Chapter Text
He combs and combs his memory, searching for something he missed — or so much as a window into the possibility of something he missed. Six years, from 1963 to 1969. Six long, long years in which they had seen each other nearly every day; in which he would’ve said he knew everything there was to know about John; and nothing.
Or maybe one thing, maybe. Days of wracking his brains, thinking himself into knots, and then the memory just falls out, in the middle of cooking his breakfast.
They had broken for lunch at the studio, they must’ve been recording You Can’t Do That or something like it. He, George and Ringo all wanted to get takeaway, but John was feeling lazy, said he’d grab something from the canteen. Only, just as the three of them were leaving, they realised they had gotten carried away, and it was 3:30 already. Which was practically 4:00, which was only an hour away from 5:00. And they were coming off of two chart-topping albums, and they were going to be in a movie, and they had gotten in at nine o’clock in the morning, and why not just call it a day?
So George and Ringo had sent Paul back to let John know while they told everyone else, but Paul couldn’t find him in the canteen. Remembering he wanted to hear their last take back again, Paul checked the mixing booth next, and found it empty. But he could see through the window into the recording studio, to where John was sat in the very chair they’d left him in. Feet on a squat little coffee table, tilting his chair onto its hind legs.
From the door into the studio, Paul could just see the side of his face, the look of intense concentration there, his furrowed brows. He was hunched elaborately over his lap, head bent low. Writing in a notebook.
Paul couldn’t help but smile at how focused he was. Daft, he thought in John’s direction. He felt a giddy rush of something like joy, unexpected. Maybe it was just because it was good to see him thinking, for once.
He moved through into the room, and, footsteps quiet on the carpet, he walked round toward John from behind, reached a hand out to mess up the back of his hair. “Whatch’you workin’ on?”
John twitched in surprise, looking in panic over his shoulder, and dropping his chair back onto all four legs. But he closed the notebook smoothly, nothing to see here.
“Nothin’ much,” he said, “Or I don’t think so. Just wanted to get something down.”
“Show me?” asked Paul.
“Weren’t you all going for lunch?”
Paul smiled, a bit bemused, but didn’t call John on changing the subject. “No, we realised it’s almost four, you know. Thought we’d just call it a day, go home.”
“‘Sit four already?” John said. He tucked the notebook into the breast pocket of his suit jacket, aiming for nonchalance.
“Yeah, I know,” Paul said, distracted, “What are you all tetchy about, with that notebook, eh? You selling dirty drawings these days, or what?”
“Nah,” said John, shrugging. “Not such good business, in swinging London. Too much competition, you see.”
Paul smiled, feeling them shift into something playful, that back-and-forth he didn’t have with anyone else but John. It was almost like flirting with a girl, that same feeling of excitement.
Only it was better, because no one in the world had what he and John had together.
“Well, lemme see then. Might whip it into our next single, who knows?”
He reached toward John’s breast pocket, and got his hand smacked away. “Crucial stage now, son. Doesn’t need your bad influence.”
“Right,” Paul said, “‘cause you’re one to talk about bad influence.”
He reached out to jostle him again, angling for a play-fight, but John just twisted aside, something nervous glancing across his expression. “Look, it’s nothing, all right. ‘S just something stupid I thought up in about 30 seconds. Probably won’t even make it into a song.”
Paul’s smile froze a bit on his face as he pulled back. He felt himself blinking with the strangeness of getting a hard no from John; usually he was only too eager to tell other people to fuck off, but he generally had a harder time with Paul. This is the only reason he remembers the moment, ten years on.
But, if he was hurt or confused, it glanced right off him, pinging off the smooth, youthful surface of his friendship with John. He invited him out to lunch, to a place he suspected John was starting to favour, and John accepted.
Any bad feeling got lost in the joy of going out just him and John, table for two, please. Feet bumping against each other under their little table, each leaning in toward the other. Joking for about an hour straight.
Whatever John was so shy about, Paul was sure it would end up being a great idea, something smart yet funny yet unexpected, like everything John did. Anyway, anytime they wrote anything, they would always end up asking each other for advice sooner or later; it wasn’t like he’d have to wait long to look over what John had.
He’d see it eventually.
***
And then he doesn’t know what happened. At some point in those couple of years his life completely changed shape, became unrecognisable, as did the world. But he can’t quite place when it happened.
Years of touring, the days all running together, and then the end of touring. Which did feel something like an End, but wasn’t really. You know an end when it hits you. For instance, you might know it in the way it comes screaming toward you over several months, crashing over your head hard enough that there’s years of fallout, and the whole world knows about it, and is asking you about it constantly, reminding you over and over. A real end is hard to miss, in that way.
It was the same when he and Linda separated. Months of him drinking himself sick, and an awareness growing in him all the time that he couldn't go on like that forever. Months of Linda giving him chance after chance. Eventually he found himself with half an album — quite suddenly, it seemed — and he thought that meant he was out of the woods. But it didn't work out.
At least they’ve stayed friends. Going on five years now, if you count the couple of months that have gone by in ‘74. He’s thankful every day for her easy wisdom, the relaxed outlook he needs so badly to counter his obsessive perfectionism. She listens on the phone when he wants her opinion on a song, and he stops by with presents for Heather when he’s in town. They’ve moved on. They’re happy.
In fact, Paul is very methodically happy. He devises a picture-perfect morning routine, lingering for an hour over his coffee and a book, daydreaming himself awake. He perches in a window, looking out at the pine forest that is his only neighbour, until the rest of his day starts calling. He walks with Martha in the woods, singing what he’s doing and thinking how nice this is. He goes to sleep listening to the wonderful silence in the night, no sirens or speeding cars, and no one’s voice interrupting it, either, and he thinks, isn’t this great?
When he decided to move out to Scotland, just after he and Linda broke up, he could tell that no one really understood it. Sure, he’d be mostly on his own in the middle of nowhere, but what was so bad about that? What people didn’t get was that he needed to be in nature, to watch the Earth tend to itself day in and day out, taking the seasons in stride.
And what he didn’t even try to describe was that in fact London was the most suffocating place in the world. London was an awareness of being seen, London was planning your days according to what you wanted people to piece together about your life. Endless rounds of just-fine parties, a routine every weekend like another item on the checklist, and everybody asking themselves, is everyone really OK with this? Are we all going to pretend this is what it’s meant to be like?
Although, who knows, maybe everyone at the parties didn’t even realise how miserable it all was. He’s come to think that the defining sign that you ever actually liked someone — really liked them, in the way he knew it was possible to — was that you couldn’t go back to anything else. When you really understand what it means to be known by somebody, in a way Paul suspects very few people do, then the alternative feels like having your eyes gouged out. Constantly explaining yourself, keeping the greater part of your personality buried in some dusty corner, because no one else in the room would quite get it. If anybody out in the party scene knew anything better, they wouldn’t be there in the first place, would they?
Though, of course, Paul was there himself. So maybe not.
It wasn’t that he was lonely, in London. He was seeing people all the time, he threw dinner parties and met friends for coffee and he could always get his brother or his dad on the phone, and, after all, weren’t they the very first people who ever understood him? Any pain he felt during that period, it was just a matter of learning the importance of being friends with yourself. Who else better to get all your jokes?
Over time, he started to dedicate long hours to wandering around the city on his own. Visiting a record store he had never seen before, walking by the river. And he would go to bed with the sense that he had a full life.
Usually this would be a weekday after work, when he didn’t have any other plans anyway. But then, one Friday, there was a party and a special event at a club and a record launch and, on a hedonistic whim, he decided to stay home. Buy himself a bottle of wine, cook an extravagant dinner. When a friend of his gave him a summary of the night over lunch the next week, he thought, I have to get the fuck out of here.
Now, out at the farm, he has that full kind of day every day. Every moment belongs completely to him, only to be shared when he chooses it, and only with the people he cares about. He thinks, what should I get up to today? and then he does just that. It’s a pleasure to know what you want.
He loses track of time, working on a song that had come to him out of the blue, and he only comes to when he realises he's hungry. And technically it is one in the morning, but why not make himself a bowl of oatmeal?
And why not make an event of it? He puts on an opera record he’s been fixated on lately, trying to see if he can’t sing like that. He experiments with it while he waits for the water to boil, and he laughs with how badly it comes out, but the joy is in seeing what his voice is capable of, isn’t it, so he goes for the soprano parts too, letting his voice crack and thinking how funny this would sound if somebody else were in the house with him.
He’s coughing a bit and evaluating whether his oats are done when the phone starts screaming from the living room, jolting him out of his reverie.
Somehow a ringing phone always sounds much louder and more urgent at night, or when you’ve been spaced out for a while. He rushes to pick up, and it’s only as he’s bringing the receiver to his ear that he realises the opera record is still blaring away. He says “Sorry, one sec,” into the line and sets the phone down on the table, while he jogs over to stop the record.
He remembers to turn off the stove, and he’s only a little out of breath when he picks up again. “Hello?”
“D’you have company over?” comes John’s voice, with a laugh in it.
Something inside him flips over. Ever since Allen Klein started to show his true colours, and ever since Paul had proven he wasn’t going to be smug about suspecting him in the first place, he and John have developed the exciting new routine of calling each other — and at somewhat regular intervals, even. But Paul still gets a little thrill every time he picks up and it’s John’s voice. Something like joy, something like relief.
“Oh, yeah,” Paul says, imagining what his little opera scene must have sounded like over the phone, “It’s me and the Campbeltown Area Singers, just rehearsing, you know.”
“Right, of course,” says John, “Sorry to interrupt.”
And the lingering rush of having John call makes Paul want to beg down into the line, No, please don’t be. Please call every day, please come and interrupt my life all over again.
Instead he says, “No, I was just, I dunno, making oatmeal. Wanted a soundtrack.”
“Mm, yeah,” John says, and it’s only then that Paul can string enough coherent thoughts together to notice the strange quality in his voice. What is that, fatigue? Annoyance?
“Um,” he goes on. (Maybe shame? Would that make any sense?) “Oh shit, it must be, what, something like 12:30? For you?”
“Uh, 1:30, actually. But I– you know, I was up anyway, I was working on a song.”
“OK. 1:30, Christ, I should’ve thought. I just sort of picked up the phone, you know.”
It’s not like him to be so — apprehensive? insecure? “It’s really fine, John. Don’t worry. Is, uh, is everything OK?”
John sighs into the phone. “Well, actually it’s… It’s all right, it’s– how are you?”
From the way he speaks, Paul can tell John didn’t just call to see how he was. But he fills him in anyway: the repairs around the house, the longer days now they’re heading into spring. “And what about you? You at May’s place still?”
“Yeah, we’re– or actually, I’m calling from the offices, at Apple.”
Paul blinks. “Oh, yeah? Kind of a long day, isn’t it?”
John laughs, mirthlessly. “You have no idea.” There’s a pause, and Paul wonders if John’s expecting him to say something. Except he hasn’t given him much to work with.
Paul fidgets with the phone in his hand, stares into the other room. Wishing he could try and read John’s expression.
“I’ve actually been here since six in the morning, I think. It’s 8:30 now. I’m calling because there was, um…”
Paul feels his stomach start to sink, just from John’s tone of voice. He waits for him to go on, telling himself not to panic; he doesn’t even know what it is yet.
John takes a big breath in. “So, I had this journal, in the ‘60s. And I sort of lost track of it, left it in London. But I didn’t actually lose track of it, I was actually very fucking careful…”
He sighs, and goes on, “Anyway. So they get a call — Apple does, I mean — at 5:30 or so, ‘do we have a comment on the contents.’ ”
“What, a call from a newspaper?”
“I wouldn’t say so, just the fucking Daily Mail. And they got their hands on it somehow, unnamed source, submitted on condition of anonymity, all that bullshit. We’ve been… haggling with them all fucking day. You should see the offices, we’ve got about six phones going at once. They’re sicking the lawyers on them, but there’s nothing the courts can do, really, not before they go to press tomorrow. They’re going on about freedom of the press. Fucking leeches.”
Paul sits down onto his cabinet. He notices he's chewing on his thumbnail, and doesn’t bother to stop himself. “Jesus. Fuck, John, that’s…” How useless of him, to be lost for words. “I’m sorry. Is it very personal stuff?”
John laughs, “Yeah, a bit,” and again Paul wishes he was there with him. At the very least so he could get something out of his body language.
“Um, so it will be coming out in the morning, then — I guess in about five hours, now. And you might– you’ll probably get a few calls, requests for comment.”
It comes out before he really thinks it through, “What, are there things about me in there?”
And then he thinks, of course there are. This is John’s journal from the sixties. His name was bound to crop up.
It’s a moment before John answers his question. “Yeah, there’s… there’s a few mentions. I dunno, I don’t think they could publish the whole thing in the paper — just practically speaking, I mean — but it sounds like they are printing, you know, excerpts, selections. And no one was ever meant to see it, that was the point of the whole thing. You know, this job, maybe I should’ve quit expecting better, but I just, I dunno I… Paul?”
A silent moment. “Yeah,” he says, softer than he intended.
John’s silent for another second. And then his voice is utterly dejected when he finally speaks again. “Paul,” he says. A deep breath. “Don’t read them.”
His voice. Paul’s heart sinks. He wants to reach through the phone, pull John into his arms. He stares at his living room furniture, the coffee table he’s been meaning to tidy up. “John.”
“Just, I remember what’s in it, and it’s probably going to be… And I’d just, I’d feel better if… Don’t read them, Paul.”
He swallows. “I won’t. And I won’t talk to any reporters, either, if they call tomorrow, so…”
It feels so pathetic. He wishes there was anything he could do. He wishes John was in the fucking room with him.
“Yeah. Sorry again, for calling you so late. And, um, everything.”
“No, don’t worry.” He looks down at his feet. “I’m sorry this is happening.”
“OK,” says John. “And– and thanks, you know, for…”
“Oh, God. No, it’s… I wouldn’t have talked to them anyway. Fucking Daily Mail.”
“I know.”
Paul keeps staring around his own house. He wants to ask, You know I’m here for you, right? Still? But he can’t get the words out; they don’t seem to fit into the silence between them. And he doesn’t know if it’s allowed anymore, after these five years apart. He’s not sure it’s right that he would still do anything for him.
“Listen,” John says, “I should go. I still need to figure out dinner. And get very fucking drunk, probably.”
“Yeah, sure,” says Paul. “Uh, thanks for calling. Talk soon?” He wonders if that sounds as pathetic as it feels.
“Yeah,” John says, “OK. Bye."
***
He wakes up the next morning at 8:30 on the dot. He’s gathered it’s the earliest time his press agent thinks is polite to call anybody.
At first he can’t think why she would be calling; it’s not that he can’t remember the news from John, it’s just that it’s not top of mind. But she gets to her point fairly quickly, did he get the Daily Mail today, and does he have time to draft a quick response.
He cuts her off before she can really hit her stride. “Actually, Dorothy, I– I don’t think I will talk to the papers about it, if that’s all right. Just, this whole thing, I think it’s terrible. I don’t want to sort of participate in it, if I can help it.”
A pause on her end. “You don’t want to respond,” she says, deadpan.
“No, I don’t. I just– why give them more to talk about, y’know?”
“But– and you have read them? The diaries?”
He rubs sleep out of his eyes. “No, I haven’t read them. But I don’t think– I don’t see that changing my decision on this. Anyway, I told John I wouldn’t, and I don’t mean to.”
Dorothy’s not convinced; they go back and forth on the issue for a few minutes, Paul essentially repeating the same line over and over. It’s just wrong. I promised John. I don’t need to know what was in them to know I don’t want to respond. She keeps trying to tell him, for some reason.
Eventually she starts to get a sense for how much it matters to him. And she’s always hated the tabloids as much as he does, so she can understand not wanting to engage with them at all. They end the call on an agreement not to respond, Paul accepting full responsibility for the repercussions. Though he can’t imagine they could be all that drastic.
“I really think you ought to read them,” Dorothy says as they hang up.
***
He puzzles over the phone call as he makes his breakfast, but it doesn’t have much of an impact on the rest of his day. He’s in the throes of the ugly legal repercussions to putting out an album, wading through thick envelopes of copyrights and personnel credits sent up to him for his seal of approval. By the time his workday is up, he's only gotten through half as much of it as he wanted to.
And then there’s the house itself to worry about, always something needing to be repaired. He’s late making himself dinner, and then when he finishes he gets carried away in the music room, going over the song he’d been writing the night before.
All in all, the first time he becomes aware of the outside world is late in the evening, when he turns on the news for background noise as he does the dishes. He’s lost in his thoughts, tuning in and out whenever the anchor’s voice gets excited at the introduction of a new story. Mostly there’s nothing he’s terribly concerned about. With one exception.
“... And now, strong reactions from the rock music world, as the diaries of John Lennon are leaked to the public. The diaries, which the former Beatles member kept between 1963 and…”
He doesn’t hear the end of the sentence, because he’s rushed over to turn the TV off with wet hands.
There are a few other close calls the next day when he goes to run errands in town. At the newsstand, a familiar face on the cover of the Daily Mail, looking suspicious. Mrs Skinner at the post office, asking if he’d heard about the story. Even at the grocery store, two teenage employees are gossiping about John in the dairy aisle, and he has to turn heel, remember to get the milk before he leaves. And he thinks, what the fuck was in those diaries?
Still, somehow, he mostly manages to put it out of his mind. There’s too many things to think about already, thanks to his terrible habit of leaving all his errands to Saturday. On the drive back, he starts running through the chores that still need to get done at home, when a song he really hates comes on the radio, which sends him flipping through channels, listening for anything better.
The first thing he manages to get other than static is a talk show, two male voices deep in a spirited debate about something Paul struggles at first to follow.
“... Just– I don’t quite understand that, Eric, to be honest. You’ve said yourself you’ve been a great admirer of his work for years and– and– we are still dealing with the same person, after all. He’s the exact same person as he was a few days ago.”
“But, see, he absolutely isn’t, or not in my mind, and when we’re discussing artistic appreciation, it– it– you don’t mean to tell me you believe an author’s identity, their– immoral actions have no bearing on the meaning of their work.”
“What I mean to say is that everything he’s done, the incredible music he’s brought into the world, none of that’s actually changed, has it, just because we now happen to know Lennon is a homosexual…”
Paul blinks. At first that’s all he can do, and keep driving in a straight line. For some reason he feels the need to school his features into a mask of polite composure. Even though he’s alone in his car.
After a minute he remembers to turn off the radio, and he’s surprised to notice the hosts are still babbling away. He realises he wasn’t listening at all. All he hears is that last sentence, Lennon is a homosexual, spinning around in his head.
He breathes evenly, forgets where he’s going for a second. What he feels is so big he can’t process it all in that moment, in that unsuspecting, routine drive home. Instead he just feels completely blank. So neutral that he’s nauseous with it.
Distantly, though, he's aware of the foreshocks of it rocking subtly through him. He can tell exactly how this is going to weigh on him later on.
He wonders if he’s panicking over this, perhaps feeling betrayed or lied to or shocked. Maybe that’s what this frozen feeling is; he knows full well he’s not familiar enough with his own mind that he could tell for sure. But somehow, ‘shock’ doesn’t feel right as a description of it.
There's an impression of a weight lifting off, but not in a way that leaves him feeling any lighter. It's more like a dead body floating up to the surface of a pond. A vague shape getting clearer as it comes closer, pushing aside weeds and twigs, and the knowledge of what it is falling on him sharp and cold in the seconds before it’s all far too vivid.
John is a homosexual. He thinks some part of him had known all along.