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After you didn’t die the first time, and the next time, and the next and the next and the next, you began to worry that the world might end whether you wanted it to or not. That summer the heat was enough to turn your stomach. On most days your veins felt as though shot through with the sickly sweet fizz of fruit that had long since curdled in its own skin, swollen with rot in the sunlight.
You were lying on the floor and Dave was sat at the little folding table against the far wall of the studio, though “far” was a generous term considering the scant square footage. He had a newspaper spread across the table, leaning over it on his elbow. He held a Coca-Cola can to his brow; they sweated in unison; you watched the moisture slip down his temple under the arm of his glasses and cling to the underside of his jaw. Dave wore his specs more often than not now. He had only a glancing sense of style so he had chosen those awful wire-rimmed things which you privately disapproved of from both a sartorial standpoint and a personal one, because they made him seem older, which he was—you all were—but you did not want to be reminded of it more than you already were on a daily basis by your body’s dozens of minute failings.
As a child The Beatles always looked so old to you, even on the cover of A Hard Day’s Night when George was only twenty-one. The film grain aged them prematurely, or maybe it was the knowledge that now they were old in reality, from his perspective as a seven-year-old. That was before John had been robbed of the opportunity to be old, and even when he was shot Graham couldn't quite fathom at the time how few years he'd been given. Maybe aging was about realizing over and over again just how young your favorite artists were both when they achieved greatness and when they died. The shock and the tragedy and the lingering jealousy of it compounded annually.
“Did you know that 1998 is the hottest year on record?” Dave read aloud.
“Feels like it,” you mumbled.
“Says here that it’s because of the El Niño, the tropical storm. It’s mixed up everything in the atmosphere. That and the hole in the ozone layer is getting bigger and bigger.”
You made a noise of acknowledgment even though you weren’t quite sure what he was on about. You pictured the sky splitting open, gaping wide like a mouth or a cunt, and hellfire raining down on Earth. You pictured the dunes in Brighton sloughing off into the sea. You pictured England submerged entirely, like New York in that Lou Reed song—Manhattan’s sinking like a rock into the filthy Hudson what a shock—though the awkward rhyme scheme and Lou’s deadpan tone belied his alleged surprise. That wretched island which had not birthed you, technically, but had birthed a great deal of your agony, swallowed by the waves. This at least might have given you a reprieve from the heat.
You were never really able to grasp nihilism. The philosophical problem of your life was always that everything meant too much to you rather than nothing at all, that the world did you injury by merely existing and you suffered beneath the weight of that feeling. But lately you could see why people liked to say that nothing mattered. From dust to dust, ashes to ashes, all the great art and literature and music and any other record of humanity would someday be lost in time, same as every human life, snuffed out and worthless. So why bother with any of it.
“Hi,” came Alex’s voice from the doorway, accompanied by a plume of cigarette smoke. He peered down at you.
“Would you rather drown or be burned alive?” you asked.
“Jesus. Neither, I reckon,” he replied and sank into the sofa. You looked at his bare knees and cringed to think of his skin sticking to the leather.
“Drowning seems more peaceful.”
“Nah, I think it gives you a total panic response,” Dave said. The newspaper rustled as he folded one section and moved to another. “Like in films when people are thrashing about in the water…”
“Surely burning alive’ll give you a panic response, too, though,” Alex pointed out. “I can’t imagine you’d feel particularly calm if you were burning alive. Well—that monk looked quite peaceful in those photographs. Very Zen. But that might have been because he was a monk.”
“Whichever’s quicker,” you answered yourself.
“We may as well be burning alive in here,” Alex continued. “It’s like a fucking kiln.”
Dave grunted. “You should get used to it. It’s only going to get worse, you know, with all the vile shit these factories are pumping into the air and the governments refusing to prioritize the environment over industry.” He set the Coke can down. “I think I’d prefer to be burned alive. Save money on cremation costs,” he added.
“Wouldn’t that be a form of air pollution?” Alex wondered.
You imagined you could hear Dave rolling his eyes.
“Now, where has that boy gone off to?” Alex changed the subject in what was meant to be a silly voice, you guessed, high-pitched and missish, as if he had just noticed one quarter of their band was absent from the studio despite having been the one to cajole you all into coming in the first place and the owner of the space besides. The truth was that none of you were very motivated to start work on anything without his quasi-tyrannical presence stationed in the corner of his studio like a schoolmaster observing detention. The truth was that you had some idea of a song scattered in flimsy little bits around your brain and yet you could not gather them together long enough to write them down or even fully articulate them to yourself. So they just danced and darted in and out of your mind like houseflies batting uselessly against a windowpane, too stupid to either escape or die.
He came in half an hour later, flushed, in a foul mood, and said there’d been an incident on the Northern line which clogged up the tube system and anyway he was sorry but let’s get started shall we? And you all nodded listlessly, and picked at your instruments, and then he showed you this song he’d come up with, plunking out the sweet, soulful chords on his keyboard, and those little fragments in your brain suddenly acquired very clear contours almost against your will.
Later at home in the dark you pictured the future as one long August and felt like crying.
A month earlier the Royal Festival Hall in Southbank Centre was sold out and you felt confident in assuming the vast majority of the audience was not there to see the Finnish Men’s Shouting Choir.
“A fine set, old fellow,” he told you afterwards, mock-formal and grinning, still coming down from the high of performance and probably other things, too, but you refused to linger on that notion for long. You made a face at him and his smile grew wider.
You were very tired and not nearly drunk enough and as a result you were somewhat uneasy. “Cheers.”
He rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet, edging into your space and then leaning away, an expectant gleam in his gaze. He was happy, you realized, genuinely proud of the set you’d just played together with the Silver Apples. An afterimage of the same excitement you used to share at the very beginning, blue and hazy in your imagination, that disappeared the moment you opened your eyes.
“Sorry. I’ve just been thinking.” You drained the rest of your beer.
“Terrible habit.”
You glanced at the small puddle of amber light cast through the empty glass bottle and tried not to scoff. “I thought…I dunno. I thought—I don’t know what I thought. That it would be over by now.”
Damon’s interest in the conversation instantly fizzled. He sighed and shook his head. “What are you planning to do, shave your eyebrows and fuck off to Cambridge? You're too late for the Twenty-Seven Club now. You might as well keep going. Get over it.”
It seemed to you sometimes that your whole life was a very long, dimly-lit corridor, and you were padding down the hall with your hand braced against a wall for guidance and there was no light at the end of it. Once there had been a door, you thought, an exit sign glowing red in the darkness. Once there had been the possibility of escape. But now you knew it was to be like this forever, an endless blank through which you would stumble sightlessly until your legs could no longer hold you upright and the end of everything would be that one final step alone in the dark.
"It'd be kind of embarrassing, anyway," Damon continued. “To go at twenty-nine, I mean. So close and yet so far.”
"Can't even do that right," you muttered.
Damon acted like he hadn't heard. He said, “Well, I want to live. I love my life very much."
“You don't, though!” you cried. “You're miserable! You’ve fucked it with Justine and the band's falling apart and you act like we can’t tell but we’re not fucking stupid, Damon, it’s obvious you’ve been…” Your voice crept even higher than normal in your throat. “You’re thirty,” you finished lamely.
A look passed over Damon’s features, so slight that someone else might not have taken notice, but you knew it for what it was: the expression that he wore when he had decided he’d won an argument. His nostrils flared minutely with a single inhale and his jaw flexed, and then his face assumed a false passivity.
“The band's not falling apart,” he murmured. “Is it?”
You wanted to tuck your limbs into yourself and disappear entirely. “No,” you replied eventually.
"It's just you, then," said Damon. A blistering quality had crept into his tone even as the words he spoke remained blandly kind. "You know, I'm glad you're still here. A lot of people are, actually. You don't have to believe me but it's true.”
You said nothing.
"I like my life, Graham," Damon told you, slowly, as if he were explaining something to a very dull child. "I like who I am, most of the time. I like the music we play. I like Dave.” He glanced upwards. “…And Alex. And I like you." Again, an eavesdropper would be unaware of the meaning behind what sounded like a benign, even benevolent, statement. But you felt that last declaration as the pricking of a thousand tiny needles because it was a lie.
The semantic distinction between like and love was subtle and easy to overlook but ultimately essential in order to make sense of the emotions themselves, as humans have long attempted to corral their feelings into discrete categories through language despite the inherent futility of the project. You loved each other, yes. Even when you could not say it aloud, even when you wished it were not so, even when it seemed antithetical to your very survival, you still loved each other. That love was encoded and enshrined with varying degrees of transparency and intentionality in just about every bloody song you’d ever recorded together so there was no going back on it now. But liking was an active thing and therefore prone to change, while loving was a state of being with no fixed end, an undercurrent through and despite everything, practically an environmental factor. This love was something you’d got stuck in, not something you’d chosen, or you had not chosen this version of it. You could not remember another instance in which Damon had told you that he liked you, the phrase plain and almost ugly in its lack of ceremony. This was the first time, and it wasn't even true, not anymore. He did not like you, and you didn’t particularly like him. Sometimes you could almost convince yourself that you never had in the first place.
But the reality was that you must have liked him once even if you did not now, and it was just the two of you stood there in the poorly-lit vestibule behind the stage. Finally there was no one else listening, no one trying to weasel their way into your conversation and speculate on the meaning behind your every word. The music on the other side of the wall pulsed rhythmically, distantly, less like a sound and more like a feeling, similar to a heartbeat heard through a layer of skin and bone. You thought of lying with your head on his chest, a long time ago, maybe the first time, how warm your ear felt compressed between the tacky skin of his breastbone and the side of your own skull. Your cheek ever so slightly punctuated by the texture of the hair on his chest. You had listened to his heartbeat and dragged your fingertips through his hair and imagined all the blood moving through his body in a hundred minuscule channels just below the surface of his flesh. It was intimate, almost uncomfortably so, more intimate even than when you’d had that same blood and flesh inside your own body. This was the dull, unequivocal evidence of his life. It sounded the same as your own and everyone else’s and yet it thrilled you just to hear it then, just to have it so near.
An hour ago you felt a glimmer of that sensation amidst the protracted clamor of your best song, watching him over the top of your glasses from the stage where you were knelt fiddling with the pedals. I remember the sunset and the plains of cement… A shared memory, the oppressively unremarkable atmosphere of suburbia that had defined your lives for so long, with you and him standing on either side of it, telling the story the only way you knew how: simultaneously, in heterophony, over and over again. Your mind had gone somewhere else then as you played, somewhere vast and intangible and punishingly lovely, carried on wave after wave of sound. Maybe it could have always been like this, if you were not yourselves. But of course if you were not yourselves it could not have been like this.
“I just wish you'd stop feeling so sorry for yourself all the time,” Damon said finally. “It’s fucking boring, mate.”
“Well someone has to.” You wished you had another drink.
Damon looked at you, nearly smiling again in one of his many cruel subtleties. His eyes were alight with an ironic sort of pity and you didn’t like him then; in fact you hated him. He drew himself away from the wall where he’d been leaning. “You're funny,” he said at last. “Anyway even if you did disappear, they’d still find you again eventually, like they did Danny. And then I’d make you do a reunion tour with whatever shit guitar band was famous at the time.”
You should have laughed. It would have been so easy to give him that. He was beautiful enough even in the hideous fluorescent light that it hurt to look upon him, an encroaching ache like staring into a fire or perhaps the sun for too long. You resisted the impulse to shudder and avert your gaze, knowing that to do so would be to admit that humiliating truth which he had always known: you were never going to get away from him no matter how hard you tried.
“Nobody cares as much as you think they do,” Damon said.
You flinched as if struck before you could halt the movement or pass it off as an alcohol-induced tic. You opened your mouth to reply but he turned and began making his way down the hall until he disappeared into one of the little dressing rooms normally meant for the orchestra performers. There was no chance that he could have heard your response, muffled by that dreadful music through the wall: “That’s the whole problem.”
.
Several months later you heard on one of the university radio stations that the Silver Apples’ tour van had been run off the road by some maniac and Simeon’s neck had got broken. They didn’t think that he’d be able to play an oscillator or one of his tricked-out telegraph synthesizers again. Danny Taylor had been in the van, too, of course, but he survived largely uninjured and was lucid enough to perform CPR on Simeon so they had both lived.
You never learnt how to do CPR. You thought about sending a note to Simeon in hospital, but you couldn’t think of anything to say.
.
You took to watching nature documentaries, or if not strictly watching them then having them drone in the background as you paced round your flat and smoked and drank and sweat and refused to think about your album rollout and failed to write any songs for the new record. You repeatedly fell asleep on the floor in front of the television set. You fancied that you were somehow able to absorb the documentaries’ information subconsciously like the babies in Brave New World and that you woke equipped with a deeper understanding of the natural environment somewhere in the recesses of your brain.
When you did manage to stay awake you wondered what the animals thought of the documentarians, whether they perceived their camera lenses as great blank eyes or strange toothless mouths frozen open. If the animals knew they were being watched, listened to, remarked upon. They never seemed particularly aware of—never mind bothered by—the presence of the filmmakers. They just lived their lives, fighting and fucking and finding food to eat and never once giving thought to the topography as it slowly receded into the ever-warmer sea.
“You know that thing they say about boiling frogs?” It was the first time you’d spoken since you came into the studio that morning. Alex and Dave had already left on “rhythm section duty” which meant that Alex was going to the Groucho with Damien and Sarah and Dave was going home to sleep.
He looked up from the notebook he’d been scribbling in. “Boiling…?”
“Frogs. That if you put a frog in a pot of water and slowly turn up the heat until it's boiling, the frog won't jump out because it doesn't realize the temperature's changed. It's a metaphor for how we can get used to anything even if it's killing us.” Really you were talking about the long end of the world, the snowless futures, but he probably thought you were talking about something else.
“Right. Yeah, I suppose.”
“Well it's not true. The only reason why a frog wouldn't jump out of a pot was if it was trapped inside. It knows something isn’t right. No one gets boiled alive without knowing what's happening, without knowing that they've been forced to stay in the water. It's cruel to suggest otherwise. Or if it’s not cruel then it’s condescending.”
“I’ll be sure to keep that in mind next time I’m chatting with a frog.” He likely would have done, back when he was a kid. He ate ladybirds and considered himself uniquely attuned to the exhortations of the avian soul so conversing with frogs was not that far outside the realm of possibility. His seemingly unlimited capacity for belief was the force that powered it all, and that same faith in you specifically had buoyed you for a long time above the sucking waves of self-doubt. Then it had become less of a buoy and more like a weight or an explosive device permanently attached to you.
The metaphor slipped away, and you turned back to your guitar. The song needed some sense of gravity, something to foreground the lightness of the lyrics that were rattling about, vaguely hopeful, inside your head. Some brief and devastating yawn of sound to throw the listener off, then a return to melody, soothing.
“That sounds quite good,” Damon said.
“It’s a Yo La Tengo ripoff,” you told him.
“Yeah, that’s why it sounds so good.”
You favored him with a small smile; he noticed. His expression changed and you thought of sunlight and honey and being very young, more metaphors that lead nowhere.
“I really want this to work,” he said.
So make it work. He always had, after all.
He would not ask you outright. He would not supplicate himself before you, the way you’d sometimes fantasized about just for the imaginary satisfaction of saying no. Instead he said, “I want to do that song again, the one we did in Barcelona last year.”
You remembered it: a despondent plea of a song, tremulous and vulnerable. It startled you because you were not used to that kind of emotional frankness from him, at least not at that point in that context. But in 1997 you were all trying to practice honesty with a great, desperate eagerness as if it were a passing fad. So he’d shown you this song and through the crystalline pane of sobriety through which you viewed the world a year ago—colors headache-inducing, edges perpetually too sharp, every touch a vicious blow—you saw him as you hadn’t in a long time: that is to say, nearly ordinary and capable of being hurt.
“The problem is that nothing’s changed,” Damon said.
It was unkind to say and not true besides. You thought of Justine, who perhaps knew better than anyone else how enormously difficult it was to be loved by this man sitting across the studio, tugging repeatedly at the collar of his T-shirt to affect some kind of ventilation. If nothing else you both knew how it felt to be addressed by him however obliquely through music. You tried to imagine her listening to this song when it was done, if Damon really had the balls to include it on the record. Selfishly you hoped that she would never hear it or any of his other music ever again so you could take comfort in the knowledge that at least one of you had managed to go somewhere new and different and far away.
He left soon after that, and then you were blessedly alone in the studio, marinating in a pool of your own sweat and the remnants of this bastard Ira Kaplan offspring that seeped out of the monitors and collected in the magnetic tape inside the recorder. Your body felt very heavy, as if you would never rise from that sofa again and instead melt slowly into it until your skin and the leather were one uninterrupted swath of dead flesh.
You’d already given him all you could but still you scrounged deep within the well of yourself to see if you could uncover some generosity left over from when it had been the great joy of your life to give him things—records and cassettes, little drawings you’d done, blowjobs, advice both solicited and not. Melodies and chord progressions and words that rhymed and riffs and even just noises, anything that he could then structure and spin into something real, songs that were so solid they could almost be touched or cradled against one's breast. Songs that, like him, insisted upon themselves.
You flipped through the channels until you found a program about carnivorous plants in Australia and drank until the clenched fist of your brain went limp and soon after that you let yourself fall back into memory.
.
The summer you were fourteen was the summer Paul Weller’s new band hit the airwaves. “Long Hot Summer” was constantly on the radio and the radio was constantly on, so the song’s syrupy synths and molten bass line were in the background of everything you did that August, which wasn’t much but at fourteen you didn’t need to do much to feel like you were spending your time well. Mostly you lay in the grass by the river or in bed with your headphones or prostrate on the floor of the Albarns’ front room before an oscillating fan. Its mechanical breeze washed over you in an even rhythm like breathing as the dense pile of the oriental rug prickled at your back. You stayed suspended between those two sensations for hours and hours. Damon was always somewhere just out of your field of vision, still close enough to hear him humming absently to himself.
When you’re younger it’s easier to get away with doing nothing, generally speaking. Once you’re a little bit older you feel obligated to come up with something to do in order to spend time with someone else. That singleminded desire to be in another person's presence needs to be poured into some kind of vessel of activity that is legible to other people. So you start a band. Now this closeness has a purpose; now you have an excuse to be with this person for hours at a time because doing so is a means to an end, and you’re making something together that is more productive and valuable than just the pleasure of existing side by side in the same room, a pleasure that only the two of you could really experience in the first place.
That summer it was only the restless bliss of a shared nothing and always Paul Weller’s familiar-unfamiliar voice crooning plaintively,
Don’t matter what I do
It don’t matter what I do
Don’t matter what I do
I end up hurting you…
They aired the music video on the TV in the front window at Axe Music between adverts for the local used car dealership and the video for the other song de l’été, Bananarama’s “Cruel Summer”. Like most videos at the time the picture quality was shit or otherwise the TV screen was too small to see much detail, but either way it seemed the lens itself was smeared with the same combination of sweat and sun cream that coated your skin, and everything looked rather mirage-like as a result: the bright shards of sunlight over the River Cam, Weller’s hair slicked dark against his skull. He became increasingly denuded throughout the video’s runtime, reclining with his shirt open, the camera situated between his legs, as the other bloke punted them down the river, then lying on a towel by the water as his hands ran over the flat golden plane of his stomach. You never tanned like that; except for burning, the stubborn pallor of your body remained unchanged by the weather. Damon did, though, naturally.
You tried to think of an apt comparison to make between his complexion and anything that wasn’t sunlight or honey or wheat or some other beautiful horribly clichéd organic material but nothing ever came to mind. He often chose to forgo a T-shirt even when you were not swimming or sunning yourselves in the garden, because his mum complained about the frequency with which he came home covered in mud or grass stains or paint or foodstuffs, like he was somehow still six years old and incapable of eating an ice lolly without letting its sticky red runoff drip down his wrist and onto his front. Damon had hair on his chest that summer when he hadn’t the year before, something you noticed with a strange, self-conscious mix of intrigue and envy and then you made yourself stop noticing.
Instead you focused on the sluggish cadence of the English summer and allowed yourself to be enchanted by its mundanities, which you collected and mentally tallied: the pearlescent gaze of a dragonfly as it zig-zagged past, the sudden bright white underside of a rock dove’s wing in flight, the trees which seemed to lean over and hush one another as the wind meandered past them. A flurry of urgent chimes from a bicycle bell, the dense scent of grass cuttings and sprinkler-soaked soil. And all the while Paul Weller was singing through the slight fog of a vocoder: It don’t matter what I do…
.
You got yourself off astride his lap the first time in the weeks before you left for Goldsmiths, your face pressed into the join of his neck and shoulder. He was very quiet but you couldn’t seem to stop yourself from making these strangled girlish noises against his skin which was extremely embarrassing and you nearly came the moment you registered the feeling as embarrassment.
“Christ,” you muttered. “It’s not…It’s not ordinarily like that.” As if this were not obvious from the way your teeth were chattering despite the humidity.
He hummed. He seemed awash with the same languor that he radiated after several beers or otherwise had just emerged from sleep, eyelids heavy, an unworried placidity in his features, though his breaths came in short uneven bursts through his nose. Some time later he would tell you that this appearance of calm had required a tremendous amount of effort and monk-like inner strength because he did not want to frighten you with how truly frantic he was to touch you, to be touched by you. You wouldn’t have been frightened, you told him, but it was difficult to say how you would have felt instead.
You found you sort of liked the taste of the sweat on his skin. His body was very warm against yours under the sheets and no breeze reached you there alone in his room.
.
How often you’d seen the blood run from his nose and the flash of pink as his tongue emerged on instinct to catch it. How often you’d seen him then screw up his face at the taste, and then wince away from the pain caused by this brief muscular shift as if it were not inflicted by and contained within himself. How often he’d commanded you to not make him laugh because it was too painful, his speech muffled by the fist of ice chips he held to his nose, his lip, his jaw. How often you’d made him laugh anyway, hard enough to forget the discomfort and their schoolmates’ contempt for him and the existence of anyone else besides yourselves.
Not that often, admittedly, but enough that you could recall what he looked like wounded and pretending against his pain. The loneliness in the slant of his shoulders when he first started coming round Goldsmiths to hang out with you and your other university friends, the reproachful air with which he regarded Alex, the only time he ever looked like he didn't belong exactly where he was. You didn’t like him then either but you did love him, partly because you didn’t realize you had any other option except to love him. Mostly, though, then as now, you loved him because you loved him.
.
You were thinking of the blues so that’s what you were playing that night as the shadow of the Barcelona demo crept across the room: guitars that skittered over airwaves with a mania that was both acute and blindingly expansive, entire worlds between chords. Then you slowed the tempo to draw out those gaps, allowing the sound to linger and drift away from itself and then return. It was more music than could be confined within a single instrument or human being. Maybe that’s what this was even from the very beginning: an inability to keep everything inside, a spilling, a desperate chronic leak.
The nature documentary had given way to an endless loop of infomercials for obscure and increasingly specific kitchen implements by the time you felt as though this tune could be worth showing to other people. You were aware that Damon’s song was a send-off of sorts. It was a gesture towards an acceptance of the closure that he would not receive regarding many things in his life. It was new a tactic he was trying, you guessed. I knew it would end this way… The millennium loomed large on the chronological horizon as a totally arbitrary symbol of the finite nature of time, or if not time in general then one’s own time alive on earth, or humankind’s opportunity to perceive that time as something meaningful rather than a fact or an accident. And then there would be no after, no more “then” to contend with. You were almost sorry; still, you shied away from the apology you could feel your fingers trying to form on the neck of your guitar. Instead you made them play something more representative of a leave-taking. You could not say the word but you hoped that he would hear it anyway.
It didn’t seem fair to expect that the world would forgive humanity its violence against itself, but you hoped that it would forgive humanity its violence against the soil, against the air. You hoped that the end would be quick and merciful even if you did not deserve it.
.
You were on the floor in the dim bruise-colored space between a dream and consciousness when you remembered something he’d written to you, in a letter you later burned because its mere presence on your bedside table was like a black hole into which everything threatened to collapse and disappear:
No matter what happens, you will still be brilliant and playing your guitar and I will still be trying to write a song good enough to make you stay.