A Possible Life (37 page)

One thing I had discovered, from Rick Kohler, was that when I’d flown back ahead of her that summer in Greece, she’d met a man in Athens. He was an Egyptian, or maybe Tunisian, wealthy, and he’d made a big play for her. He’d told her he had a flat in Paris and it was there that she’d fled when she left me in Denver. I guess that explained why she went to live, as she did, on the Boulevard Haussmann, which, I discovered, is a wide street with chain stores and offices on the Right Bank – not at all her idea of the ‘
vie bohème
’. The man had a large apartment where she could be alone and write. I tried not to think of when he visited or how he took his rent.

I didn’t feel much about my mother as I walked towards the Palladium. Perhaps the full force of her death would hit me later, but for the time being I was so intensely anxious about Anya I could think of nothing else. I found my seat in the theatre. The house was full and the atmosphere was charged. Many of the
audience
were my age, with bald heads shining under the house lights, but there were younger people who must have sampled Anya’s work from her back catalogue and come to like it.

The stage was set up for a full band with keyboards, drums, microphones for backing singers, as well as guitar stands. This was encouraging. Although I was high from the bourbon and nicotine and half a spliff I’d had on the street, I was consumed with anxiety, not only for Anya but for myself. This woman, the love of my life – after twenty years. Would she be old and unattractive? Would I still love her at a distance? Would it rip me apart? Or would I feel nothing? I saw that my hands were shaking.

The lights went down and the MC strode on. He was superbly brief. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, for the very last time – MPR recording artist Anya King.’ The audience rose to their feet as the spotlight picked up a slight figure coming on stage left. She wore a knee-length green gypsy dress with boots and big gold earrings. She carried an acoustic six-string guitar, held at arm’s length by the neck. As she made it to the middle of the stage, I noticed that she limped. On a stool, beneath the spotlight, she sat and pushed back her dark hair, cut back to just above the shoulder, thickly streaked with grey. There was no kohl beneath her eyes, but there was powder and lipstick on her face as she turned it up into the light. Without speaking, she ran her thumb down a single arpeggio, leaned forward and at once began to sing:

Platform lights are furred with cold

In December’s freezing hold,

Genevieve, you’ve made your plan,

Now you must stay …

Tears erupted from my eyes. Her voice had changed. This was much more than the slight deepening I’d noticed on
Another Life
, this was a new register. At the end of the song, the members of
the
backing group came on stage. They included tenor sax, trumpet and two female singers. The next song was the popular ‘The Need to be You’, where the backing vocalists provided the top notes, then came ‘Boulevard Haussmann’, with a clumsy guitar solo that tried to replicate the record note for note.

At this point, Anya left the stool, went over to the piano and addressed the audience. This was the first time I had heard her speak since lunch at the hotel in Denver more than twenty years before.

‘Thank you all for coming tonight. My name is Anya King and this is the last public performance of my life. I guess you can tell from my voice why I think it’s time to call it a day.’ There was some good-natured whistling. ‘Later on I’m going to introduce you to the band, but for the time being just sit back, stand up, whatever you want to do, and enjoy the show. We’re going into a little melancholy mode here. This one’s called “The Doctor From Duluth”.’

The audience responded enthusiastically, calling out suggestions or ‘We love you, Anya.’ How much I’d missed that voice – that pure diction, the North Dakota accent with a resigned self-awareness that always seemed to put her one step ahead of you. It was the voice that had phrased intimate words to me so many times, the self-same voice that had whispered and sung ‘I love you, Freddy.’ At this point I wasn’t sure I’d make it through the set and had started to look around to see how quickly I could escape.

The lights dimmed, except for one spot on the piano. ‘This is called “I’m Not Falling”,’ she said. After all this time she had the arrangement she wanted – voice and piano alone. She’d also changed the tempo, slowed it down, so it was no longer a kind of novelty anti-love song that Larry Brecker had liked: it was a self-critical account of her inability to give herself to another person. She blamed what the song called ‘a greater need’, which I suppose referred to her music. She’d written the first draft of the song
when
she was nineteen, but it was as though it had taken her thirty years to understand it.

She stood up and walked stiffly back to the middle of the stage, where she strapped on her guitar. ‘All right. Here we go. One, two, three, four.’ Off they went into ‘Forget Me’ and for the first time the band seemed to gel, to pull its weight. Also for the first time, Anya began to look as though she might be enjoying herself. She stayed up-tempo with a light-hearted ‘Ready to Fly’, her voice see-sawing all over it. When she came to the final verse, with its key change, she thrust her hips forward and pointed up to the sky in a very literal reminder to the other musicians. And up they went.

Then there were introductions to the band, at the end of which she said, ‘OK, for the last little bit of fun, we’re going to do a song which has a special memory for me. And Freddy, I don’t know if you’re out there. I kinda think you must be. So, thank you for the flowers. And this one’s for you.’ I was fearing ‘Song for Freddy’, but the bubbling bass line and the ringing guitars led into ‘Hold Me’. She sang it just as she had in the SoHo club that first night. Her voice was gruffer, but she still managed to convey a sense of excitement when she sang ‘There’s a mighty road to travel/And some dangers I don’t know.’

Back at the piano, she gave a mesmerising ‘Julie in the Court of Dreams’ and ‘Wolf Point’ with its chilling trumpet solo. She then played ‘Another Life’, and that was too much for me. I put my hands over my ears and waited for it to stop.

There was another upbeat section with Anya back on guitar for ‘Don’t Talk Spanish’, which featured a fantastic tongue-in-cheek flamenco solo from the guitarist, then ‘City on a Hill’ and ‘Gate Nineteen’ before she thanked everyone for coming and prepared to leave. There was a lot of calling out and pleading from the audience for more.

‘Sure, you can have more,’ she said. ‘This is “more”. This is my last song.’

She seemed to flinch as she straightened up in front of the microphone, and I wondered where the pain was – hips or knees or heart. There came a slow dreamy tenor sax, fizzing cymbals, exploring bass. For a moment, I didn’t recognise the song, then I heard the diminished seventh chord ringing out from Anya’s guitar and the words beginning, ‘Frida, don’t you let them have their way.’

The song was eight minutes long on the record and I looked down at my watch as she began. It was almost unbearable to think that there were only seven, then six minutes of this magnificent voice left for the world to hear. The audience was motionless as the song unfolded heat-soaked plains, dust clouds, the smell of oil paint, the roar of Mexico City – and in amongst it all the hard-edged voice of a lonely girl from Devils Lake.

I’d done nothing, I’d played a few things for fun and money, but I felt as she sang then the enormous stretch of what Anya had tried to do – that outreach of imagination, to feel your heart beat in someone else’s life – and I saw how much it had cost her.

I looked at my watch. There was about a minute left as she entered the final verse with its doubtful ending, ‘Maybe it was more than you could take, my darling,/Were these choices really ours to make …’

And when the final note faded, she did what she had done the first day I met her at the farm and she thought she’d said enough for the time being. She just shut down. There were no fade-outs, no goodbyes. She took the guitar off and propped it on the stand, bowed briefly to the audience, turned on her heel and walked off the stage – trying hard, I could tell because I knew every pore of her skin so well, to limp as little as possible as she left the spotlight – went into the blackness of the wings and disappeared.

Becky wanted me to buy a flat in London because she was keen to visit more often, and the next day I went to see a new development near Hoxton, an old Victorian building with its name
chiselled
above the lintel: St Joseph-in-the-West, once a workhouse or something, now full of saunas and fitness rooms.

I didn’t really go for it. I didn’t want to be swallowed up by so much history, by the failed existences of others. At my age I’d begun to pity the struggles of the young and I was resigned to all the lives I wouldn’t now have time to lead. It was no longer a matter of envy when I saw beautiful women sharing plans with laughing men.

So I told the estate agent I’d call the next day, then went and sat outdoors at a pub. Beside me were guys in suits, shouting over lager to female colleagues in their shiny work clothes. I didn’t know their world. They looked fired up and engaged, but I’d never even had what they would call a proper job.

I was almost sixty years old, but I didn’t understand anything. It all in the end seemed to have been a matter of the purest chance. But for a succession of tiny pieces of good fortune, I might never have had a glimpse of Weepah Way, the farm or Anya King. Yet I also knew that if any of those bits of luck had fallen out a different way and I had had another life, it would in some odd way have been the same – my heart existing, as Anya put it, by a different name.

I don’t feel I’m the same person as the kid who walked across the park to school each day. I saw an article in the paper the other day that said that at my age I’d have no cells or whatever in common with that small boy. Maybe someone else has his cells now. I look ahead and I can see the years spooling out of me like tape from an unhinged reel-to-reel, spinning out of control, tangling, never to be rewound. And the past seems like something I imagined. The guitarist I was in my first band in England, at the poll-winners’ concert … I remember the grain of the wood beneath my tapping foot; but in what sense was that me?

Sometimes my whole life seems like a dream; occasionally I think that someone else has lived it for me. The events and the
sensations
, the stories and the things that make me what I am in the eyes of other people, the list of facts that make my life … They could be mine, they might be yours.

I’m an actor playing a part I’ve never mastered. I’ve stood here – back to the bar window, beer in glass, slight jet lag, old leather jacket – maybe a thousand times before. And it never adds up.

So when eventually my hour comes and I go down in that darkness, into the blackness of the black-painted wings, there’ll be no need to mourn me or repine. Because I think we’re all in this thing, like it or not, for ever.

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Published by Hutchinson 2012

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Copyright © Sebastian Faulks 2012

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This is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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First published in Great Britain in 2012 by
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ISBN 9780091936808 (Hardback)
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