The Stand wasn’t exactly a straitjacket for Walter. There were subtle differences in the band and musical influences beyond the basic pub rock, but I knew none of them could help him with the strange sounds he was hearing. He too seemed to sense that. The politics in the band were set in stone. Whoever he turned to, he would upset or distract the others. Crow might understand, might even be sympathetic to Walter’s dilemma, but he would want him to “man up.” The Hansons would start prattling on about Stockhausen and the mysticism of sound, and Crow would flip. Crow was the boss. He represented the end-stop to all and any musical diversions.
Many months later, after some time worrying and fretting about how I might help my godson, a new possibility had presented itself.
I phoned Walter on a warm, sunny morning in August. “Walter! I met with Paul Jackson, Nikolai Andréevich now of course. I’m selling his paintings for him.”
“Aha, terrific,” breathed Walter. “How did that come about?”
I explained about the visit from Maud, Andréevich’s wife.
Walter had loved The Curious Life of Nikolai Andréevich, returning to the cinema to see it over a dozen times when he was between the ages of eight and thirteen. It had become something of a cult classic, shown regularly at the Electric Cinema on Portobello Road.
“He’s a painter now?”
“Extraordinary drawings and paintings made while he was living rough up in the Lakes.”
“Does he still make music?”
“I think he experienced a really enormous trauma of some kind while he was working on the film. He just produces art now. I say that, although he hasn’t done anything new since he returned to his wife, but I’m hopeful. I’m just organizing the first exhibition of the works he did while he was up the mountain. There are lots of them, and they’re all good.”
“So how is he? Is he OK?” said Walter.
“He is very clear about what happened. He speaks of a revelation.”
“Not mad, then?”
“Not mad,” I confirmed. “Neither are you mad, Walter.”
“I’m hearing some really strange stuff; you know that. A psychiatrist might regard me as mad. A little bit.”
“You told me about the ‘sound attacks.’ Isn’t that what you called them?”
“Yeah,” he slurred. “And I’ve been getting more of them. And there’s something new: I am starting to see lights now too, and they usually combine to form a single very bright light. You know I don’t do drugs.”
“That sounds like Nik’s final moments in the movie,” I said. “His revelation began that way, with the intense light from the lamps used to backlight him. Is it like that?”
“Not quite,” said Walter. “I do see a light, almost like a star in the sky, but it’s explosive. Inside that starburst is a child.”
“Like in the movie 2001?”
“Classic film!” Walter laughed. “It’s similar in a way; what I can see is a baby girl, I think. It’s like a black hole in reverse. A kind of birth in the cosmos.”
Walter really did need to speak to someone. I decided to press him. “Listen, Walter, Nik would be happy to speak to you. I think he could help you. What he experienced is not precisely the same as you, but he found a way to… to survive.”
“Survive,” repeated Walter.
Mere survival didn’t seem like a great offer, I realized. “He is also happy. Very much so.”
I didn’t add that he seemed to have become almost autistic in his behavior. Walter would find that out for himself if he met with him.
I went on: “He will make as much money selling art as he ever made selling records.” By then I had sold at least ten of Old Nik’s pictures for between twenty and two hundred thousand pounds. I knew Walter didn’t care that much for money, but I was making a practical point. Nik would make a good living working as an artist, despite his afflictions. “You should meet him. He will help you, I’m sure of it.”
“Can I come to your place and see his work?”
“Of course you can,” I replied. I felt I’d made a start.
Walter arrived at my flat two weeks later; the summer of 1996 was drawing to an end. When I saw him face-to-face, I thought he looked different. Usually so self-consciously cool—like one of those carelessly handsome young male models-actors in a perfume commercial—he was now uncharacteristically eager, and seemed younger. I was reminded of how he had been as a kid when I described my hallucinogenic adventures. Whatever was going on had shaken him.
Walter looked at a few of Old Nik’s paintings and drawings at my flat. There was one in particular that caught his eye. A huge angel filled almost the entire canvas, and unusually this particular painting was almost monotonal; there was no color, no relief from the apocalyptic vision. But what caught Walter’s eye was the face of a child, neither male nor female—a kind of cherub-seraphim—who seemed to live within the flowing robes of the huge angel. He drew my attention to it.
“This face,” he said with restrained excitement. “This is very much like the face I see in the starburst when I get my sound attacks. It’s a familiar face. It’s half child, half angel.”
“Are you sure you’re not seeing your own 2001 star child, yet to be born?” I laughed. “Have you and Siobhan been discussing plans to have a family?”
Walter smiled and looked at me. He looked down and shook his head almost shyly.
Poor me. Poor Louis Doxtader. As the moment approaches when Walter Karel Watts meets his hero Nikolai Andréevich, I can feel myself, and my great secret, fading inevitably into the background of this story. I sit in my aerie to write. In the last few days of my writing here in the south of France the weather has been sunny and the view clear all the way to the sea. My collie dog Bingo, rescued by Siobhan from a rather cruel farmer in Ireland, sits at my feet, breathing deeply, staying cool in a shady corner, but the window is wide open and a breeze is blowing. This morning we walked together in the small botanical reservation behind the hilltop village of Châteauneuf, and tried to avoid crushing the exquisite purple, yellow, and blue wildflowers growing there. Already shimmering, they were set sparkling further with the fluttering of pale blue, brown-red, and white butterflies of various sizes. As I threw a stick high in the air for Bingo, I spotted what looked like yet more butterflies hanging in the sky in the distance above the mountains behind the château and monastery of Gourdon, thirteen hundred meters above the sea and about fifteen kilometers away. There were a dozen or more hang gliders, some swooping, some as still as hummingbirds, working the vortex rising along the ridge of the mountain.
That was one of the things Walter had loved most about Old Nik’s film when he was a young teenager: it was the first time he had seen a hang glider. In the movie, as Maud had described when she came to visit me, he leaps from a mountaintop in a hang glider and soars above a huge lake. This was set up to illustrate how Nikolai Andréevich had been spiritually liberated by the abusive privations he had to undergo in the story.