The Holy City by Patrick McCabe

even knowing I was smoking the cigarette until the record came to an end, crackling repeatedly until the metal arm eventually drew back, and Eric Burdon and the Animals began to recede. And with them the promise of those warm San Francisco nights, in that dirty old part of the city, as Eric had just sung,
where the sun refuse to shine.
    A promise fading, glimmering and diminishing: like a tiny light, as James Joyce had written, beyond a pier-head where a ship was about to enter. Almost out of sight, just like the girl who, very shortly before, had waded so breath-takingly into the water. With her skirts kilted boldly and dovetailing out behind her, her bosom as soft and slight as a bird’s.
    The Altonaires were playing in the Mayflower that weekend but their music was dull and I kept wanting to go home, all they kept playing were dreary old fifties novelty songs and in the end I left in the foulest of humours. The girl in whose company I found myself wasn’t exceptionally pretty but she made it clear that she liked me a lot — which I have to say was flattering.
    â€” I see you going about the town on your rounds, she told me, and I’ve often seen you above in Cafolla’s.
    I had no desire to offend her. She looked quite wonderful in her Tammy-style dress. But all I kept thinking of was the girl wading into the water and lying there with Marcus Otoyo, the two of us chatting away about poetry. About Robert Louis Stevenson and
A Portrait,
so contented, prostrate on the sand.
    When I looked again, the Tammy girl was kneeling beside me, her cheeks colouring pink as she nervously enquired:
    â€” Do you think you’ll be going to the Mayflower next week? The Sands are playing there on Saturday.
    Tony Kenny played with the Sands. I liked his music but I wasn’t sure if I’d be going.
    â€” I just don’t know, I remember telling her. Maybe, I said. I really just don’t know.

9 Any Views on That, Mahatma Gandhi?
    There were a few things that consistently kept bothering me in the White Room. I couldn’t stop wishing Stan Carberry hadn’t interfered with my mother. I wished more than anything that he’d left her alone. Why did he have to go and do that — bring her out to the barn that night?
    And I wished that I’d never known anything about religion — Catholic or Protestant. I wanted to know about neither. And yet at the same time I wanted to know everything. Why could I not be like everyone in the sixties, I kept asking myself, and say that God was dead: Hey, man, take it easy, no need to worry, nothing bothering us cats down here.
    But more than anything what was bothering me was what I’d done to Mukti. It was wrong and I knew it. Except I also knew this: that, if I capitulated this time, not only to excessive feeling but to any kind of vulnerable emotion at all, my time in that White Room could prove to be devastating. Worse than anything I’d experienced so far. And I couldn’t risk that.
    In the sixties they said people kind of liked being a little mixed up. That was what the Beatles were always insisting: take, for example,
I am he as you are he
etc., from ‘I Am theWalnut’ as Mike Corcoran sings. Or should I say Mike Martinez, ha ha, later of the famous Mood Indigo house band the Chordettes.
    Yeah, that was the way. Identities were frivolously encouraged to fracture in those days, to turn themselves upside down and inside out, through the influence of drugs, alternative therapies and who knows what else. With nobody so much as batting an eyelid at any of it. No, it was all about getting your kicks, man. You could be everybody and nobody all at once. Nothing and everything all at the one time. It was ‘thrillsville’, they said, ‘too much’ and ‘outasite’.
    But it didn’t turn out that way for me. I heard later from Mike that Mukti was supposed to have been heartbroken with the way things had turned