Phase Space (70 page)

‘Who?’

‘Novelist. 1890s. Writes about a fooking big Atlantic liner, bigger than anything built before. Loads it with rich and complacent people, and wrecks it one cold April night on an iceberg. Called his ship the
Titan –
’

‘Spooky,’ I said dryly.

‘In another world –’

‘Yeah.’

Lightoller is full of crap like that, and not shy about sharing it.

But I welcomed Lightoller’s bullshit, for once; we were, after all, just distracting ourselves from the fact that Sick Note was gone. What else are words for, at a time like that?

Bored, morbid, a little drunk, we had wandered off, through the ship, in search of Sick Note.

We had come through the foyer on A Deck, with its huge glass dome, the oak panelling, the balustrades with their wrought-iron scroll work, the gigantic wall clock with its two bronze nymphs. All faded and much scarred by restoration, of course. Like the ship. Like the city outside which we could glimpse through the windows: the shops and maritime museums of Albert Dock to which the ship was forevermore bolted, and the Liverpool waterfront beyond, all of it under a suitably grey sky.

I said something about it being as if they’d towed the Adelphi Hotel into Liverpool Bay. Lightoller made a ribald remark about Sick Note and the nymphs.

We had walked on, down the grand stairway from the boat deck, along the corridor where the valets and maids of the firstclass passengers used to stay, past the second-class library and the third-class lounge, down the broad stairs towards steerage.

The second track was, of all things, ‘It Don’t Come Easy’.

‘Ringo,’ I said.

‘Yeah. Solo single in April ’71.’

I strained to listen. I couldn’t tell if it was different. Was the production a little sharper?

‘Every Night’, the next track, was Paul: just McCartney being McCartney, pretty much as he recorded it on his first solo album.

‘Sentimental pap,’ I said.

Lightoller frowned. ‘Listen to it. The way he manages the shift from minor to major –’

‘Oldest trick in the book.’

‘McCartney could make the sun come out, just by his fooking chromatic structure.’

‘I’ll take your word for it.’

‘And it’s another track they tried out for
Let It Be.
And –’

‘What?’

‘I think there are extra lyrics.’

‘
Extra
?’

The next track was quiet: Harrison’s ‘All Things Must Pass’.

Lightoller said sourly, ‘Another
Let It Be
demo. But they were still keeping George in his place. First track he’s had.’

The playing was simple and exquisite, little more than solo voice with acoustic guitar, closer to the demo George had made of the song in his Beatle days than his finished solo-album version.

I didn’t recognize the next song, a Lennon track. But it got Lightoller jumping up and down.

‘It’s “Child of Nature”,’ he kept saying. ‘Fooking hell. They tried it out for the
White Album.
But Lennon held it back and released it on
Imagine
after the split –’

Now I recognized it. It was ‘Jealous Guy’. With different lyrics.

‘Fooking hell,’ said Lightoller. ‘This has only appeared on a bootleg before. And besides, this is no demo. It’s a finished fooking production.
Listen
to it.’

That’s Lightoller for you. Excitable.

We had reached the alleyway on E Deck that Sick Note had always called Scottie Road. You could tell this was meant for steerage and crew: no carpet, low ceilings, naked light bulbs, plain white walls.

We worked our way towards the bow, where Sick Note had lived the last years of his life.

‘Sick Note would never go down to the engine rooms,’ Lightoller reminisced.

‘“Reciprocating engines”,’ I said, imitating Sick Note. ‘“A revolutionary low-pressure turbine. Twenty-nine boilers.”’

‘Yeah. All nailed down and painted in primary colours to show the kiddies how a steam ship used to work. Not that they care.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘But Sick Note did. He said it was humiliating to gut a working boat like that.’

‘That was Sick Note.’

Away from Scottie Road the ship was a labyrinth of rooms and corridors and ducts.

‘I never could figure out my way around here,’ I said.

Lightoller laughed. ‘Even Sick Note used to get lost. Especially after he’d had a few with the boys up in the Smoking Room. Do you remember that time he swore –’

‘He found a rip in the hull?’

‘Yeah. In a post room somewhere below. A rip, as if the boat had collided with something. And he looked out –’

Sick Note had found Liverpool flattened. Like the Blitz but worse, he said. Mounds of rubble. Like the surface of the Moon.

‘ … And he saw a sky glowing full of shooting stars,’ Lightoller said.

It was one of Sick Note’s favourite drunken anecdotes.

‘Of course,’ said Lightoller, ‘this old scow probably wouldn’t have survived any sort of collision. The hull plates are made of brittle steel. And it was just too fooking big; it would have shaken itself to pieces as soon as a few rivets were popped –’

Lightoller can be an anorak sometimes. But he used to be an engineer, like me.

Correction. He is an engineer, like me.

At last, on F Deck, we found the Turkish Bath.

Sick Note had made this place his own: a few sticks of furniture, the walls lined with books, posters from rock concerts and Hammer horror movies and long-forgotten 1960s avant-garde book stores plastered over the crimson ceiling. I found what looked like a complete run of the
International Times.
There was even a kitchen of sorts, equipped with antiques: a Hoover Keymatic washing machine and a Philco Marketer fridge-freezer and a General Electric cooker. Sick Note always did have an uncanny supply of artefacts from the 70s, or late 60s anyhow, in miraculously good condition, that the rest of us used to envy. But he’d never reveal his source.

And there were records here too: vinyl LPs, not CDs (of course), leaning up against each other all the way around the edge of the floor like toppling dominoes; the stack even curved a little to get around the corners. The odd thing was, if you looked all the way around the room, you couldn’t see how they were being supported – or rather, they were all supporting each other. It was a record stack designed by Escher.

Lightoller bent to look at the albums. ‘Alphabetized.’

‘Of course.’ That was Sick Note.

‘Let’s find the Beatles. B for Beatles …’ He grunted, sounding a little surprised. He pulled out an album with a jet-black sleeve. ‘Look at this fooking thing.’ He handed it to me.

The cover was elementally simple: just a black field, with a single word rendered in a white typewriter font in the lower left-hand corner.

God.

Just that, the word, and a full stop.

Nothing else. No image. Not even an artist name on the cover. Nothing on the spine or the back of the sleeve; no artist photos or track listings, or even a copyright mark or acknowledgement paragraph.

The record slid into my hand inside a plain black-paper inner sleeve. And when I tried to pull out the record itself – reaching inside to rest my fingers on the centre label – the sleeve static-clung to the vinyl, as if unwilling to let it go.

The vinyl was standard-issue oil black. The label was just the famous Apple logo – skin-side up on what was presumably Side One, the crisp white inner flesh on Side Two. Still no track listing – in fact, not even a title.

I held the album by its rim. I turned it this way and that; the tracks shone in the light.

Sometimes I forget how tactile the experience of owning an album used to be.

‘Look at that fooking thing,’ breathed Lightoller. ‘A couple of scratches at the rim. Otherwise perfect.’

‘Yeah.’ An album that had been played, but cared for. That was Sick Note for you.

We exchanged glances.

Lightoller lifted up the glass cover of Sick Note’s deck, and I lifted on the album, settling it over the spindle delicately. Lightoller powered up the deck. It was a Quad stack Sick Note had been working on piece by piece since 1983. No CD player, of course.

When the needle touched the vinyl there was a moment of sharp crackle, then hissing expectancy.

The music came crashing out.

And that was how we found ourselves listening to a puzzlingly different John Lennon.

Side One’s last track was the big song McCartney used to close
Ram:
‘Back Seat of My Car’.

‘Another song they tried for
Let It Be,
’ Lightoller said. ‘And –’

‘Shut up a minute,’ I said.

‘ … What?’

‘
Listen
to that.’

In place of the multi-track of his own and Linda’s voices that McCartney had plastered over his solo version, the song was laced with exquisite three-part harmonies.

Beatle harmonies.

‘Lightoller,’ I said. ‘I’m starting to feel scared.’

Lightoller let the stylus run off, reverently.

I got up from the carpeted floor and walked around the room. There were framed photos and news clippings here, showing scenes from the ship’s long history.

I couldn’t mistake the pounding piano and drum beat that started Side Two.

‘“Instant Karma”,’ I said.

‘A single for Lennon in February 1970.’

‘In our world.’

‘Great fooking opener.’

Then came a Harrison song, a wistful, slight thing called ‘Isn’t It A Pity’.

Lightoller nodded. ‘Another one they tried out in early 1969, but never used. It finished up on George’s first solo album –’

The next track was ‘Junk’, a short instrumental McCartney wrote when they were staying with the Maharishi in India. It sounded like the theme of a TV show about vets. But it was sweet and sad.

We just listened for a while.

With the gentle guitars playing, it was as if Sick Note was still there, in this cloud of possessions, the very air probably still full of a dusty haze of him.

… Here was the ship in dry dock in Belfast after her maiden voyage, with that famous big near-miss scar down her starboard flank. Here she was as a troop carrier in 1915, painted with gaudy geometric shapes that were supposed to fool German submarines. Here was a clipping about how she’d evaded a U-boat torpedo, and how she’d come about and rammed the damn thing.

‘“Old Reliable”,’ I said. ‘That was what Sick Note used to call her. The nickname given her by the troops she transported.’

‘He loved this old tub, in his way,’ said Lightoller.

‘And he did love his Fabs.’

That was Sick Note for you.

The fourth track was ‘Wah Wah’, another Harrison song, a glittering, heavy-handed rocker with crystal-sharp three-part harmony.

Lightoller nodded. ‘Harrison wrote this when he stormed out during the
Let It Be
sessions. He kept it back for his solo album –’

‘In our world.’

‘Yeah. I guess he brought it back to the group, in the
God
world …’ Lightoller was sounding morbid. ‘But there was no fooking twelfth album, was there? This must be a fake. Or an import, or a compilation, or a bootleg. Once Allen Klein and Yoko got involved they were all too busy suing each other’s fooking arses off.’

I picked up the album sleeve. For a possession of Sick Note’s, it was surprisingly grubby. Specked with some kind of ash. I felt obscurely disturbed by Lightoller’s loss of faith in his own bullshit. ‘But all the Allen Klein stuff started in the spring of ’69. Even after all that, they made another album together.’

‘
Abbey Road.
’ Lightoller nodded, and I thought the spark was back in his eyes. ‘Yeah. They might have hung around for one more try. But something would have had to be different.’