Selena held me ever more tightly. Her touch terrified me. She had me in the palm of her hand. She could break me. She could tell Floss—indeed everyone—what she knew, that I had raped her best friend. My control over my life for the past eighteen years, the dignity I felt in my recovery, my sobriety, and freedom from drugs all began to crumble. If she talked, I would be finished. My life would be over.
At that moment I felt her left hand move from my arse to my thigh, and then slip around to my cock. She looked up at me, grinning lasciviously, a sly part of me responding, thinking things could be worse.
She waved at her sister who was standing on the opposite side of the stage. I saw that Siobhan was smiling, tears of joy streaming down her face. Selena put her index finger on the program and whispered to me.
“Siobhan Watts,” she said. “‘S. Watts.’” It was she who had written the poetic lyrics.
Walter was still standing in the center of the stage and only a few of the crowd were turning away to leave. There was a kind of buzz in the air, and the lighting monkeys (the operators of the big spotlights up in the gantry) were sweeping the sky.
Selena was in shadow when she looked up at me and said, “You saw the angels, didn’t you?”
I just nodded. I was thinking, Are we united in madness? And with hope flooding in: Does this mean she won’t betray me?
The crowd was now finally beginning to turn away from the stage and leave. But as they did Walter came to his senses.
“Don’t go!” He was shouting. “Not yet!”
People turned back to the stage.
“Don’t go,” Walter shouted again. “I have something I need to say. Something I want to ask you all.”
There was a slight pause and the audience refocused on the stage.
“Is there, in the audience, by any chance, a girl born in Bern in Switzerland in the spring of 1995 who was adopted and doesn’t know her biological parents?”
At first there was no response.
Walter tried the magic words. “Is that girl looking for her birth mother?”
Everyone in the audience looked around at everyone else. What a question!
But incredibly, one by one three arms went up, then four, then finally seven.
Walter laughed. He could hardly believe it. None of us could. What he had intended to be a demonstration to Floss that if her daughter was alive, she would one day be found, had suddenly become infused with genuine possibility. The child might be found. Tonight.
He looked at Floss, who was laughing back at him.
Up in the lighting gantry to the right of the stage, as I learned later, Molly was concentrating on her job. The controlling bar of the huge spotlight she had trained down on Walter was set at a high angle, and she was stretching awkwardly to keep it steady.
Over the earphone communication system she heard the lighting director give her a command.
“Molly, cut your lamp.”
Cut the lamp? She didn’t understand. There were only three stage spots trained on Walter. The rest were spread around the field, another seven “Super Troupers” as they were known. The entire lighting crew was winging it, being inventive, taking initiative. Everything was turning out beautifully.
This time Frank could be heard on the intercom, more firmly. “Cut your lamp, Molly. Do as you’re told.”
She did as instructed and was removing one of the headphones when the director spoke again.
“Molly,” he said. “Weren’t you born the spring of 1995 in a clinic in Bern?”
Every light operator sharing the earphone system in the thirty-man team heard what he asked. A few of them laughed. Molly had not heard anything Walter had asked of the audience; her headphones were still tight to her head. She had only heard the director.
All her colleagues searched the stage to find her.
One by one all the spotlights in the park found her up on her lighting tower. Nine spots lit her up like a superstar in space.
A girl in a star.
The cherubim hidden in the robes of Nik’s darkest angel.
The crowd began to applaud. It was merely a ripple. They couldn’t know what was going on, but some of them clearly sensed it was something special.
Walter and Floss looked up, and Molly gazed down at them.
Walter beckoned to all the girls who had raised their hands to come forward. But all of us onstage behind him had seen Molly’s face up in the lighting tower. We saw Floss’s stunned smile as she looked up at the girl.
Maud’s face, too, caught my eye as she compared Molly with Floss back and forth—mother to daughter—and I knew then that Molly was Floss’s daughter. My daughter?
Two long-lost children, found within months of each other. I remembered Walter’s visions of a child in a star—was it in one of his soundscapes? By some incredible mischance, or perhaps a miracle, Walter’s visions were taking on new power, especially as embodied in the music that night. Floss’s amazing and tragic life adventures, her own adoption and finding Molly, suddenly took on operatic significance. Could it be a mere coincidence? Maybe… but in the context of the concert, it was full of poignancy and momentousness.
Then I saw that Walter knew what he had to do. He positioned 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 up 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.
It was a night at Dingwalls writ large. Steve Hanson wrote of the event in his autobiography.
At Dingwalls with Big Walter and the Stand, there had always been a moment when we would find some direct connection with the audience. They would as often as not be half-drunk and, if our set had been long, they would be tired. But when Walter adopted his famous “stand,” the atmosphere would transform into one of complete anticipation and wonderment. It was as though we were all waiting for an orgasm to complete, one that had begun but stalled for a moment.
At some of the stadium shows in the eighties and nineties with Hero Ground Zero, there would be a similar moment. Patty would stand poised, her tambourine fluttering rapidly in the air, the music silent, the breeze blowing her dress. The tambourine sounded like a rattling hiss. The audience were hanging. Patty was like a sparrow hawk that had spotted a field mouse. And when she finally brought it down to her side, and the rest of us in the band took off, the energy and tension in the audience would be released in what felt like a spiritual ascendance.
Really, you have to be a musician in a big band at a huge concert to know how that feels.
And when the four of us were together again at Hyde Park, performing Walter and Harry Watts’s soundscapes, when we were done there was nowhere else to go. Floss’s lost daughter Molly had been found. She had been in our midst all along. Walter took up his position and when he finally began to wail his heart-wrenching harmonica solo, we all ascended.
This time when the music ended there was applause, and it was gratefully acknowledged.
We heard the band walk off.
We heard the technicians leave their posts.
Soon the audience was gone, and the cordoned area in Hyde Park began to clear.
An hour later it was all over.
This time the silence was appropriate, delightful, and free of tension and expectation.
The show was over.