H

e closed the door, leaning against it, grateful for the support. It kept the teeming world away. After a few seconds and with effort, he pushed into the house, slipping the Oi Polloi parka from his shoulders and hanging it over the edge of the banister. He went into the kitchen to warm the pot for a loose-leaf Earl Grey with blue flowers. It was his personal blend, made for him exclusively by Steven Smith.

Perched on a stool in his cool, glass kitchen, he stared up at the bruising sky. The clouds mirrored the vortical motion in his cup, dense and sudden, like blood dropped into water. He shivered and held the exquisite China cup in both hands before catching himself. That wasn’t who he was anymore.

The change had come from a blow to the head. In some cases, an early frontal lobe trauma can lead to an inability to control mood swings and a lack of empathy. A high proportion of serial killers have some evidence of brain damage, but for Liam it had been quite different.

It was an ordinary school day, and he’d had an ordinary difference of opinion with Max. Liam would often initiate differences of opinion, even when no obvious difference of opinion was forthcoming. He lived for friction, for the chance to off-load the anger that churned inside him. He didn’t know where that anger came from—he could guess—but its provenance was of little interest. His rage was emetic, and he wanted it out of his body as quickly and violently as possible. He was always fighting, always acting up, always talking back, and he was always right, especially when he wasn’t. But this time he’d made a mistake. He’d picked a fight with a bigger kid. Max had a head trauma of his own and needed to pass on the blessing. Liam had picked a fight with a boy with a hammer in his hand.

He finished his tea, went upstairs, and took a long, languorous bath in his cast iron double-slipper clawfoot tub. He shaved methodically without a mirror, guiding his bocote wood-handled open razor carefully over his chin, having lathered himself with extract of limes hard shaving soap, generously blotted with a badger-hair brush. While soaking in the tub, he glanced at an immaculate 1887 copy of Mallarme’s Poésies in the original. It was a first edition, so he was careful not to get the cover damp. Liam didn’t speak French, but he loved to read the words out loud like an incantation. They clattered off the black tiled walls, the gold-inlayed grouting softening the impact to a degree. The floor tiles were Connemara marble and reminded him of green carbolic soap, one of the few happy memories of his childhood.

He dried himself with a towel so thick and soft he could barely bend it around his body. The slightest application to the skin drew water into its filaments, so Liam arrived at his dressing room fluffy and dry. He sprayed and stepped into a cloud of Penhaligon’s The Uncompromising Sohan, and closed his eyes to better savour the lingering scent of rose and oud.

At his dressing table, he stared into the ornate antique triptych mirror, noting the hawk-like nose, the petulant lips, the pleasingly firm jawline. He hated his eyes: goatish and heavy-lidded, they were the eyes of a high-ranking Nazi officer: sleepy, supercilious and cold, both bored and arrogant. He hated his eyebrows even more. They were profuse and haywire. Lately they were getting worse, jutting out like antlers, a territorial challenge to passing impala. No wonder he hid behind his front door. He had the nose and mouth of a poet and the eyes and eyebrows of a troglodyte. Those eyes had seen charcoal smeared on cave walls, had witnessed reeking mastodons thrashing in pits of spikes. They had met those of Cro-Magnon men and realised the jig was up. If he had normal eyes and eyebrows, he would have looked like Chris Evans, the Captain America actor. Not Chris Evans, the irritating ex-husband of Billie Piper.

During his regular career lulls, when he could slip away from the cameras and the press, Liam was free to pluck his eyebrows, which he did with 17th Century porcelain-backed tweezers he’d bought at auction. He spent the days afterwards staring into a hand mirror that had once belonged to Grace Kelly, admiring the tightness, the control, the efficient and elegant framing of his face. Even his eyes looked better in this context: brighter, less like those of an ungulate. He fought back an impulse to pluck them again, but he had a photo shoot supporting the new album booked for next week. The best he could do would be trim back the more wayward antennae, some of which forked out an inch if left untamed.

He’d woken up with his head turbaned and his senses displaced. Nothing was quite right. Everything felt like it had been bustled out of the way to make room for something new and important that was coming, and Liam was certain he was the coming thing, the thing the world was waiting for. The universe was pushing through him like light through a prism. He prodded at the tight ball of linen binding his head. This was the focal point: something like the ghost of pain echoed out of him in soft buttery ripples. He was in a hospital, and he couldn’t remember why he was in a hospital.

There was a little jaundiced man in the bed opposite with cavernous hollows where his cheeks should have been. He was listening to a cricket match on the radio, an earpiece pressed to the side of his head. His hair was neatly parted and fell in thick oily waves. It seemed unnaturally lustrous for his cheese-paring face. The match concluded to his obvious dissatisfaction, and his papery fist bounced off the Telegraph resting in his lap. He tugged at the earpiece and, in his passion, disengaged it entirely from the radio. The ward filled with the sound of music. And what music! A joyful noise unto the creator. Liam goggled. He felt as though he’d stepped into a new world, clothed in white raiment. The ward seemed busy with new colour and detail, the sick and the dying now invested with poetry and legend. They were dignified and benevolent, where previously they had been screaming and smelling of urine. The old man’s narrow face darkened, as his fingers moved toward the radio’s dial. Liam leapt from the bed and snatched the radio from the old man’s hands, pressing it hard against his bandaged head. He felt the bass pulsate through him, the drums hard as punctuation through some heavenly decree. But it was the singing, the choral, exultant singing that brought tears to his eyes.

“Just like a prayer I’ll take you there”.

It was an invitation to a celestial kingdom and Liam was rocking up to the pearly gates. He stood there shaking, eyes shut, leaking tears, while the little yellow man called for a nurse.

After this revelation Liam was insatiable. He devoured music and music opened him up to everything. It cleansed the doors of his perception and, where previously his chief interests had been footie and fighting, he now embraced the world:

Wings of Desire, Betty Blue, Beethoven’s 7th, Subway, Meat is Murder, The Outsider, Nausea, If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller, La Belle et la Bete, The Bicycle Thieves, M. Hulot’s Holiday, Die Rosenkavelier, Tago Mago, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, Performance, Drowning By Numbers, As I Lay Dying, Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Death In Venice, Night of the Hunter, The Poison Boyfriend, The Big Blue, In Cold Blood, Being There, Erik Satie, Berlioz, Le Quatre Cents Coups, La La La Human Steps, This Mortal Coil, Lonely is an Eyesore, Benjamin Péret, Paris Peasant, Pink Moon, Shelleyan Orphan, Mitsouko, Vetiver, Letter from an Unknown Woman, In a Lonely Place, The Unbelievable Truth, In Gardens where we feel secure . . . 

Liam decided to start a band. He knew he had a long way to go before he could realise a Symphonie Fantastique like his hero, Berlioz, but fire had been kindled in his soul and he had to act, despite the paucity of materials available to him. He had no money and no access to an orchestra, but he did have a flaming desire to create and was realistic about his compositional skills. He would need to nurture the flower of his gift over time.

To this end, he recruited two school friends: Paul, whom he nicknamed “Bonnard” after one of his favourite painters, and Paul, whom he didn’t give a nickname. The band was called La Reine, after the Dumas novel, which the other two were fine with. The initial compositions were disappointingly flat, lifeless doodles, over which Liam intoned his Valéry-inspired verse to little effect. It was dispiriting: the insipid strumming, the leaden bass, his voice unformed; the cadence of the lines was wrong, falling between missing beats. The first song he’d ever heard, bandaged in that stifling hospital ward, had shown more wit and imagination than the nonsense he was creating, and his sensibility had grown far beyond that pseudo-gospel dirge by now. The gulf between the music he could make and the music in his head seemed unbridgeable.

Liam sat alone in the corner of the rehearsal space, the ink on the cramped pages of his lyric book blotted with tears. Paul and Paul jammed noisily. Paul had bought a delay pedal and was anxious to try it out.

“Liam! Listen! I’m the fucking Edge.”

He played a simple guitar figure that clanged about the dingy space.

“That’s fucking mint, that,” said Paul.

“Yes, Paul,” said Liam, solemnly, “most diverting.”

“I hear you fuckers are looking for a drummer.”

Silhouetted in the doorframe like an Athena poster, was a young man with wide shoulders and a wider grin.

“Beesley’s the name,” he said, “and skins are the game. Both kinds.” He gave a wink and Paul laughed.

“Welcome, friend,” said Liam. “In truth we are in dire need of the spine of syncopation. For we are sprawling and flat, like the suckered mollusc dredged from the keep-net. We crave your support, sir.”

“Yeah, I know. I heard you outside. Like the fucking Alarm or something.”

“Well, not that bad,” said Paul.

“Sorry,” said Beesley, “well look no further: the prince of percussion is about to . . . hang about, mate. Do I know you?”

Liam started. There was something oddly recognisable about this Beesley, his gait, the way he carried himself. It struck Liam, suddenly, with a familiar violence.

“You were that geezer I knocked on his arse,” said the drummer.

“Yes,” said Liam, “and I owe you a debt of gratitude, sir. You have given me . . .”

“This bloke, your mate . . .” the drummer rounded on the Pauls, “started on me, and I knocked him spark out in front of everyone.”

Paul and Paul shifted uncomfortably.

“Yes, but the point is . . .” said Liam.

“Spark out,” said Beesley, “with a vibraphone mallet—yeah, I also play vibraphone. Have you seen a vibraphone mallet? It’s like a toffee apple made of leather. Its padded—you couldn’t knock out a dandelion with it, but this fucker was in the hospital.” He laughed heroically, fists on hips.

Liam no longer felt like telling the newcomer about the vast improvement he’d made to his life, however accidentally. There didn’t seem much point. The boy was more interested in gloating and importuning the others who were, predictably, already laughing.

There was a loud resonating clang and Beesley, still grinning, sank to the floor. Behind him, guitar still humming in his hand, stood Liam’s brother Noel. He jerked his chin out in recognition, before looking down at the slumped percussionist.

“Alright, our kid. Who’s this twat?”

Noel steamrollered his way into the band just as Liam knew he would. He changed every aspect of it: the clothes they wore, the songs they wrote. He changed the band name to that of a leisure centre. He wrote a batch of new songs that were loud, hedonistic and clumsy, but people seemed to like them. They were immediate, they were catchy, they swaggered, and they were extremely loud. Eventually, and having turned his attention to everything else, Noel turned his gaze on Liam, cornering him one day in the rehearsal room before the others got there. Liam was perched on an amp, poring over the Penguin edition of The Eye by Nabokov. He wore a pea-coat, a black woollen rollneck, tapered needle-cord trousers and black, suede Chukka boots. He sipped nervously on an imported Karelia cigarette.

“It’s got to stop, son.”

Liam looked up. “Hello, brother-mine. What’s got to stop?”

“This. You.”

“How do you mean? I am as God made me.”

Noel scowled. “How’d you work that out? Look at you—got up like some left bank . . .  flaneur. I’ve news for you, pal, it ain’t the rive gauche, it’s the rive . . . go fuck yourself.”

“Bravo. As ever le mot juste.”

“I’m serious. It’s not the eighties—nobody wants mardy faced intellectual pop singers, fuckin’ Momus. The nineties are going to be loud and it’s going to be lairy and it’s going to bring the people together.”

“Even the idiots?”

“Especially them. Who do you think has the money?”

“But they don’t even like bands. They don’t go to gigs.”

“They will,” said Noel, “we’ll make ‘em. We’ll cram ourselves down their throats till they’re gagging for us. But you . . . look, if you wanna be part of this band you need to be more aggressive, louder and less . . . Paul fucking Morley. Here, I’ve brought you some clothes. Put these on.”

He threw a bundle of clothes at Liam’s feet.

“I don’t understand. Are we going fishing?”

“That’s what you’re going to be wearing. If you don’t like it, you’re out of the band.”

“But it’s my band.”

Noel snorted. “Not anymore, son. Not anymore.”

Liam stamped his cigarette on the cement floor and threw down his paperback. He drew himself to his full height, towering over his brother by a full inch. This usurper, this mountebank, he had stolen into Liam’s world of truth and beauty and coarsened it, replacing Liam’s carefully metred poetry for nursery rhyme doggerel, his sophisticated, ironic worldview for rabble-rousing hyperbole, and now he was trying to change the way Liam dressed and even how he sang. Liam felt himself filling with emotion and, as inarticulate waves of pain and anger choked him, he struggled to voice his outrage at the vicissitudes raining down on him.

“It’s a kerazy sit-choo-aaaation.” He screamed, voice cracking.

Noel nodded. “Yeah, do it like that. You’ve got something there. “

Liam rose from his dressing table and wandered into his library. On the walls were prints by Odilon Redon and The Ghost of a Flea by William Blake. On the furthest wall from the window, away from the sunlight and under glass was an original oil painting: Felicien Rops’ Pornokrates. It depicted a naked young girl in a blindfold leading a pig on a leash. As an image it spoke to Liam, and no matter how depressed he was he could always come into this room, with its rich leather scent, and stare at this painting and smile. He ran his fingers over the bookshelves and his hand came to rest on a paperback. It was creased and well-thumbed, the cover bright-red and featured the etiolated skeleton of a flower. This book had been the cornerstone of his miseducation. Like Dorian Gray’s Yellow Book, it had opened him up to an exciting world of new possibilities, of stories, scents and sensations. The book fell open, and Liam read a few lines from The Charm of Innocence, nodding and smiling, before shutting it with a clap.

He peered out the window. The press was out there, one or two now, not like the nineties, but enough for him to put on the show. He slinked into his dressing room and set about the transformation, placing his silk dressing gown on a hanger. He put on an Ampro hoodie and shorts, and a pair of Novesta Shoes Star Masters in military green, because it was nice to give something back. Finally, he took the wig from the life-size phrenology head that rested on the lacquered surface of his dressing table. He smoothed it into place, teasing it at the edges, fussing with it, twisting individual hairs with saliva until he was satisfied. He stood still in front of the mirror, jutting his jaw and bending his legs. His arms hung at his sides, almost to the knee. He was ready to meet his public. Do it for the money, Liam. There was a Gustave Moreau painting coming up at auction. Think of that.

He opened the front door, flicked some Vs and gobbed on his own doormat. In a flurry of good-natured invective, he bowled his way down the street, cameras snapping at his heels.