The Ground Beneath Her Feet (47 page)

But at present he’s caught up in another story. They say another galaxy is presently invading the Milky Way, swirling its otherness into our familiar neighbourhood, bringing its story into ours. It’s small, we’re (relatively) big; we’ll pull it to pieces, destroy its suns, rip its atoms up. So long, small galaxy, goodbye baby and amen.

Ormus’s story and the story of The Witch Flies High are swirled together now. Which will pull the other apart?

Even worse: will they turn out to be the same story after all?

I’ve been thinking about what you might call the Medea issue. A witchy lady, Ms. Corinth, undeniably; with sons, and a deserter father too. Can’t deny the similarities, especially as Antoinette has chosen to play them up, abandoning “Crossley” for “Corinth.” What is she trying to do, scare people? Or just Mull Standish? Is she genuinely capable of tragedy, of going so far beyond the frontiers of motherhood and sanity that her deeds acquire the stature of destiny? Is she
fated?
Ormus, who at first found her malevolent, has come to think of her as half posturing phoney, half lunatic-fringista, more insubstantial than shady, a designer witch, using numerology to help her pick her lovers, using occult signs not to conjure devils but only to decorate the busts of her nightmare-black baby-doll dresses. Unlike the no te-writers—She, Eno—he isn’t buying. And the two silent scribblers, after all, are individuals whose own dysfunctionality erodes their credibility as analysts. Ormus Cama, finally, cannot believe that he has walked on to the stage of some fearsome contemporary goat song. Antoinette Corinth cannot, will not, be responsible for his fate.

We underestimate our fellow humans because we underestimate ourselves. They—we—are capable of being much more than we seem. Many of us are able to answer life’s darkest questions. We just don’t
know if we can come up with the answers to the riddles until we’re asked.

There will be a tragedy. Antoinette Corinth will not be held responsible.

Mull Standish perseveres with his wooing of his children, and Hawthorne and Waldo slowly respond. As the cycles of their pirate world accumulate into a year, then two, his sons’ bantering treatment of him acquires a quality of genuine affection. There are loving gestures: an arm around a shoulder, a playful, filial punch to the cheek that opens out, at the last instant, into a brief stroking gesture of the fingertips. The needs of blood draw them close. The day comes when one of them—Waldo, inevitably, the less defended personality of the pair—accidentally calls Standish “Dad,” and even though Hawthorne subjects him to prolonged abuse for this gaffe, Standish is moved to tears. And Hawthorne isn’t really cross. “Dad” feels like the right word, even to him. After all these years.

Adversity helps, of course. Laws are being passed that will close the pirates down. The weather, which once scattered and wrecked the Spanish Armada, has not dealt kindly with Standish’s pirate fleet. These are old tubs, and they leak. Batter them with storms and they threaten to break. There are growing problems of insurance, and the boats are, beyond a doubt, dangerous.

There is a new terrestrial station, Radio 1. It steals many of Standish’s most talented broadcasters. His ships begin to shut up shop, one by one. Soon there is only Radio Freddie, the first to start broadcasting and the last to remain.

The
Frederica
, rusting, knows her time of rest cannot be far removed.

Rhythm Center, Ormus’s first band, has had a series of small successes, making the Fifty, seeming never to reach the modest plenty of the Forty. In part the failure to make a real breakthrough is because the band plays no live gigs, it being Standish’s view that the club audience wouldn’t “buy” them. His strategy is to keep it mysterious, build a cult, an underground groundswell. There are also the difficulties associated with recording on a small independent label, Standish’s own Mayflower franchise: the distribution problems, the limited promotional
budgets. The death is reported of the American DJ Alan Freed, who has finally drunk himself into an early grave after giving currency to the word “payola,” that’s pay plus Victrola. Freed is dead but the practice of accepting bribes to play records is not, and Mull Standish may be rich but he can’t go up against the big boys in this bidding war. His pirates will play Rhythm Center’s 45s but the other pirates won’t. And the BBC, well, nobody ever proved a corruption charge against the BBC, but Ormus hasn’t made their playlist, either. In spite of his reasonable success. The BBC makes its own decisions, it isn’t led by the common herd. What, they should let the kids decide what they put on the air?
Please
.

Outside England, forget it, no dice. No pay, no play. Vina is in America but Ormus’s voice is trapped on the other side of the Atlantic. She can’t hear his plea.

The songs themselves are the real problem. Something unreconciled in the writing. There are too many people inside Ormus, a whole band is gathered within his frontiers, playing different instruments, creating different music, and he hasn’t yet discovered how to bring them under control: the lover yearning for his vanished love, swooning for Vina into the North Sea night; and the dreaming eavesdropper following his dead twin brother who sings him the songs of the future; and the simple rock ’n’ roller in love with a banging-heartbeat beat; and the impish comic penning ironic faux-country odes to bread; and the angry moralist railing against the addle-brained age, its fakeola, its fuddled death wish; and finally, the reluctant visionary who is given glimpses of another possible universe, glimpses he would prefer not to see.

He hasn’t fully grasped how to make of multiplicity an accumulating strength rather than a frittery weakness. How the many selves can be, in song, a single multitude. Not a cacophony but an orchestra, a choir, a dazzling plural voice. He worries, as Standish does, about being too old; hasn’t understood that this can be set aside, rendered irrelevant. In short, he is still trying to settle on the one true line to follow. Still looking for ground to stand on, for the hard centre of his art.

The crucial change comes, as all true Ormus fans will readily know, in mid-1967, in a recording studio in a Bayswater backwater, behind the Whiteleys department store. The story of the recording of Ormus
Cama’s song “It Shouldn’t Be This Way,” and of the subsequent three-year delay in its commercial release, has been told so often that it barely needs repeating. The popularly known version of the event is broadly true, and even if it weren’t, the advice of the Wild West newspaper editor is well worth taking.

If the facts don’t fit the legend, print the legend.

Mull Standish is waiting by the mixing desk when Ormus arrives, looking grim. Okay, I’m ready, he says. Get rid of the musicians.

Standish stiffens, grows very still. All of them? he asks.

Every last one, assents Ormus, flopping down on a squashy corner seating unit and closing his eyes. And wake me when they’ve gone, he adds.

Now Rhythm Center is Ormus and only Ormus. He’s alone in the studio with guitars, keyboards, drums, horns, woodwinds, a big bass, an early Moog synthesizer. He sits down behind the drums and starts to play.

What, you’re going to play them all, the sound mixer wants to know. What am I supposed to do, I’m on four-track here.

(Who is this guy, he means. This is the real world here, feller; sixteen-track, thirty-two-track, forty-eight-track recording tape, that’s fantasy-land, it’s the future, and this in front of me it’s just a mixing desk, ain’t got no time machine.)

We’ll just have to bounce the tracks down as we go, Ormus snarls. Something’s got into him today It’s not a good idea to argue.

Bounce them down, the engineer says. Sure, why not.

Bouncing down is what you do when you need to keep tracks free. You mix together two tracks and transfer the mixed sound to a third track. Then you can re-use the first two tracks to record two more parts of the music and you bounce these down to the free fourth track. Now you’ve got two tracks containing mixes of two tracks each. If you’ve still got a lot of parts to record, you can bounce these two tracks down into one, giving you a single track with four parts on it and three free tracks.

And so on.

The problem is that once you’ve done this you can never separate the tracks again. The mix you make is what you’re stuck with. You can’t pull the music apart and play with it any more. You’re making final,
irrevocable decisions as you go. It’s a recipe for disaster, unless the person doing it is a genius.

Ormus Cama is a genius.

Each time he lays down a track—he can play every instrument in the studio better than the sessions guys he’s just fired—he comes into the booth, lies down on the seating unit, closes his eyes. The sound mixer moves his slides, turns his dials, and Ormus directs him until the music coming out of the speakers is the secret music in his head. Pull these up, push those back, he says. Bring this in here, fade that away there. Okay, it’s okay. That’s it. Don’t change a thing. Go.

You’re sure, now, the mixer says. Because this is it. No turning back.

Bouncey bouncey, Ormus grins, and the mixer laughs and sings back at him.

And like a rubber ball I come bouncing back to you.

The sound grows, becomes fat, exciting. The mixer’s a big unfazeable guy, he’s getting paid, what’s to worry. He’s good at what he does, he’s worked with everyone, he doesn’t get impressed. But look at this, his shoulders are going, boom, to the music, dip, to the beat. This Indian bloke running in and out of the studio, blowing a horn, mixing it in, bouncing it down, then strings, then a bubbling electro beat, he’s got the ear, he’s got the chops.

Bouncey bouncey!

It’s time to sing.
But you’re not here to put it right, And you’re not here to hold me tight. It shouldn’t be this way
.

When it’s done, the mixer stands up and holds out a huge paw. I wish you all the best with your song, he says. I’ve had a good day today.

Ormus stands toe-to-toe with Mull Standish. The rage is still on him.

So, he asks, quietly, furiously. Am I ready or what?

Standish nods. You’re ready.

But this famous scene is the aftermath of a scene people don’t talk about:

On the last night of Radio Freddie, at the emotional closing-down ceremony aboard the erstwhile ferryboat, Cap’n Pugwash and his fellow pirates are moved to tears on behalf of their beloved rusting tub.
Listen, Pugwash keens, as if speaking by the bedside of a dying lover, you lot are only going off the air, but she’s going off the water, the poor old girl. Yes, it’s the knacker’s yard for the
Frederica
, and nothing to be done about it but drink.

Much is imbibed. Eno Barber sits behind his glass window with a bottle of rum. The sign on the wall behind him reads,
Go away
. Hawthorne and Waldo sing schoolboy rugby songs. This amazing loss of cool passes unnoticed in the general stupor, and actually endears them to the Pugwash bunch, which joins in lustily. Dinah Dinah show us your leg, a yard above your knee. If I were the marrying kind which thank the Lord I’m not sir. Ugly, boastful, male, ultimately innocent songs.

Ormus confronts Mull on deck. They’re both drunk. Mull steadies himself against the movement of the boat by putting a hand on Ormus’s shoulder. The singer pushes it away, and Mull staggers briefly, then gathers himself. You bastard, Ormus tells his friend, you’ve been holding me back. Two fucking years. What am I supposed to do? How long am I supposed to wait? Optimism is the fuel of art, and ecstasy, and elation, and the supply of these commodities is not endless. Maybe you don’t want me to make it. You want me to stay small-time, not even a has-been but a never-was, beholden to you, a hanger-on, a fly in your goddamn web.

Mull Standish keeps his temper. It’s true, he says, mildly. I haven’t pushed you as I might. My small indie label, et cetera. You call that holding you back, then okay, I held you back. I’m holding you back because if I let you go now you’ll fail, you’ll fall to earth. You haven’t found the courage to fly. Maybe you won’t. The problem is not technical. You’re worried about wings? Look on your shoulders. There they are. The problem, pal, is not wings but balls. Maybe you’re just a no-balls eunuch and you’ll sleep on a mattress at The Witch for the rest of your eunuch life.

The boat sways and so do they. Ormus Cama is being given a great gift. Words are being said which will oblige him to face the issue of himself.

Whatever you want to say about yourself is fine with me, Standish says. You say you’ve got a dead twin in your head who’s listening to the
chart-toppers of tomorrow, I could care less. You talk about visions, baby, I say follow that star all the way to Bethlehem and check out the kid in the manger. The trouble is you’re running away from it all, there’s too much of you missing from your music. You’re phoning it in. People notice. I tell you what, just fuck off, why don’t you. What I see is potential that is not being realized. This as an investor I do not care for. What I know is that music comes out of the self, the self as given, the self in itself.
Le soi en soi
. The silk in silk, as we used to say in my punning Francophone youth.

Standish is breathing heavily now. His entire being is crackling at the edges of his body. St. Elmo’s fire; like that. Because he loves this man, he’s straining at his physical frontiers to show him the way. Is it Vina you need, he roars. Then find her. Don’t whine into a radio mike on a broken-down boat. Find her and sing her your songs. What’s the most dangerous thing you can do? Do it. Where’s the nearest edge? Jump off it. Enough already! I’ve said my piece. When you’re ready, if you’re ever ready, give me a call.

Loud singing explodes from the cabin. I’ll come again, you’ll come again, we’ll both come again together. We’ll be all right in the middle of the night, coming again together.

A week passes and then Ormus calls.

Set it up. I’m ready. Set it up.

And later, at the end of the recording session, when they have the precious tape, they’re standing toe-to-toe, uncertain whether to fight or kiss.