Beatlebone (14 page)

I intended to spend three days and three nights on Dorinish Island. I imagined this was going to be an odd, meditative interlude in my life—three days of utter inwardness; an exploration of inner space; a seablown breeze to clear all the webs away—and I would return to report my findings in a mature, honed prose, as clear as glass: this from a man who had never knowingly underfed an adjective.

Early on another May afternoon, I cycled the ten miles from Westport to Murrisk Pier. I arrived just as the fish-farmer docked his boat. I do not have the words for boats. I can say only that it was a small boat with an outboard motor. I felt ladylike and impractical as I was helped onto the boat. I carried an Arctic sleeping bag and a small backpack that contained food, notebooks and a bottle of whiskey. I had a mobile phone for use only in emergencies. We set off for Dorinish. I was boyishly excited but also I felt a little sheepish. The boat slapped hard against the waves as it zipped smartly across the water. Small islands came into view as locket shapes and faded as quickly. There was an island shaped like a boot spur; there was an island shaped like a scimitar moon. It was cold on the water and my stomach looped on the dip and rise and the quick sloping of the boat as it moved across Clew Bay. Once a valley I was among its clouds. The tips of its peaks came into view as knuckles and mounds. I recognised Dorinish at once as it appeared: a pair of sisterly cliffs that rise as buttresses against the Atlantic. The engine cut as the boat was worked with tidy skill close to the stones of the island. I climbed out and made it through the foaming ebb of the tide and onto the shore. The fish-farmer waved as he departed again for the length of three days and three nights.

I was alone then on the island.

John Lennon published two books of stories or prose fragments:
In His Own Write
and
A Spaniard in the Works
. His style is built on heavy punning and the formation of madcap compound words that roll out across trippy sentences. At its very occasional best, it has a playfulness and comic intelligence that reads something like Spike Milligan as shot through Dylan Thomas or James Joyce. In fact, he had a teenage obsession with Thomas that persisted into his adult years, and later, when his first book appeared and was dutifully compared to Joyce, he bought a copy of
Finnegans Wake
, and he read a few pages and loved it—he said it sounded like the voice of an old friend—but he couldn't be bothered to read any more than those few pages.

His own stories, or fragments, suggest great potential but read like first drafts. His prose writing flitters along the surface of things only, and it is funny and vivid and pacy, but it never slows or comes down through the gears sufficiently to allow moments of tenderness, sadness, love, anger, bitterness, or rancour, all the sweet and thorny emotions he routinely sprang in his brilliant and nerveless songwriting.

He wanted to walk out in the world. He began to make odd excursions. In 1978, he visited Japan alone. He flew there via South Africa—he carried just a single overnight bag. He had a couple of hours stopover in South Africa and he asked a cabdriver to show him some of the country. The driver brought him to a park where he just sat quietly for a while. In Japan, he walked into a hotel and for the first time in his life he booked a room for himself. He walked the streets and nobody could see him. He stepped onto a ferry and stood among the crowd of commuting workers on the deck and kept his eyes down and found to his delight that he was invisible there.

The first of the famous photographs are from his teenage teddy boy phase in the late 1950s. “Teddy,” of course, abbreviates from Edwardian; the teddy boy fashion of this time was essentially a reprise of the dandyish look adopted by gangs of mostly Irish street boys in Salford and Liverpool in the 1880s. They were at that time known as Scuttlers, and they were very cool and extremely vicious. I came to see him essentially as a kind of Edwardian type: the Melancholy Dandy. It was suggested in the way that he carried himself. And the way that we carry ourselves is dictated primarily, I believe, by the secret airs and reverberations of our places.

There is a natural roll or jauntiness to the step when you walk down Bold Street on a busy afternoon. The street is alive with youthful energies; Bold Street is where the cooler kids hang about in their dapper regiments and they have a natural swagger in Liverpool, a kind of haughty belligerence lacked by their contemporaries in London or Dublin. Fashion houses still send scouts to walk the Liverpool streets and report on what the teenage kids are wearing and how they're cutting their hair.

My afternoon routine was to have coffee at the FACT cinema near the top of Bold Street and then shop at Matta's Middle Eastern deli about halfways along. I walked daily the roll of the street, and very often I experienced an overwhelming sense of
déjà vu
, because for all its vibrancy there is an air of otherness or of past times about the street, too. I was not yet aware that Bold Street is the site of more reported paranormal activity than anywhere else in Britain.

A time slip occurs on the street. It is usually documented as happening in the vicinity of the old Lyceum post office, by the side entrance to Central station and opposite Waterstones bookstore. A typical report, from 2002, carried in the Liverpool
Daily Post
, came from a former policeman who went shopping on the street with his wife one Saturday afternoon. They emerged from Central station. He met a friend and stopped to talk for a moment. His wife went ahead to Waterstones. When he went to follow, he saw the name “Cripps” above the bookstore, and he jumped back at the honking of a motor horn from an old-fashioned van with the name “Cardin's” on its side. Everywhere on the street the women wore full skirts and had permed hair; the men wore mackintoshes and hats. He crossed the street and the window of the store contained not books but old-fashioned women's shoes, umbrellas, handbags. He felt panicked and he asked a lady beside him, who wore contemporary dress, if this store didn't sell books. Equally bemused, she said that she thought it did, too, and she turned away. He entered the store and there was his wife among the stacked paperbacks, and he looked outside and the street had returned to the moment again.

There have been more than a hundred similiar reports over the years. Almost all of them relate to the area around the Lyceum post office on Bold Street. All the reports suggest that the time slip that occurs leads into the 1950s.

I was removed from Dorinish Island in a state of distress. The fish-farmer brought me back to Murrisk Pier and to the same pub that Sid Rawle had been taken to and in much the same condition. Though I had lasted a day and a half as opposed to a year and a half. I had a toasted ham and cheese sandwich and five glasses of red wine. Weak as a kitten, I felt in no condition to cycle back to Westport, and so I phoned a friend there and asked her to drive out and collect me. When she arrived and saw the state that I was in, she actually
shuddered
.

How do I look? I said.

Shook, she said.

Very shook, she said.

What the fuck happened you? she said.

I don't know if I can go into it, I said.

By the next morning, however, I felt greatly restored, and I decided to light out for Achill again. I had the sense—perhaps hysterically—that the fibres of the story were starting to knit together. I cycled from Westport to Newport, skirting once more the edges of Clew Bay. Here and there between the trees a view opened up across the water to the knuckle of Croagh Patrick and each time it appeared I raised a knuckle of my own in ritual salute. I hummed little songs as I pedalled along. I stopped for a while in Newport. Anytime I've been through the town I've entered it in sadness and left in something close to happiness—its trapped feeling or reverb, plainly, is a benevolent one.

There was a café tucked away in a corner of the square. I went and sat there for a while. I made some notes about what might be seen from the attic floor of the hotel in the square. A pair of old farmers came into the café and made their order at the counter. They took a table and talked quietly together; they seemed so easy in their skins. They made light work of enormous sandwiches stuffed with ham and coleslaw and lettuce and there were pots of tea and cream cakes to follow. Then one of them looked over at me and rather sternly said—

Wouldn't you enjoy your life?

I left the café and aimed the bike due west for Achill Sound. As I cycled along I heard a train that had not passed this way for years, the rhythm of its heavy clanking along the ruts and ribs of the earth, and I imagined all the faces at the windows, in a blur as they went by, and their tiny sadnesses, and all of them were lost again to the years since they'd passed.

The mountains to the north were hardfounded against grey light.

A thin rain descended on the day in slow drifts and sang.

I came at last on a view of Achill Sound—I got off the bike and stood for a while in the drizzle and watched the whitecaps break and each wave as it gave out was the ghost-trace of some lost feeling and a shiver in the blood.

The water moved beneath and slapped against the stakes of the bridge as I cycled across. The streets of the village at Achill Sound were empty as if the world had been about for a while but had moved on again. I took the road by the water and I climbed the mountain by the road and after something less than an hour the road crested and I looked down on the bay at Keel and it was filled darkly as though with blood.

It was the middle of the afternoon when I came to the beach at Keel. I walked it for a long while. I sat on the rocks and was mesmerised by the water. My breath slowed to almost nothing. I saw the women as they crept out of the air in their cloaks of black and waded, and moved out, and screamed their grief to the sky and sea. The shapes of their heavy thighs showed under the wet black of their clothes in the saltwater and the wrack. They screamed and turned finally to face me in their stepped generations and each of them wore my own face—

Lah-de-dah

Lah-de-dum-dum-dah.

He believed that the force of a cataclysmic event could smash past a creative block. If such an event placed one in mortal danger and was accompanied by a tremendous crack-up, so much the better.

In the summer of 1980, after heavy weather had sent all of her crew to their bunks with nausea, he was left to sail single-handedly a yacht called the
Megan Jaye
from Rhode Island to Bermuda. He attributed his even and settled stomach to his macrobiotic diet.

The storm grew more ferocious as the night passed and it looked like the end for a while—the Atlantic was grabbing from all sides—and he was panicked and tearful and screamed for God to come take him because he didn't fucking care no more anyhow, and then he lost his mind for a long stretch of sea, and he grew frantic and giddy as the seas raved and the skies opened, and he sang his old songs—he belted them out from his lungs as charms—and he Screamed, and after a long hard night fraught with death-fear and the odd hilarity of disasters he made it at last to calm waters and a placid morning—Bermuda—and he believed that it was this event or passage that cleared his mind and allowed him, after four barren years, to create new material and work again.

At the small hotel in Keel, I managed to arrange a room and get through the accompanying small talk without mentioning anything about the unsettling vision on the beach. I was watchful of my tone, however—never in itself a good sign—and I worried that I may have been acting overly cheerful or hearty. The young lady at reception was pleasant and told me about some nearby walking and cycling routes. I said I'd see what the old legs had left to give, and I tried to keep the exclamation marks out of my speech. She said I was in room number nine and smiled quietly as she handed over the key. She asked me did I care to dine at the hotel that evening and I said well, certainly, yes, a reservation for one, please, and now I worried that my diction was becoming too formal, in a kind of weirdly over-comma'd Victorian way. Basically, I was all over the shop, and I was anxious again to the pit of my gut: I decided this meant that the story was starting to come together.

I established myself in the room marked nine without significant incident. I smoked a little weed for calm, exhaling out the window so as not to activate the smoke detector. Now what we have here, I said to myself, is such an old, old question: how do you bring up the fact of ghosts in reasonable company? Especially in the reasonable company of one's readers? I was looking out to the hills and the backs of the village buildings as I pondered this—I realised I was actually looking out at the back of the local police station and quickly put my pipe away—and I was feeling much more settled and together in myself, and thinking a little about the story but in a necessarily vague way, just letting it sit at the back of my mind, just there on the ledge of the subconscious where all stories must for a long while sit and season—or so at least I convince myself; no pressure, don't rush it, and so forth—and it occured to me that the 1970s is by now essentially an historical fiction. True memory of the era—as in sense memory, as in the precise tang on the air of a new morning back then, or the throb and rumble of a great city rising from its fumes in the early morning back then, or the way a lover's dark hair might splay just so on the sheets, and she stretches—has by now succumbed to time and distance, and what's left to us is mediated, and it can only be built up again in gimcrack reconstructions, with scenic facade, but if we can get the voices right, the fiction might hold for a while at least.

The Liverpool accent, or at least the city accent as it can be heard within, say, a two- or three-mile radius of Lime Street station, is closely related to an Irish accent. There is a type of Liverpool accent that bleeds in particular into the accent of the northside of Dublin. But of course this is an old and storied migration, and one that is stitched into the lore of countless thousands of families: the cities are cousinly.