Sway (4 page)

He sneers in his weird drawl,
Well I could never be-e-e-e satisfied and I jus-s-s-t can’t ke-e-e-p on crying
. He looks sideways at Keith, pursing his lips. There is a jostle of guitars. He twitches his head, chin raised, marching
in a slight crouch or stoop.

Their hair is long and they look both ugly and vain. They look like women, that’s what people will say, but in fact they don’t
look like women at all, it’s just that they’re sexual, aware of their bodies. If anything, their hair makes them look like
very careless transvestites, with something devious and brittle beneath their outer resolve. The music is making them move
in ways that might be embarrassing, but they’re trying to master that embarrassment by seeming not to care. This sense of
fakery has something vaguely to do with being English and playing the music of black Americans. They’re trying to be serious
and sarcastic at the same time, emotional but also cool. All the helpful commonsense distinctions are being made pointless
by their grating, persistent music.

The crowd breaks the tables and one of the bass player’s amplifiers. They smash a few pint glasses on the floor. Brian is
set upon by six boys who claw at his long blond hair and tumble after him in a scrum up the broken stairs.

After that, the gigs start to draw crowds. It’s the violence that draws them, the violence in the music, and the violence
that ensues. They play every Wednesday at a new pub in Ealing, weekends at a hotel bar in Richmond. Almost all the shows end
in some sort of confrontation: a skirmish in the crowd, a verbal brawl between the band and some heckler, a fistfight broken
up by bouncers and then continued on the pavement outside. There is always a tension in the rooms, the darkness and heat accentuated
by the tight jostle of too many people in too small a space. The anticipation of what might go wrong becomes central to the
music, which gets louder and more jagged in response.

One night when they’re onstage Mick notices the way that Brian rattles his tambourine. He smirks at the crowd and gives it
a single hard shake, as if he’s cracking a small whip. The next night Mick taunts the audience along these same lines, turning
his face in profile between phrases, laughing at some private joke, then sneering and pointing his finger. All the lights
seem to be on him. He pushes it further and further but not too far.

In February, Brian meets a girl at a pub in Soho. He’s trying to get another booking for the band, and he’s brought some money
— he’s borrowed it from the band’s common fund without telling them — so that he can make an impression on the bartender.
But he forgets this mission as soon as the girl comes in out of the rain with her group of friends. From the bar he can see
her hair falling in wet strands over her narrow face. She’s tall and thin and she wears a shiny black raincoat, a coat that
seems to be made of some rare, expensive kind of plastic.

Within a minute or two, he has become the center of attention at their table. He’s wearing a tweed jacket and a narrow black
tie whose ends dangle free of the clasp. He buys a bottle of champagne and has it brought over to the girl and her friends.
The girl in the black raincoat regards him at first with a comic skepticism, a feigned hostility, but he pours her a glass
of the champagne nonetheless. Before long she is speaking in a way that almost mirrors the way he speaks, sarcastic and deliberately
peculiar, as if they are in together on some secret.

He asks about her raincoat. He says he had a dream once about a girl in a raincoat just like hers. He asks her if by any chance
she speaks German, or if she’s ever been to Germany. Her raincoat looks German to him.

She looks down at the lapel of her coat as if she’s never noticed it before. When she looks back up at him with the same suspicious
smile, he notices the little gap between her front teeth, the faint groove on the underside of her nose, between the nostrils.
When she asks him for a cigarette, he tells her that she will have to fight him for it, and after a confused pause she raises
her two fists to the level of her cheeks and pretends to stare him down.

That same evening, Tricia arrives at Edith Grove, this time having left the baby with her cousin Claire in Clapham. Her hair
has been cut shorter, curled at the ends like Jackie Kennedy’s. She’s in high spirits, planning to meet Brian on his own terms,
but it turns out that he isn’t even home; he’s somewhere in the West End at a jazz club, looking for gigs.

It’s Mick who tells her this, after he’s invited her inside. He’s loafing around the flat in a new bathrobe and a worn pair
of pajamas that look as if they’ve been twisted in tight knots and left for a year in a damp trunk. A textbook is spread out
on the sofa beside a parcel of fried potatoes wrapped in newspaper. As he sits down on the sofa, he indicates a chair for
her to sit in with a wave of his hand.

He puts his feet up on the table and lifts a martini glass filled with something tepid and brown. He has a long strand of
dried toothpaste on the lapel of his robe.

“Didn’t he know you were coming?” he says.

The chair he’s offered her is piled with dirty clothes, which she picks up in a clump and places on top of one of the amplifiers.
In recent weeks, her disappointment over Brian has reached an apex and turned into something resembling exuberance, a desperate,
unashamed yearning.

“Do you think I would have come all this way if I hadn’t told him?” she says.

She sits down and lights herself a cigarette, breathing out with closed eyes. She’s wearing mascara and a new green dress
beneath her topcoat.

“That’s our little till,” Mick says. He points to a cigar box on the floor, lying sideways with its lid agape. “We keep our
savings in there, to make the payments on the instruments? As you can see, there’s not much in it now. Nothing at all, in
fact. Keith just ran off a little while ago to try to find him.”

She leans forward with her elbows on her knees, her feet splayed out dejectedly in front of her. Mick raises his glass awkwardly
and sips some of the strange liquid.

“Beef tea,” he says. “Would you like some?”

She stands up and starts to appraise the clutter in the room. On the wall near the kitchen is a long Bakelite-covered table
stacked with dirty plates, ashtrays, newspapers stained different shades of bright yellow and beige.

“Are you sure?” she says.

“Sure of what?”

“Are you sure that it was Brian who took the money?”

Mick stands up. He yawns, stretching his arms by clasping his hands in a bridge behind his waist.

“It’s his band,” he says. “You know that. He needs that money to keep himself in shampoo, I suppose. Shampoo for that lovely
hair of his.”

He is standing right behind her now. She can feel him pausing there, watching her with a kind of scorn. She closes her eyes
and feels a warm swelling inside her, not anger or guilt but some fusion of these that brings with it a tinge of her earlier
anticipation, her excitement over seeing Brian.

She imagines him making one of his funny faces, jabbing two fingers up his nostrils and sticking out his tongue. She sees
him doing this in a circle of girls whose faces she can’t see, wearing the dark suit she gave him as a present when they lived
back in Cheltenham.

“I’m sure he’ll be back soon,” says Mick. “Why don’t you come sit down?”

When she feels his hands on her shoulders, she stands very still for a moment. Then she turns and stares at him. Their kissing
is a way to avoid having to look at each other any longer.

If anything, she tries too hard. Her breath is stale and she keeps thrusting her chest out at him. He moves her clumsily back
toward the couch. When he sees her eyes roll back blankly in the vagueness of succumbing, he realizes how determined she is,
how little this has to do with him.

The music is simple on the surface. On the surface, it’s a matter of three chords that even a boy like Keith, sequestered
in his bedroom in his parents’ house, can learn to play along with on his guitar, until he begins to listen more carefully
and hear what’s actually there. After that it becomes a matter of how many layers he’s able to discern, how much he’s willing
to commit to in terms of patience and repetition. For a boy like Keith, the willingness is all but infinite. He’s a shy dreamer,
prone to isolated fantasies, preyed upon at school by older boys who call him a faggot and a girl. They throw rocks at him
from the building sites of unfinished council terraces. They inspire in him confusing, shaming acts of cruelty, tormenting
animals mostly. The music he listens to when he’s alone is like the angry essence of the boys who taunt him, the aggressive
force in them that he can’t help but covet. Its sound is otherworldly, impossible to connect to his drab suburb of identical
brick flats, muddy roads, dustbins.

The three chords are usually only alluded to, he finds, approached from various, jarring angles in massings of two or three
odd notes that are sometimes not even in the same key. He struggles with half tones and quarter tones, dozens of tiny, hard-to-discern
variations in rhythm and pitch that he has to match somehow on his thick-stringed, high-fretted guitar. To hear any of this
requires an ear acute enough to pick out several tones at once and isolate each of them, even as they change, and this in
turn requires a nearly autistic willingness to move the phonograph needle back, groove by groove, in order to assess again
the same two-second snatch of song. It is a tedium exceeded only by the painful, fumbling labor of trying to finger these
notes on a fretted board, going only by ear, by trial and error, one awkward voicing to the next. The music raises blisters
on his fingers, causes him to pound the guitar in frustrated fits or to stare at it from his bed. It defies him to internalize
even a portion of its alien power, to play it just once with his body and not his mind.

A hundred and fifty people in Ealing. Almost two hundred in Richmond. They’ve begun to draw followers who come every week
in leather and black sweaters to dance on the tables with such violence that a reporter from the
Record Mirror
feels threatened and denounces the band as “thugs.” A kind of culture has started to evolve. Everyone under thirty has decided
that they’re an exception — a musician, a runaway, an artist, a star. There are no more wars to fight, no more ration coupons,
nothing to do but study graphic design or live in Paris for a month busking in the Métro. They have no experience of fear,
or violence, or patriotism, or duty. What they have instead is an obsession with style, a collage of half-understood influences
from other times and places. It is a language of pure connotation, of suggestion and innuendo, and once it gets started it
has to move faster and faster, it can never stop working.

It’s something Keith has begun to feel a little suspicious of, when he’s not belittling it in his mind, the way the unspoken
secret between Mick and Brian — their mutual awareness that Mick has slept with Tricia — has had the odd effect of bringing
them closer. Keith sits with his guitar now, idly playing little bits of music, while Brian tries once again to teach Mick
a riff on the harmonica. They are weirdly eager and solicitous with each other, rising to careful heights of consideration.
For Keith, who’s never even kissed a girl, whose only contacts with girls are sarcastic and self-defeating, it brings a confusing
kind of envy.

It’s a Little Walter riff they’re trying to learn, impossible to duplicate without a microphone, but when Brian plays it he
manages to catch some of its menace and depth. He takes Mick’s hands and cups them around the harmonica, places his fingers
on Mick’s and holds them in place. Then he brings his own hands to his mouth and mimics the waving motion that produces vibrato,
raising his eyebrows at Mick, who takes the cue by just barely shaking his head. He stares seriously into Brian’s eyes and
tries once more to reproduce the sound. He sits up straight and raises his shoulders, the instrument cradled in one hand and
completely covered by the other, which flutters beneath his thumbs in the deliberate way of someone making birdcalls. He closes
his eyes and blows harder, and Brian nods his head at the ground, unimpressed but patient, almost resigned in the way he’s
passing on his skills.

Even in March it is still cold in the flat. Through the window, the crusted snow glows a faint blue between the rails of the
iron fence. At three in the morning, Keith has passed out at the far edge of the bed where the three of them are curled up
for warmth. Brian and Mick are snuggled against each other, both drunk, both moving back and forth between deep, stuporous
sleep and lulled, half-waking dreams.

It is so dark that when Brian opens his eyes, Mick’s face is a blue vagueness that seems asleep but also not like a human
face at all. It seems large and made of highly pumiced stone, a monument that emanates a kind of numinous comfort that has
nothing to do with Mick’s actual self. He seems to be faintly smiling. Then his face seems blank and tranquil, the remembered
smile a faint nimbus that fades in and out.

Brian twists a little and Mick groans. For a moment, the look on his face is pained, but then he moves his head down against
Brian’s shoulder, and they enter a space that is almost indistinguishable from sleep. They are pressed up against each other,
front to front, and each of them has a hand buried deep in the warmth between the other’s legs.

Then Mick’s hand slackens and stills. His mouth is open and his eyes stare at Brian without recognition.

They’re still holding each other in their hands. There is a moment before the shame has time to register, and Brian closes
his eyes, opting to continue, but Mick takes his hand away and turns on his side, rolling over toward Keith on the other side
of the bed. It occurs to Brian then that he has been deceived, that Mick has been awake this whole time, and now he is awake
himself, unable to move.

They get their next big break a few nights later, a Saturday night gig at the Marquee Club, the most important club in London.
The sound is bad and they play a sloppy, fast-paced set, but there is a young publicity man in the audience who wants to speak
to them anyway, a twenty-year-old former design student named Andrew Loog Oldham. He sees that this band with its aloof antistyle,
drawing the crowd closer to the stage to fight for a space in which to dance, is in some way a rough successor to Elvis Presley.
He’s encouraged to think this way because a band from Liverpool of all places has just sold a million copies of its own song.