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“He looked at me sometimes as if he believed I might perform a miracle on him.” - Francie Schwartz
“Right, but I had to hear about it from the television like it has nothing to do with me,” Paul says into the telephone, the words coming out of him in some sort of furious, hissing burst; his desire to snap tempered only by the drowning flood of humiliation.
It was bad enough that Jane announced the break up on television—all but inviting everyone to stick their nose in it, to question Paul. It would only make it worse, hearing the wavering anger in his voice contrasted against the unrelenting coldness of hers, as though he’s the unreasonable one. Or worse—his dad hearing it from the next room.
“What did you expect—for me to wait around for you to sort yourself out? It’s not as though I came out with some new boyfriend,” Jane says, her voice infuriatingly even; the unspoken like you hanging in the tense silence.
The unfairness sizzles through Paul’s nerves, filling him with seething indignation. He didn’t even come out with a new girlfriend. He wouldn’t be that indelicate. He’s not John.
“You’re being childish,” Paul says.
He hears her scoff, tinny and static down the telephone line.
“I’m childish?” There’s a hysterical note in her voice. A hint of vulnerability that’s only grown rarer the longer they’ve known each other. “Did you even want to marry me? Do you even know what you want? This entire relationship, you’ve been nothing but—”
She cuts herself off abruptly, choked out by her own earnestness. She’s not like Paul—lacking in his nostalgia. She won’t cede anymore feeling to this dead old thing they used to call a relationship. If she’s done, she’s done.
When she speaks again, her voice is light—almost amazed, as if she’s realising something obvious. “I can’t believe I thought I wanted to do this with you forever.”
Her words land like a gut punch, leaving him winded.
He thinks of lying with her in his bed, their noses almost touching, her eyes soft, freckles glowing with fondness for him. In those moments, he would always think: this is how it’s supposed to be.
He releases a shaky sigh, closing his eyes, pressing his forehead against the old, dry wallpaper, as if he could push himself into it and disappear. “There’s no need to be cruel, Jane.”
She makes a soft, sad sound, like a laugh, but not really. “I can only give as much as I get,” she tells him, quietly. “There’s something wrong with you, Paul. You must realise that.”
And with that, she hangs up.
—
With hindsight, he’ll think it was an omen: before Jane, before the stupid premiere, they moved to the new studio on Monday, ready to set their future into motion, and all it took was a day for their engineer to get so fed up with them, he quit.
It didn’t come as a surprise—which isn’t to say Paul was expecting it—but it made sense; like spilling a mug of tea and ending up with a milky puddle in your kitchen. In the midst of their bickering at the mixing desk, Geoff Emerick said, “Boys—” in a tone so oddly reminiscent of Brian, that Paul understood what was happening, before he even really knew what it was he understood.
They go to Cavendish, after—because it’s close, and it’s the middle of the night so there’s nowhere else to go, and it feels less like they’ve just been told off by the headteacher, there. And it’s easiest—half of them living there and all. The majority half, if one were to count Yoko, which Paul does sometimes because the sharp sting of thinking it satisfies something bitter in him, the same way picking at a scab does.
The four of them, and Yoko, sit around his living room, muttering inanely about things that don’t matter: Anyone want tea? Shall we roll a joint? Paul, where’s the drug tin?
Paul has his hands planted under his thighs—mostly to stop anxiously chewing at his fingernails. He sits, alone in an armchair, rocking innocuously, waiting for them to get to it—for blame to start flying around—as Francie serves them all drinks like a good little maid. It makes Paul’s skin itch, her ambling about aimlessly like that. He wishes she’d just sit by him for a bit instead of playing hausfrau when no one asked her to.
When the grass finally cools them off, it’s George who goes first, asking, “What’ll we do, then?”
Inexplicably, it’s Yoko that answers: “You can get someone else to do it, no?”
It startles Paul. Startles all of them, really—even John. Paul almost laughs, the absurdity of it gurgling fretfully in his chest. He’s sharp all over. He wants to bite something.
“He had a point, though,” George says, his voice lower than before—a caution to him now that itches at Paul, too—making bitter thing in his head snap, christ, shut up, as George says, "Didn’t he?"
Without meaning to, Paul’s eyes wander over to the sofa where John sits, only to find that John’s already looking over at him, too—his eyes scrutinising and unreadable. Paul blinks away; looks at George, instead, their gazes meeting for a moment, before George glances away to where Paul’s had just been, to look at John. No, not John.
His shadow. Yoko.
And then, George looks back at Paul, staring pointedly.
It all feels a bit less funny, then.
Paul’s too aware of himself—his nerves grinding under his skin, and the drugs in his system unbalancing him, and the irritating pull of the song they didn’t even finish properly catching at his attention, despite the uselessness of it. Paul’s song—the reason they’re here, now, in the first place—not avant-garde enough for John’s new sensibilities or whatever the fuck; setting John off, then setting them all off, making Geoff so miserable he couldn’t stand to be around them anymore. Blowing it all up and for what? John liked the song just fine in India. La, la, la, how life goes on.
What George doesn’t say, and what Paul knows George means on some subconscious level, is: agree with me and get rid of her for us. As though it’ll make any difference.
Once, when Paul was telling Francie about George and Ringo’s complaints about Yoko’s ceaseless presence, she laughed, and said, “You guys are such men. It’s not that complicated. It’s—high school. That first love feeling, you know what I mean? They just want to be around each other.”
“It’s hardly their first love,” Paul said, because the suggestion felt silly, given that he’s known John his whole life. He’d seen John in love.
But Francie said, “How would you know? Maybe it is. Maybe it’s the first time it’s felt that way.”
And Paul had no satisfying answer for that.
What is he even supposed to say? He can’t tell John what to do. Even Cynthia couldn’t.
“I dunno,” Paul says, nervously. It’s stupid, and inadequate, and he knows it. He tries again, stuttering out, uselessly, “I mean it’s— I dunno.”
He thinks, a little hysterically, of when they recorded the demos for this album at George’s house. The shaky relief he’d felt—something inside him sighing out, like maybe in his subconscious he thought they wouldn’t come to it after the last film. After Brian. It was the longest break they’d ever taken. Start as you mean to go on, Jim always told him, and they were starting with ambition. With plenty of songs, with a company. And then, in that first recording session, along came Yoko—
“It’s only a bit of Beatle bickering. Nothing we haven’t done before,” John says, suddenly—shaking Paul out of his neurotic reverie. He says it patiently, oddly commanding. The album’s not out of tune, Paul.
When Paul looks, John’s looking at him too, his eyes gentle. It’s pleasing, and it’s embarrassing how pleasing it is. Paul looks down at his knees, knocking them lightly into each other.
“Right,” he agrees. “We’ll find someone else. Like Yoko said.”
He can feel George’s gaze ping-ponging between the two of them, but George doesn’t say anything more. Not agreeing, just retreating. An acquiescence because when John says it’s so, then it is.
“Maybe do a little less Beatle bickering with the next one,” Ringo says—probably the only one of them who can get away with saying it without setting alight the tension hanging over them. It may as well not be a quip at all for how dryly he says it, but Paul still huffs a weak laugh in response—the only one who does.
George corners him in the kitchen, after, sidling up to Paul while he’s pouring himself another drink.
“You don’t have to pretend to like it just because it’s him,” George says, apropos of nothing. “It’s only going to be more of this, you know.”
“I’m not pretending to like it,” Paul says, evenly. He feels a dull annoyance. This is an impossible conversation. He doesn’t want to have it.
George huffs for some reason—a mirthless laugh. “You know it won’t make a difference, yeah? You can’t change his mind just because he’s in your house.” He gives Paul some sort of look like he thinks Paul might not know that. This time the annoyance feels sharp and hot, firing up Paul’s indignation. As if he needs to be preached to about John.
“I’m not trying to change his mind about anything,” Paul says, in lieu of telling George to fuck off. "I like it when he’s happy, George. He’s my best mate.”
“Alright, Paul,” George sighs, in a placating sort of way he’s recently started taking up with him. Like there’s more he could say, but he’s already decided it would be a futile effort. Like in some blink Paul didn’t notice, George managed to consider the entirety of him, and found that he will inevitably come up lacking.
—
By morning there’s a handful of journalists gathered outside his dad’s house, ready to sniff out some quote about Jane that they can run with. Paul watches them from the window of the guest room. One lights another’s cigarette; a photographer points his camera at Angela’s camellia tree, twisting the lens for precision. The idleness of it irks Paul; his humiliation, just another day of work for them, as dull and meaningless as winding coils.
“We could always go home,” Francie says from behind him, trying and failing to be soothing.
It would be worse back home. He can only imagine how Cavendish is now: another cluster of journalists, still somehow overshadowed by the cluster of girls—some heartbroken and mournful, some triumphant. Jane was never right for him, of course. Something was off there, they could always tell.
And then there was the house. The people in it.
“Why invite them if you hate having them here so much?” Francie asked him once. She loved them, of course. Paul would often come home to the three of them—John, Yoko, and Francie—giggling together, thick as thieves. Sometimes it would take an age for any of them to even notice he was there. He’d wait in a doorway, watching them, imagining himself as some sort of nomadic character—a ghost in his own house.
No, he doesn’t want to fucking go home.
He turns to Francie, watching him warily—not a worried wariness, just uncertain of him—and he feels a sudden, revolting embarrassment. She’s so out of place here, her accent too jarring; her attempts at London bohemian composure too overbearing. She always says these things like she’s being objective. It irritates Paul with a serrated kind of sharpness. He hates her newness. It feels like she showed up to his world only to refuse to learn his language, and then make fun of him for speaking it. She doesn’t understand any of this.
She’s not inner circle; she's an indulgence that wormed her way into this moment, because Paul came home to Cavendish one night to find it profoundly empty, and she was the most recent thing to flirt with him.
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” he says, nodding to the window—to the journalists and photographers, ready to sear her existence into the record, to catch Paul out. “Could finally get your place in.”
Francie blinks at him. Paul watches his words settle on her face, a slow waterfall of disgust drooping her eyebrows, curling her lip.
“You’re the one that brought me here,” she says—that, too, filled with infuriating uncertainty. “I don’t understand what you want from me.”
Like he’s supposed to have an answer. Like it’s a question, at all.
Did you even want to marry me? Do you even know what you want?
Paul feels impotent shame burn through him—ashamed of her for being here, and of himself for putting her here, for yielding to her for so long.
“I don’t want anything from you,” he says. “What do you have to give me?”
—
In the bathroom, at the premiere, while holding a key of cocaine out for Paul, Robert asks idly, “So, is she Mrs Lennon, now?”
Paul takes his time replying, leaning down for a prim snort, focusing on the electric sting of it in his sinus. Robert may not hound him for gossip, but that doesn’t mean he can’t find gossip to be had from Paul’s reactions. That’s why he brought it up, probably. John and Yoko courted that kind of attention. Paul could feel it when he was with them. It embarrassed him a little—made him feel conspicuous in his aloneness, sitting next to them; the only Beatle tonight without a girl.
“You might know better than me,” Paul says, swiping at the ghostly tickle in his nose.
Robert smirks at him, amused. “Might I?”
Didn’t you do a show with them? Paul thinks, but doesn’t bother saying. Just shrugs, listlessly. He knows it must come across as petulant—can practically hear his dad chiding him for it: are you going to answer or just spasm at me?
Robert takes it in stride—never one to be put off by another’s mood. Egged on by it, sometimes, if it’s entertaining enough.
“Perhaps, I’m interested in a more sober perspective,” he says. Then adds, gesturing with the baggie of coke: “So to speak.”
Paul hums, pretending to think about it, as Robert bows his head gracefully for his own snort.
He never knows what to say when people ask about them. Mike asked him what Yoko was like, once, and Paul’s brain kept getting stuck on meaningless, childish descriptors: her name is Yoko, and she likes art, and she’s shorter than me, and she has long black hair. She stands next to John all the time.
It was the same with their art. He couldn’t engage with it as a thing with depth—just kept thinking about what John would want him to think about it, and coming up with nothing. He kept hoping Robert would voice his opinion so that he might find a way to fake his own, but he wasn’t even sure what he wanted to hear. It’s not as though he didn’t know that Robert was opportunistic, but it vexed him that he couldn’t tell if it was opportunism that was driving Robert to help them out, or if it was genuine admiration for the work. The whole affair seemed like an elaborate game of charades, made all the more irritating by how no one seemed inclined to explain any of the rules to Paul. Everyone just played their part like any of it made any sense, and Paul—feeling foolish and inadequate—played along, too.
But he didn’t understand it, and he didn’t understand them. He doesn’t—at this moment—quite understand John. He gets the uneasy sense sometimes that this might be something he’s not going to understand. He might just be another dead thing left in the earth John scorched on his way to wherever he’s going—as valuable as the family John no longer wants, and the music John no longer likes.
“Dunno,” Paul says. Which isn’t an answer at all, but when he tries to open his mouth to clarify he just says it again. “Dunno.”
He laughs, nervously. It rattles through his chest, sharp and desperate, like he’s been sprinting, though he’s been standing perfectly still.
“You alright?” he hears Robert ask, from somewhere very far away.
“Bit out of it, you know,” Paul grinds out. He digs his fingernails into the palms of his hands, but it only adds to his disorientation. He doesn’t exist enough for it to work. He’s too small—too split from his own body.
He wishes Francie were here. Sometimes, in the middle of sex, he zones out, lulled out of his head by some ambient sensation. His ears pivot unbidden to the melody of the house, the patter of animals, the creaking floors; it’s like all frequencies are set just right—a master mix of Cavendish—all, except the guest room. His mind reaches and reaches and reaches, unable to catch onto whatever it is it’s looking for, and it’s not until Fracie runs a hand through his hair, fingers scratching against his scalp, that he comes back to himself, feeling terrified and depleted.
Paul closes his eyes, trying to cut off some of the everything around him.
“Do you want me to go get someone?” Robert asks—an undercurrent of fear in his voice that Paul has never heard before. It revolts him, his mind lost for a moment to the unbearable cloud of second-hand embarrassment.
“No, Christ, just—”
He needs—
He doesn’t want to say it, but the panic burns through him, and he thinks it might actually come out of him in some gruesome burst if someone doesn’t—
“Can you just touch me for a second?” Paul pleads, helplessly.
Instantly, he feels the warm press of Robert’s hand settle on his shoulder, melting through the fabric of his jacket, settling against his frayed nerves.
“Like this?” Robert asks, unsure.
“Yeah,” Paul chokes out, mortified.
“Sorry,” he adds in a desperate whispers, though he’s mortified by that too.
“It’s alright,” Robert tells him, gently. “Always wanted to hear you say that.”
It startles a shaky laugh out of Paul. When he opens his eyes he finds Robert there, his brows bent in foreign concern, but smiling with relief, all the same.
“There you are,” he sighs out. His hand shifts, caressing its way up Paul’s neck, brushing absently against his pulse, the feeling of it so grounding and kind that it makes Paul shiver. Robert—already hyper-aware of Paul’s every physical reaction—latches onto it with a quick, discerning flicker of his eyes, lingering over the hotspot where his hand meets Paul’s skin.
His eyes catch on Paul’s, waiting there for a long, quiet beat.
“How do you feel?” he asks, his voice lower, now—different, but still painfully understanding.
Paul becomes altogether too aware of how close they’re standing. Robert’s breath tickles his face, bouncing warmly against his cheek with each exhale.
“I’m alright now, actually,” Paul says, clumsy and loud, flipping the mood all out of order. He shrugs off Robert’s hand a little abruptly—Robert’s eyebrows shooting up, startled—but he only feels the heat worse without Robert’s touch, like it’s left a stinging scar. He wants to apologise, but remembers Robert’s comforting joke like a twisted echo—always wanted to hear you say that. He doesn’t know what he would even be apologising for. Robert didn’t really—
They weren’t even—
“It’s not—” Paul starts. “I mean—”
He laughs, weakly. Where he’d been distant from his body before, he’s now become unbearably present.
“Had a bit too much, I think,” he says.
He hopes Robert will just accept it—hopes they can just move on like none of this was real—but something crosses Robert’s face, knowing and gently dismissive.
“It’s alright,” Robert says, like he means it completely. “I suppose we’ve passed the cultural moment for that kind of experimentation, anyway.”
It’s another joke to ease Paul, but all at once, it embarrasses, and angers, and stabs him—a roiling molotov cocktail of tender, agonising longing.
He’s bruised, and battered, and high, throbbing all over, and Tara reaches out for the flimsy, sensitive stitches on his lip, and asks, reverently, how does it feel?—
He’s dizzy with inebriation at George’s wedding, George’s warm hand pushing against the small of his back, guiding him to sit down for a minute before he kills someone with the bloody bow and arrow, and somewhere under all the good humour Paul feels a fraught urgency, and he tells George, accusingly, you’re leaving me to the vultures, now—
He’s barely more than a child, sunbathing in his back garden, the expanse of Ian James’ freckled back laid bare for him, close enough to touch—so warm Paul can practically feel it on his fingertips as he watches—and he feels a strange, staggering, blistering feeling pulling in his navel—
He’s high in a car, alone with Brian, and because they’re alone he asks, did you ever want to get married? Brian makes a face that shatters something inside him, and before Paul can apologise, Brian smiles, melancholy and forgiving, and says, I don’t suppose anyone would have me with the time I spend on you four—
He’s in Scotland with a ring, and Jane says, with careful, knowing hope on her face, are you sure? And Paul thinks of the crushing loneliness of Cavendish when no one’s there, and the crushing loneliness of grief, of losing Brian; Paul thinks, yes. What else is there? What else can I do?—
He’s in the bathroom with Robert, almost choking on his own need, but he lets the moment pass, like he always does.
—
He parks himself at his dad’s piano, hammering away at the aging keys.
His dad’s house is always a little off-putting to him in a way that feels too immature to talk about, bothering him in ways that it shouldn’t—too much space, too many unfamiliar things. When he drives up, he always thinks of home as his shabby old bedroom on Forthlin Road, only to remember, a second too late, that he won’t be seeing it—his past now swallowed up into someone else’s.
But the piano, they kept from Forthlin Road—cheaper and older than anything Paul has at home, or in the studio, but still the first sound that echoes in his head when a song comes to him.
He follows the notes for Julian’s song—almost perfect, except for that one bit that feels off—moving his fingers over and over, trying to imagine how it would sound in his old front room, with his and John’s younger voices. He gets lost in it, floating away, out of his body, out of his life. If he could just figure it out—
If he could just get this one thing right—
“Getting a bit late in the evening for that,” he hears his dad’s aged voice say.
Paul snaps back to earth. He doesn’t know long he’s been at it, but it’s dark outside, and the room’s been vacated it seems—the women gone now. Just him and his dad left alone.
Jim smiles when Paul turns, tired but indulgent. He’s always so happy to see Paul when Paul visits now. It stirs something hungry in Paul every time, and he never knows how to make heads or tails of it—always a little surprised that the feeling stuck around for another visit.
The acknowledgement is enough to urge Jim over, and he comes to sit on the bench next to Paul, pressed close to his side. Paul feels a stupidly childish urge to lean into the warmth of him, but it would be an odd thing to do. He’s a 26 year old man.
“Stuck on this one,” Paul admits, though it must’ve been obvious, from his incessant playing.
Jim’s hand echoes Paul’s, testing out the chords Paul had been playing, his volume more muted.
“It’s a nice one,” Jim observes when he stops. He runs his hands over the keys, reverently, pausing on a dent in the wood, just under middle C. He catches at it lightly with his thumbnail, giving Paul a look from the corner of his eye.
“John did that,” Paul says. John knocked his guitar into the piano, rowdy from a jam session—the kind the two of them fell into when they got tired of trying to crack through a difficult song, yelling out nonsense to make each other laugh.
Jim hums like I know and of course all wrapped in one; John’s influence in Paul’s life, so intrinsic, that he managed to find his way into this foreign house Paul doesn’t even live in.
“How is John?” Jim asks, in some impossible tone.
The question surprises Paul, though it shouldn’t. Jim does ask sometimes. Everyone does. It’s a thing to ask Paul.
Paul bites his lip and looks down at the keys. His dad’s right—it’s too late to be playing anything. He’ll keep the whole neighbourhood up. The inability to get it out itches, maddening, under his skin.
“I dunno, really,” Paul says. Jim frowns at him, like he thinks Paul’s being strange. Like even he—as disapproving as he’s always been of John—feels put off by the oddity of Paul’s answer. Paul feels a simmering dread—the keen awareness that he’ll have to look his father in the eye and explain himself, somehow.
He can feel it all, then: the mounting tower of his failures. He wants to leave—go drink something, or smoke something, or snort something; go play music until his brain forgets how to speak. He doesn’t have a reason for why Francie’s here and Jane’s not. For why he can’t just do things like he’s supposed to: pick a good girl and marry her; join a group and keep it together.
He blurts out, “I’ll make it work with Francie.”
His dad frowns—confused, of course. They weren’t talking about Francie.
“You— you think that’s it with Jane, then?” Jim fumbles out slowly, uncertain if that’s the right thing to say.
Paul shrugs. “She seems to think so.”
Some bubbling sense of self-loathing makes him tell his dad: “She thinks there’s something wrong with me.”
Jim’s frown only deepens. He looks at Paul like there’s something he wants to say, but he doesn’t know how. He looks around them, grasping for help anywhere he could possibly find it—the piano, the walls, Angela’s furniture. He sighs, unmistakably uncomfortable, and then says, in a frighteningly unsure voice, like the words are foreign to him: “It’s alright to get it wrong, son.”
It sets something off in Paul—a sudden, mountainous anger erupting hotly through him, searing in his veins. He feels a violent, ugly hate for his father that he hasn’t felt since he was a teenager. He thinks of the roaring fights they used to have. About John. About Paul throwing his life away with John. Making a mistake with John. All the fucking embarrassment, and shame; all the times he had to break away from himself just so he wouldn’t have to be himself, grinding himself down into the shape he was supposed to take—making him impotent with useless, inexpressible emotion. He’s worn normality down to its threads and he’s still fucking it up, because there’s something wrong with him. There always has been. Isn’t that what his dad was so afraid of?
“Can’t be the bachelor Beatle forever,” Paul says. It comes out of him cold. He’s cold all over. “How would that look?”
Jim stares at him, completely perplexed—out of his depth. He’d look at Paul like that, sometimes, right after Mum died. Paul, a creature from another world, for all Jim understood him.
“But you love her?” he asks, carefully.
Paul looks away, swallowing the raw, pitiful lump that rises his throat. He stares blankly at the piano, thinking about the chords in Julian’s song, so he doesn’t have to think at all.
“Yeah,” he says, flatly.
Jim considers him for a very long time, but Paul doesn’t look at him, and doesn’t say anything else.
Eventually his dad sighs, gripping his shoulder with a sturdy hand. “Get some rest, Paul.”
—
Paul watches Linda watch him. She sits at the top of the bed, her back against the headboard, Paul half-lying on top of her legs, tracing patterns into her knees, though it’s a half-hearted effort. He mostly just wants to touch her. The golden glow of the California sun, and the misty cloud of the weed they’re smoking gives her an idyllic haze, like a classic painting of a Greek goddess—bare-chested and pink-cheeked; her eyes smiling warmly at him like she knows something he doesn’t.
Paul takes a long pull of the joint, holding her gaze. There’s something delightfully erotic about it, as though he’s inhaling a bit of her, and she can feel it. He likes how it feels for his desire to be desired back. He hadn’t been aware the feeling was growing distant in his life.
He exhales softly, reaching across the expanse of the bed to give her the joint, feeling a low, sizzling spark at the brush of her fingertips as she takes it.
Watching the rise of her freckled tits as she inhales, he asks, “Would you ever want to get married again?”
She coughs out a smoky laugh, choking for a moment, before answering. “God, no.”
Something must show in his face, because she laughs again, more knowing this time.
“It’s a pain. You know it is.” She takes another pull of the joint, her eyebrows quirking in a teasing little dance as she does. She blows a smoke ring at him, lays the joint in the ashtray, and says, cannily, “That’s why you’re here with me.”
It knots up some of the easy comfort in Paul’s body. He can’t pretend to be a saint—he knows that—but it’s not as though he’s driven entirely out of meaningless hedonism. He wouldn’t lock himself away in a hotel room with just anyone.
“Maybe I’m here because I like you,” he says. “It’s nice with you, you know.”
The wry humour in Linda’s eyes loses its edges. She reaches out with her free hand and pets his hair, letting her fingers slide down from the crown of his head to cup his jaw, her thumb caressing his cheek. He blinks softly at the touch. He could sleep safely in the palm of her hand, he thinks, a little nonsensically.
“Anything’s nice when you’re lonely,” Linda tells him, quietly.
Like everything else between them, the ache, when it comes, feels easy. Or, not easy necessarily, but relieving in a way—like maybe it’s not so terrible to be seen this clearly, if the person seeing you opens up their own wounds. Paul’s own vulnerabilities discomfort him, but hers feel like treasures. He likes to help. He’d like to be the one to help her.
“That’s the point, isn’t it? We’re all lonely till we get married.”
Linda blinks at him slowly. She smiles, small and strange—a watercolour mix of cloudy, indecipherable emotions. “I’ve never been as lonely as I was at the end of my marriage,” she tells him, honestly.
“Yeah, but— if you were in love with him it might be different.”
She laughs at him, lightly—amused, like she finds him beguiling. “If,” she says.
She pulls her legs out from under him, laying herself sideways on the bed like he is, so that she’s face to face with him on the mattress. She kisses him, then, so slow and lovely, Paul feels it through his whole body, pulling him to her, desire unravelling grandly inside him.
When she pulls away, he lingers there with his eyes closed, wanting her to do it again and unable to communicate the intensity of just how much. But she doesn’t. He opens his eyes, and finds her gaze zig-zagging rapidly up and down his face, taking him in like she’s trying to record him. A flash of exposure in her brain, so she can keep him. Like their time together is frighteningly impermanent.
“It takes a lot of love,” she says, “to make up for that much loneliness.”
—
Paul and Francie drive back home in stony silence. Paul left his dad's house with anger simmering in his veins, but it seems to eke out of him the closer they get to London, leaving behind only a discomfiting aftertaste that Paul tries not to fixate on.
Francie shoots out of the car as soon as it’s parked outside the house—sick of his sulking silence. Paul doesn’t have it in him to be angry at her—doesn’t care enough.
He takes his time in her absence—pulling their bags from the boot, ambling up to the doorway Francie left open in her wake—and it’s only as he stares at the emptiness of his hallway, that he realises the aftertaste that’s been lingering inside him is dread.
He stops, staring at the hall, listening to the distant muted voices, chatting in the living room without him. He becomes aware, suddenly, that he’s sick with exhaustion. He doesn’t want to go inside. He doesn’t want to go to the studio tomorrow. He doesn’t want to see anyone. His life stretches out before him, endless and impossible, and all he wants is to go home, but he can’t place what that even means—just not here. Not this.
He drops the bags, sits on the front step, and lights a cigarette, watching the shadows of the driveway, thinking about nothing at all. He doesn’t know how long he stays out there before he hears the scampering of animal feet against the floor. He feels before he sees Martha’s snout against him, following his arm to his raised hand, curious, and then put off by the cigarette smoke. She’s followed by a shadow, cutting off the light from the open door, looming over Paul.
Martha gets bored of him, quickly—he’s not missed as much, it seems, with familiar smells left in his absence to give her attention. She wanders off to explore the garage, and in the spot she vacated, sits John.
After a moment, John asks: “What are you doing out here?”
Paul doesn’t know how to answer so he doesn’t—just takes another drag of his cigarette, and watches Martha explore.
John whistles for her, holding out his hand for her to smell. She gives it a cursory sniff, but chooses Paul instead, sitting in front of him and watching him, needy for attention.
“Oh, now you miss me,” Paul mumbles, ashing his ciggie on the ground so he can scratch under her neck with both hands, the way she likes. She wags her tail eagerly, and Paul feels his fondness for her ease his homesickness a little.
“There’s my sweet girl,” he says, letting her lick at the palm of his hand.
“You’ve a chance now, Martha,” John says, his voice rumbling playfully from Paul’s side. “Go in there and give Francie a bite; you’ll be the only one left.”
Despite himself, Paul laughs.
He glances sideways at John. John sits with his knees up to his chest, his arms wrapped loosely around them, his head pillowed against his arm, all knotted up like a little boy. He watches Paul with that lovely face he only wears when he trusts someone; the one that makes him seem like a flowerbud in early spring, too shy to bloom just yet, but darling all the same.
“There’s my sweet Paul,” John says, in a warm echo of Paul’s tone, earlier.
Paul tries to smile back but it feels too fragile on his lips. “Don’t know about that.”
John frowns, a touching note of concern in his features. “No? What’s wrong with you, then?”
It shocks a sound out of Paul—he hopes it sounds like a laugh.
He’s fifteen on a bus, glancing surreptitiously at a boy he’s never seen before, with some hot, raw feeling expanding in his chest, his heart beating like he’s just come out of the womb to the shock of life—
He’s in his bedroom in Forthlin Road, his eyes closed, hard in the tunnel of his own fist, the warm line of John’s shoulder burning into him; John’s breathy grunts piercing him with white-hot, humiliating arousal—
He’s drunk on happiness and cheap wine, stuffed into a single bed in Paris, looking at John’s sleeping eyelashes, wondering if anyone has ever felt so full—
He’s across a stage, sparkling with joy—
He’s in Key West, raw with grief—
He’s tripping on LSD, melting, drowning—
He’s lying by a lake in India, the hot sun bringing out the sea of freckles across the expanse of John’s pale back, close enough to touch; the shrivelled up core of want buried inside him aches, and pulses, and screams out, but Paul only watches, until John turns his head to smile at him, and Paul does as he’s always done: he lets the moment pass—
Takes a lot of love to make up for that much loneliness, Linda tells him, and Paul thinks, I know. I know how much it takes—
He’s across a guitar, eyeball to eyeball, his soul pouring out, caught in a melodic dance with John’s, and for one radiant moment he is so completely understood, and he thinks: I could do this forever. We’re allowed this—
“Oh, you know,” Paul says. “Just been a bit stuck on one, I think. Can’t seem to make anything work.”
John watches him thoughtfully for a moment, his expression soft and unreadable. He reaches out, giving Martha a long pet, trailing from her head to her neck. She closes her eyes, slow with satisfaction.
“Just been in your head too long,” John tells him, gently, their fingertips brushing absently against each other in the thick of Martha’s fur. “Come in. Play it for me.”
“Okay,” Paul says. “In a minute.”