“What about Hugo?”
King sniffed, looked at me from the corner of his eyes, sizing me up finally. He shook his head. “It fucked him, that night, you know? It was, I don’t know, transcendent for him, for all of us, but it broke him too. He was ecstatic about it that night, and then the next day when we realized that it sounded good and we’d got it down on tape, you know? This fucking incredible piece of music that seemed to take you somewhere if you wanted to go.”
He sighed. “But Hugo couldn’t get back there. He told me he’d caught a glimpse of something, and I said ‘Yeah, man, me too. The walls were fucking melting.’ But he said ‘No, none of that mushroom shit. Something else.’ ”
“Did he say what it was?
King laughed. “Sunflowers? It’s all in the lyrics, ain’t it? This glimpse of something he’s been seeing since he was a little kid. Somewhere better than here, than this shit.
“Either way, man, it fucked him up. But gradually, you know? We finished the record and then we toured it, and for a while he was the same old Hugo. Still intense, but you could drink with him, talk about women and shit. But it was that song. We played about twenty gigs and each night he’d get to that song and he’d want to us to get to that place again, just like that first night. But it was lightning in a bottle, man. You can’t replicate that sort of shit, night after night.
“So we’d play that song and we’d go round and around, like it was some sort of mathematical problem.”
“That pattern on the album cover,” I said, realizing it then. “It’s a Fibonacci spiral.”
“If you say so, man. He sort of explained it to us once in the van on the way to a gig, but you know, I’m a bass player. It doesn’t mean shit to me. I just try to keep time and not fall off the stage.”
“So what happened after the gigs were over?”
King shrugged. “We stopped hearing from him. By the end of the tour, he wasn’t really talking to any of us anyway. We took our cut of the door and went our separate ways.”
“And, what, that’s it?” I said. “You never heard from him again?”
King had finished his beer. I ordered him another. He said, “People come and go in this game, mate. Look, I heard from Jez, our drummer that Hugo had sold all of his gear. Couldn’t afford the rent and got kicked out on his arse. He was sleeping rough for a while. Still got his guitars and some recording gear in storage. Heard he was trying to write some new material but the drugs were getting in the way. No cash flow so he was borrowing and not paying it back. Last I heard he was in a squat with Jez and a couple of girls. Still playing. Still not talking. Still trying to get from here to there. You know?”
“Do you have an address?” I asked. “For the squat.”
“What are you anyway,” he said, “the fuzz or something?”
I didn’t know at that point why I wanted to find Hugo Lawrence. But I’d caught a glimpse of that uncertain geography, and I could see how it could flood your life, for better or worse. King made a couple of calls, and then, somewhat reluctantly, gave me the address.
I don’t know what I expected to find. The squat was in a row of boarded up terraces, narrow little homes in a warren of backstreets. A shithole of an estate. Feral kids roaming in packs, dogs straining at leads like unexploded bombs, young men and women with permanently listless scowls on their faces.
I assumed it was where Hugo Lawrence had come to die or else to find a way out or in. To break on through to the other side. I clambered over a fence and found a smashed back window that I could crawl through.
The smell assaulted me as soon as I dropped through the window. The scent of honeysuckle and jasmine, phlox and tuberose. A dizzying and suffocating mass of flowers. But it was not just that. Nothing is ever just one thing. There was something broken and corrupted too. It was the kind of smell you wouldn’t assume you could identify, but there it was: not just shit and piss and the fug of heroin, but the putrefaction of bodies, the slow, ugly decay of flesh. I stumbled through the kitchen, taking a breath and holding it, my mind gone blank, narrowing to a point of light.
There were three of them in what remained of the room, long dead on the floor, their bodies beginning to liquefy into the carpet. The smell of spoiled eggs and shit. But that was not the most significant part of the room. It really wasn’t a room anymore. The floor was flooded with clover and cow parsley and tangled grass; there were bluebells growing between the corpses’ fingers, in the places where their bodies had decomposed the most. Claiming them for the earth. Gypsophilia flooded from between one of the women’s legs, across the room and up one of the remaining walls. It was scrawled with a set of numbers and mathematical symbols that I had neither the time nor the inclination to inspect. The geography of the house had been corrupted from within. It wasn’t evident from the outside. The transformation was beautiful, rich beyond words. The heavy, blossom-laden branches of a hawthorn tree. A sea of weeping willows hanging over grassy banks, meadows and copses at the limit of my vision, all seemingly illuminated from within. A drowsy hum to the earth; a heavy stillness that fizzed in the blood. A guitar had been abandoned on a granite outcrop and claimed by lichen. A stream sprang from the rocks, singing quietly and rolling gently around the body of a young man. His long hair was crawling with lice and beetles. The leaves of a Rowan tree, tremulous with dew. Heather and foxgloves, little collapsed stone walls. Everything was flooded with small details, expanded beyond all comprehension. What remained of the room simply resembled old ruins in an ecstatically rendered landscape.
Hugo Lawrence wasn’t among the bodies, so I went in pursuit of him. I fled through a field of poppies toward the promise of summer, or the remains of it. For a while I felt like part of something. I walked for an hour or more. My feet were soaked and my mind was tranquilized. There was immanence to the place. Something I could only call magic, because I had no other words for it.
What else can I tell you? I didn’t find Hugo’s Sunflower Junction. There was a place here for someone, but not for me. This was the ghost of someone else’s imaginings. I lay for a while in the gorse on the side of a valley, breathless and weeping. I don’t really know why. A vague sense of exile perhaps, or of the evanescence of things. I found another guitar on a rock, along with a small digital recorder. I waited for a while, but Hugo was long gone. I took the recorder and made my way back. I glanced behind me now and then, thinking I’d caught a glimpse of a sea of sunflowers somewhere, just beyond a rise, through the trees, across a river. But I was mistaken. It wasn’t mine to find.
A week after Emily died I packed a bag with just the essentials. Toiletries, a few changes of clothes, my wallet, cards, phone, laptop. I didn’t even take any pictures of her with me. There were some on the phone anyway. I paid the last of the rent, talked to the insurance people and solicitors, put the furniture and our belongings in storage. There was no one I needed to say goodbye to. No family and no more than a handful of friends whose lives had taken them away from me as we’d hit our forties. I stayed for the funeral, and then I left.
We’d married young. Emily was seventeen and I was twenty-two. Those relationships tend not to last, but ours did. A few bumps in the road but what we had was clearly too important to walk away from. So many things that seem important when you’re young fall away from you as you get older. And all that remains is love. The short list of things that you wouldn’t do for each other. I think so, anyway. Time has clouded my judgement.