Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

“It was like a love affair with a competitive edge.”

1966.

Paul met him while pretending to understand a piece of art.

“Y’don’t have to act like you get it,” he said in a hard nasal lilt, mostly Kiwi, a little - if Paul was not mistaking it - Liddypool. “In fact, it’s a piece’ve fuckin’ trash.”

Paul turned his head to greet the man beside him; a twiggy, unkempt bohemian drowning in an afghan coat and a pair of worn military boots, wild auburn hair stuffed under a newsboy cap. He had his hands shoved in his pockets and was pitched forward an inch, staring at Paul with a furiously intense gaze over the dark frames of his spectacles. Paul actually moved to take a step back - his shoulders turned and his right foot made to pivot; the look hit him in the chest and pinned him to the spot, both at once. The man’s eyes were the same colour as his hair, narrowed to cheshire cat crescents, and he was loudly chewing a wad of gum, open mouthed.

Paul blinked. “Excuse me?”

“You’re not meant to understand it,” he explained, smacking his gum from one side of his mouth to the other. “It’s all a grift; doesn’t mean a damn thing.”

“The piece, or the show?” Paul found himself asking, arching an eyebrow. The stranger raised his brows right back, a thorny grin tugging the corner of his mouth.

“Well -” and the man slid a step closer, so smooth it felt casual, natural. His shoulder knocked against Paul’s and he slipped a hand out of his pocket to tug at the brim of his cap, leaning in like he was telling a secret. “I was talking about the piece, but you can say it for the show too. Ono, she’s completely batty, y’know? They had her locked up in the nuthouse back in Japan, yeah? That’s why she’s runnin’ her scams in London.”

“And what makes you think it a scam?” Paul kept on asking, setting a hand to his chin. It was unusual, to say the least, to meet someone so forward with their real opinions at a gathering like this, the hippest and richest of the London art scene crammed into the smokey, wooden corridors of the Indica's basement. Not without a few glasses of social lubricant, at least.

The man scoffed, and blew a lock of hair out of his face. “No one makes anything these days ‘cept to provoke a reaction,” he sneered. “S’all a lotta cynical drivel that says nothing, like filling a gallery with mirrors, and she’s the worst of the lot.”

A gallery of mirrors, Paul hummed a scale to himself, modified it a bit, tucked it away for later. “Isn’t the point of art to provoke a reaction though?”

Moving a bit, Paul thought, like a stray cat, the man seemed to be considering him; pulling a loose hand through his hair in a rather feminine gesture, a contrast to the masculine tilt of his hips and the smokey confidence with which his eyes were raking him up and down. Paul stared back, worrying his bottom lip with a fingernail. Instinctively, he understood that they were evaluating each other, but he had no idea what it was all about.

The stranger knew: “Not the way they mean it,” he said, as if they had not skipped a beat and four measures, and a couple steps on the staircase for that matter. “Take this shite for example: two hundred quid t’see a fuckin’ apple sittin’ on a pedastal? What’s the point of it?”

Paul returned his attention to said apple. “I thought it was meant to represent -” what had he thought? “Decay,” he ventured. “The um, inevitability of it.”

“Oooh yeah? Do y’think the yellow wallpaper represents the domestic sphere too?”

“What?”

“The whole point of it’s to be so baffling that you can say any old thing about it and sound profound! What’s provocative about it’s that the daft cow was sittin’ around thinking about how to get people to think she’s got somethin’ real to say, instead of just saying it! That’s not art, that’s fucking psychology mate. If art were about that, there’s no reason we shouldn’t be framing shite literally and be done with the whole thing!”

“I hadn’t thought to hear a harsh criticism of Duchamp at an avant-garde gala,” Paul retorted playfully.

“It’s all subjective, luv.” The stranger was grinning full-tilt now. “But it should come from inside, yeah?”

“Right - a real artist should be able to offend, simply by being themselves.”

“He gets it!” The man clapped and Paul’s heart leapt with the noise. He realized, presently, how intimately they’d been speaking, how close they’d drifted - shoulder-to-shoulder, the scent of the man’s gum pooling between them, the press and murmur of the crowd tacking them to the velvet rope, their back-and-forth framed in plexiglass like Yoko Ono's confounding art-piece. Paul was rather grateful for it, truth be told; collecting eccentric acquaintances at galas and gatherings like this was one of the perks of fame, and this man was the most interesting person he’d met tonight. He was quietly desperate to know his thoughts.

“So, how does one offend naturally? Like a real artist does?”

The man’s hands said a few things before his mouth caught up. Paul’s eyes tracked the dance of his long, knobby fingers, his wide and elegant palms. Whenever he saw someone with hands like that he wanted to set them on a piano, or a guitar. George almost lived and died using his marvellous hands on work that would have destroyed them before he was old.

“It’s like there’s a veil,” the stranger pontificated with a sweeping gesture, all wrist and fingers. “And the veil is fear, and that fear is between the world we live in, and the world of truth, and like, um -” He stuttered - his whole expression blinked, a TV going static. Paul got the impression that he should nod encouragingly, that he had perhaps asked something which made one vulnerable to ridicule in these sorts of circles. The whole interruption took less than a breath, but that sensitivity followed Paul into the rest of the conversation. “- the world of truth is the world of art,” the man continued, “but the world of truth is also the one you feel, y’dig?”

Paul was already nodding along again. Yes, yes, that’s what he thought too -

“You can’t overcome fear consciously, so art like this is only painting on the veil, a bunch’a pretentious gits leaving graffiti on the gates of heaven, is what I’m saying -”

Yes, he got what he was saying. He thought so, at least; felt as if this man had put a period on a sentence he’d spent the past two years agonizing over.

“If you approach it from this dimension of, this posture of, like - where you’re coming at it coldly deliberate-like… it’s bloody arrogance, don’t you think? Trying to tear down that barrier’s like thinking you can control the arc of history.”

Paul waited, lips pursed; this could be going somewhere truly interesting, or the man was about to reveal himself to be another one of those tiresome Marxist Deconstructionists who were cropping up everywhere these days.

“I think that to make real art - like, if you want to tap into the current of what’s really going on, you can’t be fully aware of it. You can’t be -” he tapped his temple, “- all in your head about it. You’re not speakin’ the truth, you’re feeling it - lettin’ it speak through you. You’re taking from the realm of truth and transforming it into something a human can perceive, but you don’t always know what it is.”

“Like alchemy,” Paul offered, turning the metaphor over a few times. Art and mirrors and incantations… in a gallery where no one can see the truth.

“Like magic, yeah,” the stranger’s smirk softened, blossomed boyish, and he relaxed his shoulders. “S’like how all the Yank musicians are going right now - Dylan and Hendrix and all them. They’re tappin’ into something over there, some kinda Jungian unconscious? But the brits are still rhyming ‘june’ and ‘spoon’. Nothin’ but granny songs, the war’s been over twenty years and the whole fuckin’ island’s still asleep!” As an example, he sung: “ ‘Birds sing out of tune, And rain clouds hide the moon,’ - rubbish! Mechanical pop drivel!”

It was a credit to his upbringing - and his thorough media couching - that Paul didn’t flinch. Instead, he said: “Interesting,” and, with a carefully mechanical smile, offered his hand. “Nice to meet you, by the way. I’m Paul McCartney.”

The stranger was caught in the headlights. Feeling mischievous enough to push it, Paul began humming the opening bars of his first hit single. “‘Please lock me away’,” he trilled, “ ‘And dooon’t allooow the day’...”

“‘- here inside’,” the stranger added, “- ‘where I hide with my loneliness’.” A tad cracked and hesitant at first, but when Paul kept on along with him he crescendo-ed into a full camp falsetto that had the posh woman sipping wine askance them shooting off a dirty look: “ ‘I don’t care what they say’, I won’t stay in a wooooorld without love’!”

That had them both going - deep, sincere laughter, the kind that punched Paul in the gut and had him near doubling over. The stranger was grabbing his right hand, encasing it in his warm, calloused palms. He looked Paul directly in the eye when he introduced himself. “John Lennon.”

Paul looked back, took in the details he hadn’t noticed before: the hawkish aquiline nose, the raised mole between his wispy, stormcloud eyebrows. He was like a character in a French Existentialist novel, Paul thought; what he always imagines those superstar philosophers - Satre, Camus, or whoever - will look like before he flips the book over. “Are you a music critic, Monsieur Lennon?” he inquired from behind his other hand, still snickering.

“Nah, I’m an artist.” Lennon threw both palms in the air. “Actually, the ‘artist’ part is rather theoretical. I “make” “art”, but me art don’t fucking sell, and art that doesn’t sell in this fascist economy doesn’t fuckin’ count as art.”

And then - still looking Paul straight in the eye - Monsieur Lennon spit out his gum, snatched the apple off its plexiglass podium, and took a gigantic bite. Cu-ruuuunch went the the two hundred quid art-piece, so juicy and decidedly un-decayed that Lennon’s demonic grin was wet with it.

Paul’s eyes went wide. At this point, he did not care if the man was a Marxist Deconstructionist. This was the most fascinating conversation he’d had in -

“At least art that doesn’t sell can’t be part of the grift,” he pointed out coyly.

Lennon made a dark noise in the back of his throat, both bitter and impressed, and took another bite of the apple. “Well, don't let it be said I’ve not sold out to buy me weekly butter."

“Then you’re an artist in the same sense that I’m a musician, I s’pose,” Paul replied, unbidden. He has no idea what he meant by that, and he has no idea what the look Lennon gives him when he says it is supposed to mean either.

“S’pose so. Ya had the temerity t’do it under your real name and everything.”

“Maybe you missed your true calling,” he interjected before Lennon could say anything else about the other thing. “As a critic, I mean. Any english music you do like?”

Lennon crossed his arms, gestured with his chin. “I like this.”

Face to Face by the Kinks, a newly pressed vinyl playing faintly from another room. “I do too,” Paul nodded. Then, he pointed out: “I chose the music for today’s gala.”

Lennon’s expression remained cool. “It’s not their best though, is it?” he mused, something hard edged in his voice.

Paul didn’t back down. “I suppose not, but I like what it’s doing.”

“And what’s it ‘doing’?”

Paul rolled his wrist as he spoke, opposite hand wrapped around his elbow. “It’s not ‘Peter and the Wolf’ or whatever, but the songs are arranged thoughtfully, don’t you think?”

Lennon managed to look down at him, all smug up behind his imperial nose, 'though he was about half an inch shorter. Paul continued: “I’ve always wanted to make an album like that, I guess, that tells a story. More ambitious than this one is, of course - with leitmotifs, and such, like in proper music.”

“What’s stoppin’ you?” Lennon asked. Brusquely and immediately, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

Paul was stunned silent by the question. There were so many reasons, and all of them set his stomach knotting and his fingers twitching into fists. The sound of Lennon’s sloppy chewing filled their bubble, drowned out the noise of the crowd moving around them.

“You make it sound easy,” Lennon continued. “Like if you only sat down and did it you could pop out a conceptual- kinda album better than this when the thing you’re most famous for is rhymin’ ‘yesterday’ with ‘far away’. So why don’t you do it?”

Paul bristled. “I... didn’t mean to sound arrogant.”

Lennon’s wicked trickster grin returned, only this time Paul felt like he was in on the joke. “I wasn’t complainin’.” He set the half-eaten apple back on its podium, then dug two ciggies out of his pocket, clipped them between his lips to light them up. Upon exhale, he handed one to Paul. “Well, c’mon then.”

“Hm?” Paul tipped his head, cigarette on his teeth.

“I owe you a drink for slaggin’ off your music like that, don’t I?”

Paul drummed the smoke along his bottom lip a few times, as if he was really thinking it over. “That’s two you owe me for, then. For the crack about ‘Yesterday’.”

“I thought ‘We Can Work it Out’ was shite too.”

“Three.”

“ ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ had potential, but the opening line’s a stinker.”

“That's worth a shot at least.”

“I could keep goin’, but they call us starving artists for a reason.”

“I’ll cover the fifth if you tell me how’d you fix ‘I Saw Her Standing There’.”

Lennon pressed his cigarette to his mouth, the whole veiny root system of his hand curved around his jaw. Smirking through the smoke, he said: “In that case, son, I’ve got linear notes on the whole discography.”

--

He dragged Paul a brisk walk through Piccadilly to The Dog and Duck, and the whole time they discussed the year’s albums - the man hadn’t heard Pet Sounds yet (horrendous!), but his thoughts on Blonde on Blonde were invaluable. He had, also, heard a suspicious number of Paul’s own top forty hits, considering all he’d been on about back at the gallery. It was several more than five drinks when he deigned to give Paul the linear notes.

“She was just seventeen,” Lennon proclaimed, slamming his beer on the table, “y’know what I mean.”

“That’s it?” Paul wondered, sipping his own brew rather more conservatively.

“Try it out.”

Paul twirled the neck of the bottle between two fingers, aware that he was pouting. But he obeyed; hummed out the new line, and was appalled to find that -

“See?”

“It rolls off the tongue, you’re right.”

“Now try it like this -” Lennon started drumming a be-bop beat off the table, rattling their platoon of discarded glasses. “You could even dance t’it. Be-bop a lua -”

A-whomp-bam-boom, Paul’s brain finished. He grabbed his drink - and Lennon’s - to stop them from rattling straight to the floor. “That’s how I wrote it originally, you know.”

“Seriously?”

Paul nodded, smiling into the collar of his coat. “Yeah, a little rockabilly. But more like -” He drummed out his own counter-beat, and Lennon’s quickly fell in line. E7, A7, B7, E - ah, that was it. They were sat diagonally across from each other, knees knocking, claiming a corner for themselves at the booth nearest the loo, tilted close so they could hear each other above the booming bass of the radio, the chorus at the bar where a grainy, hand-held telly was showing the news in flickering bursts of black and grey: trouble in America, trouble in Indochina. What a terrible thing, to offer nothing more ambitious than a mirror to a world such as this. When Paul caught his drinking companion’s eye, he could swear they were thinking the same chords.

“Well? Give us a show, luv,” Lennon prompted, adding a clap on every off-beat. “A-one, two, three -”

Paul took a deep breath: “ ‘Well she was just seventeen’-”

“That’s right, baby.”

“- ‘you know what I mean’ -”

“I do, I do,”

“- ‘and the way she looked was way beyond compare, sssoooo’ -”

“ ‘How could I dance with another’ -” Lennon chimed in, half an octave lower and in imperfect harmony, “ ‘when I saw her standing there!”

When they laughed, Lennon’s voice went down and Paul’s went up, behind his nose, and the same thing happened when they sang. The vocal lock was so consummate that it reverberated in every one of Paul’s bones; he’d never had a harmony that good on any of his records, not even when he brought in George or one of their old mates in for a session. He looked at Lennon, who was rosy-cheeked and smiling so broad it might crack his face open. The grin could’ve been shit-eating, very ‘oh I told you so, you humdrum straight’, but there wasn’t a hint of self satisfaction in it. Usually, Paul balked at edits, suggestions, critique - all of which were uniformly wont to make his songs worse - but that hadn’t been criticism; it was what he’d wished the song sounded like in the first place.

“It’s slightly, um,” Paul rubbed his nose. “Forward, though.”

Lennon was already rolling his eyes. “Don’t tell me y’talk to -” he paused, took a sip of beer. “- birds the same way you write.”

“‘Course not.”

“So why write songs that way?”

Paul slumped in his seat, realizing that he had no good answer for that. “Are you a songwriter in your spare time, then?” he asked blearily, glowering from under his eyelashes.

“Er, a… a bit I guess...” Lennon’s shoulders drew up tight, like they’d been when he first approached him. “When I was a kid. Had me a guitar in 1956, so like every other boy I wanted t’be Elvis.”

“Before he sold out,” Paul added automatically. An old singer’s fisherman tale, never heeded.

“Fuckin’ right.”

“Why’d you stop?” Paul pushed forward, chin on the heel of his palm and fingertips grazing his jaw. The lighting of the venue had Lennon turning all pink and ghost blue, sinking into the insomniac bruises beneath his eyes, yellowy-and-pale with the red highlights in his hair catching blaze. There were subtleties to this conversation happening beneath the words. John Lennon told Paul that he’d grown up mostly in New Zealand, but it was the blackness of his eyes and the way his fingers clung together that said there was something terribly tragic and exciting behind the story. He liked the idea of his new acquaintance fumbling around the C-chord on the other side of the world at the same time Paul was tucked away in the top room at Forthlin Lane, writing the first draft of that creaky old granny song he hated so much; listening to the same records, thinking the same things about them, but taking that inspiration in such different directions. It felt significant somehow.

“Eh -” Lennon brushed his hair behind one ear, scowling. “Couldn’t sing, couldn’t write, couldn’t play. Didn’t have the -” he reached out to poke Paul in the nose, “- face for it.”

Paul scrunched up his nose and bounced back like Lennon’s fingertip was scalding hot.

“Honestly, sometimes I wish I didn’t.”

Lennon gave him a funny look.

“The face for it, I mean.” Paul ran a hand along his jaw. “Wish I didn’t have it.”

“Didn’t they put you in magazines?” Lennon pried. “All the little girlies calling your name?”

“How long can that last? If I’m being candid, I always hoped I’d make it a,” (lot) “- bit further than Elvis. Not that I made it even that far.”

Paul was shocked by what he’d said. He must have looked it too, because Lennon’s expression only got more inscrutable. He tipped his beer to his lip and took a long drink, not once breaking eye contact. “Is that so.”

Was it so? Paul’s hands were flat on the table, resting as if splayed across piano keys. In the boozy blue light he could see all the notes of his butchered songs sinking into the black shadows pooling around his knuckles. The hill he told himself he was climbing to finally make the kind of music he wanted was getting taller all the time, yet here he was still pushing that old boulder.

Well, that couldn’t be true. Paul was only twenty-four, after all, and besides - keeping his goals realistic was the only reason he’d gotten where he was today. It was unlikely anyone would be as famous as Elvis ever again, nor should that be the point. Like he was always telling Jane: it was about the music, not the swimming pools.

Lennon was still staring at him, as if he really expected an answer. Paul opened his mouth, but was interrupted by a shadow falling across their table.

“John Lennon.”

Lennon’s head whipped around and Paul followed the angle of his sudden, frantic gaze. Towering above them was a diminutive woman of east-Asian descent, dressed for a funeral, a sliver of a severe, majestically granite face shimmering under the lowlights, half-hidden by her cascading, crow-black hair. By process of elimination Paul assumed that this must be Yoko Ono.

“I know it was you,” she said sweetly.

Paul held out a hand. “Good evening, Miss Ono. I really enjoyed the show.”

“Ignore her,” Lennon said, turning away.

Yoko Ono’s eyes slid towards Paul, body following with the grace of sand being pulled out by the tide. “He’s not supposed to be here,” she informed him. Her accent was tinged notably American, practically talking up between-the-eyes like New Yorkers did. “Don’t believe he doesn’t know who you are. He’s always stalking my shows, always looking for some cat to buy him a drink.”

Paul raised an eyebrow. “S’that true?”

Lennon sighed, performatively. “I knew who fuckin’ Paul McCartney was, Christ. I didn’t know you were Paul McCartney.”

“No, that you were using me to get past the bouncer.”

“Ah,” and he had the decency to look sheepish. “Don’t pout, McCharmly, I didn’t pluck you out by accident.”

Paul’s eyebrow had not levelled yet. He wondered if this John Lennon fellow had any clue how absurdly charismatic he was. He must’ve - after all, Paul was the person he’d wanted to buy him a drink tonight, and here Paul was: having just bought him multiple drinks. After what he’d implied about the manipulative character of Miss Ono’s art earlier, it was pretty rich.

But Paul didn’t mind. It was flattering, to have the most interesting person in the room think the same thing about you.

“I know it was you,” Ono repeated.

“Oh,” and Paul set two fingers to his mouth. “The apple.”

“What is your problem?” she demanded.

“I was just engaging with the piece, darling,” but Lennon was looking at Paul when he said all this. “See, if her work’s about trust, then I was contributing to the meaning of it by showing how you can’t trust a hungry man to resist a free meal.”

“I see,” Paul nodded. “Then you’ve turned it into protest piece, about the state of the economy.” It’s not that Paul was trying to make fun of her, but he couldn’t resist the riff.

“And you’re continuing the performance by providing a broke man the temporary ambrosia of drunkenness. Charity and art all at once! If that ain’t the dream of the bourgeoisie!”

“I guess it’s settled then.”

“Nothing has been settled,” Yoko Ono said, which was technically true. Feeling fuzzy from drink and good company, and eager to end the conflict on a reasonable note, Paul dug out his chequebook.

“Miss Ono, let me make it up to y -”

Lennon grabbed Paul by the arm and yanked him 'round so that they were face to face in the tight corner of the booth. “I told you to pay her no mind."

“John,” she said, firmly.

“You did eat her apple…”

“It was there for the eating. 'Sides - that’s not what she’s steamed about, trust me.”

“John,” she purred, so low it slipped beneath the bass booming from the speakers underfoot. Paul did her the courtesy of a glance, but Lennon kept shaking his head.

“Anyroad,” and there it was again, a hint of the North in him, “- weren’t you about to tell me about that new song you’re workin’ on?”

“Was I?” Paul echoed back, airily. Neither of them were drunk enough to believe such a conversation actually happened, but that’s not what Lennon was asking.

“Yeah, the one wit’ the -” and he mimed bashing a keyboard, hummed a couple incoherent notes.

“Joooohn,” Yoko Ono added.

Paul rarely shared his in-progress music. There wasn’t anyone to share it with, besides his producers; Jane didn’t really get it, his father was still in Liverpool, and nothing good had come in the past from sharing too many songs with George.

“Actually,” and Paul “played” the opening to a ditty he’d been toying with all week. “It went like this.” He hummed it. Then he kept going. Eleanor Rigby picks up the rice in a church where a wedding has been, hm, hmmm, la, da, di, la, la, la.

“John, John, Joooohnn, John, John,” went Miss Ono’s breathy accompaniment. She set her small hands on the edge of the table and curved forward.

John John Jooooohnnn Lennon fished a bent cigarette from his pocket and lit it on the candle flickering above the booth, eyes flashing amber in the haze. “Pretty, but a little thin.”

“Thin?”

“Lean, no fat. Some lonely bint in a church, then she dies? What else? What’s it all about, McCartney?”

“It’s obvious what it’s about,” Paul replied stiffly.

“Jooooohn. Jooooooooohnnnn.” Ono was experimenting with tones now.

“You’re supposed to juxtapose the music and the story, to see what’s not being said.” It really was very obvious.

“Joooooooooooooohnnn!”

Lennon made an extremely rude noise with his nose. “That’s no good.”

With unflinching boldness not usually seen in a woman, Yoko Ono swept aside the fleet of empty glasses they had amassed over the course of the night and climbed onto the table.

“Er-?” Paul said.

Lennon took a leisurely drag off his smoke and resolutely continued to pay her no mind. “If you’re looking for the audience to fill in th’ gaps,” he murmured, tone liquid and deeply personal somehow, gaze so intense and unwaveringly fixed on him that Paul couldn’t help but ignore her too. “- they’ll end up using whatever boring shit’s already in their head. That’s why you’re the writer, and they’re the listeners.”

Paul frowned. “You think so?”

“Sure, the whole point is that you gotta have a perspective. What d’you think loneliness is? What d’you think fate means? The job of the artist’s to make them think something new.”

“To see past their veils of truth?” Paul appended softly. He felt like he was a glass ball hanging on a thread, and like his strange new friend was holding a pair of very large scissors. Perhaps he was drunker than he’d thought, the whole scene taking on a rather dreamlike quality, all quicksilver and unreal. Ono was crawling towards them, light as the reflection of moonlight on still water, and John Lennon had sidled in so close that he had to brace a hand on Paul’s knee to keep upright.

“Tell me, Paul McCartney -” The candle’s reflection was chasing itself around and around inside the pools of Lennon’s spectacles. “What’s on the other side of yours?”

There was nowhere else to look but at him, his long, sharp features blinkered in the dusky shroud of cigarette smoke. At some point they had passed beyond the veil in real life, and didn’t Lennon say that you can’t always know what it is you’re bringing back from the other side?

“I -” Paul breathed at the same time Yoko Ono picked up an empty bottle, set it to Lennon’s ear, and shrieked his name at the top of her lungs.

“Are ya trying to pop me fucking eardrums you unhinged bat!” he shrieked back, and promptly: the spell was broken. With a smile so subtle it might have all been Paul’s imagination, Yoko set the bottle down and poured herself off the table like mercury.

“I told you, John,” she said cryptically, a rebuttal in some argument Paul would never be privy to. For a moment, Lennon’s full attention was on her, and he went white as a sheet.

So:

It did turn out that he - one John Lennon, esquire - was not supposed to be there; not in The Dog and Duck, or the Indica for that matter. And so: impulsively, Paul decided to leave with him - short-breathed and giggling, through the back exit by the kitchen which patrons were not permitted to use, not having bothered to say his goodbyes to Barry at the galley, who had invited him, or checking in with Jane’s brother, who might've been expecting him somewhere else in an hour. There were low clouds rolling over the Tower, sheets of fog on the river. Between the cracks, the stars were burning brighter than the street below. Something inside was telling him that he should play this conversation out to its natural conclusion.

“She’s a fuckin’ witch - I swear to you, McCartney, she’s been stuffing me mailbox full of hexes for months now.” Lennon blew into his hands, breath misting in the crisp, November air.

“You’ve had her then?”

“Don’t even joke, mate.” Lennon made a show of shivering from head to toe.

Paul was not convinced. “There’s no reason a bird should hate you that much otherwise.”

Lennon hesitated, chewing the side of his mouth. After a moment, he jerked his chin towards the mouth of the alley, gesturing for Paul to walk with him.

“It’s her career she thinks I fucked,” he explained vaguely.

“How’s that?” Paul asked as they turned onto the street.

“Thinks I scalped a patron off her.”

“Did you?”

“If I did, they’d’ve been my patron by now. Do I look like I have them?” Lennon waved over his ratty clothes with demonstrative vigour. Both legs of his jeans had holes in the knee.

“No.”

“There’s your answer.”

“But did you have them?” Paul teased.

Lennon’s eyes rounded out, like he didn’t get the joke. Do I really come off that square, Paul wondered? But it passed quickly and they were laughing in synch again. “That’s how all the artistes did it in ye olden days,” Lennon sung that part, in the style of an obnoxious radio personality. “Down on me knees, under the table. Not much different from what you do, really.”

Paul chose to ignore that. “What sort of under the table work got you banned from the Indica?”

Lennon shoved his hands in his pocket. “Tried to sell ‘em a piece of art.”

Another mystery to tuck away behind the filing cabinet. Lennon dug around in his coat, and produced a fag and lighter. Paul was gesturing for a puff before he finished lighting up.

“You smoke grass?” Lennon wondered, a tad bewildered, and then the smell hit Paul.

That he started coughing was answer enough. “Uh, couple of me mates do,” he stammered, pinned by Lennon’s amused smile. “Sometimes.”

“ ‘Me mates!’ he says!”

Paul waved the smoke out of his face. “H-hey, I grew up on the Mersey y’know. Should you be smoking that in the middle of the road?”

Lennon ignored the second thing to pounce on the first: “What a coincidence! I was born in Liverpool too!” The "was" came out closer to "warse", as if to underscore.

“Explains the accent.” Paul couldn’t tuck away his delighted grin. It was a coincidence, and what a one. Paul wasn’t generally taken with the astrology craze sweeping the subcultures - signs and portents, and all that; he was one always determined to go his own way. But this - what was this? A meeting that was meant to happen? Long diverted? Paul was drunk, and bright are the stars that shine, dark is the sky and the mischief moving under the current of John Lennon’s Cheshire Cat eyes; and maybe a little stoned too, already, from inhaling that smoke. Permit him to think something about it.

Even though there was conversation on the other side of the street, although a car surged past them, then another, outlining them with misty headlights, Paul reached out and snatched the joint from Lennon’s lips. He took a deep hit, held it for probably too long. Definitely too long, if the jaunty dance Lennon’s mouth was doing was anything to go by. Comically long, perhaps.

He was hacking before he exhaled.

“You’ll get used to it,” Lennon promised with a chuckle, slapping him on the back. “C’mon. Let’s go wandering.”

They spent about eighteen hours merrily exploring St. James’s Park. Only a slight under-estimation, Paul supposed, made by his neophyte drug brain. The second twenty-six hours of those eighteen were spent explicitly looking for the exit, but they kept each other entertained by quoting their favourite Goon Show skits, which inevitably waylaid them in a fierce duel to determine whose Goon knowledge was more freakishly complete.

A duel Lennon easily won. “Don’t worry,” he said, flicking Paul in the forehead. “Just means I’ve spent more time lazing around on me arse.”

To escape the park, they were forced to hop a fence. Lennon grabbed two pikes and vaulted over the top like a madman, a tumbling ball of yellow corduroy and ratty trousers. Once again a stray cat: he landed on his feet, and ambled himself upright drunkenly. Grinned drunkenly too. “McCartney,” he demured, wheeling about, all fake-gentleman. He made a show of offering of his clasped hands through the bars to give Paul a boost.

Paul leant in and cupped both palms around his mouth. “Jooooohnnnn!!!” he stage whispered, a near-perfect imitation of Yoko’s glass-shattering wail.

John dropped him on the pavement, they were both laughing so hard. It must have been late; there were no cars, no one around. The fog had crawled into the streets, which were bathed in the firefly glow of veiled streetlamps. The veil of truth, Paul thought, it hasn’t lifted yet. They halved another joint and John relayed to him a long, rambling - and naturally, riveting - story about him and his old gang (literal?) squatting a summer in some old Colonial estate that’d been slated for demolition. His mate Derrick, y’see - and they all told him the date they had to be out by so it was no one to blame - well he got the date wrong and was asleep on the top floor when the wrecking ball rolled up. The thing is: other than that, Dunedin was so fuuuucking boring a man could go mad. He really could.

“No choice except t’cause trouble,” Paul agreed.

“Yeah?” John nudged him with an elbow. “I bet you were a good kid. Mind your p’s and q’s, got your A-levels and all that.”

“I wasn’t good or bad,” Paul answered matter of factly.

“Oh, when'd you become so darn-ed angelic, then? Our gentle, baby faced, Mellow McCartney?”

Paul looked away, still matter of fact. “I’m not as good as all that,” he said quietly, and swayed to a stop. John followed suit, holding himself carefully. They’d drifted near his neighbourhood, Paul noticed, and the conversation had drifted to something approaching a choke point.

Except that when he raised his chin to meet Lennon’s intrigued gaze, Paul felt that the current was still going, an ebb and flow of engagement tugging them in the same direction for a little while longer.

“Say, why don’t you come back to mine?”

Both of John’s eyebrows went straight to the hairline, disappeared beneath his cap. Paul tipped his head to one side and waited him out. He wasn’t sure why he was the one waiting on the approval of this odd man who’d apparently been banned from every major art venue in the city, but there it was.

“Uh,” John scratched his ear nervously, curiously subdued. “Sure, mate.”

He was quiet as Paul let him into his home. Paul: clicked the foyer lights on, lit the kitchen, put on a kettle. “You can leave your coat anywhere, I don’t keep a cleaner,” he chirped when he noticed John was uncomfortable. He didn’t think his townhouse was so showy, but Lennon had said a number of things over the course of the night to imply that his current place of residence was not necessarily paid for, nor legal. He didn’t want the man to think he was rubbing it in his face.

When he brought out the tea, John was still standing at the mouth of the hall, cheeks ruddy, hair curling from the humidity, looking deeply conflicted.

“Er, McCartney. Look -”

Paul pushed a cup into his frigid hands. “Come with me.”

John raised his face slowly, eyes wide, and nodded once. Paul led him upstairs to the music room, left him to linger in the doorway as he set his tea on the windowsill and thumbed through his record collection, whistling the open strains of ‘Wouldn’t it be Nice’ as he went. “Ah, here we go.”

He spun to his feet and presented the sleeve of Pet Sounds for John’s approval.

Lennon’s face was hidden in the shadow cast by the hall, but Paul could tell his expression was more bemused than amused. There was a tick of silence between them - quivering like the skin of a half-cooked egg, tense with some energy Paul couldn’t place - before John strode into the room, one ginger step at a time, an ambiguous slant to his head, lips twitching like a livewire.

“You dragged me halfway down the bloody Thames,” he exclaimed, voice hoarse. “- t’listen to the bleedin’ Beach Boys!?”

--

Yet a few hours later Paul was laying on his back with his acoustic guitar slung ‘cross his stomach, strumming away, and John Lennon was laying opposite of him - their ears an inch apart - singing at the top of his lungs. He’d coaxed John into belting out Smokey's ‘You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me’, for no other reason than that he thought he might sound good doing it.

“ ‘Oh, oh, oh, wanna a banana split now, I can’t quit now’ -”

His grasp on the lyrics could use some work though.

“ ‘You really got a hoooooooooold on meeeeee’,” John crooned, voice cracking at a pitch that went straight through the heart. A knife that didn’t hurt. Paper being crumpled in a closed fist. Something like that; there was a quality to it, tender and ineffable.

“Bull you can’t sing, you lying arse,” Paul observed generously.

“So you’re deaf. Explains why your music sounds the way it does.”

“I’m serious. Your voice, it’s very, hm,” Paul plucked a few chords to illustrate what he meant. “It’s natural, is all. Seems like y’feel the music.” John matched his scale, yowling like a cat being tortured in an alley. Paul flailed a hand out blindly, attempted to whack him in the side of the head. “Stop that!” he scolded, and missed by about the width of a football field.

“He’s not deaf, ladies and gentlemen!” John shouted, rolling out a ringmaster-esque salute with his long, pointy arms. “The man is stoned beyond all rational thought!”

A door slammed at the end of the hallway.

“Paul?”

Paul snapped to sitting. There was Jane: standing in the door, her coat still on, an umbrella dangling off one delicate arm, early-morning mist all clung to her tangerine hair in an aura. She had that look on her face, the perfectly blank one she used when she was assessing a situation and hadn’t decided yet how to feel about it.

“Peter missed you last night,” she said. “Is everything okay?” Her nostrils were flaring, but she was doing her best to remain composed.

Oh, Paul realized, the entire room absolutely reeked of marijuana, and he had been expected by Peter Asher and company at The Art's Club after the show. These factors taken into consideration, the whole scene must have looked rather odd to dearest Jane.

John rose with the grandeur of the Mummy from the crypt. “Ah, there she is,” he crowed, far too bright and bubbly for whatever ungodly hour of the morning they’d passed by. “The famous movie actress!”

Jane reacted with a very mild, crane-like tilt of the neck. She wasn’t that famous. “Who’s this?” she asked Paul.

Good question. Acquaintance? Friend? Barmy foreigner whom Paul was now obligated to give a writing credit on his next single? “This is John Lennon,” he settled on. “Met him at the show. He’s -” and John stifled a laugh, just barely, as if he knew where Paul was going with it, “- a friend of the arist.”

"Aye," John agreed, smile all secrets and teeth. "A friend of the artist!"

Jane examined Paul under the microscope of her gaze. “Have you been up all night?”

Paul yawned in response.

“Want a prellie?” John asked conversationally, producing an Altoids tin from his trouser pocket.

“A what?”

“Uh - nevermind.” John - still in his coat and boots - bounced to his feet, a coiled spring unfurled. He popped a mint from the tin and stretched at the ceiling. “Weeee-heeee-eeeelll,” he groaned, voice creaky as his popped joints, “it’s time, I fear, to take me leave of the beautiful people before all this finery turns me square.” He mimed a bow to Paul: “Sir McCartney -” and a curtsey to Jane, “Ms. Asher, a delight, I assure you.” And then, as abruptly as he’d disrupted Paul’s evening, he was gone.

Jane dipped on her heel and watched him disappear down the stairs. “He’s an artist you said?”

“Not in this fascist economy,” Paul shrugged, smiling dumbly to himself. The man hadn’t even left a phone number! Ah - what an absurd confluence of serendipity; Paul’s head was filled with music, more than usual: notes and trills and arpeggios, growing branches and winding together bramble-tight. Even when Jane coaxed a cup'a chamomile into him and put him to bed, he was kept alive and fresh by it, humming in his sleep.

“You’ve been quiet today,” Jane noted over dinner.

“I’m thinking,” he mumbled, pressing the tines of his fork to his bottom lip.

“A new song?”

Paul nodded, absently. “Mm. And about the conversation I had with that John Lennon chap last night.”

“A conversation, was it?”

“Huh?”

Jane shaved a layer from her chicken breast with educated elegance. “I’d thought maybe you were -” she paused, searching for the terminology. “Well, you know what I mean.”

Oh - she meant “doing” “something”, “some” “thing” stronger than a little grass. Paul waved the thought away, literally, with a judicious swing of his knife. “No, no, we just talked.”

For an eternity. He’d met John Lennon around six PM, and they’d parted ways at eight in the morning. He and Jane talked for five hours uninterrupted on their first date, which Paul took as an unprecedented sign of compatibility at the time. What did it all mean? A life-changing chance encounter? An entire life's worth of friendship, acted out over the course of an evening? The conversation was playing on repeat inside his skull, around and around, a record that never needs turning over, grinding vinyl to bone. There were things sparking off in there, new ideas, about art, about life, about the world. Paul couldn’t put them into words, he could only write a song about it. Eleanor Rigby sits in a church, trapped in a mirror, face in a glass, a hall with no truth, hm, hmm, hmmmm. What is loneliness? A world where the mirror has nothing to show you but your own face?

He brought it to the studio four days later.

“ ‘Lo George.” He nodded when George swept in, guitar slung over the shoulder and trails of his coat dripping wet from the early November rain.

" 'Lo, Paul."

“Got something new. Think you might like this one.”

George peaked one of those long, foreboding eyebrows, curiosity lighting his face. Lately, he’d been getting session gigs on the kind of tracks he was actually interested in so strumming backup to Paul’s mouldering ballads was something of a favour these days, Paul supposed, in deference to their brotherly relationship. His old friend was famously tight-lipped, slow boil, still waters, all that. More Liverpool than the Mersey herself.

“Play it, then,” George said.

So Paul played it. Shut his eyes and let it spool out by itself. Playing into an empty studio was like dropping ink in water: the notes diffused in the air, melted against the dampened walls. Lingered around them in wisps of faint, blurry colour. It 'd been a minute since Paul wrote a song that felt like this, felt like it existed before he ever thought of it, in some distant, ancestral memory of the human race.

“So? What'd you think?” he asked after.

“Sounds nothing like you,” George observed.

Paul’s smile went all the way to his toes. With an impish wink, he replied: “I know.”

- and thank fucking God.