Phil Rickman: The Cure of Souls

Prof Levin grinning ruefully through his white nail-brush beard: a shaven-headed, wiry man of over sixty years old – precisely how far over nobody would know until he was dead and not necessarily even then. When Lol had first known him, Prof had been the world’s most reliable recording engineer, always in work, and then, after forty years in the business, he’d emerged as a revered producer, an icon, an oracle.

And now a bucolic oracle. Disdainful of belated acclaim, Prof had quit the mainstream industry. He would produce only material that was worth producing, and only when he was in the mood. He would create for himself a bijou studio, a private centre of excellence in some deeply unfashionable corner of the sticks. Knight’s Frome? Yeah, that sounded about right. Who the hell had ever heard of Knight’s Frome?

Who indeed? Down south, there was at least one other River Frome, only much bigger. The Frome Valley here in east Herefordshire had just the one small market town and a string of villages and hamlets – Bishop’s Frome, Canon Frome, Halmond’s Frome and little Knight’s Frome, all sunk into rich, red loam and surrounded by orchards and vineyards and hop-yards under the Malverns, Middle England’s answer to mountains.

Not that Prof appeared to care about any of this; that it was obscure was enough. In fact, the real reason he was here, rather than the west of Ireland or somewhere, was that an old friend, a one-time professional bass-player and cellist, was currently vicar of Knight’s Frome. It was this unquestionably honest guy who had identified for Prof a suitable property: a cottage with a stable block and pigsties but no land for either horses or pigs, therefore on sale at an unusually reasonable price. And Prof had shrugged: Whatever . He had no basic desire to communicate with the landscape – or with people, for that matter, except through headphones.

Unless, of course, he needed help. Arriving out here, marooned among crates of equipment, Prof had put out an SOS to every muso and sparks he knew within a fifty-mile radius – only to find that most of them had moved on, some to the next life.

In the end, it was only Simon, the vicar, and Lol Robinson, formerly songwriter and second guitar with the long-defunct band Hazey Jane, now on holiday from his college course in psychotherapy. Not that Lol was any good with wiring, but that wasn’t important; it was mainly about making the tea and listening to Prof grouch and taking the blame for malfunctions. This afternoon they’d installed the final wall-panels, and tested the new acoustics by recording – in the absence of anything more challenging – some of Lol’s more recent numbers.

This had continued into the night when, at some point, Prof had stopped cursing and wrenching out leads and replacing mikes… and sat back for a while behind the exposed skeleton of his mixing board, just listening to the music.

And then had stood up and stomped across the studio floor, positioning himself menacingly in the doorway of the booth where Lol sat with the old Washburn on his knees.

‘Laurence! You little bastard , stop right there.’

Lol looking up timidly.

‘Listen to me.’ Prof glowered. ‘How long, for fuck’s sake, have you been sitting on this stuff?’

It was past eleven now, but the night was still awash with pale light, forming long lakes in the northern sky. To the south, a plane tracked across the starscape like a slow pulse on a monitor.

In the middle distance was a round tower, like some story-book castle, except that the tip of its conical hat was oddly skewed. There was a window-glow visible in the tower, unsteady like lantern light. Lol was stilled by the unreality of the moment, half feeling that if he were to climb over the farm gate and walk towards that tower, the entire edifice would begin to dissolve magically into the grey-black woodland behind.

It was, he concluded, one of those nights for nothing being entirely real.

From the shadowed field beyond the gate, he heard the slow, seismic night-breathing of cattle, so loud and full and resonant that it might have been the respiration system of the whole valley. The air was dense with pollen and sweet with warm manure, and Lol experienced a long moment of calm and the nearness of something that was vast and enfolding and brought him close to weeping.

At which point he cut the fantasy. The fairy-tale castle hardened into a not-so-ancient hop kiln. There were dozens of them around the valley, most of them converted into homes.

Sad. Not some rich, mystical experience, just another bogstandard memory of the womb.

… Because therapy, Laurence, is the religion of the new millennium. And we’re the priests .

Lol gripped the top rail of the gate until his hands hurt. Prof was exaggerating, of course. His material wasn’t that strong.

Anyway, Lol was too long out of it. The most he’d done in years had been occasional demos, for the purpose of flogging a few songs to better-known artists – makeweight stuff for albums, nothing special. It was an income-trickle but it wasn’t a career, it wasn’t a life, and he thought he’d accepted the reality of that a long time ago.

Back in January, he’d enrolled on this course for trainee psychotherapists, the only one he could find still with any available places, up in Wolverhampton. It made a surreal kind of sense to Lol, though he didn’t share the irony of it with any of the other students, certainly not with the tutors.

Without actually saying therapy, shmerapy , Prof had managed to convey a scepticism well over the threshold of contempt.

‘I can’t believe you waste your time on this! You want to take money for persuading the gullible to remember how they were abused by their daddies, then they go home and slash their wrists? It’s like I say to Simon: you’re just being a vicar for you , not for them. Who gets married any more? Who wants to hear a sermon, sip lemonade at the vicarage fête? If you want to reach people, cure people, calm people, and you have it in you to give them beautiful music, from the heart… then, Jesus, this is the real therapy, the real spirituality. Forget this counselling bullshit! Who’re you really gonna change?’

Of course, Prof knew all about Lol’s history on the other side of psychiatry, brought about by early exposure to the music business – the blurred fairground ride ending in half-lit caverns with drifting, white-coated ghosts and gliding trolleys, syringes, pills.

Medication: the stripped-down NHS was a sick system, drug-dependent. It made sense to Lol that he should be using his own experience to help keep other vulnerable people out of the system. Otherwise, the medication years were just a damp, rotten hole in his life.

Prof knew all about this, just didn’t accept the logic.

‘Listen to me, boy, I have strong contacts these days… people who trust me, who tend to act on what I say, and I’m telling you, you gotta take these songs into the market place.’

‘Well, sure,’ Lol said obligingly. ‘Anybody who wants one—’

‘No! They’ll want you ! Listen to me. I can get you a good tour—’

Lol had been backing away into the booth at this point, the guitar held in front of him like a riot shield, Prof pursuing him, hands spread wide.

‘Laurence, you’re older now, you know the score, you know all the traps. I’m telling you honestly: you don’t do this now, you’ll be a very embittered old man one day. Jesus, what am I saying, one day ? How long you been out of it now – ten years, fifteen? That’s three whole generations in this business! How much time you really got left? How long now before the looks start to fade, before the winsome little-boy-lost turns into some sad, wrinkled—? Listen to me!’