ｔｈｅｑｕｉｅｔｏｎｅ

In the glow of a lamp, George nursed the hotel glass of scotch on the arm of the one, musty hotel armchair, and wondered where the fuck he was and why he felt so fucking far away from himself that he was no longer himself at all but someone else who he'd just woken up as that morning. Someone he’d heard on the radio. Someone out of the paper. He’d been on stage last night. He’d been to a club. He’d been to a party. And now he was here in some hotel, and he didn’t know who he was, but he wasn’t George Harrison. Then John began to speak. And that familiar voice perforated through the stale darkness of the room like a lighthouse, and a little of him came back. George stared at him as he absorbed it all, and didn't speak. Out of the sedation of drink and lack of sleep, the instinctive threat of danger rose, quivered, and then darted away as he realised he would have to reply. Talking to John in any state was like walking across hot coals. You had to keep an unflinchingly cool head to do it - or, as was the liberty of P, G and R, have the protection of walking on holy orders. But nevertheless, there was no one in the world who could walk across them with no danger of harm. George swallowed, and moved himself upright. He looked at John with a steady confidence he could just about muster through the fog. ‘I think we’re all scared of that,’ he sported. It wasn’t quite true, of course. Paul’s ambition was far the more fearsome beast. He had no wife or child or big country house to keep him shackled down to earth. But perhaps that made Paul’s the less formidable. No need to lash out against bonds that constrained it. As a result, Paul didn’t fear the mania that was closing in on them in the slightest. Blissful, like Ringo, in his ignorance of the chasm waiting beneath their booted feet that neither John nor George could guess the depth of, nor what lay in wait at the bottom. George was glad Paul wasn’t here to hear this. He could imagine him listening with a crinkled brow to one of these vulnerable confessions, and responding only with a scornful look of are-you-mad? - Which on the surface was true. They had all asked for this - when they had defied their roots, shaken hands with a jew in a pinstriped suit and let the money keep streaming into their bank accounts. Hundreds upon hundreds. Thousands. Now, a million. You don’t get something for nothing. George was beginning to lose himself again. He winced, and dragged himself suddenly back, back into the past where he was shielded by youth's naivety from all the shite of the present day. And in the silence, he could feel John doing the same. He could even sense the place. Slater Street. Ye Cracke, near the Art College. The smell of scallops. Fag butts and girls. And it had the pulsating, aching sense of a wound. George rose from his seat. Silently, he slipped out from the room and left John, returning holding something in his hand. He sat down again and looked at John. The stewed, melancholy eyes of a seal under that ridiculous shameful mop. He handed John the object. One of the combs John had Mimi send him, from Woolworth’s in Penny Lane. Because they were still the best, and they were still the only ones he wanted to use. He tossed it into John’s lap. John was a saint and he was heavy duty, with a generosity that was ready to offer you everything, his heart, his throat, his entrails. And George worshipped him. He would not let the world spill him like water in its thoughtless hands. ’You’re alright. I’ll make Brian book us a holiday the day these next six shows are over. Bring Pattie and Cyn. Sit on the beach and get fat. You’re alright, John.'