Peter May - Runaway

However, smearing yourself and the walls with shit was never going to be acceptable, and everyone at the hall was hugely relieved when JP gave Alice the gift of paint. Using her shit to draw on the walls was, he said, her way of giving expression to her inner self. Literally. But paint very quickly became an acceptable substitute, and across the course of those weeks we saw a marked change in her. Paint became her new medium of communication. JP had acquired from somewhere a huge roll of newsprint, and Alice would tear off great lengths of it to hang from the walls all around the hall and paint. Fantastical, colourful creations with their own narratives. Figures in distress, making love, fighting. Jesus. God. The Virgin Mary.

The hall received frequent visitors — actors, pop stars, writers, artists — and Dr Robert seemed to know them all. He was everybody’s friend. And we were treated as equals by residents and visitors alike. More than once I found myself sitting in conversation with people I had only previously seen on television, or the big screen. As if I were one of them. I saw Richard Burton one time. And Audrey Hepburn another. And had a very stoned conversation with Brian Jones. Gradually I came to see that, for all their fame and celebrity, they were just like us, with all the same fears and insecurities. Knowing that, oddly, had the effect of decreasing mine, and I found myself growing in confidence and maturity.

A BBC documentary crew came and filmed at the hall for several days. I never saw the film they made, but I suppose that somewhere in the vaults of the corporation there still remain some dusty old reels of film, recording for posterity a little of the flavour of that time we spent at Bethnal Green.

The group played often for both residents and visitors, always drawing applause and getting people on their feet to dance. JP himself never danced, but would often stand by the door, watching the dancers with a curious smile on his face.

He asked me once if I didn’t perceive dancing as being a little strange.

I said I didn’t.

And he said, ‘What if you couldn’t hear the music?’

I didn’t see how that was possible. My head was always filled with the stuff.

He smiled that enigmatic smile of his and said, ‘Nietzsche once observed that those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music. It’s a fun thought, don’t you think?’

And I don’t believe I have ever seen dancers in quite the same way since.

Dr Robert promised he would set up a recording session so that we could make demo tapes. Not at Abbey Road, but at a tiny four-track studio above the Marquee Club in Soho where, he said, he knew one of the engineers. But he also said we had to start writing our own songs, just as the young man who might have been John Lennon advised us on our first day in London.

So Luke and I spent hours in the basement flat at Onslow Gardens with an acoustic guitar and the melodica trying to write songs. I suppose that was probably the first time in my life that I really bumped up against my own limitations. We both did. Luke had an extraordinary talent, and I was reasonably accomplished on the guitar, but it was one thing to copy others, another to be original. Writing songs was the hardest thing either of us had ever attempted. It required something else. Something more. Something deeper. And the more we tried, the more aware we became that we simply didn’t have it.

Strangely, it was Dave who came up with the best song during those frustrating, sometimes fiery sessions, when we took our lack of talent out on each other, as if the fault might lie outside rather than inside of us. He turned up one afternoon with lyrics scribbled on a sheet of paper. It was the story of our running away. Unsurprisingly, he’d called it ‘Runaway’. They were simple, narrative lyrics, quite unlike the derivative love-and-loss stories that Luke and I had been playing with.

The whole song was built around three chords. G, C and D, with a repeating chorus of Run, Run, Runaway, Run-Runaway .

I can just about remember now how the melody went. But the song itself was never finished, and never recorded, so I have nothing to bring it back, except for the haziest recollection of sun slanting down from high windows in a smoke-filled room, and the all-pervasive smell of damp.

I took JP’s advice and contacted my parents. I didn’t have the courage to telephone, so I wrote them a short letter to say that I was okay. That we were all okay, and that I would be in touch when things had settled down. It was hard to find the right words, and so it was the briefest of notes. Cruel, when they must have been so hungry for news. I had no real sense then of what I was putting them through. Only with the passage of time, and graduating to parenthood myself, was I able to imagine their pain, and realize how selfish and thoughtless I had been.

I just lost myself in Rachel during those weeks. Immersing myself in my obsession for her, burying my head in the sands of our relationship and ignoring the real world that one day I knew I was going to have to face. We made love often, sometimes several times a day. The bedroom with the four-poster bed became ours by default. Dr Robert never mentioned the night that he found us there, but each week when the girl came to clean we would find that our sheets had been changed.

We often lay for hours at night just talking, learning everything there was to know about each other. Childhood adventures, teachers at school, first kisses. Rows with parents. Best friends, worst enemies. Hopes, dreams, jealousies, fantasies. For the first time I felt that I was actually absorbing another person into the very fabric of myself. I got to know every physical and mental contour of this girl who had so bewitched me. We each began to anticipate what the other would say before we said it, and then laughed when we did, both knowing that the other already understood. For perhaps the only time in my life I didn’t feel alone in the universe.

Conversely, my relationship with Maurie was deteriorating almost daily. He could scarcely bring himself to speak to me. Rachel and I made no secret of our relationship, or the fact that we were sleeping together in that upstairs room, and it all came to a head one evening when I interrupted an argument between Maurie and Rachel in Dr Robert’s sitting room. I don’t know where the others were, but I had gone upstairs looking for Rachel. And when I found that she wasn’t in our room, I came back down to hear raised voices. Rachel’s was shrill and distressed, Maurie’s little more than a low growl.

As I walked into the room Maurie was snapping at her, ‘Don’t you dare tell him!’

‘Tell who what?’

They were both startled by my unexpected arrival, perhaps wondering just how much I’d heard. Which was almost nothing.

Rachel stared for a long hard moment at her cousin. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ she said, and she turned and ran out of the room, brushing past me as she hurried into the hall.

I heard her footsteps on the stairs. ‘What the hell’s going on, Maurie?’

He turned on me, almost puce with anger. ‘I told you to stay away from her.’

His anger fired mine. ‘And I told you, it’s none of your fucking business.’

‘She’s my cousin!’

‘So bloody what? That doesn’t give you the right to tell her who she can and can’t be with. She’s her own person. Entitled to make her own decisions without reference to you.’

He took a step towards me, his whole body conveying barely restrained violence. ‘Stay away from her.’