Пит Таунсенд - The Age of Anxiety

Little Selena stabbed Michael Collins in the back, and he died. Siobhan was now a mother as a result of murder, and it would be several years before she felt sure enough of herself, and of her strength to survive in a world of predatory men with flying fists, to let Selena find her own way.

One evening in the spring of 1994 Siobhan, in her late twenties, felt free at last to drink and dance, and as Rain’s guest found herself standing at the bar in Dingwalls, slightly tipsy, watching Walter blowing his harmonica, adopting his famous “stand,” driving the girls wild. Realizing that this handsome young pub rock star had a way with words that was redolent in some endearing way of all she could recall of the gentle south west of Ireland she had known before her father lost his wife, her mother, and then lost his mind, Siobhan decided she would marry Walter. She was older than her new man by one year.

Here on the hills of Grasse, Selena and I usually sit mid-morning in the shade of three huge palm trees to drink coffee, scoff a pain au chocolat , and gaze at the distant, shining sea. She asks how my writing is going, and where my memories are misty she fills in the gaps. I knew that she had been one of those Dingwalls girls at the bar who had set their hearts on being Walter’s lover, or even wife. In a way it had been best that her beloved older sister had married him, and not one of Agneta’s spectacular Nordic blondes. She never betrayed any ill feeling toward Siobhan.

The older sister had found a good, kindhearted man in Walter, one who might have poetry in his soul. She married him and planned to shape him soon into the poetic kind of genius she deep down knew he surely could become. I suppose Siobhan and I were united in this belief in Walter’s endless potential, but we never spoke of it. It might be possible that from the dark and vile reality of all she suffered as a girl she had taken up with dreams and fantasies and schemes. We’ll soon find out how far her great ambitions took her; indeed, how far they took her man.

And so the opera can begin, with voices, singing and speaking, and music made from every kind of noise that man and nature ever generated, here combined. There will be an opera.

You will imagine this evocative sound, and this music, just as I heard it for the first time. In fact, I make the claim that my aberrations may have played a part. As Walter’s godfather, let me play God Himself and make a bridge between you and him, allowing me to let you right inside Walter’s mind. Just for a while we float above the chronology, the passing years, months, and hours of the story I have told so far, and occupy the timeless space inside a man’s creative soul. We hear the deep vibrations of his still young mind as he begins to search inside the universe of childhood, its noise and chaos, in some hope of order, and some meaning for us all, his audience of the future, past, and here and now.

A three-year-old boy. A terrifying storm. Wind, waves, blowing gravel, trees bending and cracking, occasional small crashes as debris is blown through the air and lands nearby. After a minute or two the storm subsides. We are left with the sound of the sea, or rather the seaside on a quiet afternoon. A beach somewhere. A few children playing. Distant calls, parent to child, child to child. Seagulls of course, but also a distant radio. The sound of galloping hooves on soft sand. Thudding rhythmically, two horses, breathing hard. Jumps. The whip. Faster. Faster. Then splashing through shallow water. The horses arrive, whinny, rise on two legs, then thud down again, blow air, turn, and ride away.

For a long time, I think, I was the only person Walter trusted to see his first “soundscape” description. It evoked poignant but powerful images from his infancy. It revealed the fear of horses he had felt, and the sadness too, aroused by his childish notion that his parents might love their horses more than him. It’s possible of course he might have shared it with Siobhan, but I saw no evidence that she knew about Walter’s mental aberrations. I wondered if Andréevich would have been able to break out of his self-obsession long enough to read them. Probably not. But I did believe he would help Walter carry the burden of an overactive imagination, or even the psychic connections with the people around him; acting as a kind of counselor, based on his own experience, he might help Walter to feel less afraid.

Some godparents merely send modest presents to their charges at Christmas and on birthdays. I may have taken my obligation to Walter too far, but I did feel it to be a spiritual imperative. Andréevich was no more meant to be a replacement father than I was. I merely felt the opportunity for Walter and the old man to meet had been placed in front of me.

Harry tried to be a good father to Walter, but musicians seem lost on several fronts when it comes to parenting. Harry had fans! No one could play the Preludium in E Major the way he could. Many organists shifted on the bench as though they had a carrot up their arse. But from behind, Harry was elegant. He seemed strong. He was a performer.

“My dad did try,” Walter once told me. “But he practiced for hours in his studio. Then he would be in and out, in a dress suit. Gone. He was rarely out of bed before I set off for school.”

There was a silence then. But Walter did not appear resentful. He was not a neglected child. Harry had charged me, not to be surrogate, but to double up, as it were.

“He was not a snob about music,” Walter continued. “He just couldn’t accept that we loved what had come out of Memphis and New Orleans. I love him, Louis.”

Walter looked at me and for a moment I saw the boy I had once coached in the art of manly absurdity while Harry was away on tour. We played awful football, clumsy tennis, swam like dogs, then he’d be as properly shattered as I was when I got him home.

Walter is handsome. He has the ruggedness of the instigator of trouble, but none of the swagger. He doesn’t normally talk much.

“Did you believe I’d done it with Rain?” he said.

“It’s possible?”

He shook his head.

“You were late to it though,” I said. “Like Rain?”

“You know more about your child’s sex life than my parents know about mine.”

“But the girls do put out to you.”

“Put out.” He laughed. “That sounds old-fashioned.”

“I am that.”

“Working in a club where we have no stage to speak of, just a raised platform, it’s the boyfriends I have to watch. They wait until I’m taking a drink between songs and walk right up to me and poke their finger in my face. It’s my bird’s birthday, they say. And she wants to hear ‘Satisfaction.’ If I hesitate they speak more quietly. Fucking play it, you cunt. Satis-fucking-faction . Play it yourself, you little shithead, I say. And before it can go any further we deafen him and he will slink away.”

“Don’t they get you later?”

“Crow sorts me out if they try. They have knives these days. Crow carries a fucking Beretta.”

A shining star vibrates with the sound of a vast, shimmering, and dissonant choir. A newborn baby cries. Shattering glass. A thousand million cathedral windows in a building as high as the sky, shaken by the rumbling of an earthquake, every pane of leaded glass, every lantern, loosened, falling, at first crackling, then as the amount of glass that falls increases into an almost constant shower the noise gets louder but also softens, losing its edge. Instead a sound almost like falling water fills the air. The building itself is of glass, so when the earthquake hits it eventually takes down not just the panes of glass, but also the building, until all that is left is the occasional tinkling of another last drop of silica rain. Out of the last few small echoes of glass shards slipping—one leaning against another and sliding, breaking again—comes a long, throaty moan. It is the sound of some kind of creature perhaps, or air being forced through some sort of narrow pipe or slit. This sound transmogrifies into the blast of exhaust from an engine, revving up, then taking off. A massive tractor engine of the kind used in American trucks: noisy, throaty, hearty, off, and away.