A shining star vibrates with the sound of a vast, shimmering, and dissonant choir. A newborn baby cries. Shattering glass. A thousand million cathedral windows in a building as high as the sky, shaken by the rumbling of an earthquake, every pane of leaded glass, every lantern, loosened, falling, at first crackling, then as the amount of glass that falls increases into an almost constant shower the noise gets louder but also softens, losing its edge. Instead a sound almost like falling water fills the air. The building itself is of glass, so when the earthquake hits it eventually takes down not just the panes of glass, but also the building, until all that is left is the occasional tinkling of another last drop of silica rain. Out of the last few small echoes of glass shards slipping—one leaning against another and sliding, breaking again—comes a long, throaty moan. It is the sound of some kind of creature perhaps, or air being forced through some sort of narrow pipe or slit. This sound transmogrifies into the blast of exhaust from an engine, revving up, then taking off. A massive tractor engine of the kind used in American trucks: noisy, throaty, hearty, off, and away.
As this grand operatic spectacle now unfolds—I have started speaking in iambic beats of seven. The correct name (I have looked it up) is “heptameter.” As soon as there is music I become rhythmic, like someone who—here comes the beat of seven—has had a few too many and begins to swing and sway. It’s pathetic. I can’t dance. I can’t sing. But I am powerless. It must be clear by now that in this story something strange was going on inside young Walter’s mind and I am tempted to evoke it.
It just so happened that I was present at his last performance with the band, invited by their manager Frank Lovelace. It was clear to me that Frank wanted to show off. A week before he had negotiated a huge financial deal for Walter’s latest song, “Freedom on the Road,” about the joys of life out on the road behind the wheel of a smoking, fiery rod. He’d sold it to Ford in the USA, which was bringing out a new version of its huge four-wheel-drive utility pickup truck, and the song would feature in a fifteen-million-dollar advertising campaign. It would soon be on every TV screen in the USA, and Frank expected that in years to come the song would become a staple of a long-drawn-out campaign. With each new phase of that campaign Frank would deal again and make more money for Walter and himself.
The agency making the television commercial loved some of the cheesy erotic lines, which Walter managed to make seem genuinely sexy when he sang them onstage.
This wasn’t Walter’s finest work, but it had suddenly made him a lot of money.
Politically incorrect and chauvinistic, and accepted tongue-in-cheek by the worldly R&B-loving crowd at Dingwalls, it targeted the kind of hardworking American men who used the big pickup trucks for their work. In Britain such men have white vans; equally overpowered, but more discreet.
Walter played a great show; it seemed the usual thing, no strings, no strange vibrations on the surface that I could detect. You’ve glimpsed a description of the strange sounds and music Walter himself had started hearing in the darkness of the night, but up onstage that final evening, he signaled the imminent close of the first half of their show with one splendid frozen “stand.”
The girls went crazy, and he played a killer harmonica solo that rocked old Dingwalls so damned hard the bottles up behind the bar began to rattle, leak, and fall.
My godson. I felt so proud. My rich godson.
I celebrated whatever it was that Old Nik had passed to Walter when they met a few days before.
As Walter left the stage, announcing a short break, the crowd went wild; the applause in Dingwalls usually faded quickly, but on this occasion something very special seemed to hang in the smoky air. He pushed through the appreciative cheering crowd toward the bar where Frank and I were leaning. As he slowly approached, he looked around him and pulled out a small red silk scarf from his pocket and wiped the sweat from his face. He seemed to tower above the crowd as they parted to allow a narrow way through.
He was, I was reminded once more, a beautiful man; he could have been a young Johnny Cash. He stood out in the crowd, yet at the same time he appeared rather ghostly. By the time he reached the bar, which was heaving with people who had beaten him to it, his wife was waiting for him holding out a beer.
“Walter,” she said, smiling. “So talented, big Walter: Siobhan’s big man.” This was said with neither celebration nor sarcasm. She hauled him close to her possessively. Siobhan spoke loud enough for most of the gathering girls to hear as she kissed her man on both cheeks. She was a little drunk perhaps.
She smiled with adoration, but her smile was constrained with care. Walter knew exactly what his role was in the context of that kind of event. He could do his job easily, and part of that job was acknowledging the principal currency in which rock stars were rewarded.
Siobhan was quite stunning. Her red hair and her blue-green eyes generated a sense of presence that was almost too powerful to ignore. Some of the men near her at the bar were attempting to do just that—ignore her—and their flickering eyes had jealously flit from her pale skin and slightly lecherous smile to Walter as he had gently pushed his way from the stage through the mass of bodies toward her.
As the two of them met and kissed, it was immediately obvious that Siobhan was older than her husband. She was just one year his senior, but she appeared to be more mature, and looked older than her thirty years, and despite Walter’s road-worn look she seemed more lived-in than he did. In her, the aging signified a successful decline to greater beauty, if decline is truly how it could be described. In him that night, the beginning of aging seemed rather sad, because his weary face seemed to signify an even wearier spirit.
In another life—more rock ’n’ roll than rhythm and blues—his partner would have been younger, prettier, sillier, and at such a time would have been throwing herself at him, laughing, giggling, kissing him, and flirting as though she were meeting him for the first time. Siobhan had never behaved like a trophy wife. She had never worked at it.
I sensed that as she watched her husband drink thirstily she found herself struggling to concentrate, to stay with him in the rather seedy rock ’n’ roll surroundings in which they found themselves. Was she thinking, not yet aware that she was now married to a very rich young man, that he had sold his bloody soul to the ridiculous Dingwalls circus?
And was her greatest sudden fear that he might take her soul with his?
Perhaps, after her father, she was wondering how she would survive yet another self-obsessed man?
I saw the moment when Walter noticed her eyes harden and her mouth narrow. He had told me he knew that she disapproved of what he loved doing so much in the band.
He moved toward her and spoke loud enough for me to hear. “Darling girl, you don’t have to be here. Give me one more kiss, then go on home if you like. I’ll see you later.”
Siobhan smiled even more widely, and suddenly seemed sincere. “It’s the Bushmills,” she complained. “I order it because I’m from Waterford. I knock it back. I don’t have the stomach for it. But it makes me feel very good. I’m fine. Really, my lover, I’m fine.”
There was something evasive about Walter’s expression. I learned later that he hadn’t yet told Siobhan about Frank Lovelace’s deal and what it would mean for them, and that he’d been putting off telling her as he feared it would drive a wedge between them.