“Her name was Sally,” he said finally. “It was the best month of my life.”
“What happened?”
He shrugged. “What always happens, I suppose. I got paranoid. It happens when they’re that pretty. They get all the attention. I started following her on the nights we didn’t see each other. I got jealous, kept asking questions about where she’d been. You know how it is. The first of a lifetime of mistakes.” Colin shrugged. “I never really bothered again. My heart wasn’t in it.”
It took me a moment to grasp what he meant by this. “What, you mean she was the only one?”
“The only one who mattered, yes. There were others but I quickly realized that there was no point trying after that. I mean, look at her,” he said, showing me the photos again. “That wasn’t going to happen to me twice, was it?”
I pondered what he’d said that night and tried to imagine such blind infatuation. I could all too easily understand that feeling of being overwhelmed by something precious, but to go almost fifty years without really attempting to make it work with someone else seemed not just sad, but foolish. He’d kept the memory of her in these pictures, preserved in aspic for all of these years. Sally would be drawing a pension by now. She’d probably married, had kids, grandkids, worked, retired… A whole lifetime. She’d probably never thought of Colin once.
In the meantime Colin had at some point turned to writing. Aside from the prodigious amount of records and books and newspapers, there were stacks of manuscripts on either side of a battered old Remington typewriter. Every night, if he wasn’t high, Colin would knuckle down to imagining those four weeks of his early adulthood in increasingly beatific terms. He had never intended for them to be published. They were just a way for him to access that beautiful part of his life again and again. A doorway into summer, grasping at that elusive feeling; like trying to wrap your arms around a ghost.
Then one day a CD in Colin’s collection caught my eye. The cover was amateurish, just a photocopy of a blurry image of a pattern I found vaguely familiar. It was called Sunflower Junction.
“Who’s this?” I asked. “Hugo Lawrence.”
Colin studied the CD for a moment, turning it over in his hands until his fragmented senses placed it. “He was a local chap, I think. Only produced the one record so far as I know. This one’s about a year old. I think I must have got it at one of the gigs he did.” He shrugged, passed it back to me. “Take it,” he said. “It’s on the house. You’ll probably enjoy that shit more than me.”
That was the shit I’d become partial to. I listened to Sunflower Junction later, after we’d parted ways. Colin had a late-night rendezvous with a dealer at Bottle Alley, the half-mile long double deck promenade on Hastings’ Seafront, and I had my own assignation with Ingrid, who lived on the third floor.
Ingrid was an alcoholic. She was a few years older than me. A lifetime of abuse had damaged her (I assumed) beyond repair. I thought she looked like one of those Hollywood starlets from the thirties or forties, but ten years on, after she’d been told she was too old for the screen. A faded glamour. Every now and then you caught it in the right light, or bad light. She often talked about suicide in a lazy, delirious way; the poetry of the hot bath, the pills and the bottle of Scotch, the razorblades drawn vertically down the wrists. Sometimes in bed she made me choke her until I could see she was about to lose consciousness, her eyes swimming with a febrile contentment and certainty that this, above all else would lift her away from the baseless fabric of the life she’d made for herself.
Afterwards we had nothing to say to each other. In fact unless we were fucking, we had no reason to spend any time in each other’s company. We’d keep trying, but neither of us wanted to open that lid on our pasts, to share those wounds we clearly carried around like those guys with sandwich boards, proclaiming THE EARTH IS DOOMED. What was there to say about those people who’d carried us out onto the sea, only to leave us marooned on our own lonely islands somewhere? Nothing new. We weren’t looking to be healed or coddled, or sympathised with. Not then, at least.
So we talked about anything but the past. And then we fucked and we turned over and went to sleep. Or I left the bed and came home, sat with all the lights on, daring exhaustion to claim me.
So it was after midnight when I finally put Sunflower Junction on, but I was instantly engulfed by it. The warm currents of languid guitar, the tight, jazzy upright bass and drums, the speckled sunlight of the Fender Rhodes piano and vibes, and then the punctuation of the restless trumpet or clarinet. It sounded like late period Doors, or Tim Buckley or early Van Morrison, like Bitches Brew-era Mils Davis. A stoned, summery, somnambulant trip. Every song had something to say to me. A midnight crawl through an empty Los Angeles on Baby Blue Eyes; a pastoral rumination in an English meadow at the height of Spring on “Forget Me Not”; a tight jazzy tour through a sweaty Parisian club and its backrooms on “Johnny Jump Up”; and then there was the centerpiece of the album: the long, almost improvisational jam of “Sunflower Junction,” the words conjuring bizarre images, the music spiraling and turning into a mantra, an enchantment, a summoning; circling and retreating, repeating and shifting like a mathematical equation, each time changing one number, one word, one note in order to find its way into something even more heightened, more ecstatic…
I slept and dreamed of Emily. I tried to turn away from her but my subconscious had been denied her for another day. It wanted me to feel something again. And every time I turned away, she was there, as perfect as she’d ever been. Another woman preserved in aspic, but for different reasons.
The dream was on my pillow when I woke. It was a broken, ugly thing, like the head of a dead sunflower, the yellow petals blackened at the tips, curled in over the center. I picked at the sticky petals and caught fractured glimpses of the dream I’d had; quick flashes of memory, tugs of loss and longing that I’d trained myself not to feel. But curiosity got the better of me and I pressed my fingers deep into the puckered flesh of its folds, and felt her there, felt something I hadn’t felt in a long time because it was the past, and the past was an empty room to me now.
I withdrew finally, and watched the grey light of day creep across it. Finally I found an old jam jar in the cupboard, gathered up the dream and placed it inside. I put it on a shelf a closet where I couldn’t see it.
There wasn’t much to discover about Hugo Lawrence on the internet, which surprised me. Most people make music not just to be heard but to be seen, to make money, to get laid, to be adored. I knew the drill. I used to be a music journalist a long time ago. But Hugo had no Facebook profile, no Twitter account, no social media presence anywhere. Even minor local musicians knew the internet was a tool to reach the audience they craved.
I finally located a blurry shot of Hugo on stage in a poky little club in Brighton, all hair and fire and sweat, and a review of the show that was enthusiastic despite the lukewarm reception of the audience of hardcore Folkies. Some of the extended jams lost them after ten minutes of stoned, uncommunicated reverie. They retired to the bar, but Hugo didn’t seem to care. He played the rest of the gig with his back to the dwindling audience.
I played the CD again to be certain of its strange allure. A late night can sometimes romanticize music, people, moments. It’s easy to get lost in yourself after the lights have gone off. But everything that had moved me or stirred me then did so again. I went back to Colin and asked about Hugo, but he didn’t know much.