One Friday night, in late summer, I was walking the old canal
Cars passed, open windows blaring hits by Madonna.
Buddleias overhung the road.
I left the towpath as the light began to fail
And found myself in a pub car park.
From its battered sign, I recognised the Fox and Hound
I'd last visited two decades ago,
Before I'd left the town for good,
A 16-year-old slumped over an illegal rum and coke.
A policeman had been striding towards the door
And the landlady bundled me and my friends out of a window
In the gents toilets
From which we nimbly landed on the canal owpath
And melted into the night, laughing.
Inside, nothing had changed.
The jukebox still boasted a 45 by Twinkle,
Thirty years after it had dropped out of the charts
Mock Tudor windows still faced the road and oak beams above
blackened in a fug of smoke.
No one was drinking there.
A crowd didn't begin to gather until nine
Kids, not cool exactly, but somehow... leonine.
I guessed from the posters on the walls they'd come to see a band,
And soon they were filing past me,
Paying an entrance fee to a man in stonewashed denim
And disappearing into a back room.
The idea of a night drinking alone was unpleasant to me
The pub was now empty.
I had nothing to lose, and I picked up my beer
Paid my money and followed them in
The room was cramped and dark, and during a momentary hush,
A singer on the stage was introduced as The Phantom.
He was wearing the kind of plastic mask sold in art shops,
and a superhero's cape.
To a round of applause, several other musicians formed a circle,
Smps turned in on each other like wagons on a prairie.
I looked around me: the crowd was bathed
in the red glow of the stage lights.
For a moment, the buzz of amps filled the expectant quiet.
Then, without a count-in, the band began to play.
(The bell, the cup, the gown)
(The falling tower falls down)
Almost immediately, I froze.
The sound their instruments made was almost-human:
my beer glass slithered through my fingers
As I recognised it as my own 16-year-old laughter,
Escaping through a toilet window, retreating from a policeman,
Dragged back through the long track of years which had passed,
And re- presented, re-lived in front of the audience.
In its disembodied state,
it was one of the most purely beautiful things I have ever heard—
it briefly brought the past back to life,
Old hopes and innocence burst into sudden flower.
I was sweating, shaking in the dark room, tears welling in my eyes.
But within seconds the laughter died
And the hair on my arms stood
I had the physical sensation of shapes evaporating away
Into the night outside.
Slowly, the music took on a harsher, more abstract tenor
And in it I heard the faint seashore noises of the motorway
Building into a long drone which slowly became overwhelming
Roaring like a jet engine
To me, at that moment, it seemed to express our years of living
With that motorway sound,
years of it underscoring every day and night,
every experience we'd lived through,
cleansing it from our bodies and minds in a deafening catharsis.
I was shaking as the band rounded their set out with a wash of
bells or wind chimes.
As they left the stage to scattered applause,
it occurred to me that the Phantom had not sung a note.
He was pushing through the crowd towards the exit
Hemmed in by acolytes.
I tried to get near him but I couldn't.
Dazzled by the sudden bright light in the room,
My certainty drifted away
Had the sounds I'd heard been exactly
what I'd thought they were?
I was in a difficult, neurotic state
and perhaps there were memories welling up that I couldn't control.
I felt suddenly depressed and tired,
disgusted with my own numbness.
Kids were leaving, ignitions starting up outside;
The Phantom had joined a carload,
Rolling on up the road towards the town and its only nightclub.
The pub was closing down.
I stood in the night
And I wondered what had been taken from me