Brett and the (London) Tree of Life
“What is the closest you’ve come to death?
During the great storm of 1987, I was staying in the spare room at my ex-girlfriend’s parents’ house when a huge oak tree crashed through the roof and stopped 2ft from my head. Luckily, I had closed the door which supported the trunk just enough to stop it from crushing my skull like a walnut.”
Brett Anderson, Manchester Guardian, Sep 9 2011
– — – –
The BBC weatherman told us we were all safe and shouldn’t be silly and so we went to bed. Some kids dreamt of hurricanes: explosive inversions of umbrellas and unpredictable displacements of cats. Wigs flipped backwards
Outside big black trees armed with spears and spikes were poised. Billboards that had some of the properties of kites and some of the properties of rhinos looked down. Glass windows stayed flat, blunt. For the time being
Brett went to bed along with everyone else
“G’night, Mrs. Pritchard,” he said, pulling at the overlong arms of his sweater and wondering if the hoops made him look fat
“Will you be needing a hot water bottle, Brett?” she asked and her daughter rolled her eyes. Hot water bottle as contraceptive device: statement that beds were to be slept in…no hanky panky
“No, I’ll be fine.”
He was a bit tired. And also last time he and Alice had done it they were so quiet that he could distinctly feel their pink bellies rubbing against each other like balloons or like those awful sweaty pigs that they had passed on their hike. He didn’t want to hear that again just yet
“I’ll take him up,” said Alice
“Can you help me with these dishes first?” her mother asked and in case Brett got any other ideas she did this face…this awful face… this coal mine of a face that dug awful boring black pits in her head and ALSO and INTENTIONALLY made her look just like Alice so off went Brett with a limp wave
Going up the stairs he felt that the rhythm of his steps was off. But there was a kind of music in it. And the wind. God, the wind! It sang
It sang “ooooooooooooooooooh.” Predictable perhaps but it sort of twittered in the middle. It was a falsetto wind
Brett got in bed wearing his Meat is Murder t-shirt and carrying most of a chicken in his stomach. The spare room smelled of mud. Everything smelled of mud unless it had recently been treated with flowery chemical petroleum middle class muck
“I am going to start a band,” he said, actually aloud as he lay back in the night with his black hair (which was getting quite long) making an ink blot under his head
The wind became a thunder that never faded. The old trees roared hangman’s roars and a million leaves visited the windows in ghost formation
“I just…I just need to lose a few pounds.”
The wind became a train and everything else became a tunnel
“No more curly-wurly brand chocolate bars,” he resolved
And then a big fucking tree came through the roof and blew his head in two
. .
Meanwhile Gordon Kaye was driving around in his car. A chip grease newspaper puked itself onto his windscreen and he wiped it away with his wipers
I think that’s his name. He was the guy from the show with the funny, gay Nazis and the Madonna with big boobies and maybe… maybe somehow something funny about Belgians
He was on his way to screw some young guy…I think. Why else would you be out when there was – undeniably – a hurricane coming down on England. On the radio he heard about the oldest tree in England falling down
“Oh no,” he said
Then a second later a huge commercial billboard for Polo mints got hurricaned into a nail bomb formation and puffed down on his car and next thing he knew, he was on the side of the road and people were saying “It’s him… it’s René the chef. Oh fucking hell. That’s what his brain looks like. Oh shit… push it in… push it in. Oh shit.”
. . .
Meanwhile, Brett’s head was also pushing out a lot of blood. His room no longer smelt of mud. It smelt blood and roots and leaves and the smell of wind which is the smell of deletion, forced lack of memory, forced dehistory
One long spiky arm had gone right through his head. He was thinking…
About…
Ziggy Stardust…
- – - – -
Brett was a toddler and his Dad, who was otherwise rather boring and robotic used to play Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, like, Super Loud. Little Brett used to do his little dance to it. Everyone liked the dance and clapped except his maternal grandmother who looked at him like she had once been given a mission by an angel to smother him in his bed but had either forgotten it or blown it off until now
When, in later teenage life, Brett had started to have differences with his Dad, he had remembered Ziggy and it had formed a bond, an unspoken bond between them. Dad was boring, but at one point he had said Fuck The World and played electric music as loud as 240V can push it
First year of Uni, Brett found Ziggy for £1 at the record fair. When he got it home he saw it says right there on the cover “TO BE PLAYED AT MAXIMUM VOLUME.”
So…
His dad was an unimaginative twat after all
- – - -
“Is this… Heaven?” asked Brett as he walked down a staircase, gliding down a strobe light in the fire fighter slide style as a bleach blond berliner popped a pill in his puss
An electric guitar screeched down a motorway ramp at maximum ecstasy. Mohair and mohawk humped to a funk that was made of asphalt
He drank grapefruit juice sperm and wriggled his backside and was applauded and did not shit his pants
A mad man mocked maracas in a mandrill’s muff. And then he shuffled off for a pint. He sweated more than some men make in a week as he sat down and Brett wanted a piece of what air he was huffing on
“Nice moves, man,” Brett said as he looked into two eyes that were black holes and seemed to have neither glass nor jelly in ‘em
“Bez,” said…Bez
“Brett,” said Brett
A murderer came over with cherry red doc marten tattoos where sideburns feared to tread
“Got yer E-s, Bez!” he said
“Sorted!” said Bez and he chomped down some smarties that made him do that thing where you crack your neck without touching your head
The murderer popped a pill in Brett’s mouth and left his finger in a second. Then he was off. To the shitter (of course)
Oh my god, it’s Bez and Brett said a few people. DANCE! DANCE! But Bez waved them off with modesty and a shaky hand
“What are on, mate?” asked Brett. “My head feels…all over the place.”
“I don’t know what you are on, my good man. For my part, I eschew narcotic stimulants and hallucinogens. I store them in my baggy sleeve. I get high on the music. The vibes.”
“Are we famous?”
“Beyond famous. We are…structurally significant elements of a generational transition.”
“Are we in a band?”
“We are in two bands.”
“Who is the best…who has the best band?”
“Mate…I…I can’t tell you. It’s too sad. We all feel very sad about…you losing your girlfriend.”
“Fuck girls!” said Brett. He got up and powered his bottom around the place which was now made of strobes, flamingos, legs, gasoline, cigarettes, paracetamols
A big fucking tree
…..
“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH”
Like Odin, Brett hung fron the tree. But the tree pierced his very head
So on one hand he was well anchored and unlikely to fall into the endless space beneath the tree. But on the other hand… well…
He hung there for a while and cried. Until, after a while he noticed that the cry had a sort of… Bryan Ferry sound. And he pondered that
Tack tack tack. Heels walked down the branch. His dangling eyes showed him two of everything but between the two stories they told him there was a common thread, a tall dark haired girl in a trenchcoat tack tacking down the big branch and finally crouching by him and smiling so gently
“Who … who are you?” he moaned
“I’m Berit,” she said, with poise
“Is this hell?” he moaned. Sort of like Morrissey
“No, Brett. It’s a tree.”
She paused and looked at the tree some more
“Although, I may be underestimating it. You could be right.”
She smiled and although he was hanging from his head in hell, the way she did it seemed alright to him
“Why am I in hell?”
“You didn’t close your door when you went to bed. I think…I think you were planning to sneak out and…you know.”
“PEOPLE DON’T GO TO HELL FOR THAT!”
“Also, one day you will get interviewed by the NME and say ‘I consider myself a dead man that has never been killed’ and this will initiate a kind of chronal feedback loop that will attract the tree to you.”
“Berit… I don’t even want to die, let alone all of this shit. Will you help me?”
She walked away. She waved. He woke up
He was in bed. The wind roared like diesel. He jumped out of bed and closed the big door
BOOM!
The tree visited like a bad and crazy uncle in the night. But it stopped just short of his head. And he breathed the timelessness of the wind and sort of remembered the… the … something
- – - -
Gordon Kaye recovered from his injuries more or less
Brett became a popular singer and arse. He brought joy to many
One day he wanted to say something pretentious to the NME. He paused for a second. He remembered a slightly Norwegian accent on the edge of time. He said “I’m a bisexual man who never had a homosexual experience.”
And that was that
