Chapter Text
Paul knew, before he even set foot on the cobbled pavement, that he was going to fall in love.
“Cor, this is a quaint place, innit?” George remarked, squinting out of the car windshield. The houses rolled by them in a blur of pink and blue and yellow, a row of seaside houses that bled cheerful colour in between streaks of salt from the coast.
Paul hummed in agreement, looking out at the rocky cliff below. As he watched, seagulls swooped and swerved from their perches on cragged rocks, teasing the black waves from the North Sea that crashed upwards to meet them. Although they had the windows of the car sealed tightly shut against the chilling bite of the spring air, Paul could still smell that unique smell indigenous to the sea: the smell of salt and rot, of death and life and kinetic energy. A visceral feeling enveloped him, something that spoke to his marrow and told him that he was exactly where he was meant to be.
Contented, Paul stretched his legs to rest on the dash of the car, earning him a swift elbow in the ribs from George.
“Oi! Watch it, you!’
Early on in their friendship, Paul had learned that George always spoke in a slow, meandering drawl, as if nothing he could possibly say was worth speaking faster than he deigned to — a quirk which took the vehemence out of his voice, and rendered most of his protests null.
“I’ll not have you fall asleep on me. You’ve navigated us this far, and now I need you to find us a pub and our inn — and in that order! I feel like I’ve been driving for days.”
“You’ve been driving for four hours, you nit, and you had fish and chips not even an hour ago.”
“Aye, but I’m a growing lad, aren’t I? I’m in need of nourishment.”
“Wee Georgie,” Paul teased, reaching over to muss George’s dark, carefully-styled quiff. “I forgot that I was traveling with an infant.”
“Nine months, Paul.” George groused, swerving away from Paul’s ruffling hand and almost driving the car off the side of the road in the process. There was a twang of protest from one of the guitars, stashed in the back of the car along with their other instruments. “For the last time.”
It’s still true though, Paul thought, but snorted good-naturedly and consulted his map, eyes tracing over the lines that had taken them from the grey skies of Liverpool to this sequestered village overlooking the sea. There was a twinge in his chest as he looked at the small black dot that represented his old home — Liverpool, Liddypool, deus nobis haec otia fecit — a dot that marked the place where he had spent over twenty years of his life, where he had been born, where he had first learned to play guitar, where he had said goodbye to his mother. He couldn’t identify what he felt when he looked at the small blip on the page, and if he was honest with himself, he didn’t care to. The distance seemed to make everything smaller, anyway, and eased the constriction in his lungs.
“Are we almost there, at least?” George grumbled, drumming his hands on the steering wheel in a true skiffle beat.
Paul quickly peered out the window and then back down at the map spread over his legs, trying to judge their location. “Should be,” he affirmed. “The Fox and Hounds Pub is right on this road, actually, so you’d be blind to miss it. And the inn… the inn is right down the street from it.”
Satisfied that they weren’t about to drive off merrily into the sea, Paul glanced at George’s hands, still in the throes of beating out an unconscious rhythm. Parsing together the tempo in his head, Paul began to whistle out loud, hamming up the high notes until it was distinguishable as nothing other than Little Richard.
Eyes gleaming in recognition, George quickly began moving his hands with purposeful intent, thumping out a tiny drum solo on the steering wheel that had Paul laughing in his seat. Music was what had drawn them together in the first place, and what continued to cement their friendship years later. Paul wouldn’t have it any other way. No one else that he had ever met understood music, not like George did.
Grinning to himself, Paul glanced again at the sea, the waves tossing and curling around one another, the rocks standing in stoic supervision. Impulsively, he wondered what it would be like to jump out of the car, through the passenger side window or door, off of the twisting road and into the water below — not in a ‘wanting-to-end-it-all’ sort of way, but in the absent-minded way one wants to experience life in all of its indelible possibilities. He imagined that it would be quite cold, and biting; he imagined that he could feel his mouth and nostrils filling with saltwater, his eyes burning and blinking against the sting.
A bump in the road jolted Paul out of his reverie. Tearing his eyes away from the water, Paul could barely make out what appeared to be a lighthouse in the smudged distance. Painted in whorls of red and white, it sat upon the cliff’s edge like a matriarch, carefully watching as their car approached the salt-streaked houses of her slumbering town.
The next morning Paul awoke to sun streaming into his eyes and unfamiliar linens scratching against his cheek. He blinked blearily and stretched, feeling the remnants of hours slouched in a car the day prior make themselves known in the dull ache of his muscles. The details of the room slowly filtered through his sleep-heavy haze, bathed in yellow sunlight and pastel tones: his feet poking out from under a knitted blanket, thrown over a two poster bed; a wooden desk shoved haphazardly in a corner, strewn with bits of paper and ink; a surprisingly elegant faux balcony, flanked by sheer lace curtains that swayed delicately in the spring breeze. The whole room smelled like varnished wood, and maybe mothballs, and a little like the smell that clothes get when they’re left out to dry in the sun for too long.
Paul wasn’t sure what to expect when he had called to enquire about cheap places to stay in the town, but the inn — from what little he’d seen of it so far — was surprisingly… nice. Matronly. An old radio played from a room somewhere below his own, some show tune from the 50s, and Paul winced as he opened his mouth to hum along. His breath, never pleasant in the morning to begin with, smelled like beer and chips and somewhat like that bird he’d snogged the night before. The reminder of last night’s blurry debauchery, juxtaposed against the patterned wallpaper and motherly decor surrounding his bed, made Paul feel vaguely guilty, as though he had done something that he shouldn’t have.
As he looked around he felt something flutter against his forehead, sticking feather-like to his skin for an instant before drifting towards the floor. Frowning, he peered over the side of the bed and was greeted with George’s familiar untidy scrawl.
Gone to breakfast with Astrid. I’ll catch up with you tonight — don’t sleep too long, you lazy sod.
George had scribbled a smiley face at the end of the note, complete with a wobbly upturned mouth and crooked eyes. Paul stared at it blankly. Astrid, his mind helpfully supplied, was a fellow wayfarer that they had met at the pub last night.
Paul rolled his eyes and blew out his cheeks. Good for George, the wily bugger, Paul thought, but he couldn’t help but also feel slightly abandoned. Leaving the piece of paper where it had fallen, he finally roused himself from bed and stalked off towards the adjoining bathroom, intent on scraping the taste of beer and brunette from his mouth.
Shortly after he had rinsed his teeth, combed back his hair into its usual inky quiff, and thrown on a ratty bathrobe he had fished out from George’s luggage in the room next door, he settled on the bed with his guitar, thinking, rather optimistically, that he’d finish some songwriting. After all, he and George had traveled to this offbeat village-by-the-sea not just to briefly escape their dear old dock town, but to hopefully pick up a couple of music gigs — Paul wanted to be prepared. He had a half-formed melody floating around in the back of his mind, a somber and nostalgic wisp of a thing that had come to him in a dream, but he couldn’t seem to find the words to match it. He mucked around the chord progressions for a bit, strumming his guitar half-heartedly and singing about scrambled eggs to fill in the gaping holes in the lyrics.
Tiring quickly of his lack of progress, and feeling rather lonely without George’s persistent drawl in his ear, Paul ended up dozing the rest of the morning, until he was awakened by a great clamor taking place outside on the street below. The sound of a wooden door slamming violently against its frame reached his ears, accompanied by the outraged voices of two men unleashing a torrent of angry verbiage into the previously silent street. Paul sat up in alarm. Twisting to extract himself from his cocoon of bedsheets, he stumbled to his window, placing his hands on the railing and leaning forward to gaze down at the scene beneath him.
From his position on the second floor, he could clearly see a short, angry man with a shockingly large nose shout abuse at someone just beyond Paul’s line of sight. As Paul watched, a frying pan came hurtling out of nowhere, spinning towards the man and almost smacking him square in the face. To Paul’s bewilderment, the man seemed unfazed.
“I will not have that damn deadbeat music in my shop at lunchtime!” the man yelled, retrieving the frying pan and flinging it back towards its source. “And you will not treat my kitchenware like a fuckin’ rugby ball!”
“Last I heard, it was a free bloody country!” Paul heard the second man shout in reply, the timbre of his voice rough and nasal and distinctly Scouse.
“Exactly!” The first man bellowed, flinging his hand towards a building across from the inn. “And my customers should be free to eat in peace, without you snarling sweet nothings about — what was it? — penitentiaries directly into their eardrums!”
“Your customers wouldn’t know good music if it bit them in the bollocks!”
“That’s another thing! There will also be no biting of bollocks in my establishment, you hear me?”
“You what?”
“Oh come off it, Lennon!” The first man had seemingly calmed from his original outburst, arms crossed in front of his chest and face molded into a look of stern displeasure. “I’m not putting anything past you and your wooly ways.”
Although Paul still couldn’t see the man’s assailant, the wall of the inn obstructing his view of the street below, he could still clearly hear his reply: A distant “Fuck off, Ringo” and a spiteful comment along the lines of “I’ll show you wooly ways”. A small smile twitched at the corners of the first man’s mouth — Ringo, Paul surmised.
The conflict seemingly resolved, Paul made to turn away from his balcony, not wanting to be caught as an unwelcome spectator. However, something told him to watch a little while longer, a tug of intuition that rooted him to the spot. A man was quickly entering Paul’s line of sight, approaching Ringo and the section of the street just below Paul, the weaponized frying pan dangling at his side. He was significantly taller than Ringo and angular in a captivating way, his broad shoulders tapering to a narrow waist and endless legs that covered the pavement in long strides. Clapping a hand on Ringo’s back, the man muttered what sounded like a rather begrudging apology in his ear. As Paul watched, Ringo laughed kindly, accepting the proffered frying pan and embracing the man in turn. The two spoke quietly for a moment, heads bowed together, differences apparently forgotten for the time being. Just as the taller man began to step away from Ringo, his eyes, as if by a thread, looked up to where Paul was standing.
When they made eye contact, a surge of energy snapped along Paul’s spine. He stared wide-eyed at the other man, his breath hitching in his throat. The man’s eyes were angular, arresting; an unsettlingly deep, honeyed brown framed by long eyelashes, slightly squinted against the afternoon sun and giving him an overall intense, assessing manner. The smooth planes of his face accentuated a long, aquiline nose, sitting atop a mouth that had a downcast turn etched into it — as if the man’s unbidden face was one of displeasure. His eyebrows were thick and partially covered by his hair, which fell in rebellious auburn strands across his forehead.
Adrenaline coursed through Paul’s bloodstream, whipping through his veins and causing his heart to hammer wildly against his chest. He didn’t understand what was happening but he didn’t want to look away. In fact, whenever he tried to break their eye contact, Paul found that he couldn’t, something primal and instinctive instructing him to hold his gaze. The man seemed similarly afflicted, watching Paul in a way that made it seem as if he was loath to stop. Distantly, Paul noticed that the man’s skin was pale and lightly freckled, and as Paul stared, it tinted a dusky pink.
If time had passed while they stared at each other, Paul wouldn’t have noticed. He wasn’t sure if days or mere seconds had gone by when, out of the corner of his eye, he could see Ringo nudging the man with his elbow, eyebrows drawn together in confusion. Following his gaze up to Paul’s balcony, his face cleared, and he huffed and shoved the other man again, this time in a more teasing manner.
“What?” The man snapped, finally breaking the trance when he shifted to face Ringo with a scowl.
“You just seem a little distracted there, mate,” Ringo said, nose twitching in amusement.
The man scowled harder, bestowing yet another “Fuck off, Ringo” upon the smaller man. As Paul watched, he shoved his hands deep into his leather jacket pockets and stalked off in the direction of the sea, beyond where the main street ended towards the rocky coastline. Before turning the corner, he threw an irritated, baleful look in Paul’s direction, then disappeared from sight. Both Paul and Ringo stood immobile for a moment, watching the place where the man had vanished. Silence descended upon the street once more, but it was a peculiar silence — the silence that arrives in the aftermath of some transformative world event, where everyone waits on bated breath to see if it will last.
Coughing lightly to capture Ringo’s attention, Paul called down to the street below.
“Who was that man?”
Ringo blinked slowly, as if considering whether to answer the question.
“What do you mean?”
“His name,” Paul tried again. “What’s his name?”
Another pause.
“Lennon,” Ringo answered at last. “John Lennon.”
Rather than linger in the street, Ringo apologized for the noise and promptly bade Paul good afternoon, crossing the street to enter the building directly across from Paul. A sign overhead proclaimed it to be Hurricane’s Cafe, which meant that it was presumably the ‘shop’ at the center of the mad altercation. The door closed behind him with a decisive thud.
John Lennon. Paul thought the name over and over in his head as he stumbled his way back to the bed. John Lennon. The name sounded right in his head, as if Paul was meant to think it, and when he said it out loud it sounded right in the wallpapered walls of his room, as if Paul was meant to say it. Paul collapsed on the bed, staring at the ceiling.
When they were younger, around 15 and 14, George had begun what had turned out to be a lifelong obsession with Indian culture. He loved sitar music, and transcendental meditation, and eventually he introduced Paul to Hinduism, or as Paul sardonically remembered, ‘the eternal way.’ Paul had patiently endured George’s impassioned ramblings, and he had enjoyed seeing the enthused spark of ardor that had illuminated his eyes, but for a teenaged Paul — who was so young, and had already lost so much, and had become disillusioned with faith entirely — the only higher power that he could possibly even think to worship was rock ‘n’ roll. Music could never hurt him, and it could never let him down. Elvis was his God; his half-scribbled lyrics were his prayers. While George had dutifully recited his Hare Krishnas, Paul had stolen the latest Buddy Holly and the Crickets album from the local record store.
However, sitting on the quilted bed of a tiny inn by the sea, thinking of a boy he had just met with red hair and clever eyes, Paul couldn’t help but plead to a higher power. Krishna help me, he prayed, then thought again, slightly helplessly: John Lennon.