Пит Таунсенд - The Age of Anxiety

Floss shook her head. “I want you to be here,” she said. “I feel safer with you here.”

Walter was angered by this. “You’re completely safe with me, darling, don’t be so mad. I’ve never raised a finger to you.”

Floss looked at him beseechingly. “I don’t mean that you would hurt me. This concerns Louis. He is a part of all this.”

Walter was looking at me with complete astonishment, and I found it hard not to look guilty. Was she going to speak about the drugs I’d shared at his wedding to Siobhan eighteen years earlier? I felt a rising sense of panic. Would she confirm what Selena had accused me of? Of raping her. From what Selena had said I assumed that Floss didn’t remember anything about it. But then of course I did not remember what happened and I couldn’t be sure Selena was telling the truth when she said she knew. What had Floss meant when she said I was a part of what she had to say?

“Please, you two,” she said, composing herself. “Just sit the fuck down and stop looking at each other like that.”

Walter and I sat together, but as far apart as we could, on the long gray sofa in the dressing room. She pulled up a chair to face us and sat down.

“You know, Walter, that I lost our baby when I fell from Dragon.” Walter said nothing, but nodded his head imperceptibly. “Well, I lost a baby once before.”

Walter immediately got up and knelt in front of her. He took one side of her face in his hand.

“When? How?” He was ready to forgive her anything, it seemed.

“I was nineteen. I gave birth to her in the same clinic in Bern where I was born. Fucking Catholic parents: I didn’t consider abortion. Now of course I wonder where she is.”

“A daughter?” Walter was shaking his head in incomprehension. “What happened? Did the child die?” Walter was looking at his wife, wide-eyed.

Floss shook her head. “No. She lived.”

Walter was getting angry, but his anger seemed aimless, wide-ranging.

“Did your parents take you to Bern? Jesus Christ! How could they take you to the place where you were born?”

“They know nothing about this. I found the address of the clinic in one of my mother’s books. I told no one. No one knows, except Selena.”

“Who was the father?”

“I don’t know, Walt.” I could hear her misery. “I should never have given her away.”

Walter looked stunned. Clearly he was thinking that Floss must have enjoyed a wild sex life before they married that he knew nothing about.

“Oh, Walt,” Floss protested. “Don’t look at me like that. I mean I don’t know who had sex with me at your wedding. I wasn’t a virgin when we married, but neither was I a wild child. Selena and I always looked much wilder than we really were.”

Oh my God! My panic was ramping up. Has Selena told her I was the father? If she tells Walter, he’ll kill me.

“Who was it?” he was demanding again, more firmly. “Do you know? Surely you must be able to guess?”

She shook her head. Because unlike me, she had no suspicion at all as to who the father of her daughter might have been. Walter’s mood broke, and he drew Floss to the sofa to sit between us and put his arm around her, pulling her head to his chest and caressing her hair.

I breathed a great sigh of relief and put my arms around the two of them as they held each other, both with tears in their eyes. But my relief would be short-lived.

Floss knew nothing about what had happened to her baby. She had been running away from it all for her entire life. She looked at Walter then, shamefaced.

“It was at your wedding, Walt,” she said once more, breaking into body-shaking sobs. “I got completely smashed.”

“As one does at weddings,” interjected Walter, trying to soothe his unhappy wife a little.

“Selena gave me some drug or other. I think it was horse tranquilizer.”

“You’re saying you had sex at my wedding to Siobhan?” Walter was starting to see that this was not a story that would necessarily end so badly if only he could contain himself. “You got pregnant, had a baby whom you gave away. Who adopted the child?”

Floss shook her head again. “I don’t know. My parents met my mother Maud Andréevich very briefly in the clinics when they adopted me, but they knew nothing about her. They had no way of knowing who she was or where she lived. That’s what I wanted for myself. It had worked for me, and for Mum and Dad.

“I don’t know who the father of my daughter was, and I have no idea where my daughter might be today. I’m still not entirely sure I ever want to know. Selena got the drugs from someone else. I always thought it might have been Ronnie, he’d had some ketamine, but he always denied giving it to me. He never wanted to speak about the wedding. He always said it had been a bad and unhappy day for him. He’d never elaborate.”

Oh my God! I wanted to shout at her that I never gave her the fucking ketamine. It was Selena. It was Ronnie. Anyone but me. Not me. Not now. Oh fuck!

Then I heard Floss laugh through her tears.

“On top of the alcohol, it mixed really badly and I passed out. All I can remember is that I woke up with someone carrying me to a sofa. Then I passed out again. I can remember nothing. But I think that person made love to me while I was drunk.”

Walter was quick to correct his wife. “No one ‘made love’ to you, Floss.” His voice was firm, and very angry. “You were raped.”

Walter now knew Floss had been raped by an unknown man at his wedding to his first wife. He did the math: he thought, God! Floss had been just eighteen years old. I had to stand there and nod my head.

“Yes, yes,” I heard myself say, aware that I was the culprit. “Awful, terrible.”

If Floss had really been completely unconscious, I thought, I must have been pretty much unconscious as well.

But a vague memory did come back to me at that moment, of Ronnie being around and Selena too, and I knew we’d all taken a hit of the ketamine I had brought. I’d taken cocaine too, and drunk a fair bit of champagne. At such times I always felt I was merely dabbling. If it wasn’t heroin then it couldn’t be all that bad. More memories came to mind. I had a shadowy, swirling image of the four of us dancing in a circle with our arms linked. We were singing and laughing. I remembered Selena kissing me, and then her kissing Ronnie. I remembered that I was surprised at Ronnie; didn’t gay men find that a turnoff? Did Floss kiss Selena? Did she kiss Ronnie? Did she kiss me?

Then, nothing. No more memories. No images.

Walter’s anger switched to Selena.

“What the hell was Selena doing divvying up hard drugs? Wherever they came from. Jeez!”

I was tempted again to shout out in my own defense, but I couldn’t break my cover. In truth, I had no defense.

Floss tried to quieten him, pleading with him not to be angry. “You know the story, Walt,” she cried. “Selena killed her own father to stop him beating and abusing Siobhan. She was eight years old. That damaged her forever. She’s never had a long-term relationship.”

Walter held Floss’s face in his hands. If ever he might have composed a sonnet it would have been then.

With a sudden flash of comprehension, Walter exclaimed, “Floss!” He was almost laughing. “The baby you gave birth to in 1995 in Bern, she will still be alive!”

A voice screaming over a huge PA system at some massive public event. “Welcome to the gates of hell.” Hell. The inferno. Torture. Flames. The rack. Evil laughter. Bodies being beaten, burned, thudding, falling. A ghastly choir. An electric guitar, strangled, itself tortured. A ridiculous organ. The stupid shouting of a football crowd, an Islamic horde, a Pentecostal congregation. A preacher “casting out devils.” Aspirants speaking in tongues. Crowds of people chanting angrily in many and different demonstrations. Hippy drummers, native drummers, drumming, thundering, a building anger driven by the rhythm, transmogrifying into a driving rock ’n’ roll band of the old school, playing at full tilt. The sound is huge. This is pub rock, meets pomp rock, meets garage punk, meets prog rock, meets God rock, meets road rock, meets hell-on-earth rock, meets acid, garage, rap. This massive, frightening, disturbing soundscape eventually becomes the rap-rock-pop backing track to the worst excesses of stadium rock, festival rock, heavy metal, death metal, MTV, guitar smashing, and all of that puerile shit…