Beyond Sunset

A Willerby Story

Si wouldn’t have had an opinion if the viewing hadn’t been the last of the day and the sun hadn’t been setting just as the agent showed them into the upstairs lounge. 

At the furthest end a set of door-sized double windows had been flung open to the west, framing the sun balanced on the line of the flat horizon. Backlit ribboned and ragged July clouds painted smudges of purple and blue over the sky and inside the whitewashed walls glowed pink and red in the gathering shadow.

Si was oblivious to the grown-up conversation going on behind him – enchanted by the sun and how the landscape beneath it went on forever he heard nothing of bus routes, the closest shops or the schools Caitlin constantly reminded him Joe would need before they knew it.  

“What do you think then?” Caitlin asked him, tapping him on the shoulder. “One for our shortlist?”

“This is it,” Si said. “We should buy this one.”

“Really? Are you serious?”, said Caitlin, bouncing Joseph on her hip. “You’ve just shrugged at said “fine” to everything we’ve seen so far, but it’s yes to this before we’ve even seen the whole house? What do you like about it so much?”

“The view,” he said, and then because he knew this wouldn’t be enough for Caitlin, “and the local schools are good,” he guessed, “plus there’s a big garden for Joe to play in.”

“Well,” Caitlin said, “I suppose – the nearest primary is Outstanding, and the secondaries around here are all good or better and have been for years. You don’t think Beckworth is too far for supermarkets though? I’m not even sure we’d get takeaways delivered this far out.”

“You always have to compromise somewhere,” said Si.

Caitlin smiled and looked at him without frustration for the first time since breakfast. “Yes,” she said. “Well, let’s look at the other rooms before we decide anything, but I like it too and it’s nice to hear you positive about something.”

The rest of the three-bedroomed cottage was nice enough in a cutesy, chintzy sort of way, and the money Caitlin’s parents gifted them covered the deposit with enough left over to decorate and fix up the garage as a music studio.

Caitlin’s parents – John and Judy - lived in Beckworth, the closest town and knew the village well.

“It’s nice there,” her father said, “the pub is a good one, but round here everyone says people in Willerby are all a bit mad – nice mad though.”

“Eccentric,” said her mother. “Polite and kind, but just a bit bonkers.”

Si smiled politely and thought about the sunset he’d seen from the window.

…

They did the studio before they did anything else to the house; first the new floor, expensive soundproofing, plastering and painting and then bespoke carpentry cases for the amplifiers, keyboard, the guitars and the drums. Finally, Caitlin framed and hung cuttings from music magazines, posters from gigs and finally the vinyl album the record label had given Simon the day they’d released Cocoon.

It was supposed to have all begun that day.

Butterfly’s demos and pre-releases to the music press had generated a buzz and before the record was released there was talk of prizes and awards. Everyone assumed the record would sell well and the national and then European tour to promote it would be their springboard to fame and fortune.

Nobody seemed quite sure why it hadn’t turned out that way, why so few people came to the gigs on the tour and why the previously fawning press lost interest so quickly.

In the end the record label cancelled the European dates and pitched Butterfly to bigger bands as a support act. They’d got a couple of these, playing to half empty arenas of barely interested middle aged couples before Si picked up a reputation for being sulky and childish and the offers dried up.

But it was hardly his fault he was bad tempered - anyone in his position would have been.

It wasn’t his fault Caitlin had been careless and got pregnant, distracting him at the time he needed to be most focused.

She was, he supposed, reasonably understanding of the situation, not expecting him to go to all the hospital stuff or those weird, slightly gross classes about childbirth and babies, but having a kid hung over him, clouding and spoiling the realisation of all his dreams. On tour he worked hard at getting into the right zone with drink, drugs and sex, but The Baby was always there.

He accepted – intellectually at least - it wasn’t Caitlin’s fault when the record company “parted ways” with the band, or that it had broken up, but he couldn’t help feeling it wasn’t exactly not not her fault either.

He was pretty sure she knew this too, which was to her credit.  

Why else would she have got her parents to pay for the house?

Why else was she was fussing around helping him set up the studio and a tuition business so he could write songs to catapult him back into the industry big time?

She wasn’t a bad person, and he knew she meant well. He appreciated how she was doing her best to fix things and when he did make it, he planned to be generous.

“You can keep the house,” he fantasised saying to her magnanimously, “and the car, and if I’m in the country I’ll drop by for birthdays and stuff like that.”

Plus – he thought – the baby would get to enjoy his success second hand. In this backwater a kid with a famous dad would live like a king.

Caitlin would understand. She probably even half expected it – which was why she’d been so keen on moving close to her family who could help her out with the baby after he was gone.

It would be fine.

Si made a gesture of an effort towards getting to know the new neighbours in the first couple of weeks after they moved in but after that he left all the social stuff to Caitlin. The people in Willerby were dull and slow, interested in their gardens, allotments, local history and little else. When they tried to be interesting it was just embarrassing. A week or so after they moved in a couple of balding forty-somethings had turned up at the house with guitars and asked if he wanted to go to the local pub to jam with the village folk band, The Tumulus Wrecks. He’d told them he couldn’t as it would interfere with his creative process and sent them away. It was all for the best. He had nothing in common with the people here and it wouldn’t be long until he was moving on anyway. When that happened, he reasoned, it would actually be more awkward for Caitlin if he’d got to know everyone who lived in the village too well.

Willerby could only ever be a stop-off for him – a footnote in his soon to be extensive Wikipedia page.

This was all temporary.

But until he got his life back on track, there was at least one thing he could enjoy, the reason they’d bought the house.

The view from the lounge looking west.

He spent the last of his own money on an expensive armchair and put it next to the window so he could sit comfortably there for hours at a time.

Sometimes, then often, then every night he fell asleep in it and woke with the birds at dawn, watching the deep blues and greens of the morning gradually warm as the sun rose behind the cottage. In the afternoon corn-golden fields rolled away and away under wave-like white clouds set in a bright azure-blue sky, gradually changing shape in the winds, summoning images of fantastic creatures and snow-topped mountains.

The more he looked, the more meaning he found. There was more to it than just beauty – he grew to understand the sky as a curtain or veil with more behind it, sure if he looked long enough he would find a way to see through, where he’d discover the sublime –songs that wouldn’t be just hits but generation defining.

Songs that would change the world.

He found it harder and harder to leave, subsisting on beer, whisky, toast and pot noodles.

He smoked, drank and ate in his armchair, leaving ashtrays, glasses, bottles, dirty plates and plastic pots for Caitlin to pick up when she wasn’t busy with Joe or out doing something else.

Sometimes she nagged at him and that was annoying, because it was hard to concentrate on the view from the window with her in his ear and Joseph grizzling away about whatever six-month-olds get upset about.

“Megan says you never showed up for Craig’s guitar lesson.”

“Do I need to ring Ben and say you’re cancelling Rose’s piano lesson again?”

“Do you even move from that bloody chair to shit, or should I put you in nappies too?”

“Could you at least pick up your own fucking joint ends? You might not care if mum and dad know you’re a stoner, but I do.”

It was worst when she cried.

Joseph crying was infuriating enough and when they were both going it was unbearable. 

He did his best to tune her out by focusing as hard as he could on the view, but something always snuck through.

“I don’t know what to do. I’m here on my own, doing everything, not able to work, covering for you with mum and dad, making excuses to the people here why we can’t ever have anyone round. Si, talk to me, please!”

Other times her tone was more reasonable – more like the Caitlin he remembered from when they first got together.

“You need to see someone if you won’t talk to me,” she said once, gently stroking his arm. “I know you’re depressed. I’m sorry things haven’t worked out the way we thought they would, but you must move on. If not for me then for Joe.”

One time she came up the stairs with Carl, Butterly’s drummer and suggested they go down to the studio and jam through some of the old songs. It was a sweet thing to do, he supposed, but unnecessary. He had no interest in the old songs now and the new ones he’d write soon would be too good - too technically difficult for Carl to keep up with, and why should others share his glory anyway? He’d learn to play all the instruments himself and produce the album too. He’d probably leak it online – let the record company and the magazines and the internet site feel stupid about all the opportunities they’d lost.

After Caitlin went downstairs, he tried to explain all this to Carl, but he just seemed confused, his face taking on the same worried look Caitlin now had all the time.

Si was glad he left before sunset, when he needed to concentrate properly, when the veil in the sky was thinnest and the shapes forming behind it closest to the surface.

What he was doing was too important for any distractions.

To begin with he saw only rough outlines in the red and gold – suggestions of towering mountain ranges rising from a boundless ocean. At first, he thought it illusion but when he saw the shapes of the mountains did not change from one evening to the next, he recognised them as substantial and solid with roots deep in the earth and tops shrouded in mist and cloud. If they were real, he realised, then so too must be the sea. He spent many sunsets looking at it and as he grew more practised and expert it began to churn, heave and swell.

He saw the lights of the city next, clustered below the mountains above the sea, at first only visible when the sun was almost gone and easily mistaken for a constellation of closely clustered stars. He spent the next few sunsets focusing on them, finding with just a little effort he could see further and deeper until the lights lit up a cityscape of steel skyscrapers, tall stone towers and vast domes. In front of the buildings between long piers bobbed strange, long-masted ships with wide white sails that hung out by their sides like the wings of giant swans.

Si was never certain whether he could hear the city or if he was just imagining he did – the suggestion of rumbling engines and shouting in markets where strange-keyed tunes played on instruments he knew he could not name.

Here – that city – was where Si knew he would find the work that would make him great.

All he needed was a way to get to it.

The answer fell into place so effortlessly he laughed out loud when he saw it.

Ever since he’d been staring from his window, he’d noticed just as the sun dipped below the horizon straight, clear rays stretched from it directly into the living room where they lit up the patches of wall where they fell bright as midday.

They lasted for just few minutes, faded quickly then vanished all at once.

The rays were so obvious and familiar, what they really were passed him by until he caught one from the corner of his eye while turning his head to get a better look at the angles in the city and saw it for what it had always been -  a golden road on a golden bridge reaching all the way from the city on the shore beneath the mountains, through the west-facing window and into the room he had spent so many long hours sitting in.

He did not take the road that night, or the one after, or the one after that.

It wasn’t until the third evening he was confident he was seeing the road clearly enough for the bridge to take his weight, which conveniently coincided with a night Caitlin and the baby were spending over at her parent’s house in Beckworth.

Well ahead of time he packed his guitar gig bag with– a couple of pot noodles, a bottle of whiskey and his passport. He cleared the house of cash too, just in case.

By then Si knew the exact moment when the road would be strongest. Just before the right time he opened the double-windows as wide as they would go and clambered up on the top bar of the Juliet balcony, bracing himself steady on the frame with his arms until the last minute.

And then he stepped confidently forward onto the road that took him far, far away over the sea and to the city below the mountains.

Caitlin never saw him again.

Nobody did.

…

After he’d been missing for a couple of days, Caitlin went round to Lisa’s house, who lived almost opposite and had given her an open invitation to tea anytime the day she’d moved in. She took Joe with her, who they sat on a yoga mat with some toys to play with while they talked.

“You never saw him leave, did you?” Caitlin asked.

Lisa took a sip of her tea and shook her head. “No, but to be honest I’m not sure I’d have recognised him if I did. He never seemed to move from your house.”

Then, because Lisa seemed nice and she had been so lonely for such a long time, Caitlin told her everything, right from the beginning when she’d first met Si in a late-night bar in his ridiculous plastic leather jacket.

“I don’t think he’ll come back,” she finished. “I checked this morning and his passports gone as well as his guitar.”

Lisa looked at her hard. “Do you even want him to?” she asked. “I don’t want to be rude, and excuse me if I’m taking out of turn, but from what you’ve said he doesn’t sound like he was much use to either of you two.”

Caitlin thought for a moment. “Maybe it is for the best if he stays away,” she said. Then she laughed. “You know we only bought the house because he liked the view from the bloody lounge window? We could move anywhere we like now.”

“You could,” said Lisa, “but why not stay for a bit, give us a chance, see if you like it here? There’s much more going on than you’d expect. Tell you what, it’s a Friday. Let’s is three go to the pub tonight. Get a bit drunk. Have dinner. Then let’s come back here, put Joseph to bed in my spare room and drink some more. We’ll turn the music up loud and dance. You can cry a bit, if you want. Later, we can have chips.”

Caitlin felt herself welling up at just that – at the reminder of what it felt like to have a friend.

The last time she’d felt she really had one had been a lifetime ago when she’d been a different person – one she found she could hardly remember, someone she couldn’t really believe she had ever been.

Much later, in the early hours, Caitlin found herself pleasantly burry in a deckchair in Lisa’s patch of garden looking up into the night.

“Although I don’t think he’ll be bothered,” she said, “I can’t help feeling bad for him if he never gets to know Joe. He’s such a cool little guy, especially now he’s getting his words. He wasn’t planned but I can’t imagine being happy without him now. I wonder if Si will really be happier without us? How could he be?”

There was a long silence.

Then, “my bet is no, to be honest,” Lisa said. “Men – no boys – like him find being happy hard, because wherever they end up, they take themselves with them. Really though, do you care?”

Caitlin considered the question and found she did not.

Not a bit.

Not then.

Not ever.