes later (reader, I counted them; by then all that was left to me was to make a masochistic fetish of my solitude). They stopped on the stairs, and he turned to her and took her face in both hands, and muttered some poignant sincerity – for only fools and those who have never known the road believe these liaisons are unbeautiful and insincere – and they left together for the hotel.