The Age of Anxiety Read online

  Chapter 2

  By the time Maud came to visit me in 1996 Walter was already established in a successful career. His eponymous pub rock band was known as Big Walter and His Stand, later known simply as the Stand. He called himself Big Walter in homage to Little Walter, his harmonica-playing R&B hero from Memphis, Tennessee. Walter’s band’s name, the Stand, was in fact a reference to a way of standing. At certain points in his performance he would position himself like a statue, his harmonica in his right hand ready to play, held in what appeared to be an attempt to keep light from his eyes. His left hand was stretched out as though he were balancing on an imaginary surfboard, his knees slightly bent and turned a little to the right, his body twisted slightly at the waist. When he took this pose, the audience knew they could soon expect a powerfully explosive harmonica solo, and the girls began to scream and the boys to shout.

  After one such exciting night in 1995, Walter showed up at my flat. As I opened the door to him I was reminded of how good-looking he was, with his high cheekbones, but also that by some measures of good looks he was flawed. His eyes were rather small and a somewhat indistinct color, and for a man just twenty-eight years old he looked weather-beaten, like someone who had worked for years on the deck of a fishing boat, or thrown ropes from a horse to lasso cattle. His hair was black and thick, worn long.

  Now he looked anxious, but didn’t speak immediately.

  It was late, and I was ready for bed, but he knew I took my role as his godfather seriously and my door was always open to him. I had always been his mentor. I had long wondered if Walter thought I understood him in ways his parents didn’t. Harry and Sally had been confused when he completed his horticulture degree and picked up his harmonica again. Had they expected he would become a sort of gentleman landscape gardener?

  “Uncle Louis,” he said. (He’d always called me Uncle Louis.) “I need some help.”

  “OK,” I replied, worrying he’d turned to drugs or gotten into trouble with one of his fans. “What’s up?”

  “It’s hard to talk about this. I’m not going mad, but I know when I start to speak about what’s happening to me you might think…” Walter seemed to lose momentum.

  “Walter,” I said gently, “of course you’re not going mad. What is happening to you?”

  “I’ve been hearing shit,” he said. “Usually after gigs; I can’t sleep.”

  “Hearing shit,” I teased. “Mmm. That’s intriguing.”

  “Uncle Louis.” He sounded rattled. “I’m frightened.”

  “Tell me what happens,” I said, serious now.

  “Our shows have been amazing recently. Intense. I’ve been singing well, but my harp solos have been getting better and better.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Yeah, it’s cool, and the audiences have been going completely nuts.”

  “That is cool,” I agreed. “So what’s the problem?”

  “I can’t work out quite what’s going on, or why it’s happening, but I think I am making some kind of deep connection with the people down the front.”

  Frankly I had no idea what Walter was going on about and was trying not to look blank.

  He continued earnestly. “I know you deal with artists who have mental trouble, but they kind of fold it into their creative work.”

  “Walter, just tell me what’s going on.”

  “You know, I’ve spoken to you about this in the past; some of our fans are there every single night, often right in the same position.”

  “That irritates you? I think I remember you saying as much.”

  “I fucking hate it, but I hate it that I hate it: they are fans. They pay the rent after all. But I feel I don’t have to win them over; they’re in the bag already. They don’t offer a challenge. They know what I’m going to do next, what I will say between songs. I find myself some nights actually following their emotional lead rather than driving my own journey.”

  “I see, but you said you were hearing stuff,” I said. “What is it you’re hearing? Is this to do with these loyal fans?”

  “When the music finishes, when the applause dies down, there is music in my head that carries on—and sometimes it feels very dark.”

  “Your ears are ringing?”

  Walter laughed. He had a rhythmic laugh that rattled like a machine gun. For a moment the concern left his face, and he looked young again. “Yes, of course they are! But this is different. This is music, sound, and it’s more than something in my ear. It’s in my head and I can feel it as well. It’s like I’m having attacks: sound attacks. It sounds crazy. I knew it would sound crazy.”

  “No.” I tried to reassure him. He was getting terribly upset. “It doesn’t sound crazy, and it’s obviously very serious, to you at least.”

  He didn’t reply.

  “Walter?” I reached out to him gently; I had not seen my godson looking so vulnerable since he’d been a small boy. He sat with his hands in his lap, like a boy outside the headmaster’s study awaiting a punishment of some kind. He looked up into the air, at the ceiling, then to his left and right.

  “I can hear it now, Uncle Louis,” he said, his voice almost breaking into a sob. “It feels like a kind of mental attack. I feel like calling this a sound attack. When I talk about it, or think about it, it comes back, I hear it again and I think it comes from the fans at the front.”

  “Who else have you spoken to about this?” Walter was married to a beautiful Irish girl a year or two older than he was, called Siobhan Collins. “What about Siobhan?”

  “I’ve spoken to her about it.”

  “What does she say?”

  “She isn’t wild about anything to do with the band, to be honest. All those pretty girls down the front. Anything to do with my band work is hard for her. She thinks I need to do more serious work, to take myself more seriously.”

  “You mean she wants you to leave the band?” If I sounded surprised then, I also wondered where Siobhan was coming from—although I thought I probably shared some of her worries. Walter’s manager, Frank Lovelace, was particularly hard-driving, with a large stable of artists. He always had an eye on the big deal, keen to make commission. Walter was pivotal to the band’s success and Frank Lovelace had an overly controlling personality where Walter was concerned.

  “I don’t know. She’s never said as much. But she’s Irish!” He laughed again, that musical laughter bringing him back to life for a moment. “She wants me to be the new Seamus Heaney or something.” He shook his head.

  Siobhan worked for the BBC in the central newsroom in London. She was in charge of a group of foreign correspondents; one of her team was my daughter Rain.

  “Have you spoken to Rain?” It was a silly question. Rain had been away in Afghanistan for a few months.

  “Not about all this; listen, Uncle Louis, this has never happened to me before. I feel I’m jacking into thoughts that are coming from the crowd.”

  “But it’s what you’re good at, Walter.” I was right, Walter often seemed to hold the audience in the palm of his hand.

  “No, this feels very negative. Like I’m hearing their fears, magnifying them.”

  “Tuning in to your audience, anticipating them, is what you do. Especially well. It’s what all good artists do. Surely Siobhan is proud of you?”

  “She is, but it’s not just the band she feels is beneath me. She thinks clubs like Dingwalls pretend to be better than they are.”

  “They pretend to be like an Irish pub with fiddles and pipes and Murphy’s fresh from the brewery?”

  Walter laughed. “I’ve been with her to a few of those back in Waterford. They’re pretty wild.”

  “I have no doubt they’re full of pretty girls too,” I added.

  For just a moment Walter seemed more like his old self. He had always been self-assured and determined, but I could see something had changed in him. We talked for another half an hour. I thought that listening, just listening, was probably better than trying to come up wi
th ideas or grappling for a solution.

  He had always told me that whenever he played music he had to listen. In fact, he claimed that good musicians were divided between those who listened and those who simply played. Great musicians did both: played and listened. Walter aspired to that greatness, and lately—when he listened—he had begun to hear these strange sounds that were both unexpected and unwelcome. So he was becoming afraid of this listening; he was terrified he would be unable to continue as a musician working with others.

  A police car siren jolted me from my thoughts. I realized I hadn’t asked Walter a very obvious question.

  “So haven’t you spoken to Harry?” Walter’s father, my old friend. Harry had been a good father, if rather a distant one. He was, as I say, a successful musician, toured a lot, and seemed to live in an elevated world. Classical organ; Messiaen and Bach. Harry’s wife, Walter’s mother Sally, was also a confidante of mine, telling me about some of their difficulties as a couple.

  “I don’t want to worry my dad,” said Walter quietly. “Not yet at least.”

  “So you will speak to him?”

  When there was something he didn’t want to explain, or reveal, Walter simply said nothing. Now and then he would send a signal that he was considering whether to speak out or not: he would rub the side of his nose while wearing a slightly mischievous expression. Sometimes this would lead to him saying something. Sometimes it would just preface silence.

  On this occasion he did speak at last, but I got the feeling he was not saying what he had intended to express. “I think I should probably see a doctor first.” Walter explained that he knew that if he talked to his father, his first response would be to ask if he had seen a doctor.

  “Write down your experiences,” I suggested. “It will help if you do see a doctor.”

  “What, describe it? Or score it?”

  Walter’s technical abilities as a musician were not equal to his father’s. He couldn’t read or write music.

  “You know I deal in Outsider Art, Walter.” I laughed. “If you write it down, if you could enable others to get a sense of what you are hearing, you could join the fabulous artists on my roster. As a poet!” I laughed again, forcefully, trying to bring Walter into the present, to lighten what he was feeling.

  He sat back and looked away.

  “I can describe what I hear,” he said, looking up at me with a sad look. “But I would find it very hard to turn it into music that people could hear.”

  I’d known Walter since he was a child. But I knew the way he was perceived by others, by his bandmates, by his fans, by the band’s manager. They saw him as someone who was “merely” handsome, rugged, and cool. He looked like a man who could do pretty well in a fight, but I don’t think many people had any idea of his inner depths.

  I’d seen signs of it even when he was a child. He had studied gardening and his dream was to create a maze one day, he said. He told Rain that it might take twenty-five years for a maze to grow thick enough to get lost in—even longer in some cases. Every maze could become a real labyrinth, given enough time and care.

  He struck me as a young man who—unlike most of his friends who wanted their desires fulfilled as quickly as possible—understood the joy of waiting for nature to take its course.

  “Was there anything else?” I inquired. Walter was holding something back.

  Either I’d said the wrong thing or I’d touched a nerve. Walter shook his head and picked up his coat and bag. A shaft of light caught his face and I found myself musing that this new vulnerability would make him even more irresistible to the women he allowed close to him. My daughter Rain had always loved him. The childhood crush had become an unspoken passion. Siobhan had sensed she might be a rival, and as her boss at the BBC always seemed to be packing Rain off to faraway trouble hotspots.

  Walter hugged me and smiled his goodbye.

  In the winter of that year, 1995, my daughter Rain came to see me at my apartment—I thought for afternoon tea—and, using the door key I had given her, let herself in, crashed her journalist’s attaché case to the floor, slammed the front door, and threw her coat to the ground in the lobby. She strode into my living room, slumped onto the sofa, and with a disgusted look, and without any preamble, announced that Walter was married.

  “I arrived back in London, went to the office, saw the ring on Siobhan’s finger, and asked a friend who was the unlucky man. She told me, ‘Siobhan married her boyfriend. Your friend Walter?’”

  Rain had been away in Afghanistan with a BBC unit traveling with a US-supported mujahideen patrol on and off for two years, documenting the anticipated end of hostilities in the region.

  Of course I on the other hand knew Walter was married and had been at the wedding on June 25, 1994.

  “Why didn’t you let me know, Dad?” Rain had tears in her eyes. “I should have been there, at Walter’s wedding. He was like my brother.”

  I knew that what she really meant was that Walter was her passion; she should have been his wife. She must have known it would not have been feasible for me to contact her while she was on patrol with the mujahideen. I had been completely smashed at the wedding. I remember almost nothing. I had woken up the next day feeling like death and quickly tried to forget all about it.

  As Rain sat, miserable—she had good reason to be upset—I stopped what I had been doing, poring over some accounts. I regarded my offspring intently as if for the first time. She was quite beautiful at that distraught moment. Her hair—cut short—was strawberry blond. Her skin was slightly freckled, pale, and always sensitive to the sun. She had very little of my mother Claire’s beautiful Jewish coloring, but she had inherited her maternal grandmother’s strong bone structure. Rain was not the image of her mother; neither was she the image of me—lucky for her, as I am no oil painting. Rain’s mother, my long-lost wife Pamela, had been pretty enough, and extremely ginger. I don’t use that word pejoratively, I can assure you. I was a sucker for the look. It would be absurd to call her a redhead; Pamela was ginger, and delightfully so when she was young. Her appearance matched her personality. She was excitable, unpredictable, and capricious. Spicy.

  So it was a shock to me that, when Rain was born, Pamela suddenly decided to become celibate. Oh, and also to become a Catholic. Up until that time she had been, to put it as politely as I can, almost a nymphomaniac. She had been legendarily ginger: hot. As a young husband prior to Rain’s birth I sometimes felt as if I had landed in paradise. No man could have wanted more from his wife, sexually speaking.

  I need you to know that women found me attractive. Some women still do. I’m a strange-looking man in some ways, a mix of racial stereotypes, the Aryan with the Jew. But it’s worked well for me. I am middle height, with brown eyes, jet-black hair that I usually wear long, and although I’m getting thin on top, I have enough up there to pass for a man a little younger than my years. Not bad, for I’ve never looked after my body or my face. The one thing I find that occasionally causes some women to shrink away from me is my beard. It isn’t long, and I don’t always sport it, but I prefer wearing a beard—I feel my chin is a little weak. When I look in the mirror I don’t often shout, You handsome devil, go get ’em as I splash on the cologne, but it has happened a few times. My face has the appearance of being wider at my forehead than it should be, but that’s because my chin is small. I’ve painted a strange picture of myself, but Pamela often used to call me cute or gorgeous. When we made love and our faces were close together in the half-light, I would call her beautiful—because that was how she looked then. She would call me handsome. I assumed she was telling the truth. But we were never a family who exalted the notion of high self-esteem, and Rain didn’t think of herself as the beautiful woman she had become. Men fell for her—but Walter always treated her like a sister.

  Suddenly, as Rain sat—clearly seething, and the air buzzing with her beauty, the room sizzling with her abruptly evident but frustrated sexual energy—I saw her mother in her.r />
  “Come on, Rain,” I said. “My godson has married a fan, that’s what she was.” I tried to laugh, but I was winging it.

  This caused an even wilder display of irritation from her. “Siobhan is super-smart, Dad. If she was a fan, she was also being secretive with me. They must have decided to get married on a whim. How could you have been at the wedding and not let me know?” She exploded, jumping to her feet, banging her palms onto her thighs so hard they probably bruised.

  I didn’t want to face the fact that I really didn’t remember very much at all about the wedding. I had a dim recollection of giving some drugs to Siobhan’s younger sister, Selena, who was there with her pretty friend Floss.

  “Siobhan is actually older than me, Dad! Walter has married my fucking boss!” She had started to pace the floor, then stopped and, whirling around, slapped her hand on her forehead. “Jesus! I reckon Siobhan packed me off to Afghanistan for two years while she did the dirty deed.”

  Then Rain slumped again, and there were real tears.

  Of course I did have influence in Walter’s life and career. Rain knew this very well. I was Walter’s chief mentor, his guiding light. Perhaps partly because he had seen me at my worst, and seen me recover, he listened to me. I could have helped him to see that my daughter was in love with him—if only I myself had noticed.

  But I hadn’t spotted Walter and Rain as potential lovers. I had missed a beat. To me they would always be a couple of kids playing in the garden in a paddling pool, or digging in the sand on the beach at Clacton. Being a single father is difficult for many obvious reasons, but I made it all even harder for myself by being an addict. The drugs didn’t stop me functioning. They numbed some pain, but also my senses; I hadn’t been entirely alert to what was happening between these two lovely kids right under my nose. They loved each other, but Rain had gone further and fallen in love romantically.

  Rain would have been about ten or eleven when Pamela and I were attempting to hold our marriage together. I was using heroin as a way to survive my unrequited sex drive for the ginger-fuck-fest-wife I had once enjoyed. One day in a very strange period in which I was trying to get off the smack, we decided—the ginger-fuck-fest-wife and I—that we needed a larger, wider bed.