Mastery of the Blues

In the New Forest there is a rare kind of crossroads, the kind you usually see in the prairies and deltas of the US. When they laid down the asphalt in the early twentieth century they could not have predicted the speed of modern vehicles. In fact, the crossroads simply followed the path of ancient, well-trodden cart tracks.

There are no lights at these crosswords because the New Forest is a National Park and the locals get sensitive about light pollution. The council have been trying to create a dog-leg on the approaches to the main road, but the locals don’t like that either, and so every year a handful of cyclists die. Why? Because due to the exact cruciform nature of the crossroads, an approaching driver cannot see a speeding cyclist on the main road because they are obscured by their wing-mirrors. It is the perfect blind spot. Of course, the driver is meant to stop at the junction. In fact, there’s a big red STOP sign on both approaches.

The problem is that a STOP sign requires faith in human nature.

Stood in the middle of the crossroads was an adult male dressed entirely in black. He even wore a balaclava so his big white face wouldn’t give him away. He was my friend, Solly, a hundred miles from home. It was a Tuesday, close to midnight, and there were no cars. Not yet, but there would be.

*****

Me and Solly were part of the last generation of kids who didn’t have the internet in our formative years. By this I mean that our mothers didn’t throw a tablet in our prams to keep us quiet, and friends were still more important than an X-Box.

We weren’t the cool kids. Not by a long shot. Solly had a square face with oily, eruptive skin. And me? I was all limbs and Adam’s apple. I’ve evened out since then but Solly’s still got the unfortunate features. He had, (still has) auburn hair, which meant he couldn’t take too much sun, hence the startling pallor - and hence the IRA Easter bonnet so his luminescence would not distract a driver from mowing him down.

Solly went missing a couple of days ago. His mother, Gracie, called me, saying she’d just about had all she could take from him. He was still living at home with her, and I think his continued presence, over the years, ate away at her composure. This permanent state of unease with her son began when we were fifteen and first messing with drugs. Whenever family members gave us money we’d spend it on bud, mushrooms and E. I got tired of it - honestly I got scared of it - but they took a hold of Solly, and the morning after we took Special-K for the first time, Solly had a grand mal seizure.

It happened at home, when Gracie was trying to wake him for school. That first time hit her hard, and frequency didn't make it any easier.

When his brain woke up from the electrical storm, he could never remember who he was or where he was. More to the point, he couldn’t understand why his mother’s vaguely familiar face was looming over him, so on more than one occasion he clocked her a black eye. This was before they got him on the right meds - which was always contingent on him remembering to take them.

Gracie was never the same after that. The words unspoken implied that he was a dumb-ass for taking ket in the first place.

My mother once told me, after a few drinks, that that’s why parents always want their kids to leave home in the end. All that worry builds up, layer on suffocating layer until there comes a point when the mothers just want to scream, ‘I love you, but get the fuck OUT already!’

When we were kids there were just two of us for a long while, just me and Solly. We weren’t unpopular, we were just there. When we crashed parties, no one asked us to leave - but they weren’t overjoyed either.

When we were nineteen, high on bud and JD, Solly stroked my thigh and leant over to kiss me. I didn’t want to hurt him but my reaction was swift and, I suppose, could have come across as brutal. Solly fell asleep after that, lying on a bean bag with saliva running down his chin. I woke him up just long enough to slip an epilepsy tab down his throat because I was thinking of Gracie, sitting on her own downstairs and surreptitiously sipping her own Jack Daniels between making a great play of putting the kettle on.

Solly never mentioned that night, and nor did I. It wouldn’t have altered a thing between us if he’d just come out and said it, but for some reason he never did. So there I was, looking at a twenty-seven-year-old virgin standing in the middle of a crossroads - not a set of circumstances you see every day - and thinking why would Solly want to inflict himself on an innocent driver like that?

I started to understand Gracie more than I ever wanted to before.

*****

When we were fifteen, me and Solly decided to start a band. It was crazy foolishness, of course, because neither of us could sing or play, and we weren’t geeky about music. Our idea of that culture was getting Now That’s What I Call Music! every Christmas on CD.

Pursuant to that aim, on a boiling hot day in August we went to the music store at the bottom of Park Street, which had an old-fashioned sign jutting from the facia. It had been there as long as I could remember and for as long as my parents could remember too. It was one of those shops with a small presence on the pavement but which went back a long, long way. I think me and Solly both knew we were in the wrong place with the wrong dreams when we found no affinity with the instruments: with the harps and the ocarinas and all those guitars. We just felt hot and unsatisfied. Still, it could be said that the purpose of having dreams is so that you can eliminate them, one by one, until you end up working for a living.

The shop is where we met Sara and her brother, Ellis. Sara had golden hair in braids, which was unusual for the era and the country. But despite the Little House on the Prairie image, there was a compelling insolence to her as she stood in front of the counter and argued with the man behind it that women could play the harmonica. He said, ‘Go on then! Name just one!’ and Sara named two.

‘Two out of billions!’ the guy scoffed. ‘You just can’t do it. You just can’t. Stick to the piano.’

‘So you’re not going to sell me a Hohner?’ she said.

‘Of course I’ll sell you a Hohner. But if you can bend by the end of next week, I’ll eat my hat.’

‘Why?’ She demanded. ‘Why can’t we?’

‘Men have bigger lungs and they’re not so vain about making a stupid face when they’re blowing. Same reason you don’t see many female trumpeters.’

Sara slammed her note down and bought her harmonica. Hate to say it, but it turns out the guy had a point.

By her side was Ellis, a great lump of a kid - maybe twelve or thirteen, but big. At first glance, and at every subsequent glance, he was clearly not right in the head. Sara soon told us that he wasn’t meant to be that way, and that it was down to some malpractice at the hospital when he was born. The family got a big payout, and mollified their pain by conceding that he had a sunny nature. Ellis didn’t talk much, mostly grunts and gasps, but that smile could break rock.

I don’t know what passed between me and Solly in that music shop, but we both lingered, waiting for her to finish arguing about the harmonica.

And that’s where our friendship began. That’s when the two musketeers became four. And this was just before we took the drugs and Solly got the epilepsy which ruined his mother, Gracie.

At first, Ellis didn’t always come out with Sara. But as he got older, and even bigger, it got hard to stop him. Kids like Ellis can lash out on occasion but Sara, keeping the peace, always assured her parents that she’d be OK looking after him. So they’d both come, usually to mine, and hang out in my bedroom listening to music and talking shit. What soon became clear was that Ellis loved alcohol, and I hate myself for how wrong we were in giving it to him. We should have stopped him, but it made him at first elated and then drowsy, and, much as we loved him, it was good to have him asleep too.

Another thing about Ellis was this: although he had trouble speaking beyond corvid monosyllables, he had less trouble comprehending. He wouldn’t be the first human to query the purpose of consciousness, and maybe the alcohol helped him with that.

I didn’t know it at the time, but Solly was also giving him drugs. Which ones I can’t say, because by that time I’d pretty much given up beyond the odd spliff. Hindsight requires me to recall that during that time, Ellis was either bouncing with manic joy or mumbling in the corner. In other words, I should have known. His sister should have known too, but we were flirting by that stage, although nothing came of it in the end. Especially not in the end.

*****

When Gracie rang me, she asked me to come over. She thought I might have an insight into where Solly’d gone. In truth, I hadn’t seen him for a month or more. I had a decent job and a promising love life, and looking after my old friend was starting to wear me down. In truth, I wanted him out of my life.

I didn’t ever want Sara out of my life but she’s gone all the same. I don’t even know where she is now.

So I went to Gracie’s, and the first thing I did was to log into his laptop to see what his recent browser history had to say. And there it was: Robert Johnson, the dirt-poor black kid from the Mississippi delta who was the first to join the 27 Club. There are very few images of this blues maestro, and most on-line articles about him are illustrated with a generic photo of a man stood at a cruciform delta crossroads.

The story goes that Johnson, who lived with his mother and nine other siblings in a wood shack, started out as a passably good harmonica player. This was the depression era when times were hard, but particularly hard, one must assume, for the Johnsons. It was a hard-scrabble life. He was married at sixteen but lost both his wife and son in childbirth - and having been so brutally unanchored, he drifted toward a life of womanising and playing the clubs.

But Johnson couldn’t play the guitar for toffee, and the customers complained when he tried. The criticism must have cut him deep, because after a particularly bad reception he disappeared for six months and when he returned he could play the acoustic like an upstart angel. He was tight-lipped about where he’d been or who he’d been there with, and so the gospel rumours started: Johnson had sold his soul to the Devil; that he’d stood at a crossroads just before midnight and given the Devil his soul in exchange for playing heavenly strings. He never disabused them of that story.

At twenty-seven, that age when precocious talent must mind its step, he collapsed in agony and passed several days later, cause unknown. Some say he was poisoned by a jealous husband. Others said the Devil was growing impatient for his soul.

Good story. Solly told it often.

Just beneath this article in Solly’s search bar was a stock photograph of a crossroads in the New Forest - nothing to do with Johnson but a news article about dead cyclists. It was uncannily similar to the Johnson crossroads in Clarksdale, Mississippi.

I didn’t quite get the whole crossroads thing, but the 27 Club was enough. Solly was twenty-seven, and Solly was so beaten by the booze, the drugs and his shit-stained conscious that I figured he’d gone there to end it all. I turned his laptop off and told Gracie that I was going to bring him home.

*****

When Solly got old enough to know better, he started to bully Ellis. Not in a you’re so dumb way. It was way more sadistic than that. Sara was starting to break away from us by then. She was good-looking, and we weren’t the type of boys that girls like her ultimately hung around with. So it was mostly me, Solly and Ellis.

Without that female influence, things turned bad quickly. We started taking Ellis to nightclubs, which is not the right environment for his kind of disablement. And he would get so drunk and so high that it got easy to joke and tell him that he’d done terrible things in that condition, even though he hadn’t. The kid wouldn’t hurt a fly.

But Solly caught the bug, and he wouldn’t stop.

When Solly used to tell Ellis of the things he’d done but couldn’t remember - because he hadn’t done them - his face reminded me of time-lapse photography: it went from exuberance to despair in the wink of a bloodshot eye.

Ellis couldn’t cope with the monster Solly kept telling him he was.

And then a girl went missing in our town, one of those good girls the press prioritise, and although she eventually turned up safe and sound, (having done all the things her parents insisted she wasn’t), Ellis never got the memo.

At the time of her disappearance and in the height of all that hysteria, Solly pulled out the coup de grâce and told Ellis that he’d killed her.

After that, in some Poe-like dance of death, both Solly and Ellis went downhill fast. At some point the authorities got involved and Ellis was taken away, if you will, from our sphere of influence. Sara stopped talking to us at all, and Ellis never came around again.

When me and Solly were twenty-two and Ellis was nineteen or twenty, it was Ellis who went missing. Because of all his vulnerabilities the press were on it like a shot and the public were encouraged, alongside the police, to look for him. It’s fair to say that Ellis stood out a mile, so there wasn’t much chance of mistaken identity. Turns out that he’d gone to the woods at the back of Solly’s house and hung himself from a leafless tree, and it was Solly who found him.

All the quiet talk was about how Ellis had found the intelligence to do it, to form the noose, and that was the most heartbreaking thing about it. Ellis always had the intelligence. He just didn’t have the words.

Listen, I did it once - and on a much lesser charge than the story of that missing girl. But me and Solly were both called to the inquest and were made to feel like shit. Sara didn’t show for it, but I will never forget the way his parents looked at me in that coroner’s court on that day. Death by suicide when the balance of his mind was disturbed.

We didn’t go to his funeral.

*****

And so here is where we are. A man with a square white face in a balaclava, standing at the hub of a dangerous crossroads just before midnight, begging for the Devil to trade his soul for the gift of death. When I shouted that towards him, he turned around and said, ‘I don’t want to fucking trade. I just need him to take it.’

In the near distance I could hear a car revving at way above the speed limit. It was on an approach road, where I was standing beneath a STOP sign. The one that relies on human nature. The part of everyone’s mind that doesn’t think at all abandoned me to instinct. I ran into the centre of the crossroads and bundled him into the verge. The car sped across, the driver oblivious.

I took off the balaclava and there was Solly’s big white face looking up at me, high as a bird. And I hated him.

Solly was fast asleep in the back seat of my car, snoring. I took a blister pack of epilepsy tabs from his mother before I left, and once again, I forced one down his throat with water. Then I rang Gracie to tell her I’d found him.

She let out an audible intake of breath, the kind you imagine a person buried alive might take when they wake up in the dark; glad to be alive but still ultimately fucked.

I didn’t bring him home to his mother. I took him to the hospital and left him in the care of professional strangers. Solly, the souvenir of all my dishonour, must choose his own path from the crossroads now.

There are some memories a soul just cannot take if it means to survive.