i'd like to say thank you on behalf of the group and ourselves
So! Tonight? For the first time since 1966, a Beatle is playing rock and roll music in the city where I live. And I? AM TOTALLY GOING.
I could not be more excited, you guys. Paul McCartney is playing at AT&T Park (my home away from home! It's like he knows!) in like nine hours. I'm going with my buddy from work who is Beatlesmaniacal in the exact same why I am, except he's got twenty years on me and was also a roadie for like fifteen years (he's two degrees away from everybody, which means I am three degrees (although I had already met the dude in charge of landscaping Paul's house in Tuscon (my friend's dad's friend who went to Bridge School with us when we were fifteen (digression!))). We were talking yesterday and I was like, I dunno, I might scream, and he said, really? and I said, none of those girls could tell you why they were screaming. Sometimes it just happens.
So we'll see! I will report back in high spirits I'm sure.
And, on that note:
Hi, this story got ridiculously away from me. I have actual internet evidence that two weeks ago, it was 6000 words and "circling a landing." Oh, me-from-two-weeks-ago. So optimistic. So naive.
Anyway:
John/Paul, 23898 words, rated NC-17. If I may make a musical recommendation, try John's 'Rock and Roll' album. Just terribly appropriate in all ways.
(thank you punk_pony)
The First Year
By Candle Beck
In the middle of summer, John came over to Paul's house. Church bells had peeled back the layers of the sky to reveal a boiled blue colour.
Paul and George were sitting cross-legged on the floor of his bedroom, their knees almost touching, trading a song back and forth between their guitars. John knocked on the window, the structure of his hair collapsing, his face twisted comically with his cheeks blown out.
Paul stood up so fast he almost dropped his guitar. He said fast to George, "That's him, that's John," and went to open the window.
John leaned in, bony elbows sticking over the sill. "'allo, Paul."
A grin broke Paul's face open like a wedge. "Heya, John."
From the floor, George fingered through a small uncertain riff. Paul remembered he was there, and said, "This is George," without taking his eyes off John.
"Like 'em a bit young, don't ya," John said.
Paul flushed and scowled. George held his guitar reverently, like a father holding his dying child. He watched the two of them at the window with his head ducked down and his eyes angled up.
"He can play 'Raunchy' all the way through," Paul told John. "Are you coming in?"
John pushed his specs up his nose and looked away. Paul stared at the side of his face, the rough red place under his jaw where the skin wasn't used to a razor yet. Paul's hand was sweaty around the neck of his guitar, his head jammed and alight with song.
"Aye, I suppose," John said with a hefty sigh, a saint nobly accepting his cross.
He climbed in through the window, long legs canting and bending over Paul's little desk. The thump of his feet on the floor shook the room and made the picture of Paul's mother rattle on the wall.
John hadn't brought his guitar with him. He tried to commandeer Paul's, but it was re-strung so that Paul could play it upside down and left-handed, and so John took out his mouth organ instead. They all knew how to play 'Heartbreak Hotel,' and so they did, messy and uncoordinated but still, still.
As ever, Paul was effortlessly fascinated by John: heavy half-lidded eyes, forearms as hard as wood, the melting slouch of his oiled hair from the damp heat of the summer day. John's twisted smirk around the mouth organ, the brief sweet moments when he actually smiled. Looking at him for too long made Paul feel almost drunk.
After the song was over, and a lull had come and gone, George asked John as if proffering his hand to a snarling dog, "You want to try mine?"
John blew a low note through the mouth organ, giving George's three-pound guitar a sharp once-over. He sneered, but reached out.
"All right, give her here."
George obliged, and John's hands went to their proper places, began to play so quick and easy. Paul couldn't quite name the song, but he knew it; he picked out a soft rhythm line a half a second behind John.
"This is rock and roll radio," John said in a broad cowboy accent. "You're listening to the hits that fit, the platters that matter, the live jive, the true blues. Don't touch that dial, don't look away. We've got the Bird Man, the Bopper, Crickets and Comets and cats and kittens, Presley and Perkins particularly for the people's pleasure. Hold on tight, Radioland--this is the show that never stops."
Paul was grinning. He angled his guitar in such a way that it obscured his face, because he was sure he looked as dumb as a post. John was maybe the cleverest person Paul had ever known.
When he fell quiet at last, George asked somewhat breathlessly, "Where'd you learn to play?"
John stuttered over a note. He answered, "Me mum. She had a banjo," and said, "And who spent good money buying a guitar for an infant, I wonder?"
George went red, snatching his instrument back, and Paul laughed. John smirked at nothing in particular, hid half his face behind the mouth organ again.
Later, Paul's father called him for tea. John went back out the window because Jim McCartney hadn't liked him from the start, and with his heartbeat running fast and high as a bird, Paul shouted goodbye at his narrow retreating back.
*
Paul had met George on the coach that took them over to the better side of town for school every day.
George had been thin-wristed, shoulders like cane, hunched over his knees in a window seat. A torn piece of paper stuck out of his bag like a plume, covered in cramped hand-drawn pictures of guitars. Paul had sat down next to him, asked him if he played better than he drew.
They were friends right away. George was quiet and perceptive, a watchful wary look haunting the youngish planes of his face. Paul liked how George cocked his head to the side as he was playing his guitar. He liked George's scrawny spider hands rushing up and down, crooked and wringing music out of the catgut strings.
George was younger than Paul, and he stopped talking whenever Paul had something to say. Paul liked that about him, too.
Paul had met John behind the stage at St Peter's Church in Woolton. John had a guitar in his hands when Paul first saw him. He sang static into the microphone, squinted against the sunlight in his stiff red shirt. There was a specific snarl that lurked on John's mouth. There was an edginess in the way that he had offered Paul a cigarette behind the church, the twitch of his fingers against his lip as he sucked on his own.
John had a band, just whichever of his mates he could get together with a guitar or a washboard. It was ragtag, ramshackle, playing skiffle and American rock and roll and the hard sad songs that John came up with. John was the leader, the voice, the pale hands wrapped around the microphone.
The three of them, John and Paul and George, became something just shy of friends. Everything revolved around their guitars, their bruised and bloody fingertips. Music was all they ever talked about. They played together in the front room of Paul's house where the acoustics were better. They went down to the riverside at night, down to the lunar landscapes that had been bombed into being during the war. There was no one around past midnight, and they could sing as loudly as they wanted.
At the end of summer, John climbed in Paul's bedroom window as drunk as any sailor. He sprawled on the floor with one foot under the bed, and asked, "D'ye wanna join me band, son?"
Paul wanted to join John's band only slightly less than he wanted his mother to be alive again. He did not let his voice crack as he said, "Yeah all right," and squeezed his hands together so John wouldn't see how he was trembling with excitement.
George kept hanging around, hoping to get offered a spot as well. John said he was far too young to even be considered, which wounded George, Paul could tell, hurt him in a small pinched way that showed mostly around the eyes. George didn't say anything about it; it wasn't his way.
Paul took the kid along and John wouldn't bother protesting more than just for appearances. There were no possible arguments to be made against George once he started playing, anyway.
None of John's friends were a tenth as good. There was a constantly circulating cast that filled the empty spaces in the band, pocky gangly art students with ink under their nails and glue in their hair, gleeful wild boys in the streets at night but no better than chimps banging on the secondhand instruments John always managed to scrounge up. Paul was annoyed by them a lot of the time, Dennis with his donkey's laugh and Ned who called Paul Mackey even though Paul hated that name, all the single-afternoon friends who couldn't manage to keep a simple backbeat going for longer than a minute. Paul didn't know why John couldn't see that the band was better than that. They needed a real drummer. Someone who could play bass. And George, it was as clear as glass that they needed George too.
But Paul didn't say anything, either. There was something about John that he just responded to; he just followed. John had insane dreams. He treated the future like a colossal dare, certain of nothing except that he would make it or die trying.
Paul wasn't generally the sidekick type, but he found he was willing to give it a go for this sort of hero.
*
Down at the River Mersey, the filthy smoke-coloured water whipping along, Paul came upon John and his friend Stuart sketching with pieces of charcoal on a broken crag of wall. Paul stood at their backs waiting to be noticed for a minute.
Eventually, he said, "All right, lads?"
John glanced over his shoulder. An elephant with great slow-unfurling ears was arrested under his hand. "You again."
Paul formed a smile. "In the flesh."
Stuart laughed but not like he thought Paul was being clever, more of a sneer to it than that. They didn't get along, Stuart and Paul.
He watched the two of them drawing on the wall for a minute longer. Stuart was creating giraffes alongside John's tigers and elephants, tall trees bursting at the tops like fountains. Paul stuck his hands in his pockets, feeling hushed and awkward.
"So we're going to the Depths, aye?" Paul asked, rocking back on his heels.
"Later, later," John answered without even looking back at him. His bit of charcoal jumped borders and drew a bird in one of Stuart's trees. "We mean to have this finished before it rains again."
Paul glanced at the chilled autumn sky, which was the shade and weight of lead, pressing down upon them. His fingers were in claws inside his pockets as he looked at John's hands half black and half white, John's calculating sideways smile as he elbowed Stuart away from a particularly smooth patch of wall.
"You said we were going to the Depths," Paul said, and then heard himself, and winced.
John and Stuart were already smirking, rolling their eyes at each other.
"Don't whine, Paulie, it's unbecoming," John told him. Scolded, Paul looked down, wishing his face didn't go so swiftly and stupidly red.
"Can he draw?" Stuart asked John.
"Not a whit," John answered.
"Then what good is he?"
"Oi," Paul said, and was ignored.
"Need another bird here," Stuart said, indicating a place on the wall where John obligingly sketched a pelican with jagged wings.
Paul watched them for a minute longer. His hands itched, empty and anxious. John didn't look at him, wholly absorbed in the charcoal jungle he and Stuart were creating on this rubbled piece of wall. Paul thought of the Depths, a rough pub near Sefton with the walls slick from secreted violence and spilled beer. He and John had spent hours there last week, babbling about Elvis Presley and knocking into each other's hands on the table top.
But John had other things to occupy him now. He used the edge of his thumb to blur a charcoal line, and then swiped a black mark onto Stuart's cheek. Stuart grabbed him, shoved a dirty hand through his hair as John twisted and sniggered.
"Right," Paul said to no one in particular. "I'll see you later, I suppose."
John didn't answer. He was grappling with Stuart, reaching with stiff fingers, snapping his teeth at the air. John was grinning behind his mock-war face. His blackened hair slumped in front of his eyes.
Paul said, "Right," again, and then went back the way he came, crossing the strafed lots and tripping over loose pieces of blown-up buildings.
*
A few weeks later, stashed away in the warmth of a stairwell at the Liverpool Institute, Paul said:
"John was playing me this Little Richard record. He says Richard's a better singer than Elvis--fuckin' lunatic, right?"
George looked up from his guitar. He was bleary, disconnected, still lost in the song. His fingers travelled sleepily across the strings.
"Yeah sure," George said with a shrug. He didn't seem too interested.
"He got us a gig playing at Winston's, did I tell you?"
"Aye, you did."
Paul gave him a sideways look. "You can come along, fill in if someone fags out."
"Might do."
A sting of travelling music spurred from George's hands. The institutional grey stone of the stairwell echoed like a canyon. Paul picked out a rhythm line, humming under his breath. Several minutes slipped past unheeded. Paul's fingertips ached, splinters under the nails. They'd been at it for better than an hour already.
Their impromptu duet came unravelled. George fell sideways into a Gene Vincent song, and Paul couldn't keep up. He was distracted, not really at his best. He let his guitar fall across his lap, kept up a hollow thumb-beat on the body of it. George played happily onwards.
"You have to come and play for him again," Paul said. "He'll let you in the band this time, no question."
George's mouth curled in a faint smile. "Yeah?"
"It's a guarantee."
Paul was not actually as confident as he sounded. John couldn't be predicted or manipulated or talked into things the way that normal people could. Paul had learned that right away. It didn't stop him trying, of course.
"Maybe I will, then," George said. "Here, the middle eight," and then his fingers stung against the strings and Paul's heart fluttered against his ribs, that familiar rock-and-roll feeling.
"Getting better all the time," Paul said.
George rang the song off with a flourish. The stairwell was suddenly very quiet, as obtrusive and obliterative a silence as the noise had been before it. George glanced up at him, a touch of colour on his face.
"I've been dreaming in song," George told him. "People in my dreams open their mouths and music comes out. You ever have that happen?"
Paul shook his head. "You fell asleep with the radio on, yeah?"
A little scuffed laugh, George's fingers squeaking on the strings. "Nah."
"Think that means you're going mad, then."
"Probably," George agreed. He didn't sound overly upset about it.
"Well, rest easy, me lad," Paul said, playing up the Irish accent he'd learned from his grandfather. "The National Health has asylums like palaces, from what I hear."
George gave him an amused look. He was fiddling with his guitar still; he never really stopped.
Paul shifted on the stairs, looking for a comfortable position but it wasn't much use. Whole parts of him were numb and cold from the stone. It was all much more intolerable now that he wasn't playing anymore.
"Come on, are you hungry?" Paul asked. George yawned and shrugged, which meant yes. They stood up carefully, tilting and clutching each other's wrists, stamping their feet to restore the feeling.
"We should go to the Lance," Paul said, picking up his scarf and wrapping it three times around his neck. "Everybody ends up there."
George said all right because that was George's automatic response to everything. He didn't look at all surprised when they walked into the café and found it empty save for John Lennon and three of his tuneless friends, Stuart among them. George, Paul could tell, was learning to anticipate this sort of thing.
*
John had Paul over to listen to records and then supper. John's Aunt Mimi didn't like Paul any better than Paul's dad liked John, a lemony glare on her face every time he caught her eye. Paul was always disconcerted when confronted with people who were immune to his charm. He pasted on a nervous grin, and didn't ask for a second helping of anything.
Leaving the house, Paul turned to look up at John's lit bedroom window above the front door. It was something he did unconsciously, like tapping his foot to the beat of a bass drum, humming along with songs under his breath.
It was just recently dark, the sky stained deep purple and bruised with pale clouds. Across the narrow street, a small pack of loutish fellows huddled, smoking cigarettes and squinting against the smoke. Paul recognised a couple of them from school, and others in a vague neighbourhood kind of way. He tipped his chin up in a mute acknowledgement, but they weren't content to let it stay there.
"Oi, Macca, has he turned you yet?" That was one of the boys from the Institute, the one who always wore a tattered airman's jacket. He was rewarded with a rustle of mean-spirited snickering.
Paul hesitated, his hands itching at his pockets. "You what?"
"Your mate Lennon. He's a batty boy, or hadn't you heard?"
A rush went through Paul, something like adrenaline but glassy at the edges. His face heated, sweat breaking out of the back of his neck. His mind spun, thinking that if they said that about John, then they would say it about him, and it was very important that they didn't say it about him.
Paul's back teeth were clenched. His voice came out strange and tight. "Shut your filthy mouth."
The boys laughed, jeering at him and sucking their cheeks hollow. The one in the airman's jacket rolled his shoulders off the wall and came closer to Paul, a smirk plainly etched on his face.
"Lookit him, lads, he wants to defend his honour. Bloody Lancelot, here."
Paul took a step forward, forcing his shoulders up. "Shut it, or I'll make you."
"Aye, I'd like to see that. Runty little poofter-"
Paul punched him in the face. Something popped in his hand, a miniscule bomb erupting, and he was worried about that from far away. He hit the boy in the airman's jacket again as he stumbled back, and then the others were on him, wrenching his arms back.
There were six of them. Paul ended up in a heap on the ground, bleeding from his nose. There was a cigarette burn on the pale skin of his arm, just below the crook of his elbow.
Paul lay there for some unmarked length of time. Eventually he picked himself up and limped back to John's house. He tossed pebbles until John appeared in the window, leaning forward on the sill. Paul turned his beaten face up into the light, saw John's eyes go wide.
Only moments later, John was there in the street with him, closing a hand around Paul's elbow. John was too loud, too fast and disjointed.
"That fuckin' Dalton, was it him? What'd you do? C'mon, hey, you're bleeding everywhere. What, what'd you do?"
Paul shook his head. His face felt hugely swollen. Slick coppery blood trickled down his throat and made him sick to his stomach. He liked the press of John's fingers against his arm, the way they were huddled together like conspirators in the dark.
"He said you were queer," Paul said, his voice abused and rough. "Talking rot."
John went still for a moment, and then his hand was back pinching around Paul's arm. He showed a brief wild grin.
"Was it Dalton? Fred Dalton?"
"Wears an RAF jacket?"
"Yeah he does, it was his father's. I'll bloody well kill him."
Savage light gleamed in John's eyes. Paul gazed at him, entranced. His mouth felt tacky and sore, pressed into an eager shape. The cigarette burn on his arm itched like something crucial that had been forgotten.
"He said you were," Paul heard himself saying. There was a strange giddy tone in it. "But you're not."
John pulled his lip up over his teeth, and said, "C'mon, you can't go home like that. Your old dad will only blame it on me."
"It was your fault," Paul said, somewhat hazy. His face hurt a great deal.
John led him around the back of the house, silently slipping inside to the quiet motherless kitchen. John ran the tap over a rag and then handed it to Paul, leaning back against the counter. Shadows crawled up his chest in claws and wings. Paul pressed the cold wet rag to his nose, his swelling lip. He watched John, feeling the moment become crystalline around them.
Paul took the rag away. "You're not," he repeated softly, and it was a question.
A long minute passed. John leaned against the counter, arms crossed over his chest. His eyes, better than half-lidded most of the time, appeared closed now, blind. Paul couldn't stop staring at him.
"No," John said eventually, which didn't necessarily answer anything. "Clean your face."
"Listen-"
"Just clean your face, Paul, all right?" and the hard snapping edge in his voice shut Paul's mouth, made him quiet and obedient. Paul didn't know what he had meant to say, anyway.
He cleaned his face and then John turned him out onto street. Paul wanted to say, wait wait, and he wanted to show John the cigarette burn on his arm, feel John's cool fingertips at its edges. He wanted to push his hands through John's hair, and touch the skin stretched taut over his collarbone.
But he only went home, battered. Defeated.
*
Some time passed.
Paul continued to haunt the cafés and pubs and alleyways of the city where he had grown up. He took his guitar with him everywhere he went; the strap wore thin patches in the shoulders of his shirts. Days became indistinguishable, lost to strings of cigarettes and the bits of melody that floated in and out of his head like leaves on the river.
John let George fill in with the band more and more often. George was wearing him down with steady understated hero worship, listening captivated every time John played them one of his songs, laughing through his nose at every minor quip and jibe. John thrived on that kind of attention, burned that much brighter. He still mocked George for being a mere child, but he wouldn't let his ill-mannered friends do the same.
Sometime towards the end of winter, a hulking wreck of a council house near the art college was condemned due to appalling structural instability. It had been partially destroyed during the war and shoddily reconstructed, a relic that looked dug up from the bottom of the ocean. It was rotting in its foundations, sagging with melancholy. The boarded-up windows didn't survive John and his prise bar, and then the band had a place to play whenever they wanted.
The dilapidated house appealed to Paul's mood. He was feeling trapped and destructive these days, haunted by thoughts that would have made his mother cry. Back home he kept becoming irrationally angry with his father for still carrying his grief so heavily, so obviously--it had been better than a year and a half now since Mary had died--and shoving his little brother out of the bedroom they shared. Mike's sardonically piping voice drove Paul out of his mind on a good day, and those were few and far between lately.
So Paul scotted off with John and George and whoever else was around that night, went to the council house where the floorboards bent and gave alarmingly under them, an eerie wooden chorus of creaks summoned by their footsteps. There were holes in the walls because when John got pissed he needed to hit something, and the walls didn't hit back.
Paul carved his initials in the baseboards. He played guitar until his fingers bled and then had John and Stuart lift him by his legs so he could print a perfect red handprint on the ceiling.
John said, "They'll tear this place down in a year at most."
"It's here now," Stuart answered, and passed George a cigarette.
Paul snorted because it was an obvious thing to say, and Stuart was always coming out with crap like that, things that were only deep on the surface.
They were sitting in a loose circle around the gas lantern that fizzed and sputtered with dark gold light. Taking a break because Paul's hands weren't the only ones ravaged, their instruments were cast aside. George was smoking with quick tight puffs, sideways eyeing how John went about it.
"Who's playing drums for the show in Lime Street?" Paul asked.
John lifted a shoulder in an elegant shrug. He was slumped against the wall, his legs bent in front of him. "Reichert maybe. Maybe Blake."
"Blake is bloody awful."
"Yeah, but he'll do it for free. More dosh for us, son."
Paul huffed; it wasn't a good enough reason. He watched the light play across John's face, catch in the hollows of his throat. His fingers picked at the floorboards, chipping tiny splinters free of the wood.
"Terry Moran took a bottle to Bilcher's head coupla days ago," Stuart said. "So I'd say that band is breaking up. Get their drummer, that weedy bloke with the sexy girlfriend--what's his name?"
"Will Valence, he's worse than Blake," Paul said. He didn't know why Stuart was butting in. He wasn't even in the band.
Stuart hunched over John's guitar, drawing a fantastical cityscape with a chinagraph pencil. It would smear, Paul thought, and paint John's hands. It would make a terrible mess.
Later that night, nothing had been decided, and they had finished the bottle of gin John had bought and all the cigarettes were gone. They split up by the college, Paul and George going one direction, John and Stuart the other. Paul didn't turn to watch John leaving like he wanted to, but he did hear him laughing at something Stuart said, and that was almost as bad.
In the idle way of a just-remembered question, George asked if John's parents were alive. Paul said yes. He had met John's mother a few times; they had spent a day or two practising shut up in the bathroom at her house in Blomfield Road, where the acoustics were pure and crystalline. Julia was an inconstant light-voiced woman who lived two miles away from her son. She had all of John's wit and charm and most of his jagged edges, too, his sharp appeasing smile. John had been living with his Aunt Mimi since he was six years old, and Paul had never asked why. He wasn't sure John knew himself.
Paul told George that John's father was out at sea, and his mother lived in town. George said, "Hmm," and asked no further questions, which Paul found exasperating but characteristic.
They went their separate ways when Paul veered off for the shortcut through the graveyard behind the Catholic church. Hands in his pockets, guitar on his back, Paul followed a familiar trampled path through the tilted and sinking headstones. There was a teasing bit of melody stuck in his head and he wasn't even humming because it was bad luck to sing in a graveyard.
He was thinking about John again. His mind was sodden, half-drunk and stomped flat by weariness. Behind his eyes, John was grinning and stretching and rolling his hips like Elvis.
Things were getting bad, Paul knew, but he was in no condition to worry about it just now. He thought about the boy in the airman's jacket who had called John queer, and he thought about how John watched Stuart's swift sketching hands, and a cold stony pocket opened up inside him. When Paul got home, he sat down at the piano and worked out the song twining in his brain, his head resting on the music rack and his eyes closed.
Eventually his father came out in his pyjamas and told him to get to bed or get a cuff. Paul complied, and lay down fully dressed on top of the covers, his hands lifted above him to play the invisible song.
That night, Paul dreamt of John in the crippled council house, the ceiling falling in chunks around him and systemic cracks like vast spiderwebs spreading on the walls. He dreamt of John lying on the ravaged floor, stripped bare to the waist and smirking.
Paul woke up panting, sweating, hands wrenched in the bedcovers. His heart was a hummingbird in his mouth, his chest echoing and hollow in its absence.
It was a curse beyond bearing, Paul thought, hunching in the washroom a few moments later. This devastating focus. These darkhot thoughts of his. This wasn't how he'd been raised. He splashed cold water on his face. He slumped on his shoulder against the shut door, long careful breaths and a song dredged up from somewhere to give him something else to think about, and soon, soon he'd be all right again.
*
The school term was over.
John had hovered on the verge of being expelled from the Liverpool College of Art all year due to his grossly disrespectful and destructive behaviour. His escapades were always outlandish and improbably brash, and he never mentioned the consequences, that surfeit of trouble in which he perpetually existed. As the weather got warmer, John often hadn't bothered to show up at all, which could have been only a relief to the college faculty.
Before the end of term, John would come round Paul's school at the midday break and they ate fish and chips off wilting wax paper, leaning on the hoods of cars that didn't belong to them. Paul showed him the stairwell where the acoustics were best, and John tested it by playing a brief rag on the mouth organ that lived in his front pocket, its pale blocky outline rubbed through the fabric of his trousers. Paul drummed a pencil against the wall in time, sang vague gibberish sounds to fit John's song. The other students coming up and down the stairs fell silent as they passed the two of them, and Paul liked that very much.
Now the nights were short, the moon looking like a tattered moth in the coaly sky. Sometimes, they went into a club at sunset and didn't come out again until dawn, and it was as if darkness itself were only a myth, something disproven by modernity.
John had a huge row with his Aunt Mimi around then, and he left home, went to stay at the flat Stuart had in Percy Street with another bloke named Rod. Paul didn't know the specifics, only that John didn't want to go home yet, nor to his mother's place in Blomfield Road, nor anywhere where he was related by blood. John slept on the paint-spattered floor of the flat's tiny cold-water kitchen, wrapped in a tatty blanket and nibbled at by the rats.
Paul rode his bicycle over to Percy Street on a Saturday morning, found John and Stuart up on the roof. Stuart had his legs hanging over the side, heels tocking on the building, a sketchbook across his lap. John was throwing bits of gravel at wheeling black birds. Paul went into the building through the broken front door, climbed up every stair and out of the trapdoor onto the roof, his hands scuffed by the rough tar-paper.
"Hey John," Paul said.
John whipped his arm sideways, and across the way a bird squawked and exploded with a flurry into the air. He looked back at Paul with that familiar half-annoyed flatness in his eyes.
"What are you doing here?" John asked, largely uninterested.
Paul flinched under his skin. His mouth made a smile. "That place we're playing tonight, the pub? I forgot the name."
"Whores and bastards," and John's lip curled, a gouging kind of look. Paul felt his face grow hot for some reason.
Stuart sighed extravagantly, not looking up from his sketchbook. "The Horse and Bridle, actually."
"Over in King Street, yeah?"
"Sure," Stuart said, as airy as if it were no more than an opinion. Paul scowled at the neat curve of his back, his down-tilted face. Stuart never did anything but draw, and draw, and draw.
"I'm bringing George," Paul said.
John made a harsh scoffing sound, and Paul's skin tightened defensively as he belatedly recognised John's awful mood.
"Bit soft, aren't you?" John said on a sneer. "How many times are you going to make me tell you--he's not joining the band."
"But he's good," Paul insisted. John never argued with that, his logic following strange other paths.
"It's bad enough, you and your fuckin' baby face making us look like a bloody church band," and this was dangerous, this savage coruscating gleam in John's eyes. "One more manky public school boy is two too many, you follow?"
Paul noticed that his hands were closed into hard-knuckled fists at his side. He spoke without thinking.
"Quite a band you'd have without me, is that it? Quite a band you had before I joined, you and your mate who only knew two chords and your mate who couldn't play a bloody washboard."
John came striding towards him, his fingers clutched around a handful of gravel and the wind blowing his hair wild. Paul almost took a step back but then he forced himself to stay still, forced the sneer to fix on his face.
"Aye, but they were my mates, weren't they, Paulie? Rather have them around than some cow-eyed nancy boy who never shuts his goddamned mouth."
Paul recoiled as if hit with a dart. Mortified horror raked through him, his mind rushing heedlessly to the dark places it had revelled in so completely for so many months now. John could see--of course John could see. It was a weakness, and John had an eye for that, if nothing else.
Stuttering, Paul managed, "You can sod off then," and then he turned his back sharply because something was burning in his eyes and he couldn't stand it. John laughed, cruel and high. Paul yanked open the trapdoor, also fell through it in his haste.
He stood over the basin in Stuart's kitchen, his hands braced on the counter. Eyes squeezed shut until his heart rate settled, and then he ran water over his hands and froze the colour off his face. With his palms tucked into his eye sockets, Paul whispered to himself, "You're not," some crooked kind of echo.
The trapdoor clapped shut, and a second later a body thudded into the hallway. Paul wiped his face hurriedly on his sleeve, adrenaline tasting bright in his mouth because he thought it would be John, John come to tear into him again, tear him to pieces, but instead Stuart came in with a smirk and a pencil tucked behind his ear.
"Aw, is he gonna cry?" Stuart asked in a false lilt of a voice. Paul's face wrenched in a sudden snarl.
"Bugger off, you fuck."
"Watch your mouth, son," and Stuart cuffed him hard across the back of the head, jarring Paul into the counter.
Paul whirled, red drenching across his vision and something like sulphuric acid running hot in his veins. He was going to hit Stuart until he wasn't smirking anymore, nor breathing or moving or speaking.
Stuart dodged his first swing, and then shoved him hard. Paul tripped, overbalanced, and would have fallen but for Stuart's quick hand wrenched in his shirt, dragging him upright. Paul found himself pushed up against the wall, Stuart's thin painter's hand fisted against his collarbone.
"Get a hold of yourself," Stuart said. "You're acting like a fool."
"Shut up, you, you don't know-" and Paul jerked to attack him again but Stuart was stronger than he looked, keeping him pinned in place.
"Stop it," Stuart told him sharply. "Why are you listening to him? You can't--don't listen to him when he's like that, all right?"
Paul shook his head, felt something pop painfully in his neck. His teeth dug into the inside of his lip; he couldn't answer because he couldn't speak because if he spoke his voice would crack, and he might actually cry, and then he would have to throw himself in the river to drown.
Stuart blew out an irritated breath. His eyes were an odd dark silver, narrowed as thin as pound coins. He had freckles, Paul noticed in an extremely distant way, dozens of them.
"It's not him," Stuart said. "He says those things because he can. He thinks he has to. But it's not really him."
Paul stared hard past Stuart, and didn't answer. His face was so hot it felt like he was melting. He wanted to get out of here, run and run and run.
Stuart pushed him aside with a vaguely disgusted sound, and went to the cabinet for a fresh pack of cigarettes. Paul stayed against the wall, breathing measured and careful, pressing his fingertips against his thighs in calming piano chords. His eyes fell on the wadded-up blanket in the corner where John had been sleeping, and a lump jammed itself into his throat.
Stuart offered him a cigarette. Paul took it because he needed something to do with his hands. Three matches died on him before he was able to light it. Stuart watched from the other side of the room, that obnoxious smirk back on his face.
They smoked, sharing a silence that was only moderately tense, and then Paul was feeling more stable, so he lied, "I've got somewhere to be," as he flicked his fag end into the basin and moved to leave.
"Shall I tell John you won't be coming tonight, then?" Stuart asked, a terribly subtle tone of mockery in his voice.
Something flared in Paul, penny firecrackers rattling like gunfire along the insides of his ribs. It suddenly seemed insufferable, all this cringing and second-guessing and shame. Paul's mother used to tell him, keep that chin up, love, and she'd say it now, he knew, if he came home looking like this. If she were still home to see him.
Paul pulled his shoulders straight, looked back at Stuart with a glare. "No," he answered. "You can tell him I'm bringing George. Tell him it's my bloody band too."
And then he walked out, letting the door slam behind him. For a moment, he felt like a gangster, a cowboy, a legend who would never be forgotten, but then he caught himself looking up to the roof for a glimpse of John against the clear blue sky, and straightaway, Paul was just a boy again.
*
So they played that night at the Horse and Bridle, and when John's friend Eddie got too pissed to provide his usual incompetent guitar work, John let George come onstage to fill his space. John was drunk himself, or halfway there, anyway. The rush had allowed him to abandon all his grudges, everything that was bleak and unsatisfied in him. He cradled his hands around the microphone, sang love songs as if he really meant them. Paul was dazzled, huddling near the wall and trying not to show it.
Their brief rooftop row seemed the furthest thing from John's mind. He grinned at Paul, hooked an arm around his neck and dragged him to the front of the small stage so that they could sing Jerry Lee Lewis into the same microphone. Paul should have been still angry with him, cool and aloof, but it was a physical impossibility. John's face from two inches away was flushed as red as roses, looking slick and soft to the touch.
Paul's voice gave out sometime in the second hour. He fell off the microphone and rolled his back on John's, feeling the shifting war of their shoulder blades through sweat-damp cotton. The pub was cramped and packed to overflowing, people jammed in corners and folded into each other, dancing too close. Paul could feel every one of them, every individual heart in the room thumping a unique rhythm. Every breath he took was the admixture of a hundred blood-hot exhales.
John was singing. Sweat stung at Paul's eyes and so he closed them, let John's coarse lovely voice wash over him, his fingers moving blind and flawless on the guitar.
John was singing, shredded up and pleading, "She's the woman that I know, she's the woman that loves me so."
And then John howled, a primal sound that was the difference between rock and roll and everything else in this world: that single joyful scream. It had barely been absorbed by the crowd before he stepped aside to let George come tearing into the guitar solo and John was laughing, shouting, "Go son, go," and George beamed like Paul had never seen before and for a moment it was exactly how he wanted his life to be.
It was their best show yet. Afterwards they crowded around a too-small table and drank and drank, softening their edges, soothing their ragged voices. Paul was next to John and circumstances were such that he had the thrill of John's leg knocking against his, their shoulders nudging like blind creatures seeking space.
Paul was feeling dizzy, or giddy, or somewhere in between. He wrapped both hands around his cold pint, hoping to siphon off some of the heat from under his skin.
All the way drunk now, drunk and past drunk, John accused George of having sold his soul to be able to play the guitar like that. George looked so pleased Paul had to laugh, and John pounded his fist on the table, demanding to know what the devil looked like.
"Like Elvis," George said, swaying slightly in his seat. "Elvis in a suit made of black leather and he's ten feet tall with red eyes, and his guitar is also a sword."
John barked an amused sound. "That's not bad, boyo. Somebody with talent could probably make a song out of that."
Across the room, a fight broke out like a mortar shell dropped into the crowd. A chair was smashed over someone's back, and then it was a general scrum, five or six guys whipping elbows and throwing wild looping punches. John leaned forward across Paul, shouting out raw-voiced encouragement in his casually miscreant way.
The move pressed him up against Paul's side, warm and intensely there, John's arm heavy around his shoulders, and Paul wasn't really breathing so well. He wondered if John could tell. He wondered if the faint sweat still shimmering on John's throat would taste like liquor or salt.
Paul had to get out of here.
He slid out from under John's arm, riding out the shiver that went through him as John's calloused fingertips scraped across the back of his neck. Paul stood beside the table, shot George a wide-eyed look that was probably mistaken for panic, but that wasn't it, not really. Paul just had to get out of here.
He begged exhaustion and John called him a dozen unforgivable names but none of them could touch Paul, not after the night they'd had. He let Stuart's irritated voice run on a loop in his head, ever-reminding: it's not him, it's not him.
Paul smiled and said, "Brilliant show, lads, just brilliant," and he was looking right at John as he said it, everything and more written all over his face.
John didn't seem to notice. He booed fiercely when George staggered to his feet as well, and made as if he would hurl his pint glass at them, but Paul was not too worried. This wasn't one of John's violent drunks; if it were he would have already joined the momentary brawl across the room.
Paul barely managed to keep from looking back as he and George left the pub. That was the first habit to break, he decided in a drunken fit of absolute sincerity. No more looking back.
On the pavement, out in the hushed fish-smelling night, George elbowed him. "You're humming that song of John's. That 909 song."
A breath caught in Paul's throat. "Am I?"
"Christ, man," George said, trying to deepen his voice like John did but it didn't quite work. "Where's your head?"
Paul didn't tell him. It wouldn't do to traumatise the kid before he even got into the band.
They said their goodnights and then Paul set off towards his home. He was cutting through the cemetery when he heard his name being called, and for a split second his blood was frozen, his skin as still as glass, thinking it had to be a ghost.
Then again, from not so far away, "Paulieee," like a mourning wail. Paul felt his heart kickstart, and he gasped quietly under his breath: it was John.
He turned in the foot-beaten path and watched John saunter into the cemetery, listing at a distinct angle with his shirt pulled out of his belt on one side, his hair falling gracelessly over his forehead. John moved into the blocky shadow of the church and grinned at him, that huge terrifying grin of his that could mean a thousand different things.
Paul swallowed, and sucked on the inside of his cheek to keep his expression clean of any soused idiotic glee. John had followed him.
"Can't shake you, can I," Paul said, trying for a bit of levity. His throat seemed to be getting smaller the nearer John came.
"You don't want to," John told him. He stepped too close, still tugging at Paul with his grin, his dare-filled eyes. "You don't want to shake me at all, do you?"
It was important not to look at John for too many seconds in a row. Paul flicked his eyes to the moss like tattered suede over the headstones, the murky promise of the road beyond the trees. John reeked of the night, beer and smoke and musty stage light all over him.
"I'd have reason enough," Paul answered, wanting to keep it easy, back and forth.
"Don't tell lies, son, it's bad for you," John said.
Strange to realise now how much it disconcerted Paul every time John called him son. It was terrible timing. Paul set it aside, stuck a careless smile on his face. The one thing Paul had always been able to do was smile.
"A bit of wisdom from the monk, eh?"
"It's fact," and John put his hand on Paul's shoulder. "Solid fact, true blue. I've seen how you look at me."
Paul's mouth opened but nothing came out. It was an apocalyptic moment, whole cities crashing to dust inside of him. He could feel each of John's fingers pressing into his shoulder, thumb hard against the bony curve of his collarbone. Paul tried not to move. It was a spell; it could be broken.
John tilted forward, bringing their faces together and stopping Paul's breath. "I've seen you, Paul," he whispered.
The space between their mouths seemed composed entirely of steam. Paul could feel his hands shaking as he lifted them to John's chest, taking hold of his shirt and walking them backwards very slowly and carefully. Paul wasn't thinking about what he was doing beyond the immediate: he stepped to avoid headstones and thick-grown weeds; he made sure John was mirroring his pace so they didn't step on each other's feet. John followed him with an intensely knowing glint in his eye, his hand hot against the skin of Paul's neck.
Behind the angle of the church wall, away from the road, away from any kind of light, Paul pressed his back against the stone and pulled John to him.
John breathed out, "Good man," against his lips, and then kissed him.
Somehow, after everything, Paul wasn't really expecting that. His legs gave out briefly, but there was the wall and there was John shored up against his front, John's hands like bridge struts on Paul's hips. John pushed his tongue into Paul's mouth and Paul's arms went around his neck without conscious thought. John kissed him again and again, unchecked, a desperation at the edges of it that Paul wished he could attribute to the drunk.
But Paul didn't care that they were drunk. He sank his fingers into John's hair and hooked his ankle around the back of John's leg. He didn't care what that made him, the wicked smile that John's lips formed against his. He didn't care when John mumbled, "Likes it, does he?" because he did, God help him, he liked John's narrow body over his own as much as anything short of the stage.
It was messy and uncoordinated, there in the shadow of the church wall. John unbuckled his own belt, took Paul's hand and pushed it into his trousers. Paul was grateful for the direction, lightheaded from lack of air and the punishing heat of John's mouth against his own. He curled his fingers against John through his pants and John hissed, biting at Paul's lip. Paul was panting, pulling John off through damp cotton with no grace or rhythm or melody, nothing like it.
It was lovely, he thought, lovely, and then John's head fell back on a moan, and he was done. Paul pressed his face, his open pleading mouth to the smooth stretch of John's throat, feeling driven just so slightly out of his mind at the feel of wet spreading under his hand.
John was limp against him for a long moment, breathing hard in recovery. His hands dangled bonelessly over Paul's shoulders. Paul didn't begrudge him, his tongue marking out John's pulse and their bodies pressed so close. Paul was suffocating, sick and spinning with arousal. Something akin to terror kept his fingers hooked in John's trousers, not letting him pull away.
But John didn't. He lifted his head and his eyes looked black and foggy and detached, whirring alien ships. He seemed to barely recognise Paul, barely even see him. Paul said something that tasted like "please," and John smiled a slow smile like a knife blade, slid his hands up under Paul's shirt.
Paul let his head tip back against the wall, his lips forming around the word please over and over again. Far above the church and the steeple, the fences and the trees, a heavy northern moon kept watch. Paul was conscious of John's fingers working his trousers open, John's hard mouth biting at his jaw, and a million miles away there was the moon, and that was all for him, that was all.
*
Paul woke up in the bedroom he shared with his brother, wreathed in a dream about submarines that clung to his mind like smoke or moss. For several long moments, he blinked up at the cracks in the ceiling, letting an ocean flow out of him, retrieving his commitment to dry land.
The night before came back like having the wind knocked out of him: John pressing him against the wall of the church, John's well-used hands searching under his clothes. Paul shivered, his body going tight with goosebumps and a thin excited sheen of sweat.
He lay in bed a few minutes longer, eyes closed, remembering, reliving until he woke up a bit more and discovered a breathless slither of mortification creeping under his skin. He pushed everything out of his head in favour of a Carl Perkins song, and went looking for breakfast.
The place was empty when Paul came out, his father's teacup resting neatly on its saucer in the sink, a small brown lake at the bottom. Paul made toast on the stove and ate it dry, the way he did when he was very young and they couldn't get butter. He ate standing up, studying the raw-silk sky out the window that looked the same as it did every morning.
It was too quiet and so Paul fetched his guitar and went round to the small garden around which their group of council houses was clustered. The garden was an industrial colour of green, rusty flowers wilting in the heat. Paul found a little patch of cool under a stunted tree that hunkered in the shadow of one of the houses, futilely waiting for the sun.
He turned off his mind, bent down over his guitar, and closed his eyes. He disappeared into it, not trying any new songs or any complicated, nothing but what his hands already knew by heart.
Some amount of time passed. Paul had no recollection of it. He was thousands of miles away.
Then George was saying his name as if for the third or fourth time, a curt parental demand that had Paul's head jerking up, his mind resurfacing a moment later.
George was standing in the sun, looking miserable in the cheap wool suit that his mother made him wear to church. His hair was slicked to the right instead of straight back like he usually wore it, and it made him look even younger. George scowled at Paul, but that might just have been the sun in his eyes.
"Ah, not gone deaf then. You had me worried, son."
Paul curled his lip without realising it. "Don't--don't call me that." Surprise flashed across George's face, and Paul hurried to any other topic of conversation. "Did you bring your guitar?"
"No, I came straight from church." George lifted a hand to scratch under his shirt collar. He'd already rid himself of the tie, and it hung out of his pocket like a dead pet snake. "This heat might kill me."
"Ain't that a shame."
"Tragedy, a tragedy is what it would be. The whole city would mourn."
Paul glanced at him, half a smile. "Policemen in black cotton gloves. Crepe bows around the necks of public doves."
"Oi, that's a song, innit?"
"Poem, actually."
"Poem?" George's face screwed up, jeering and doubtful. "If you say so, Paulie."
Paul almost told him not to call him that, either, but he bit his tongue. He couldn't be in control of everything.
It felt awkward to be sitting with George above him, so Paul got to his feet, which were numb and heavy as blocks of wood. George stuck his hands in his pockets, rocking on his heels.
"It was good last night, yeah?" George said.
A little piece of electricity went through Paul, spark of panic before he realised that George was talking about the show. Paul shrugged, said, "You were all right."
"Are you gonna talk to John again? About me joining all official like?" George was talking fast, his eagerness showing through. "You said you would."
Paul blinked at him for a moment, and then a small laugh rattled from him. He shook his head, looking down.
"Yeah, I'll talk to him," he said, because it was easy to say that.
George grinned. "Gear. Let's go get a curry."
They cut through the backyards and under the wash lines blowing in the grey breeze, and Paul thought about the band. He thought about the wall of sound that came from the three of them, small stages where they could not stand abreast, cramped backrooms where they passed a flask of liquor back and forth before going on. The idea of the band was leeward and sheltered in his mind, polished to a high gold shine. Paul turned it over, rubbed at its edges, remembering the ancient Roman coin his brother Mike had found when they were kids and how he couldn't stop fiddling with it. The band was his good luck piece; he wanted to carry it around in his pocket.
Sitting at the counter waiting for their curries, George said, "I saw a picture of Elvis in his Army uniform the other day."
"Yeah?" Paul said, thinking about John Lennon's hands.
"He looked. I don't know. It looked like a costume. Like it was for a new movie."
"Hmm," Paul answered. He wondered where John was now, if he was still asleep in the clothes he had been wearing last night.
"Do you think he likes the Army?"
"What?" Paul asked.
George gave him a look, a quick folding-down on his eyebrows. "You're not paying attention again."
Caught, Paul shrugged and tried to pass it off. "I pay attention."
"Aye, when John's in the room," George sneered, and Paul went still.
"I don't--sod off," he managed. George's lip curled viciously as if he would say something more, but then he blew out an explosive breath and slumped back.
A moment or two of densely packed silence passed. Paul wouldn't look at George. He picked splinters out of the wood of the counter, wondering if his ears were as bright red as they felt.
"Anyway," George said eventually, sounding pinched and stilted. "You want to talk about Elvis now?"
A hard smile forced its way onto Paul's face. He ducked his head. "Yeah. Yeah."
It was safer all around. Rock and roll picked them up, patched the holes in their conversation. Soon enough, Paul was drumming on the counter with cheap metal spoons, and George was mumbling lyrics around his curry, and outside the sun broke through the cloud cover, splashing onto the street like a great blue wave crashing into California all those many miles away.
*
part two
I could not be more excited, you guys. Paul McCartney is playing at AT&T Park (my home away from home! It's like he knows!) in like nine hours. I'm going with my buddy from work who is Beatlesmaniacal in the exact same why I am, except he's got twenty years on me and was also a roadie for like fifteen years (he's two degrees away from everybody, which means I am three degrees (although I had already met the dude in charge of landscaping Paul's house in Tuscon (my friend's dad's friend who went to Bridge School with us when we were fifteen (digression!))). We were talking yesterday and I was like, I dunno, I might scream, and he said, really? and I said, none of those girls could tell you why they were screaming. Sometimes it just happens.
So we'll see! I will report back in high spirits I'm sure.
And, on that note:
Hi, this story got ridiculously away from me. I have actual internet evidence that two weeks ago, it was 6000 words and "circling a landing." Oh, me-from-two-weeks-ago. So optimistic. So naive.
Anyway:
John/Paul, 23898 words, rated NC-17. If I may make a musical recommendation, try John's 'Rock and Roll' album. Just terribly appropriate in all ways.
(thank you punk_pony)
The First Year
By Candle Beck
In the middle of summer, John came over to Paul's house. Church bells had peeled back the layers of the sky to reveal a boiled blue colour.
Paul and George were sitting cross-legged on the floor of his bedroom, their knees almost touching, trading a song back and forth between their guitars. John knocked on the window, the structure of his hair collapsing, his face twisted comically with his cheeks blown out.
Paul stood up so fast he almost dropped his guitar. He said fast to George, "That's him, that's John," and went to open the window.
John leaned in, bony elbows sticking over the sill. "'allo, Paul."
A grin broke Paul's face open like a wedge. "Heya, John."
From the floor, George fingered through a small uncertain riff. Paul remembered he was there, and said, "This is George," without taking his eyes off John.
"Like 'em a bit young, don't ya," John said.
Paul flushed and scowled. George held his guitar reverently, like a father holding his dying child. He watched the two of them at the window with his head ducked down and his eyes angled up.
"He can play 'Raunchy' all the way through," Paul told John. "Are you coming in?"
John pushed his specs up his nose and looked away. Paul stared at the side of his face, the rough red place under his jaw where the skin wasn't used to a razor yet. Paul's hand was sweaty around the neck of his guitar, his head jammed and alight with song.
"Aye, I suppose," John said with a hefty sigh, a saint nobly accepting his cross.
He climbed in through the window, long legs canting and bending over Paul's little desk. The thump of his feet on the floor shook the room and made the picture of Paul's mother rattle on the wall.
John hadn't brought his guitar with him. He tried to commandeer Paul's, but it was re-strung so that Paul could play it upside down and left-handed, and so John took out his mouth organ instead. They all knew how to play 'Heartbreak Hotel,' and so they did, messy and uncoordinated but still, still.
As ever, Paul was effortlessly fascinated by John: heavy half-lidded eyes, forearms as hard as wood, the melting slouch of his oiled hair from the damp heat of the summer day. John's twisted smirk around the mouth organ, the brief sweet moments when he actually smiled. Looking at him for too long made Paul feel almost drunk.
After the song was over, and a lull had come and gone, George asked John as if proffering his hand to a snarling dog, "You want to try mine?"
John blew a low note through the mouth organ, giving George's three-pound guitar a sharp once-over. He sneered, but reached out.
"All right, give her here."
George obliged, and John's hands went to their proper places, began to play so quick and easy. Paul couldn't quite name the song, but he knew it; he picked out a soft rhythm line a half a second behind John.
"This is rock and roll radio," John said in a broad cowboy accent. "You're listening to the hits that fit, the platters that matter, the live jive, the true blues. Don't touch that dial, don't look away. We've got the Bird Man, the Bopper, Crickets and Comets and cats and kittens, Presley and Perkins particularly for the people's pleasure. Hold on tight, Radioland--this is the show that never stops."
Paul was grinning. He angled his guitar in such a way that it obscured his face, because he was sure he looked as dumb as a post. John was maybe the cleverest person Paul had ever known.
When he fell quiet at last, George asked somewhat breathlessly, "Where'd you learn to play?"
John stuttered over a note. He answered, "Me mum. She had a banjo," and said, "And who spent good money buying a guitar for an infant, I wonder?"
George went red, snatching his instrument back, and Paul laughed. John smirked at nothing in particular, hid half his face behind the mouth organ again.
Later, Paul's father called him for tea. John went back out the window because Jim McCartney hadn't liked him from the start, and with his heartbeat running fast and high as a bird, Paul shouted goodbye at his narrow retreating back.
*
Paul had met George on the coach that took them over to the better side of town for school every day.
George had been thin-wristed, shoulders like cane, hunched over his knees in a window seat. A torn piece of paper stuck out of his bag like a plume, covered in cramped hand-drawn pictures of guitars. Paul had sat down next to him, asked him if he played better than he drew.
They were friends right away. George was quiet and perceptive, a watchful wary look haunting the youngish planes of his face. Paul liked how George cocked his head to the side as he was playing his guitar. He liked George's scrawny spider hands rushing up and down, crooked and wringing music out of the catgut strings.
George was younger than Paul, and he stopped talking whenever Paul had something to say. Paul liked that about him, too.
Paul had met John behind the stage at St Peter's Church in Woolton. John had a guitar in his hands when Paul first saw him. He sang static into the microphone, squinted against the sunlight in his stiff red shirt. There was a specific snarl that lurked on John's mouth. There was an edginess in the way that he had offered Paul a cigarette behind the church, the twitch of his fingers against his lip as he sucked on his own.
John had a band, just whichever of his mates he could get together with a guitar or a washboard. It was ragtag, ramshackle, playing skiffle and American rock and roll and the hard sad songs that John came up with. John was the leader, the voice, the pale hands wrapped around the microphone.
The three of them, John and Paul and George, became something just shy of friends. Everything revolved around their guitars, their bruised and bloody fingertips. Music was all they ever talked about. They played together in the front room of Paul's house where the acoustics were better. They went down to the riverside at night, down to the lunar landscapes that had been bombed into being during the war. There was no one around past midnight, and they could sing as loudly as they wanted.
At the end of summer, John climbed in Paul's bedroom window as drunk as any sailor. He sprawled on the floor with one foot under the bed, and asked, "D'ye wanna join me band, son?"
Paul wanted to join John's band only slightly less than he wanted his mother to be alive again. He did not let his voice crack as he said, "Yeah all right," and squeezed his hands together so John wouldn't see how he was trembling with excitement.
George kept hanging around, hoping to get offered a spot as well. John said he was far too young to even be considered, which wounded George, Paul could tell, hurt him in a small pinched way that showed mostly around the eyes. George didn't say anything about it; it wasn't his way.
Paul took the kid along and John wouldn't bother protesting more than just for appearances. There were no possible arguments to be made against George once he started playing, anyway.
None of John's friends were a tenth as good. There was a constantly circulating cast that filled the empty spaces in the band, pocky gangly art students with ink under their nails and glue in their hair, gleeful wild boys in the streets at night but no better than chimps banging on the secondhand instruments John always managed to scrounge up. Paul was annoyed by them a lot of the time, Dennis with his donkey's laugh and Ned who called Paul Mackey even though Paul hated that name, all the single-afternoon friends who couldn't manage to keep a simple backbeat going for longer than a minute. Paul didn't know why John couldn't see that the band was better than that. They needed a real drummer. Someone who could play bass. And George, it was as clear as glass that they needed George too.
But Paul didn't say anything, either. There was something about John that he just responded to; he just followed. John had insane dreams. He treated the future like a colossal dare, certain of nothing except that he would make it or die trying.
Paul wasn't generally the sidekick type, but he found he was willing to give it a go for this sort of hero.
*
Down at the River Mersey, the filthy smoke-coloured water whipping along, Paul came upon John and his friend Stuart sketching with pieces of charcoal on a broken crag of wall. Paul stood at their backs waiting to be noticed for a minute.
Eventually, he said, "All right, lads?"
John glanced over his shoulder. An elephant with great slow-unfurling ears was arrested under his hand. "You again."
Paul formed a smile. "In the flesh."
Stuart laughed but not like he thought Paul was being clever, more of a sneer to it than that. They didn't get along, Stuart and Paul.
He watched the two of them drawing on the wall for a minute longer. Stuart was creating giraffes alongside John's tigers and elephants, tall trees bursting at the tops like fountains. Paul stuck his hands in his pockets, feeling hushed and awkward.
"So we're going to the Depths, aye?" Paul asked, rocking back on his heels.
"Later, later," John answered without even looking back at him. His bit of charcoal jumped borders and drew a bird in one of Stuart's trees. "We mean to have this finished before it rains again."
Paul glanced at the chilled autumn sky, which was the shade and weight of lead, pressing down upon them. His fingers were in claws inside his pockets as he looked at John's hands half black and half white, John's calculating sideways smile as he elbowed Stuart away from a particularly smooth patch of wall.
"You said we were going to the Depths," Paul said, and then heard himself, and winced.
John and Stuart were already smirking, rolling their eyes at each other.
"Don't whine, Paulie, it's unbecoming," John told him. Scolded, Paul looked down, wishing his face didn't go so swiftly and stupidly red.
"Can he draw?" Stuart asked John.
"Not a whit," John answered.
"Then what good is he?"
"Oi," Paul said, and was ignored.
"Need another bird here," Stuart said, indicating a place on the wall where John obligingly sketched a pelican with jagged wings.
Paul watched them for a minute longer. His hands itched, empty and anxious. John didn't look at him, wholly absorbed in the charcoal jungle he and Stuart were creating on this rubbled piece of wall. Paul thought of the Depths, a rough pub near Sefton with the walls slick from secreted violence and spilled beer. He and John had spent hours there last week, babbling about Elvis Presley and knocking into each other's hands on the table top.
But John had other things to occupy him now. He used the edge of his thumb to blur a charcoal line, and then swiped a black mark onto Stuart's cheek. Stuart grabbed him, shoved a dirty hand through his hair as John twisted and sniggered.
"Right," Paul said to no one in particular. "I'll see you later, I suppose."
John didn't answer. He was grappling with Stuart, reaching with stiff fingers, snapping his teeth at the air. John was grinning behind his mock-war face. His blackened hair slumped in front of his eyes.
Paul said, "Right," again, and then went back the way he came, crossing the strafed lots and tripping over loose pieces of blown-up buildings.
*
A few weeks later, stashed away in the warmth of a stairwell at the Liverpool Institute, Paul said:
"John was playing me this Little Richard record. He says Richard's a better singer than Elvis--fuckin' lunatic, right?"
George looked up from his guitar. He was bleary, disconnected, still lost in the song. His fingers travelled sleepily across the strings.
"Yeah sure," George said with a shrug. He didn't seem too interested.
"He got us a gig playing at Winston's, did I tell you?"
"Aye, you did."
Paul gave him a sideways look. "You can come along, fill in if someone fags out."
"Might do."
A sting of travelling music spurred from George's hands. The institutional grey stone of the stairwell echoed like a canyon. Paul picked out a rhythm line, humming under his breath. Several minutes slipped past unheeded. Paul's fingertips ached, splinters under the nails. They'd been at it for better than an hour already.
Their impromptu duet came unravelled. George fell sideways into a Gene Vincent song, and Paul couldn't keep up. He was distracted, not really at his best. He let his guitar fall across his lap, kept up a hollow thumb-beat on the body of it. George played happily onwards.
"You have to come and play for him again," Paul said. "He'll let you in the band this time, no question."
George's mouth curled in a faint smile. "Yeah?"
"It's a guarantee."
Paul was not actually as confident as he sounded. John couldn't be predicted or manipulated or talked into things the way that normal people could. Paul had learned that right away. It didn't stop him trying, of course.
"Maybe I will, then," George said. "Here, the middle eight," and then his fingers stung against the strings and Paul's heart fluttered against his ribs, that familiar rock-and-roll feeling.
"Getting better all the time," Paul said.
George rang the song off with a flourish. The stairwell was suddenly very quiet, as obtrusive and obliterative a silence as the noise had been before it. George glanced up at him, a touch of colour on his face.
"I've been dreaming in song," George told him. "People in my dreams open their mouths and music comes out. You ever have that happen?"
Paul shook his head. "You fell asleep with the radio on, yeah?"
A little scuffed laugh, George's fingers squeaking on the strings. "Nah."
"Think that means you're going mad, then."
"Probably," George agreed. He didn't sound overly upset about it.
"Well, rest easy, me lad," Paul said, playing up the Irish accent he'd learned from his grandfather. "The National Health has asylums like palaces, from what I hear."
George gave him an amused look. He was fiddling with his guitar still; he never really stopped.
Paul shifted on the stairs, looking for a comfortable position but it wasn't much use. Whole parts of him were numb and cold from the stone. It was all much more intolerable now that he wasn't playing anymore.
"Come on, are you hungry?" Paul asked. George yawned and shrugged, which meant yes. They stood up carefully, tilting and clutching each other's wrists, stamping their feet to restore the feeling.
"We should go to the Lance," Paul said, picking up his scarf and wrapping it three times around his neck. "Everybody ends up there."
George said all right because that was George's automatic response to everything. He didn't look at all surprised when they walked into the café and found it empty save for John Lennon and three of his tuneless friends, Stuart among them. George, Paul could tell, was learning to anticipate this sort of thing.
*
John had Paul over to listen to records and then supper. John's Aunt Mimi didn't like Paul any better than Paul's dad liked John, a lemony glare on her face every time he caught her eye. Paul was always disconcerted when confronted with people who were immune to his charm. He pasted on a nervous grin, and didn't ask for a second helping of anything.
Leaving the house, Paul turned to look up at John's lit bedroom window above the front door. It was something he did unconsciously, like tapping his foot to the beat of a bass drum, humming along with songs under his breath.
It was just recently dark, the sky stained deep purple and bruised with pale clouds. Across the narrow street, a small pack of loutish fellows huddled, smoking cigarettes and squinting against the smoke. Paul recognised a couple of them from school, and others in a vague neighbourhood kind of way. He tipped his chin up in a mute acknowledgement, but they weren't content to let it stay there.
"Oi, Macca, has he turned you yet?" That was one of the boys from the Institute, the one who always wore a tattered airman's jacket. He was rewarded with a rustle of mean-spirited snickering.
Paul hesitated, his hands itching at his pockets. "You what?"
"Your mate Lennon. He's a batty boy, or hadn't you heard?"
A rush went through Paul, something like adrenaline but glassy at the edges. His face heated, sweat breaking out of the back of his neck. His mind spun, thinking that if they said that about John, then they would say it about him, and it was very important that they didn't say it about him.
Paul's back teeth were clenched. His voice came out strange and tight. "Shut your filthy mouth."
The boys laughed, jeering at him and sucking their cheeks hollow. The one in the airman's jacket rolled his shoulders off the wall and came closer to Paul, a smirk plainly etched on his face.
"Lookit him, lads, he wants to defend his honour. Bloody Lancelot, here."
Paul took a step forward, forcing his shoulders up. "Shut it, or I'll make you."
"Aye, I'd like to see that. Runty little poofter-"
Paul punched him in the face. Something popped in his hand, a miniscule bomb erupting, and he was worried about that from far away. He hit the boy in the airman's jacket again as he stumbled back, and then the others were on him, wrenching his arms back.
There were six of them. Paul ended up in a heap on the ground, bleeding from his nose. There was a cigarette burn on the pale skin of his arm, just below the crook of his elbow.
Paul lay there for some unmarked length of time. Eventually he picked himself up and limped back to John's house. He tossed pebbles until John appeared in the window, leaning forward on the sill. Paul turned his beaten face up into the light, saw John's eyes go wide.
Only moments later, John was there in the street with him, closing a hand around Paul's elbow. John was too loud, too fast and disjointed.
"That fuckin' Dalton, was it him? What'd you do? C'mon, hey, you're bleeding everywhere. What, what'd you do?"
Paul shook his head. His face felt hugely swollen. Slick coppery blood trickled down his throat and made him sick to his stomach. He liked the press of John's fingers against his arm, the way they were huddled together like conspirators in the dark.
"He said you were queer," Paul said, his voice abused and rough. "Talking rot."
John went still for a moment, and then his hand was back pinching around Paul's arm. He showed a brief wild grin.
"Was it Dalton? Fred Dalton?"
"Wears an RAF jacket?"
"Yeah he does, it was his father's. I'll bloody well kill him."
Savage light gleamed in John's eyes. Paul gazed at him, entranced. His mouth felt tacky and sore, pressed into an eager shape. The cigarette burn on his arm itched like something crucial that had been forgotten.
"He said you were," Paul heard himself saying. There was a strange giddy tone in it. "But you're not."
John pulled his lip up over his teeth, and said, "C'mon, you can't go home like that. Your old dad will only blame it on me."
"It was your fault," Paul said, somewhat hazy. His face hurt a great deal.
John led him around the back of the house, silently slipping inside to the quiet motherless kitchen. John ran the tap over a rag and then handed it to Paul, leaning back against the counter. Shadows crawled up his chest in claws and wings. Paul pressed the cold wet rag to his nose, his swelling lip. He watched John, feeling the moment become crystalline around them.
Paul took the rag away. "You're not," he repeated softly, and it was a question.
A long minute passed. John leaned against the counter, arms crossed over his chest. His eyes, better than half-lidded most of the time, appeared closed now, blind. Paul couldn't stop staring at him.
"No," John said eventually, which didn't necessarily answer anything. "Clean your face."
"Listen-"
"Just clean your face, Paul, all right?" and the hard snapping edge in his voice shut Paul's mouth, made him quiet and obedient. Paul didn't know what he had meant to say, anyway.
He cleaned his face and then John turned him out onto street. Paul wanted to say, wait wait, and he wanted to show John the cigarette burn on his arm, feel John's cool fingertips at its edges. He wanted to push his hands through John's hair, and touch the skin stretched taut over his collarbone.
But he only went home, battered. Defeated.
*
Some time passed.
Paul continued to haunt the cafés and pubs and alleyways of the city where he had grown up. He took his guitar with him everywhere he went; the strap wore thin patches in the shoulders of his shirts. Days became indistinguishable, lost to strings of cigarettes and the bits of melody that floated in and out of his head like leaves on the river.
John let George fill in with the band more and more often. George was wearing him down with steady understated hero worship, listening captivated every time John played them one of his songs, laughing through his nose at every minor quip and jibe. John thrived on that kind of attention, burned that much brighter. He still mocked George for being a mere child, but he wouldn't let his ill-mannered friends do the same.
Sometime towards the end of winter, a hulking wreck of a council house near the art college was condemned due to appalling structural instability. It had been partially destroyed during the war and shoddily reconstructed, a relic that looked dug up from the bottom of the ocean. It was rotting in its foundations, sagging with melancholy. The boarded-up windows didn't survive John and his prise bar, and then the band had a place to play whenever they wanted.
The dilapidated house appealed to Paul's mood. He was feeling trapped and destructive these days, haunted by thoughts that would have made his mother cry. Back home he kept becoming irrationally angry with his father for still carrying his grief so heavily, so obviously--it had been better than a year and a half now since Mary had died--and shoving his little brother out of the bedroom they shared. Mike's sardonically piping voice drove Paul out of his mind on a good day, and those were few and far between lately.
So Paul scotted off with John and George and whoever else was around that night, went to the council house where the floorboards bent and gave alarmingly under them, an eerie wooden chorus of creaks summoned by their footsteps. There were holes in the walls because when John got pissed he needed to hit something, and the walls didn't hit back.
Paul carved his initials in the baseboards. He played guitar until his fingers bled and then had John and Stuart lift him by his legs so he could print a perfect red handprint on the ceiling.
John said, "They'll tear this place down in a year at most."
"It's here now," Stuart answered, and passed George a cigarette.
Paul snorted because it was an obvious thing to say, and Stuart was always coming out with crap like that, things that were only deep on the surface.
They were sitting in a loose circle around the gas lantern that fizzed and sputtered with dark gold light. Taking a break because Paul's hands weren't the only ones ravaged, their instruments were cast aside. George was smoking with quick tight puffs, sideways eyeing how John went about it.
"Who's playing drums for the show in Lime Street?" Paul asked.
John lifted a shoulder in an elegant shrug. He was slumped against the wall, his legs bent in front of him. "Reichert maybe. Maybe Blake."
"Blake is bloody awful."
"Yeah, but he'll do it for free. More dosh for us, son."
Paul huffed; it wasn't a good enough reason. He watched the light play across John's face, catch in the hollows of his throat. His fingers picked at the floorboards, chipping tiny splinters free of the wood.
"Terry Moran took a bottle to Bilcher's head coupla days ago," Stuart said. "So I'd say that band is breaking up. Get their drummer, that weedy bloke with the sexy girlfriend--what's his name?"
"Will Valence, he's worse than Blake," Paul said. He didn't know why Stuart was butting in. He wasn't even in the band.
Stuart hunched over John's guitar, drawing a fantastical cityscape with a chinagraph pencil. It would smear, Paul thought, and paint John's hands. It would make a terrible mess.
Later that night, nothing had been decided, and they had finished the bottle of gin John had bought and all the cigarettes were gone. They split up by the college, Paul and George going one direction, John and Stuart the other. Paul didn't turn to watch John leaving like he wanted to, but he did hear him laughing at something Stuart said, and that was almost as bad.
In the idle way of a just-remembered question, George asked if John's parents were alive. Paul said yes. He had met John's mother a few times; they had spent a day or two practising shut up in the bathroom at her house in Blomfield Road, where the acoustics were pure and crystalline. Julia was an inconstant light-voiced woman who lived two miles away from her son. She had all of John's wit and charm and most of his jagged edges, too, his sharp appeasing smile. John had been living with his Aunt Mimi since he was six years old, and Paul had never asked why. He wasn't sure John knew himself.
Paul told George that John's father was out at sea, and his mother lived in town. George said, "Hmm," and asked no further questions, which Paul found exasperating but characteristic.
They went their separate ways when Paul veered off for the shortcut through the graveyard behind the Catholic church. Hands in his pockets, guitar on his back, Paul followed a familiar trampled path through the tilted and sinking headstones. There was a teasing bit of melody stuck in his head and he wasn't even humming because it was bad luck to sing in a graveyard.
He was thinking about John again. His mind was sodden, half-drunk and stomped flat by weariness. Behind his eyes, John was grinning and stretching and rolling his hips like Elvis.
Things were getting bad, Paul knew, but he was in no condition to worry about it just now. He thought about the boy in the airman's jacket who had called John queer, and he thought about how John watched Stuart's swift sketching hands, and a cold stony pocket opened up inside him. When Paul got home, he sat down at the piano and worked out the song twining in his brain, his head resting on the music rack and his eyes closed.
Eventually his father came out in his pyjamas and told him to get to bed or get a cuff. Paul complied, and lay down fully dressed on top of the covers, his hands lifted above him to play the invisible song.
That night, Paul dreamt of John in the crippled council house, the ceiling falling in chunks around him and systemic cracks like vast spiderwebs spreading on the walls. He dreamt of John lying on the ravaged floor, stripped bare to the waist and smirking.
Paul woke up panting, sweating, hands wrenched in the bedcovers. His heart was a hummingbird in his mouth, his chest echoing and hollow in its absence.
It was a curse beyond bearing, Paul thought, hunching in the washroom a few moments later. This devastating focus. These darkhot thoughts of his. This wasn't how he'd been raised. He splashed cold water on his face. He slumped on his shoulder against the shut door, long careful breaths and a song dredged up from somewhere to give him something else to think about, and soon, soon he'd be all right again.
*
The school term was over.
John had hovered on the verge of being expelled from the Liverpool College of Art all year due to his grossly disrespectful and destructive behaviour. His escapades were always outlandish and improbably brash, and he never mentioned the consequences, that surfeit of trouble in which he perpetually existed. As the weather got warmer, John often hadn't bothered to show up at all, which could have been only a relief to the college faculty.
Before the end of term, John would come round Paul's school at the midday break and they ate fish and chips off wilting wax paper, leaning on the hoods of cars that didn't belong to them. Paul showed him the stairwell where the acoustics were best, and John tested it by playing a brief rag on the mouth organ that lived in his front pocket, its pale blocky outline rubbed through the fabric of his trousers. Paul drummed a pencil against the wall in time, sang vague gibberish sounds to fit John's song. The other students coming up and down the stairs fell silent as they passed the two of them, and Paul liked that very much.
Now the nights were short, the moon looking like a tattered moth in the coaly sky. Sometimes, they went into a club at sunset and didn't come out again until dawn, and it was as if darkness itself were only a myth, something disproven by modernity.
John had a huge row with his Aunt Mimi around then, and he left home, went to stay at the flat Stuart had in Percy Street with another bloke named Rod. Paul didn't know the specifics, only that John didn't want to go home yet, nor to his mother's place in Blomfield Road, nor anywhere where he was related by blood. John slept on the paint-spattered floor of the flat's tiny cold-water kitchen, wrapped in a tatty blanket and nibbled at by the rats.
Paul rode his bicycle over to Percy Street on a Saturday morning, found John and Stuart up on the roof. Stuart had his legs hanging over the side, heels tocking on the building, a sketchbook across his lap. John was throwing bits of gravel at wheeling black birds. Paul went into the building through the broken front door, climbed up every stair and out of the trapdoor onto the roof, his hands scuffed by the rough tar-paper.
"Hey John," Paul said.
John whipped his arm sideways, and across the way a bird squawked and exploded with a flurry into the air. He looked back at Paul with that familiar half-annoyed flatness in his eyes.
"What are you doing here?" John asked, largely uninterested.
Paul flinched under his skin. His mouth made a smile. "That place we're playing tonight, the pub? I forgot the name."
"Whores and bastards," and John's lip curled, a gouging kind of look. Paul felt his face grow hot for some reason.
Stuart sighed extravagantly, not looking up from his sketchbook. "The Horse and Bridle, actually."
"Over in King Street, yeah?"
"Sure," Stuart said, as airy as if it were no more than an opinion. Paul scowled at the neat curve of his back, his down-tilted face. Stuart never did anything but draw, and draw, and draw.
"I'm bringing George," Paul said.
John made a harsh scoffing sound, and Paul's skin tightened defensively as he belatedly recognised John's awful mood.
"Bit soft, aren't you?" John said on a sneer. "How many times are you going to make me tell you--he's not joining the band."
"But he's good," Paul insisted. John never argued with that, his logic following strange other paths.
"It's bad enough, you and your fuckin' baby face making us look like a bloody church band," and this was dangerous, this savage coruscating gleam in John's eyes. "One more manky public school boy is two too many, you follow?"
Paul noticed that his hands were closed into hard-knuckled fists at his side. He spoke without thinking.
"Quite a band you'd have without me, is that it? Quite a band you had before I joined, you and your mate who only knew two chords and your mate who couldn't play a bloody washboard."
John came striding towards him, his fingers clutched around a handful of gravel and the wind blowing his hair wild. Paul almost took a step back but then he forced himself to stay still, forced the sneer to fix on his face.
"Aye, but they were my mates, weren't they, Paulie? Rather have them around than some cow-eyed nancy boy who never shuts his goddamned mouth."
Paul recoiled as if hit with a dart. Mortified horror raked through him, his mind rushing heedlessly to the dark places it had revelled in so completely for so many months now. John could see--of course John could see. It was a weakness, and John had an eye for that, if nothing else.
Stuttering, Paul managed, "You can sod off then," and then he turned his back sharply because something was burning in his eyes and he couldn't stand it. John laughed, cruel and high. Paul yanked open the trapdoor, also fell through it in his haste.
He stood over the basin in Stuart's kitchen, his hands braced on the counter. Eyes squeezed shut until his heart rate settled, and then he ran water over his hands and froze the colour off his face. With his palms tucked into his eye sockets, Paul whispered to himself, "You're not," some crooked kind of echo.
The trapdoor clapped shut, and a second later a body thudded into the hallway. Paul wiped his face hurriedly on his sleeve, adrenaline tasting bright in his mouth because he thought it would be John, John come to tear into him again, tear him to pieces, but instead Stuart came in with a smirk and a pencil tucked behind his ear.
"Aw, is he gonna cry?" Stuart asked in a false lilt of a voice. Paul's face wrenched in a sudden snarl.
"Bugger off, you fuck."
"Watch your mouth, son," and Stuart cuffed him hard across the back of the head, jarring Paul into the counter.
Paul whirled, red drenching across his vision and something like sulphuric acid running hot in his veins. He was going to hit Stuart until he wasn't smirking anymore, nor breathing or moving or speaking.
Stuart dodged his first swing, and then shoved him hard. Paul tripped, overbalanced, and would have fallen but for Stuart's quick hand wrenched in his shirt, dragging him upright. Paul found himself pushed up against the wall, Stuart's thin painter's hand fisted against his collarbone.
"Get a hold of yourself," Stuart said. "You're acting like a fool."
"Shut up, you, you don't know-" and Paul jerked to attack him again but Stuart was stronger than he looked, keeping him pinned in place.
"Stop it," Stuart told him sharply. "Why are you listening to him? You can't--don't listen to him when he's like that, all right?"
Paul shook his head, felt something pop painfully in his neck. His teeth dug into the inside of his lip; he couldn't answer because he couldn't speak because if he spoke his voice would crack, and he might actually cry, and then he would have to throw himself in the river to drown.
Stuart blew out an irritated breath. His eyes were an odd dark silver, narrowed as thin as pound coins. He had freckles, Paul noticed in an extremely distant way, dozens of them.
"It's not him," Stuart said. "He says those things because he can. He thinks he has to. But it's not really him."
Paul stared hard past Stuart, and didn't answer. His face was so hot it felt like he was melting. He wanted to get out of here, run and run and run.
Stuart pushed him aside with a vaguely disgusted sound, and went to the cabinet for a fresh pack of cigarettes. Paul stayed against the wall, breathing measured and careful, pressing his fingertips against his thighs in calming piano chords. His eyes fell on the wadded-up blanket in the corner where John had been sleeping, and a lump jammed itself into his throat.
Stuart offered him a cigarette. Paul took it because he needed something to do with his hands. Three matches died on him before he was able to light it. Stuart watched from the other side of the room, that obnoxious smirk back on his face.
They smoked, sharing a silence that was only moderately tense, and then Paul was feeling more stable, so he lied, "I've got somewhere to be," as he flicked his fag end into the basin and moved to leave.
"Shall I tell John you won't be coming tonight, then?" Stuart asked, a terribly subtle tone of mockery in his voice.
Something flared in Paul, penny firecrackers rattling like gunfire along the insides of his ribs. It suddenly seemed insufferable, all this cringing and second-guessing and shame. Paul's mother used to tell him, keep that chin up, love, and she'd say it now, he knew, if he came home looking like this. If she were still home to see him.
Paul pulled his shoulders straight, looked back at Stuart with a glare. "No," he answered. "You can tell him I'm bringing George. Tell him it's my bloody band too."
And then he walked out, letting the door slam behind him. For a moment, he felt like a gangster, a cowboy, a legend who would never be forgotten, but then he caught himself looking up to the roof for a glimpse of John against the clear blue sky, and straightaway, Paul was just a boy again.
*
So they played that night at the Horse and Bridle, and when John's friend Eddie got too pissed to provide his usual incompetent guitar work, John let George come onstage to fill his space. John was drunk himself, or halfway there, anyway. The rush had allowed him to abandon all his grudges, everything that was bleak and unsatisfied in him. He cradled his hands around the microphone, sang love songs as if he really meant them. Paul was dazzled, huddling near the wall and trying not to show it.
Their brief rooftop row seemed the furthest thing from John's mind. He grinned at Paul, hooked an arm around his neck and dragged him to the front of the small stage so that they could sing Jerry Lee Lewis into the same microphone. Paul should have been still angry with him, cool and aloof, but it was a physical impossibility. John's face from two inches away was flushed as red as roses, looking slick and soft to the touch.
Paul's voice gave out sometime in the second hour. He fell off the microphone and rolled his back on John's, feeling the shifting war of their shoulder blades through sweat-damp cotton. The pub was cramped and packed to overflowing, people jammed in corners and folded into each other, dancing too close. Paul could feel every one of them, every individual heart in the room thumping a unique rhythm. Every breath he took was the admixture of a hundred blood-hot exhales.
John was singing. Sweat stung at Paul's eyes and so he closed them, let John's coarse lovely voice wash over him, his fingers moving blind and flawless on the guitar.
John was singing, shredded up and pleading, "She's the woman that I know, she's the woman that loves me so."
And then John howled, a primal sound that was the difference between rock and roll and everything else in this world: that single joyful scream. It had barely been absorbed by the crowd before he stepped aside to let George come tearing into the guitar solo and John was laughing, shouting, "Go son, go," and George beamed like Paul had never seen before and for a moment it was exactly how he wanted his life to be.
It was their best show yet. Afterwards they crowded around a too-small table and drank and drank, softening their edges, soothing their ragged voices. Paul was next to John and circumstances were such that he had the thrill of John's leg knocking against his, their shoulders nudging like blind creatures seeking space.
Paul was feeling dizzy, or giddy, or somewhere in between. He wrapped both hands around his cold pint, hoping to siphon off some of the heat from under his skin.
All the way drunk now, drunk and past drunk, John accused George of having sold his soul to be able to play the guitar like that. George looked so pleased Paul had to laugh, and John pounded his fist on the table, demanding to know what the devil looked like.
"Like Elvis," George said, swaying slightly in his seat. "Elvis in a suit made of black leather and he's ten feet tall with red eyes, and his guitar is also a sword."
John barked an amused sound. "That's not bad, boyo. Somebody with talent could probably make a song out of that."
Across the room, a fight broke out like a mortar shell dropped into the crowd. A chair was smashed over someone's back, and then it was a general scrum, five or six guys whipping elbows and throwing wild looping punches. John leaned forward across Paul, shouting out raw-voiced encouragement in his casually miscreant way.
The move pressed him up against Paul's side, warm and intensely there, John's arm heavy around his shoulders, and Paul wasn't really breathing so well. He wondered if John could tell. He wondered if the faint sweat still shimmering on John's throat would taste like liquor or salt.
Paul had to get out of here.
He slid out from under John's arm, riding out the shiver that went through him as John's calloused fingertips scraped across the back of his neck. Paul stood beside the table, shot George a wide-eyed look that was probably mistaken for panic, but that wasn't it, not really. Paul just had to get out of here.
He begged exhaustion and John called him a dozen unforgivable names but none of them could touch Paul, not after the night they'd had. He let Stuart's irritated voice run on a loop in his head, ever-reminding: it's not him, it's not him.
Paul smiled and said, "Brilliant show, lads, just brilliant," and he was looking right at John as he said it, everything and more written all over his face.
John didn't seem to notice. He booed fiercely when George staggered to his feet as well, and made as if he would hurl his pint glass at them, but Paul was not too worried. This wasn't one of John's violent drunks; if it were he would have already joined the momentary brawl across the room.
Paul barely managed to keep from looking back as he and George left the pub. That was the first habit to break, he decided in a drunken fit of absolute sincerity. No more looking back.
On the pavement, out in the hushed fish-smelling night, George elbowed him. "You're humming that song of John's. That 909 song."
A breath caught in Paul's throat. "Am I?"
"Christ, man," George said, trying to deepen his voice like John did but it didn't quite work. "Where's your head?"
Paul didn't tell him. It wouldn't do to traumatise the kid before he even got into the band.
They said their goodnights and then Paul set off towards his home. He was cutting through the cemetery when he heard his name being called, and for a split second his blood was frozen, his skin as still as glass, thinking it had to be a ghost.
Then again, from not so far away, "Paulieee," like a mourning wail. Paul felt his heart kickstart, and he gasped quietly under his breath: it was John.
He turned in the foot-beaten path and watched John saunter into the cemetery, listing at a distinct angle with his shirt pulled out of his belt on one side, his hair falling gracelessly over his forehead. John moved into the blocky shadow of the church and grinned at him, that huge terrifying grin of his that could mean a thousand different things.
Paul swallowed, and sucked on the inside of his cheek to keep his expression clean of any soused idiotic glee. John had followed him.
"Can't shake you, can I," Paul said, trying for a bit of levity. His throat seemed to be getting smaller the nearer John came.
"You don't want to," John told him. He stepped too close, still tugging at Paul with his grin, his dare-filled eyes. "You don't want to shake me at all, do you?"
It was important not to look at John for too many seconds in a row. Paul flicked his eyes to the moss like tattered suede over the headstones, the murky promise of the road beyond the trees. John reeked of the night, beer and smoke and musty stage light all over him.
"I'd have reason enough," Paul answered, wanting to keep it easy, back and forth.
"Don't tell lies, son, it's bad for you," John said.
Strange to realise now how much it disconcerted Paul every time John called him son. It was terrible timing. Paul set it aside, stuck a careless smile on his face. The one thing Paul had always been able to do was smile.
"A bit of wisdom from the monk, eh?"
"It's fact," and John put his hand on Paul's shoulder. "Solid fact, true blue. I've seen how you look at me."
Paul's mouth opened but nothing came out. It was an apocalyptic moment, whole cities crashing to dust inside of him. He could feel each of John's fingers pressing into his shoulder, thumb hard against the bony curve of his collarbone. Paul tried not to move. It was a spell; it could be broken.
John tilted forward, bringing their faces together and stopping Paul's breath. "I've seen you, Paul," he whispered.
The space between their mouths seemed composed entirely of steam. Paul could feel his hands shaking as he lifted them to John's chest, taking hold of his shirt and walking them backwards very slowly and carefully. Paul wasn't thinking about what he was doing beyond the immediate: he stepped to avoid headstones and thick-grown weeds; he made sure John was mirroring his pace so they didn't step on each other's feet. John followed him with an intensely knowing glint in his eye, his hand hot against the skin of Paul's neck.
Behind the angle of the church wall, away from the road, away from any kind of light, Paul pressed his back against the stone and pulled John to him.
John breathed out, "Good man," against his lips, and then kissed him.
Somehow, after everything, Paul wasn't really expecting that. His legs gave out briefly, but there was the wall and there was John shored up against his front, John's hands like bridge struts on Paul's hips. John pushed his tongue into Paul's mouth and Paul's arms went around his neck without conscious thought. John kissed him again and again, unchecked, a desperation at the edges of it that Paul wished he could attribute to the drunk.
But Paul didn't care that they were drunk. He sank his fingers into John's hair and hooked his ankle around the back of John's leg. He didn't care what that made him, the wicked smile that John's lips formed against his. He didn't care when John mumbled, "Likes it, does he?" because he did, God help him, he liked John's narrow body over his own as much as anything short of the stage.
It was messy and uncoordinated, there in the shadow of the church wall. John unbuckled his own belt, took Paul's hand and pushed it into his trousers. Paul was grateful for the direction, lightheaded from lack of air and the punishing heat of John's mouth against his own. He curled his fingers against John through his pants and John hissed, biting at Paul's lip. Paul was panting, pulling John off through damp cotton with no grace or rhythm or melody, nothing like it.
It was lovely, he thought, lovely, and then John's head fell back on a moan, and he was done. Paul pressed his face, his open pleading mouth to the smooth stretch of John's throat, feeling driven just so slightly out of his mind at the feel of wet spreading under his hand.
John was limp against him for a long moment, breathing hard in recovery. His hands dangled bonelessly over Paul's shoulders. Paul didn't begrudge him, his tongue marking out John's pulse and their bodies pressed so close. Paul was suffocating, sick and spinning with arousal. Something akin to terror kept his fingers hooked in John's trousers, not letting him pull away.
But John didn't. He lifted his head and his eyes looked black and foggy and detached, whirring alien ships. He seemed to barely recognise Paul, barely even see him. Paul said something that tasted like "please," and John smiled a slow smile like a knife blade, slid his hands up under Paul's shirt.
Paul let his head tip back against the wall, his lips forming around the word please over and over again. Far above the church and the steeple, the fences and the trees, a heavy northern moon kept watch. Paul was conscious of John's fingers working his trousers open, John's hard mouth biting at his jaw, and a million miles away there was the moon, and that was all for him, that was all.
*
Paul woke up in the bedroom he shared with his brother, wreathed in a dream about submarines that clung to his mind like smoke or moss. For several long moments, he blinked up at the cracks in the ceiling, letting an ocean flow out of him, retrieving his commitment to dry land.
The night before came back like having the wind knocked out of him: John pressing him against the wall of the church, John's well-used hands searching under his clothes. Paul shivered, his body going tight with goosebumps and a thin excited sheen of sweat.
He lay in bed a few minutes longer, eyes closed, remembering, reliving until he woke up a bit more and discovered a breathless slither of mortification creeping under his skin. He pushed everything out of his head in favour of a Carl Perkins song, and went looking for breakfast.
The place was empty when Paul came out, his father's teacup resting neatly on its saucer in the sink, a small brown lake at the bottom. Paul made toast on the stove and ate it dry, the way he did when he was very young and they couldn't get butter. He ate standing up, studying the raw-silk sky out the window that looked the same as it did every morning.
It was too quiet and so Paul fetched his guitar and went round to the small garden around which their group of council houses was clustered. The garden was an industrial colour of green, rusty flowers wilting in the heat. Paul found a little patch of cool under a stunted tree that hunkered in the shadow of one of the houses, futilely waiting for the sun.
He turned off his mind, bent down over his guitar, and closed his eyes. He disappeared into it, not trying any new songs or any complicated, nothing but what his hands already knew by heart.
Some amount of time passed. Paul had no recollection of it. He was thousands of miles away.
Then George was saying his name as if for the third or fourth time, a curt parental demand that had Paul's head jerking up, his mind resurfacing a moment later.
George was standing in the sun, looking miserable in the cheap wool suit that his mother made him wear to church. His hair was slicked to the right instead of straight back like he usually wore it, and it made him look even younger. George scowled at Paul, but that might just have been the sun in his eyes.
"Ah, not gone deaf then. You had me worried, son."
Paul curled his lip without realising it. "Don't--don't call me that." Surprise flashed across George's face, and Paul hurried to any other topic of conversation. "Did you bring your guitar?"
"No, I came straight from church." George lifted a hand to scratch under his shirt collar. He'd already rid himself of the tie, and it hung out of his pocket like a dead pet snake. "This heat might kill me."
"Ain't that a shame."
"Tragedy, a tragedy is what it would be. The whole city would mourn."
Paul glanced at him, half a smile. "Policemen in black cotton gloves. Crepe bows around the necks of public doves."
"Oi, that's a song, innit?"
"Poem, actually."
"Poem?" George's face screwed up, jeering and doubtful. "If you say so, Paulie."
Paul almost told him not to call him that, either, but he bit his tongue. He couldn't be in control of everything.
It felt awkward to be sitting with George above him, so Paul got to his feet, which were numb and heavy as blocks of wood. George stuck his hands in his pockets, rocking on his heels.
"It was good last night, yeah?" George said.
A little piece of electricity went through Paul, spark of panic before he realised that George was talking about the show. Paul shrugged, said, "You were all right."
"Are you gonna talk to John again? About me joining all official like?" George was talking fast, his eagerness showing through. "You said you would."
Paul blinked at him for a moment, and then a small laugh rattled from him. He shook his head, looking down.
"Yeah, I'll talk to him," he said, because it was easy to say that.
George grinned. "Gear. Let's go get a curry."
They cut through the backyards and under the wash lines blowing in the grey breeze, and Paul thought about the band. He thought about the wall of sound that came from the three of them, small stages where they could not stand abreast, cramped backrooms where they passed a flask of liquor back and forth before going on. The idea of the band was leeward and sheltered in his mind, polished to a high gold shine. Paul turned it over, rubbed at its edges, remembering the ancient Roman coin his brother Mike had found when they were kids and how he couldn't stop fiddling with it. The band was his good luck piece; he wanted to carry it around in his pocket.
Sitting at the counter waiting for their curries, George said, "I saw a picture of Elvis in his Army uniform the other day."
"Yeah?" Paul said, thinking about John Lennon's hands.
"He looked. I don't know. It looked like a costume. Like it was for a new movie."
"Hmm," Paul answered. He wondered where John was now, if he was still asleep in the clothes he had been wearing last night.
"Do you think he likes the Army?"
"What?" Paul asked.
George gave him a look, a quick folding-down on his eyebrows. "You're not paying attention again."
Caught, Paul shrugged and tried to pass it off. "I pay attention."
"Aye, when John's in the room," George sneered, and Paul went still.
"I don't--sod off," he managed. George's lip curled viciously as if he would say something more, but then he blew out an explosive breath and slumped back.
A moment or two of densely packed silence passed. Paul wouldn't look at George. He picked splinters out of the wood of the counter, wondering if his ears were as bright red as they felt.
"Anyway," George said eventually, sounding pinched and stilted. "You want to talk about Elvis now?"
A hard smile forced its way onto Paul's face. He ducked his head. "Yeah. Yeah."
It was safer all around. Rock and roll picked them up, patched the holes in their conversation. Soon enough, Paul was drumming on the counter with cheap metal spoons, and George was mumbling lyrics around his curry, and outside the sun broke through the cloud cover, splashing onto the street like a great blue wave crashing into California all those many miles away.
*
part two