Neighbors
By Peter Nekrasov
It’s been a couple months since Mark died and still nobody knows what happened. Some say heart attack, some say overdose. A few days ago I got a letter from Mark’s former manager, saying he left me his old house on Middleham Road, and inside the envelope there was a key to the thing. I hadn’t lived there since ’85, so I hopped in the car and drove uptown.
I remember when Mark first moved into the house across the street. It was a small square box with an old rusty finish, and it seemed to sway in the breeze like a hologram. Ever since he got there, he seemed like he was trying to get away from something, some dark cloud called the Seventies. It ran deep—he was nearly broke, dropped out of university after a short time studying psychology, and ditched his old folks’ flat in Fulham once he found a job nearby at some metalworks. Nobody knew much about him—he was a shifting presence, quiet yet unruly, always apt to deceive.
The only person I ever saw him with was his older brother Ed, who played in a few local bands and occasionally spun disco records at the Rio. Ed always brought him things: biscuits, records, newspapers. They listened to jazz, played football, laughed about Mark’s new anarchist pogo band The Shits, a play on the same-town legends The Slits. At the time, punk rock was all the rage: everyone who listened to The Clash went out and bought a beat-up guitar at their local garage sale, Mark included. It was fun and so it tore him apart: punk rock was nothing but a reminder that the true thrill of music was gone, that everything was laid out in the open. While it gave him the confidence to play, it was a deep discomfort with the honest-to-god directness of it that led him to seek opacity, sell his guitar for a Wurlitzer, and start meditating long hours in the dark.
At night he was writing songs and recording demos at home. He would take breaks at a nearby pub or someplace rowdier, and I’d watch him return late in his old Ford Escort, suspension bouncing, tailpipe spitting sparks whenever it touched the ground. When I looked across the street, there was a light on in the master bedroom, and I could make out some vague figure moving behind the curtain. He felt similar to me—we were both withdrawn and obsessive over our work, the true work for which life seemed like a distraction.
When his new band got signed to EMI (same as Roxy Music, like he wanted) and put out a Top 40 hit, he flew the coop. He was recording in Highbury and touring Canada, and I didn’t see him for years. No one moved in to replace him—his house just sat there, swirling with memories, full of ghosts. It was crowded in by trees, big and small. Some days they were festooned with insects, snails, seashells sticking to the leaves, waiting to be submerged in the flood. But they were eventually replaced with one sole tree whose dying branches formed a globe. Different birds gravitated towards the tree, sitting in the shapes of various continents, chirping restlessly, keeping vigil.
When I got there, there was a light on in my old house. I didn’t bother checking in, and instead I walked up the path to Mark’s house. When I put my hand on the door, I thought everything might spill out. I felt weightless as I walked in; his house had acquired the air of discarded objects. On the dining room table there were papers and endless clutter. I spent the afternoon going through it all: reminders (Meeting with Keith, 14/4/88), scraps of lyrics (Place my chair at the backroom door / Help me up / I can’t wait anymore), addresses, receipts, phone numbers, misremembered quotations, mail orders, deposit slips, diatonic scales. There was a page ripped out of some book, tucked in the case of an unlabeled cassette. On the top of the paper he had scribbled MYRRHMAN in black marker. It read:
At the station there’s a lonely traveler, waiting for the midnight train. It’s been a while since he got there—he checks the station clock—and he’s still waiting. His thighs are getting sore and his stomach is beginning to grumble. He fumbles around in the pockets of his sweatpants, a few nickels in loose change, hopefully enough for the fare. He doesn’t know where he’s going, but he knows he is chasing the image of someone who has been forgotten.
Somewhere far off the train is hissing in the night, cloud of smoke trailing. He’s listening for the echo but it’s dead air. He refuses to look into the camera. And then comes a chirping like a cricket, humming at the frequency of earth, or maybe a dolphin. It’s been a while since I’ve seen one of those, he thinks, maybe decades. He is only at the beginning of a long journey that will take him into the sun.
He is unsure of what the train will bring. A somber melody, a wailing chord? or perhaps the final deliverance which will allow him to breathe.
The page ends. Somehow it made sense to open with death, greet it and get it out of the way. It was an ending marking a beginning. In retrospect, his later work was how I had always imagined him—sparse, stark, and insular. His last was a record that anticipated the tearing down of structures, the disbanding of his sole project, and his disappearance into oblivion. He loved music, however privately, and channeled this love in obscure ways, sometimes taking a step back and simply allowing emotion to delight in itself. Mark was a man of deep uncertainty and introspection, a memory that continually refuses to be forgotten.