It was September 9, three days before the band was to leave for the American tour. They had finished one album, the next one was already in progress, and Keith was sitting outside his house on a plain wooden kitchen chair, playing his guitar. It was early afternoon and the sun was hitting everything at a tilted angle, the wind tossing the boughs of the trees, filling the air high above him with a sound like thousands of rattling plastic bags. Some friends were playing golf on the lawn, using plastic balls that wafted back toward them in wild curves. He looked out at the old carpets on the grass, the shabby furniture, all the things he would be leaving behind for the next three months, and all of it looked perfect. The golf cart sagged in the high grass beside the moat, a purple banner trailing behind it like a giant, colored serpent coiling in the wind.
“You don’t even see me sometimes,” Anita would say. But it wasn’t true, he saw her all the time. She was upstairs now, getting her things into suitcases, the bedroom a heap of clothes and jewelry, magazines and cosmetics. He could see her standing with her hips canted forward, one hand on her thigh, the other on her cheek, looking down with pensive hostility at the mess. She was not coming on the tour. She was going to a drug clinic in St. John’s Wood.
She had given him a lot of things to forgive lately. She had slept with half the people he knew — that was what he had signed on for, he knew that. She had even slept with Mick, because she was crazy, or just to hurt Keith, or possibly just because she wanted to. She was threatened by Keith in some way. Maybe she had reason to feel threatened, because after all he had forgiven her even for Mick. She didn’t have as much power to faze him as she’d thought. He had forgiven everything except the scene last week, when she had taken too much heroin and blacked out for close to an hour.
Every sound had a slight flange to it, a little sag at the middle, as if he was manipulating time, bending it and stretching it. He chopped out a rhythm of big chiming chords and heard all the textures of the different notes lined up in rows. It was a sad song, but it didn’t feel sad to play it. There was nothing that needed to be done right now, nothing he could do anyway, nothing but the sight and sound of his friends beneath the trees and the ability to communicate it through the notes of his guitar. He was high in a way that slowed down the apprehension of sound just enough for him to hear little textures beneath the surface, a graininess of copper wire, steel wire. If music was just an escape — an evasion of “reality” — then how did you account for this moment when the wind and the light on the trees and the sounds of his friends’ tapping golf clubs permeated him so entirely that he seemed to embody these sensations, to encompass everything outside him so that there was no “him” and no “outside”?
She came down in her buckskin jacket, bare-legged, her head tilted a little toward one shoulder. “I’ll be ready in a few minutes,” she said. “Will you tell Tom?”
He nodded, closing his eyes, still strumming the guitar.
“I’m just going to take what I take,” she said. “It’s too much to think about. I don’t know how people pack.”
“I think there’s a sheet of paper somewhere,” he said. “Candace sent it. Addresses, phone, all that. The itinerary.”
“I’ll just ring her. I can’t be bothered with a sheet of paper.”
She was standing in front of him, her hand in his hair. Her eyes moved slightly from side to side as she stared at him. “You’re not coming with me, are you?”
He looked down at the patio. “I’ll tell Tom you’re almost ready,” he said. “I’ll be in in a minute, all right?”
It came back at the strangest times. It had been two months since Brian’s death and most of the time it still wasn’t real, except at times like this. This was the period when Keith was smashing up cars on the M1, falling asleep with lit cigarettes in his hand, staying up for three nights in a row, shooting rifles from the cockpit of his Hovercraft. It didn’t look or feel like mourning. In most ways, it was the happiest he’d ever been.
When he was a boy, maybe eight years old, his aunt had bought him an atlas of the United States, one of those well-meant gifts that triggers an unexpected enthusiasm in a child. He would linger over the maps before he went to bed — the legends, the statute miles, the shapes of the states, the words “Pacific Ocean.” He could see with his eyes how huge the places must be — Texas, Wyoming, California — the shaded areas of their mountain ranges, the pale blue contours of their shorelines and lakes. Stockton, Mariposa, Bakersfield — the names had nothing to do with the rows of brick houses outside his window. They led him through moviescapes of rubbled forts, horses in the sand, riflemen, cattle. He knew it was out there, a physical reality, not a dream. He had the maps, the names, the borders and geography. He was a boy who went to school in a cowboy costume with holstered toy pistols and spurs.
Right up until the time he’d died, Brian would call in the middle of the night, as if he were still a part of the band, as if they were all still friends. He had made so many tapes, why did he keep erasing them? Could he come over and play Keith his new tape? All his best songs went wrong because he waited too long, kept picking at them, second-guessing himself. Or maybe it was time for him to strike out on his own, start something new, a different kind of band.
Keith would hold the phone uncomfortably between his shoulder and his ear, sitting on a kitchen stool in the dark, playing his guitar. In the living room there would be a throng of people — friends and hangers-on, people whose names he knew and people whose names he didn’t — listening to music, smoking, laughing, sulking. Brian’s voice would lapse into silence, a child trying to tell a story but getting lost in the mire of details, or sometimes it would intensify into weeping, into outraged, paranoid tears. Keith would talk him down with a persistent stream of factual information: records he had listened to, meals he had eaten, places he had driven in his car. It was always he and not Anita who fielded these calls. He was the one who was always awake, always smiling, the center of things even when he wasn’t in the room, always feeling situated in his skin by three or four o’clock in the morning.
“You just have to get something down and then we can work with it,” he would say. “You have to stop thinking so much. Mick doesn’t hate you, he doesn’t even think about you, I tell you this over and over. No one thinks about other people half as much as you do.”