| One Friday night, in late summer, I was walking the old canal;
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| cars passed, open windows blaring hits by Madonna. |
| Buddleias
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| overhung the road.
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| I left the towpath as the light began to fail and found myself in a
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| pub car park. |
| From its battered sign, I recognised the Fox and
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| Hounds: I’d last visited two decades ago, before I’d left the
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| town for good, a 16-year-old slumped over an illegal rum and
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| coke. |
| A policeman had been striding towards the door and the
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| landlady bundled me and my friends out of a window in the
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| gents toilets, from which we nimbly landed on the canal
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| towpath, and melted into the night, laughing.
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| Through the gate and past the bourn
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| Meadowsweet and thick blackthorn
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| There were birds high on the trail
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| When I saw your face
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| Inside, nothing had changed. |
| The jukebox still boasted a 45 by
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| Twinkle, thirty years after it had dropped out of the charts. |
| Mock
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| Tudor windows still faced the road and oak beams above
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| blackened in a fug of smoke. |
| No one was drinking there.
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| A crowd didn’t begin to gather until 9. Kids, not cool exactly,
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| but somehow… leonine. |
| I guessed from the posters on the
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| walls they’d come to see a band, and soon they were filing
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| past me, paying an entrance fee to a man in stonewashed
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| denim and disappearing into a back room. |
| The idea of a night
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| drinking alone was unpleasant to me. |
| The pub was now empty.
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| I had nothing to lose, and I picked up my beer, paid my money
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| and followed them in.
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| Very early once in May
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| Voices outside called my name
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| There were green leaves in your hair
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| When I kissed your lips
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| The room was cramped and dark, and during a momentary
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| hush, a singer on the stage was introduced as The Phantom.
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| He was wearing the kind of plastic mask sold in art shops, and
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| a superhero’s cape. |
| To a round of applause, several other
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| musicians formed a circle, amps turned in on each other like
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| wagons on a prairie. |
| I looked around me: the crowd was bathed
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| in the red glow of the stage lights. |
| For a moment, the buzz of
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| amps filled the expectant quiet. |
| Then, without a count-in, the
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| band began to play.
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| The bell, the cup, the gown
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| The falling tower falls down
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| Almost immediately, I froze. |
| The sound their instruments made
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| was almost-human: my beer glass slithered through my fingers
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| as I recognised it as my own 16-year-old laughter, escaping
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| through a toilet window, retreating from a policeman, dragged
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| back through the long track of years which had passed, and re-
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| presented, re-lived in front of the audience. |
| In its disembodied
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| state, it was one of the most purely beautiful things I have ever
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| heard—it briefly brought the past back to life, old hopes and
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| innocence burst into sudden flower. |
| I was sweating, shaking
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| in the dark room, tears welling in my eyes. |
| But within seconds
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| the laughter died and the hair on my arms stood up—I had the
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| physical sensation of shapes evaporating away into the night
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| outside.
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| Slowly, the music took on a harsher, more abstract tenor, and in
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| it I heard the faint seashore noises of the motorway, building into
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| a long drone which slowly became overwhelming, roaring like a
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| jet engine. |
| To me, at that moment, it seemed to express our
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| years of living with that motorway sound, years of it
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| underscoring every day and night, every experience we’d lived
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| through, cleansing it from our bodies and minds in a deafening
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| catharsis.
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| Hollow boned, you’ll waste away
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| Searching through the forest glades
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| For the green leaves in the hair
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| And the lips that kiss
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| I was shaking as the band rounded their set out with a wash of
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| bells or wind chimes. |
| As they left the stage to scattered applause,
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| it occurred to me that the Phantom had not sung a note.
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| He was pushing through the crowd towards the exit, hemmed
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| in by acolytes. |
| I tried to get near him but I couldn’t. |
| Dazzled by
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| the sudden bright light in the room, my certainty drifted away;
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| had the sounds I’d heard been exactly what I’d thought they
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| were? |
| I was in a difficult, neurotic state and perhaps there were
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| memories welling up that I couldn’t control. |
| I felt suddenly
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| depressed and tired, disgusted with my own numbness.
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| Hollow boned, you’ll waste away
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| Searching through the forest glades
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| For the green leaves in the hair
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| And the lips that kiss
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| Kids were leaving, ignitions starting up outside; |
| the Phantom
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| had joined a carload, rolling on up the road towards the town
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| and its only nightclub. |
| The pub was closing down. |
| I stood in the
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| night and I wondered what had been taken from me. |