Then Alice
Then
Alice
In August, the heat becomes unbearable. The little basement studio where the band are recording is anvil-hot, tolerable only in the coolness of night. Jake declares a week’s holiday.
Tom and Eddie are content to lie around the pool deepening their suntans, playing cards and drinking vats of cheap red wine at night. But after just one day of this, Jake takes the bus into Florence and comes back driving a tiny lemon-yellow bubble car. All three of us, Eddie, Tom and I, gather around to watch him unfolding his long, thin body from the confines of the car; at six foot two, it’s a miracle he managed to get inside it in the first place.
‘We’re going on a road trip,’ he says. ‘Just you and me.’
‘In Noddy’s car?’
‘This magnificent machine is a Cinquecento. We couldn’t possibly travel in anything else.’
Cars, cappuccinos – authenticity is Jacob’s drug.
The Cinquecento has a top speed of around eighty kilometres per hour, so we decide upon a few nights in Siena, just a short drive up the road. The euphoria of those first hours, the two of us alone at last, puttering through a backdrop of Tuscan hills now burnt bronze from the weeks of scorching sun. It looks as I’d imagine Africa to look, beautiful but parched, bleached, bleak from the lack of green. Jake turns on the radio and the opening bars of ‘All Along the Watchtower’ start up, and he says, ‘Fuck.’ We listen in silence, volume right up, and afterwards he tells me about seeing Jimi play in a tiny little Soho pub called The Toucan.
‘You knew he was different right away, even before the mental guitar solos. He had it like no one else, not Jagger, not Bowie, certainly not The Beatles. That was the moment I knew nothing else mattered apart from music. I came back from that gig and I began playing guitar obsessively, all the way through the night. Sleep felt like a waste of time. I wanted to be just like him. I taught myself to play bass and rhythm guitar, I felt like I needed to be able to do everything better than anyone else.’
He holds my hand and we’re quiet again and I know he’s thinking about Jimi, his death, a drug overdose that could have been prevented, people said, if only his girlfriend had reacted sooner. I remember her name, it’s scorched into my memory: Monika Dannemann. If she had dialled 999 half an hour earlier, he would probably still be alive.
‘But he might have been brain-dead,’ Jake says, as if we’ve been having this conversation out loud instead of in our heads.
‘What must it be like to be Monika?’
‘Hard to see how she’ll ever get over it.’
Hendrix’s manager found a poem he’d written hours before his death, ‘The Story of Life’. A love song, really, to Monika, which talked of love being a series of hellos and goodbyes. A beautiful poem or a suicide note? No one will ever know.
Jimi Hendrix’s death affected all of us, but with Jake you can tell it’s still raw. He rarely talks about his past and always tries to steer away from anything negative, but right now there’s a surround of sorrow in our tiny little car. I reach out my hand, tanned brown from our summer of sun, and place it on his thigh. He picks it up with one hand and kisses it quickly before returning it to his leg. No words are ever needed.
When we see a sign for a vineyard, Jake pulls off the road. We drive at around five kilometres an hour up a bumpy track riddled with potholes, olive groves on either side, and finally, after a long and jarring five minutes, a farmhouse comes into view, standard Tuscan fare of cream stone walls and a red tiled roof. Behind it the sweep of a vineyard, acres and acres vanishing into the horizon.
An elderly woman comes out to greet us, talking in fast, lyrical Italian that neither of us understands. We stare at each other in confusion.
‘ Mangiare ?’ she says bringing her fingers to her mouth.
‘ Si, signora, grazie ,’ Jake answers with the only Italian he knows. He mimes putting a bottle to his lips, head tipped back like a drunk, and she laughs.
‘ Ovviamente ! Chianti Classico.’
There could be no more perfect place for lunch than this. A little wooden table set up beneath the shade of a sprawling cypress tree. A cheerful blue gingham tablecloth, tumblers filled with red wine, a plate of home-cured salami, a basket of bread and a bowl of the fattest olives I have ever seen. We eat greedily, assuming that this is it, but we are in Italy and we should have known better. Soon we are given bowls of truffle tagliatelle, wide ribbons of pasta that gleam with oil and taste more intoxicating, more sublime than anything I have ever eaten before.
‘Oh my God,’ we say to each other, over and over again.
Jake, with his hamster store of extraneous knowledge, can tell me all about black truffles. The specific breed of dog used to hunt them – Lagotto, he even remembers its name – the wars that break out between locals when one stumbles across another’s secret stash.
‘It’s a bloodthirsty business,’ he says. ‘People die for truffles. You can see why.’
‘Sometimes I think I’ve fallen in love with the Encyclopaedia Britannica . How do you know all this stuff?’
He laughs, then takes hold of my hand.
‘By the way, will you marry me? Any time you like,’ he says. ‘Today, next week, in five years.’
‘Should I answer?’ I say when I manage to speak, and now he smiles, tilting his head as he observes me.
‘I’d have thought so.’
‘Then yes, of course I will. Any time. Today, next week, in five years.’
Siena in August is empty of Italians; just foolish tourists like us braving the heat, spending our days cowering within the thick walls of the Duomo. Not that it’s a hardship to be in this mind-bending building, more opulent, more dramatic than anywhere I have ever seen, in life or textbook. Acres of marble, columns that are striped and preposterously tall, a frescoed ceiling so gilded it is almost blinding. There is an altarpiece with four saints sculpted by a teenage Michelangelo, each one perfection, and I find it hard to take this in, that here in Siena, we casually stumble across Michelangelo.
‘Can we live here one day?’ I ask Jake as we brace ourselves for the burning sun of the piazza.
‘Just what I was thinking,’ he says.
We rent a hot little room above a bar and spend our days seeking out shady restaurants, eating long, indulgent lunches of wild boar pappardelle and a porcini risotto with pecorino cheese that amazes us. It’s hard to sleep at night, so we have afternoon siestas instead, knocked out by our calorific lunches and carafes of red wine, waking thirsty and fuzzy-headed when the sky is turning dark grey. I love the evenings best of all, walking through streets so narrow we must go in single file while on either side tall coloured buildings lean towards each other like lovers. We’ll stop at our favourite café in the square and drink espressos, sometimes with a balloon of grappa.
The sketches I love best come from this time, Jake freer, happier than I’ve ever seen him. While I’m drawing, he’ll scribble lyrics in his little leather notebook or take sips from his coffee or stare up at the sky, searching for the hallmarks of his childhood, stargazing his consolation from those demons he will never share. We are so relaxed with each other in these days that I’m tempted to ask him. What happened? What is it that sometimes makes you so sad? But then I look at him, almost absurdly handsome in his loose black shirt, hair that now reaches his shoulders, and he smiles back at me, raising his brandy in a salute, and I know that I will never do anything to recast him in gloom.