42 - The Lost Years.

As soon as Dave Gill has left the Vicarage, Douglas hurries back to the record player, drops an LP onto the turntable, lowers the needle, and sighs with relief as the first few bars of Tchaikovsky's Violin concerto emerge from the speakers. He knows he's been 'worked on' in some way and is pleased with the deep, rarified satisfaction that the music gives him, the way it blends with the time-softened furniture, the books from floor to ceiling either side of the chimney breast, the piano in the corner with some Bach spread out on the music rack. This is me, Douglas thinks, but as he drifts off on the waves of sound it is Dave's words that are still washing around in his mind. "Those were my 'dark years', Rev", the phrase comes back to him. This was a period of about 15 years in which Dave was drinking heavily and using heroine. It's a kind of lost period, Dave has explained. Memories a bit of a blur. Marriage breaking up. Selfishness. Not being there for Xag. Now he's 'clean'. Although Douglas has learned that this doesn't include, or rather, exclude, Pot, which after years of heroine abuse, is like a menthol cigarette, apparently.



Douglas picks up his note-book from the occasional table. He'd been writing down some ideas for his sacred play when Dave arrived full of energy, on his own trajectory, irresistable. Douglas scans over his own familiar handwriting, trying to pick up the threads, but the moment of absorption has passed. Dave clearly sees The Dark Years as an essential part of his Spritual Journey, Douglas reflects. Jesus was in the wilderness for 40 days and 40 nights, Dave was in a drug-addled stupor for nigh on fifteen years, which is why he's so obsessed with 'the voice of him that cryeth in the wilderness', "Because that's a bit like how I was, Vic, y'know?" Douglas smiles to himself. In a bizarre way he's almost jealous of Dave's dark vortex of self-annihilation. He had to reach rock bottom, absolutely rock bottom, he said, to come back out again, to choose to live. What Douglas has when he looks back is not so much dark years, as grey years. Suddenly whole decades start to fuse. From his early childhood up to and including his time at University the memories are like Chrystal, full of light and colour and magic, but after that it's just a succession of events. He tries to find some memories that have the same potency of those of his youth - there are a few high points: formal achievements, some nice holidays, the birth of his children, but where is he in all of it? He's as absent as Dave.


He feels an envious satisfaction that Dave's decades of pure unbounded hedonism did eventually lead to despair and confusion, to a splintering of his self, lost somewhere in countless random sexual encounters, in hard drugs and booze, in a strange parallel world of celebrity and excess. Douglas feels this validates his more circumspect approach to life, confirms that it has its own integrity, a core of self-preservation, at least. And it's not as though Douglas hasn't had a rich interior life, motivated by intellectual curiosity. Common sense is out of fashion, he knows that. He smiles and thinks to himself "It's society's crime, not ours." And yet in another way, there are curious parallels. It strikes Douglas that they are both performers. That they have both chosen professions in which one becomes a kind of public property, a 'persona'. Douglas' parishioners can no more fathom the real, complex, human being beneath the cassock, than Dave's fans can see the real man beneath the black leather. He has been fascinated to hear Dave talk about his fans, the care he takes not to disappoint them 'in real life'.

Douglas has also been surprised to learn that Dave is almost a decade older than him, a fact he finds some comfort in. He is not particularly relishing the thought of his fiftieth birthday. Life gets smaller as you get older. With the spaciousness of possibility gone, the boundaries of a single life become all too apparent. So this is the person he is. This is what he came to be when he grew up. He wishes he could go away for a week. Spend his birthday alone in the Scottish Highlands. Do some work on the play. Alison wants to have a family dinner, which will be fine, particularly since Christopher will be back. And then maybe he and Christopher can go for a long walk along the estuary. Father and Son. Listening to the night birds, sharing their reflections on music, and literature, and life. Comfortable with each other the way he and his own father never were.