Fall to the Ocean

The heat melted the air above the pool, the desert beyond unresolved, a smear of browns and golds, the sky a big, stupid blue. Stell lay facing me on a sun-lounger, her body in a foetal curl inside her long, leather coat. Her fingers shook as she smoked. Not the Stell of my memory but a make-over, face pale and sharp beneath a crest of very black hair, eyes covert behind horn-rimmed shades, a pout of vampire red lipstick half on her mouth, half off. The other two girls were mopsy-curled blondes in bikini bottoms, laughing into their drinks, blinky-eyed in the heat, their mascara smudged with sweat. Opposite them, ignored by them, a red-haired boy in Bermudas, shark’s tooth necklace around his neck, plunked a 12-bar on an unplugged Fender bass. My bass, another old friend - the white Precision with the red devil decal bought out of the band’s first record advance in a shop on the Charing Cross Road.

I stood over Stell, included her in my shadow. “Everyone, this is Bam,” she said. ‘Say hello.” She was too cool to show any surprise at seeing me after so long. Either that or the years since I’d walked out on her and Ben simply didn’t count.

The mopsy blondes nudged each other, amused by the idea of greeting me. The bass plunked on, out of tune, out of time.

Stell tapped ash from her cigarette and tilted her blanked-out eyes to my face. “Pour yourself a tequila, you old twat. Eat the worm.”

The room was dark. Indian blankets covered the windows. Ben lay on the bed watching a Mexican soap opera, face lit by the TV screen. The light reflected in his eyes as he turned to me.

“Bamforth? No-one told me it was Halloween.”

The J200 on the bed had a split in the front and a broken E-string. I moved it out of the way and sat down. Ben cut the loud Spanish voices with a flip of the remote.

“How did you find us?”

“Patience and a map.”

“Maps are so literal. They make you think you know where everything is. You living in the States now?”

“No, it’s a business trip. Band I’m managing. Got a couple of gigs out here on the coast.”

Ben nodded, his expression blurred. “I’m working on some new songs.”

“Good.”

“Best stuff I’ve ever done. Got quite a few labels interested. Don’t want to rush into the studio. Need to get a few guys together, you know. But it’s difficult. The last bunch gave me ball-ache. My old record company wasn’t any better. The fuckers wouldn’t recognise good music if it walked up with a flashing neon sign around its neck and introduced itself by name.”

“It’s a business, Ben, it always has been.”

I first met Ben and Stella in the late sixties in a rehearsal studio underneath Old Compton Street. I’d seen an advert for a guitar player in one of the music papers and decided that poverty was more decorous in a band than out of one. I was a romantic just like everyone said they were back then.

Going down the stairs there was the usual smell of damp, dope and patchouli oil. Torn posters covered the thick, padded door. It was dark inside, but I could just make out the gleam of a drum-kit on a riser in the corner. To the left, two faces were turned towards me, pale moons in a windowless night. Dawn began to glow as my eyes became accustomed to the dimness.

“Hi, I’m Stell,” one of them said, getting up and coming towards me. She was a little blonde with the small features of a child. Her smile, her big smile, made me feel right at home. We shook hands, both of us laughing at the formality, and then she took me over and introduced me to Ben, a chubby guy with very long curly hair. He was sitting hunchbacked over an acoustic guitar, his arms folded along the top of it like a boozer at the bar. He did not look up at me when he said a quiet hello. The guitar was a pile ‘em high sell ‘em cheap model, twenty quid at the most. It didn’t look promising.

“We were just having sandwiches,” Stell said. “Cheese and chutney. Do you want one? It’s proper Cheddar. I got it from the street market near our flat.”

Ben and I chatted about music for a while. Influences and all that – influences were very important back then. I named some people he’d never heard of and he named some I’d never heard of. It was a kind of competition. He was very shy, but friendly, an animal wanting secretly to be petted.

Stell leant over and put her hand on Ben’s shoulder. “Play him some of your stuff.”

Ben’s voice isn’t something people feel indifferent about. You love it or you hate it. Thin and tremulous, it has no link to the way he looks at all. You expect low and unexceptional and you get high and inimitable. When it connects with a receptive listener they never forget it. The same thing goes with his songs. You can hear the first few bars of one on an overworked sound system in a noisy club or catch the sound of his voice on the wind from some distant suburban garden on a summer evening and understand the place you’ve been taken to with no question of who or what entering your head.

I was and am a receptive listener.

About halfway through Ben’s third song, I bent down, released the clasps on my case and took out my guitar. I wanted to be in on this. I wanted to testify.

Ben hesitated and drifted to halt when I got up to search for an amp to plug into. He looked at Stella with a help-me expression.

“I’m sorry, Bam, we’re looking for a bass player,” she said. “Our management have this guitarist they want us to use.”

“Right,” I said. “I see.”

“He’s very good.”

“Glad to know it.”

“Do you play bass?”

“Not usually.”

“But you could?”

“Probably. But I don’t have a bass.”

She looked at Ben, he nodded and she turned back to me. “We could buy you one. The record company have given us some money and we don’t know what to do with it.”

The first tour of the States was an exceptional one for an unknown band. Once we’d kick-started some air-play the album started to shift out of the record stores and gigs sold out on the coasts and filled out gradually in the mid-western cities. I looked after Ben and Stell that first year. I remember getting a phone call from them the first time we played New York. I was at the hotel trying to get some sleep. They said they were lost and could I come and find them. I got in a taxi and eventually found them walking hand-in-hand down Riverside Drive wearing baseball caps and eating corn-dogs.

“Where are we?” Ben said when I got out of the cab and joined them. He didn’t say hello or acknowledge my recent arrival. “Is the gig anywhere around here? Do you know the way to Greenwich Village?”

“Is that a song,” I said.

“Fuck off.”

Stella showed me a mug she’d bought with New York printed on it. “Do you know a place where I can get some postcards?”

Ben and Stell left me behind over the years. They found new ways to get lost, straying to places where I could no longer reach them. The band changed many times. A succession of musicians came and went, but I stayed on bass, my old white Fender Precision. Without anyone ever discussing it, I inherited the job of running the day-to-day side of things, auditioning or tracking down the best people for the job. At rehearsals, I took the guys through the set list. Ben and Stell would put in the occasional appearance to go through any new numbers. Towards the end they stopped coming at all.

There was an evolution in the music, too. Ben’s songs got longer, less structured, the lyrics kind of murky, which I, as a working-class lad and a fan of the earlier work, thought of as half-arsed back then. One evening, he stopped in the middle of a number and sent us off the stage so he could play acoustic and sing alone. It wasn’t a slick performance, but it was affecting. Ben, gaunt as a stray dog, crouching over the microphone in a finger of yellow light, his voice breaking into a rasp on the high notes. These spontaneous solo spots began to interrupt the pacing of the show regularly from then on. It was exasperating for the band, because we never knew exactly when he was going to do them. I attempted to speak to him about organising the running order on an established basis, but he just smiled at me vaguely and walked away. I went to follow him, but Stell, little Stell, blocked my way and put a hand on my chest. She’d taken to emphasising her beautiful eyes with rings of black make-up, their blue innocence intense in her narrow white face. Both she and Ben had recently shaved their heads and her cap of blonde fuzz gave her a belligerent appearance.

“Leave it,” she said.

“I can’t leave it. Someone’s got to sort this out.”

She pushed at me and grew angry when I wouldn’t be moved. “It’s nothing to do with you. Who are you, anyway? Do your job.”

Ben’s performances became weaker and more fractured over the following months. One night, Ben and Stella didn’t turn up at all. The band and I played a couple of songs to stall the audience, but in the end the gig was cancelled and ticket money refunded.

The next morning I was on a plane back to the UK.

A young couple were getting married in the Spanish soap. It was an elaborate affair, costumed, fanciful. Ceremonies are just shows when it comes down to it. The silent opening and shutting of the actors’ mouths made me sad.

Ben shifted heavily on the bed and his left foot kicked the J200 on to the floor. I picked it up and leant it against the wall.

“Shit,” he said.

“Nice guitar,” I said.

Yeah. Which one is it?”

“The Gibson.”

“Right. Do you want a beer?”

I shook my head. “No thanks.”

He gestured toward a small fridge next to the bed. “Could you get me one?”

I did the deed and handed him the bottle. He chugged a couple of mouthfuls and burped. “Mexican beer, who’d have thought it.”

“The world is indeed a strange place.”

“Indeed.” He lit a cigarette and exhaled slowly. “Do you like your life back home?”

“In the UK?”

“Yeah.”

“Of course. You haven’t been over recently?”

“Stell and I went back a few years ago. It wasn’t anywhere I knew. I looked away and they changed everything around.”

“I feel that way here.”

Ben moved again, propping himself awkwardly on his elbow. “Time is the thing. It’s all time. Have you noticed that everywhere you go there are clocks. They look down on us. We have to do their bidding. We’re fucking clock people. You see a guy walking along the street and his legs are going tick-tock, tick-tock. And his head’s going bing-bong, bing-fucking-bong.” He drank some more beer. “I haven’t had a watch in years. I hate the stupid things. Handcuffs, man. Bracelets. You should throw yours away. Take it off. Free yourself.”

“You want me to take my watch off?”

“Yeah. Do it.”

I shrugged. “Okay.” I removed my watch and put it in the pocket of my jeans.

“You should listen to me.”

“I always have.”

When he spoke again his voice had changed. “You’re not after money, are you?”

I stepped out of the house and back into the sun with gratitude. The heat outside was hostile and uncaring, but its breath-catching ferocity stripped my mind of thoughts and I was glad. Stell and the kids were where I’d left them. I could tell they’d seen me, but they didn’t look over or acknowledge my presence. Instead of turning toward them, I kept going in the direction of the pool. When I reached the edge, I continued walking. The water was cool and crystalline and cleansing and it tasted of good times. As it closed over my head the sound changed, shutting me in, blocking out the world and the high hiss of the desert dying.

I swam to the far end of the pool and got out. The dunk-dunk of a bass guitar being played badly and out of time returned to me as my ears cleared. Slopping in my wet clothes, I walked along the other side of the pool and out to my car. I didn’t look at Stell as I passed where she and her friends were sitting and neither of us spoke. Behind me a trail of wet footprints dried quickly in the sun.