Read Online The Perfect Order of Things by David Gilmour - Free Book Online Page B

later, it was spring now, I found myself riding a motorcycle along a country road, the same Sweet Cherry Lane that I would later notice from the car with my wife. You could smell the warm grass; farms dotted the horizon; the whole world, it seemed, swam in a lush green wind. In my overnight bag was a bottle of Scotch and a well-worn, brick-sized paperback of War and Peace (the divine Constance Garnett translation). I wanted to give my old friend a taste of the greatest novel ever written but also a glimpse of what I was like, what pleased me, moved me, delighted me these days. In anticipation, I’d even highlighted certain passages. I imagined a late night, boozy reading: perhaps an excerpt from Nicholas Rostov’s flight in the rush of French troops; or Princess Marya Bolkonsky’s monologue about love never coming her way—a section so heartbreaking that I’d never read it aloud for fear my throat would tighten and my voice take an embarrassing wobble.
    Turning onto a gravel road, I caught sight of Justin Strawbridge waiting in the distance. Behind him, a house with a crooked spine. Crows sat on power lines overhead. Black butterflies flickered among the dandelions. He waved once and then quickly went inside. That was how it began.
    We had a great deal of fun that night, those rituals that old friends do when they haven’t seen each other for years. You retell stories you both know, and know you both know, revisit old hangovers and old lovers and old disgraceful moments, all in extreme colours now, all agreeably weightless; we touched on “the incident” with the Polish girl and apart from his eyes lingering a moment longer than they should have on my features, the evening moved on. We played songs for each other from albums that no one listened to anymore.
    “You know,” Justin said, listening for a moment to the Beatles’ “All My Loving,” “I’ve never really liked that song. There’s something dull right at the heart of it.”
    “Like an apple. It’s boring the way eating an apple is boring,” I said.
    “Too true.”
    “It’s all promise and no delivery.”
    “No chorus, either. All the best Beatle songs have a great chorus.”
    “‘I Saw Her Standing There.’”
    “‘When I Get Home.’”
    “Does a hook get any better than the hook in ‘When I Get Home’? The Beatles doing Wilson Pickett.
    “Unbelievable.”
    “Absolutely unfucking believable.”
    “‘This Boy.’”
    “It does get better. ‘This Boy’s got an even better chorus. How could anybody write a chorus that’s so fucking great?”
    And at this we both laughed in delight, for no apparent reason.
    Refreshing his drink in the kitchen, Justin said, “If I asked you to kill my mother, would you help me?”
    Pause. “Come again.”
    “She never liked the Beatles.”
    “You want to kill your mother because she didn’t like the Beatles?”
    “No, I want to kill my mother because she’s a cunt.”
    From that point on, the evening only comes back to me in fragments, like an avant-garde film. (It must have been the switch to brandy.) We talked about Walt Whitman (Justin’s guy); standing by his library (quite a large, distinguished collection of hardbacks), he read me the final stanzas of Song of Myself . I listened with pleasure not because I gave a shit about Whitman (I don’t) but because Justin Strawbridge was there, in front of me, my boyhood friend, and we were at ease with each other again, as if it had been weeks, not more than a decade. As if a part of my life which I’d believed lost forever had simply recommenced . God, how I’d missed him!
    He retrieved a manuscript from a mahogany desk—I had the feeling I’d seen some of this furniture before—and read me a selection of poems that he’d written himself; rolling stanzas affecting a sugary reverence for nature, the godliness in all things living, the circle of seasons, the big round moon. It was, from beginning to end, bullshit, but I clapped and called