With thanks to
starlitediner and
andrea_feldman for hand holding, encourangement and beta reading. I honestly never thought I would write this.
For the newcomers,
1. narcissus 2. orpheus et in arcadia ego: five things that never happened to peter doherty and carl barât
3. (dioscuri)
They are in New York. They are in New York and they are fighting. The setting is a novelty but their actions are not. They are in New York because they have made a record that people think deserves being sold over here, deserves being played and fucking performed, and yet Peter and Carl can’t stop fighting. On the surface they’re fighting over girls and some CDs Peter has given away and over whose handwriting is better; they’re always fighting, nowadays.
But Peter knows that is not the whole of it. Peter knows that John and Gary’s patience has run short, that they would rather happily be rid of him, just like he knows that Carl is caught in between all of them. Carl is torn between his loyalty to Peter - the songs, the friendship, the memories and the unspoken debts he cannot bring himself to openly acknowledge - and his loyalty to the rest of the world - the band, the label, the commitments his honour will not allow him to dismiss. Both of them clamouring at him. Peter doesn’t think he’s being selfish. He’s trying to save Carl yet again, has been trying to save him since they were introduced, guiding him through all the pitfalls of a life he is so ill equipped for.
No, if anyone is being selfish, and blind, it’s Carl, all too willing to follow orders and do as he is told without ever stopping to consider what he’s truly doing, willingly participating in this sham they’re in, where creativity and integrity are trumped by profit every time. Peter wants to write more songs, because he knows he can, Carl wants to sell the ones they’ve got, because he believes in this, or maybe because he’s been told to believe in this, and John and Gary want nothing to do with Peter because he is erratic and unpredictable, and there’s never any telling what he will do.
They are in New York and they are fighting about this, and Peter knows all these things, and many others besides, and he doesn’t give a fuck about any of them, not this moment, because for the first time in his life someone he’s just met wraps a belt around his right arm, tight, and draws the plunger up on a syringe resting on a spoon where a transparent liquid is bubbling under the wavering heat of someone else’s lighter.
Peter’s worries fall off him, inconsequential.
-
He wakes up alone in the bedroom sofa, untold hours later. He’s surprised he’s alone, his friends, new or old, generally loiter for days on end, and he has no memory of anyone leaving.
A knock at his door startles him; he doesn’t answer. Footsteps shuffle hesitantly on the worn carpet outside and Carl’s muffled voice inquires, “Peter?” through the wooden conglomerate door.
“Comin’,” Peter says, inspecting himself. He’s not fully dressed but it is not a problem - they had no privacy, back in the day, they had no secrets - so he opens the door.
Carl is outside, hiding inside innumerable layers of clothing. He looks small, Peter thinks with sudden tenderness, small and like he’s trying to make himself bigger, like a cat with raised heckles. Peter beckons him in, Carl sits on the edge of the unmade bed and then drops backwards. The bed springs protest.
“Do you still want to?” Carl asks tentatively, but without preamble.
“Yes,” Peter replies. “Let’s go.”
He gathers some clothes from the floor, goes into the loo and runs the taps and flushes the cistern as an excuse. He peers at himself in the mirror as he rinses his mouth with tap water, inspects his pale form, his pale arm. There, almost invisible, just a crimson pinprick in the crook of his elbow.
Strange, Peter thinks against the mirror. I thought I would like it more. I expected I would like it more.
He spits the water out, puts his shirt on, does the buttons up on his jeans and takes a final look at his face.
“Let’s go,” he repeats, reappearing. He smiles at Carl, fleetingly, as he searches under the bed for shoes.
At the tattoo parlour they don’t revisit their argument from yesterday. Carl grabs for the pen and paper the man at the counter offers when they say they have their own design, and Peter shrugs his willing acceptance. Carl forms the letters carefully - not as a child would, but rather imbuing them with the weight and significance of all the things they will no longer say to each other.
libertine, he spells out, and looks at Peter with rekindled hope.
Peter holds out his left arm when the needles appear, keeps the treacherous right nearby, keeps his secrets to himself.
-
Their trip through America is brief, in all. They visit only a handful of cities, and the intimate details never change. Hotel rooms, neither lavish nor dismal, small venues, record shops and liquor stores to fuel the beast. It is permeated by an uneasy truce, although John and Gary are not aware of this fact, not encompassed by the boundaries of the armistice. Their tattoos are scabbed over and messy, little flecks of skin are shed every night against rough bed sheets, or against a guitar strap, or a leather jacket. Peter inspects his often with the curiosity of a budding naturalist and can only assume Carl does the same, in their separate bedrooms.
By the time they return to England - weary of each other’s company, eager for solitude and freedom - the chrysalis has been fully shed, and staring at him indelible, in Carl’s androgynous handwriting, is the word.
Carl has told him many times before of the excesses of his youth. Sometimes he did it to impress. sometimes as cautionary tales, and when he was at his lowest, at his darkest and saddest, to understand himself, the long chain of events that had unerringly led to the top of this tower block, or to the edge of this canal or to the many other places where Peter fought to keep him back.
He’d tried everything at some point or another, Carl told him, proudly listing names, counting on fingers until he ran out of numbers. Weed at ten, acid at fourteen, ecstasy and speed at fourteen and a half, ketamine and amphetamines at fifteen and coke at sixteen, to celebrate his GCSEs. Crack at seventeen and heroin at eighteen, the summer after his A levels, to dull the tedium of a life commencing.
Some, Carl said, he had liked more than others. Some he enjoyed so much that he went back to them over and over again, and was still doing so today - he always winked slyly when he reached this point in the tale. Others he detested, and he was glad, because his distaste saved his life, he said with the conviction of the evangelical.
Peter thinks on this, the first few nights back in London. He too, has liked some things more than others, and he has seen the husk of darkness in Carl, and matched it to the one inside himself. He knows that it would be the same with him, that if he had liked crack, or crystal meth or any of the other drugs he has tried with and without Carl, there would have been nothing in the world to slow his spiral descent into the abyss.
He thinks of that evening in New York. He’s uncertain of when or where it began, knowing only that during the course of it he did things he had never done before, and maybe the singular experience of the heroin high became lost in the haze of stimuli, impossible to tease out and examine unencumbered by the burden of co-adjuvants.
Peter looks at his extended arms, at the colours and lines that make them up. He will try again, he decides. Just once more, to be certain.
-
The second time is as disappointing as the first, and soon becomes a footnote to a whirlwind of summer months where everyone wants them. They play Glastonbury, and Reading and Leeds, and for every crowd that surrenders to them John and Gary forgive him a little more for being who he is. Peter walks off the stage triumphant many times that summer, arms locked around Carl’s shoulders as often as not, and collapses into fatigued sleep in the early morning.
He wants to stop, to retreat into notebooks and ink stains and anonymity, and at last he can tell that Carl wants it too. The endless exposure is rubbing him raw, peeling from him everything that he thought he was, like a religious idol worn down by too many faithful hands. They need to put themselves back together, return to the centre. There are songs fighting to get out inside Peter, and he has only managed to quell the urge to write them and nurture them because even if he fought bitterly with Carl months ago over more or less this, he cannot deny that playing to all these people has brought him closer to Arcadia than any other taste of success so far.
After the last festival of the summer they go drinking like they have not done in a long time. John and Gary join them and jokingly complain that no one cares about them, that the world only knows there are two people in the Libertines.
“That is easily remedied,” Carl says, and produces a thick black felt-tip marker with some girl’s name written across the top in sellotape while Peter emphatically nods.
He grabs for John’s arm and pushes his shirt sleeve up, writes ‘libertine’ as carefully as he can in a shaky hand. He does the same to Gary.
“See,” Peter and Carl say, as one. “Now we’re all the same.”
“Brothers in arms,” Carl adds, delighted with his pun.
It is then that they decide. They will write a second album, and it will be better than the first. And that will only be the beginning.
-
“So, what’s next?” The interviewer asks, checking the Dictaphone.
“Next?” Carl parrots. “We’ll do it all over again, of course.”
“We’re going to write our second album,” Peter explains. “And it’s going to be better than the first.”
“No time off, no break? You’ve been touring basically for a whole year.”
“No rest for the wicked,” murmurs Carl.
The interviewer laughs, jocular. Peter smiles at her harmlessly and Carl does too. They have perfected their game. “Well, speaking of that,” she asks, “now that you have the success - and the budget - are you going to start behaving more, like... well, more like libertines, really?”
“More?” Peter asks, indignant. “Listen, what do you think we’ve been doing, the past six years?”
“Yeah, I don’t think there’s much left we could get up to,” Carl adds helpfully with a grin.
“Well, you know, the usual... sex, girls, drugs,” she continues.
“I dunno about that. I mean, he’s been doing drugs since he was ten, you know... Just look at the state of him, really. Though he’s not doing so poorly for girls either.”
Carl laughs with fake affront and punches him in the shoulder, the interviewer mistakes all revelations for lies and smiles, benevolent and benign.
“Well, what about you, then, Peter? I mean, just by looking at you I can’t imagine you’ve lived up to your name yet. There’s certainly no way you’ve touched something like, say, heroin.”
“I did, once,” Peter confesses without shame. “In New York.”
Carl whirls around, sharply, but his words are soft, his delivery so suave the whole situation seems scripted. “When was that, then?”
“The night before we got the tattoos,” he answers Carl, then returns his attention to the interviewer. “I was angry with him, the opportunity arose, I tried it. Didn’t think much of it,” he finishes, knowing that his frankness is too disarming for follow up questions.
Carl is taciturn for the rest of the interview, monosyllabic where he’d previously been verbose. It falls to Peter to answer all the questions, deftly spinning yet another layer of their mythology around them, impenetrable after all these years.
“I did it twice, actually,” Peter reveals casually, when they’re left alone. “When we got back to London after America, just to make sure it hadn’t been a fluke, or a bad trip, or whatever the fuck you call it when it’s skag. But it was just as boring the second time around.”
“Fuck you,” Carl says after a long silence, staring at his arm.
Carl’s hypocrisy stings Peter like a snake.
-
Their fame is enviable, their status insurmountable. Carl has not forgiven Peter. Peter is unsure what there is to forgive.
“I really don’t see,” Peter begins.
He stops. He starts again. “I really don’t see...”
Oh, for fuck’s sake, he thinks. I am no actor and these conversations cannot, should not, be rehearsed. I will find Carl and say what needs to be said.
It is not a difficult task, finding Carl. They are purportedly composing their second album, and they are together frequently, attempting to recreate their initial synergy. The writing is not going well. Conversations they should have had a long time before stand in the way, but they can still read one another.
“Why does it bother you so fucking much, anyhow?”
“Because,” Carl replies with disarming simplicity, “because, if you had liked it, that would’ve been the end.”
Peter is silent for a while. There is no easy reply, or easy way to negate the truth in that statement. “And with you, it’s not the same?”
“No,” Carl answers, reaching for his drink. “You’ve seen it. It’s just me, I won’t ruin everything, only myself.”
Peter struggles with this concept. “How,” he asks with difficulty, “is ruining yourself not the same as ruining everything?”
Carl speaks slowly. “Because you know I keep my promises. Even when I think they’re going to kill me.”
“Which would also ruin everything,” Peter points out logically.
“Well, yes. But in the end, you know, everyone dies.”
“So you’re hoping to draw out your misery for the next twenty years, then?”
“Twenty years?” Carl laughs. “Is that how long we’re going to last?”
Peter nods emphatically. “At least.”
“Maybe I will need some help, then,” Carl concedes.
“Brothers in arms,” Peter reminds him, looking down at his elbow.
-
Writing the album is enjoyable, after that. Peter and Carl go up to their manager’s country house together, armed with pen, paper, laptop, guitars and a long stack of DVDs for when their attention wavers. They make many trips to the off licence in the course of the two months it takes them, but never enough to dispel the mistrust of the owner. For the first time in years they are able to take stock of one another and catalogue the infinity of ways in which time and fame have changed them.
Peter discovers that Carl’s addiction to cocaine is precisely as profound as he’s come to suspect over the summer months. He also drinks too much, and Peter feels partially responsible, for having assumed that Carl no longer needed to be saved from himself. He’s not sure what Carl learns about him, although by the end of their stay they are sharing a bed with each other more often than not, but not for the promise of sex. They sleep innocently entwined, arms entangled, surrendering to unconsciousness whenever they feel like it.
“You shouldn’t,” Peter says lightly when Carl reaches for the bottle again, as they unwind at the end of a day.
“I shouldn’t,” agrees Carl. “But I want to. I need to.”
Peter studies him critically. Their relationship is confused, he thinks. Sometimes Carl defers to him like a younger brother to an elder one, but the weight of experience and life is much heavier on his shoulders, and they are inescapable burdens. They still fight, tooth and nail when the situation calls for it, and even if their weapons are varied, and all of them sharp, they are both firmly aware of what lines can be crossed and what foundations cannot be shaken. It only serves to make them stronger.
“I’m glad you didn’t enjoy the drugs,” Carl tells him after a long drink. “I’m glad we’re still doing this.”
“Yeah,” Peter says, meaning it. “Me too.”
In the end, they are right. The second album is better than the first, outshining it musically, lyrically and commercially. Peter’s face follows him from every single newsstand, his opinion on disparate matters suddenly relevant to teenagers and adults far and wide across the nation.
-
They tour the second album for almost an entire year, taking it to places that Peter never thought would be anything beyond names on a map for him. Tensions rise and fall like sinusoidal waves within the band, not only between the two of them, and sometimes Peter feels like they are moments away from falling off the edge of the world.
Carl drinks and snorts cocaine without cease, under Peter’s narrow-eyed gaze. But he is truthful when he says that he keeps his promises, and Peter is uncertain how best to intrude, for all that he can see Carl coming undone faster this time, now that experience can make do as foresight. Peter is still partial to the odd hit of speed, or the occasional tab of E, and he drinks as well, of course. Sometimes him and Carl drink together in silence, and Peter is not sure if he is an enabler or a concerned friend, on those nights.
It will not do, Peter realises. They cannot keep going like this. Carl’s words are nothing in the face of his actions.
“Twenty years,” Peter chides softly.
“I’ll be fine,” replies Carl, defensively.
-
It has become him that John and Gary approach cautiously, after concerts where everything is still as it should be.
“No,” Peter snaps in rotund reply. “No. He’s my friend, my fucking brother, and I’m standing by him. Both of us or neither.”
Fine, they say. Fine. But he will not last forever, not like that. He will not even last long. Peter watches Carl marshal his destruction and knows they are right.
“C’mon,” he says, sliding his arm under Carl’s, hoisting him up. “Let’s go somewhere. You can’t carry on like this.”
Carl’s words are slurred. “Don’t know any other way.”
“Of course you fucking do,” Peter tells him.
Carl just stares at him, baleful and lost, and struggles to regain his footing. “No I don’t,” he insists.
“Fucking martyr,” mutters Peter, Carl a dead weight on his arm. “You said you wanted help, and we’ve got nineteen years to go.”
-
They take a break, then. They pack their things once again and retreat into solitude, leaving everything and everyone they can behind. They do nothing in particular, just pass the time as they used to when they were younger. But their tempers are less volatile and their arguments less scathing, and the whole experience languorous and comforting, nothing more than a routine. Peter knows with unalienable certainty that even now it is too late for someone else to ever understand him like Carl does, that the reverse is also true. They are possessive and competitive, but also indivisible.
Peter watches the passing days soothe the fervour in Carl’s jerky movements, but he knows nothing has changed underneath. One morning Carl says, “I’m ready for it. Let’s go back.”
“No,” Peter says in return, not looking up from his notebook. “Not like this. Much as I’m enjoying Cornwall, I don’t fancy making these trips a habit; I’d rather we took our time and never had to do it again.”
Carl is angry, after that, and turns to predictable comfort. But Peter’s words have spurned something in him. It takes him a long time, but under Peter’s carefully careless gaze, Carl rebuilds himself from the beginning.
“You know,” he says, many nights later, “you can be a right obstinate bastard, sometimes.”
“So can you,” replies Peter with studied casualness.
“Probably. But you’re a right obstinate cunt of a bastard.”
“Am I?”
“I was thinking we could’ve gone to the Lakes, next time,” offers Carl instead.
Peter shudders, rising his eyes and meeting Carl’s amused gaze. “Dreadful place, the Lakes. Went there with my family once, it was all dampness and wind. I’d rather stay in London.”
“Yeah, me too, I suppose,” acquiesces Carl. Silence falls easy between them. “Thank you,” he says at last.
-
Their third album is ok, the fourth sublime, the fifth mediocre. If their legacy had not been cemented some time ago, fame would be unavoidable by now, on the throes of their sixth record - the best they have ever written. Even John and Gary are proud of it. John and Gary, Peter realises, are proud of them, of him. They have come very far. They don’t see each other often, just for recording and touring, and this is how they have managed to remain friends through the years. Long stretches of separation are enough to forgive anyone’s minor misdeeds. John has another band on the side, where he sings the songs for which there is no space in their own recordings; Gary has a life that involves them only peripherically, but when they come together there is only loud laughter and the conversation effortlessly resumes wherever they last left it off.
Peter and Carl see each other all the time. Carl has a girlfriend - a wife, almost. Peter does too, along with a string of lovers on the side, and a son from one of them. He does not ask about Carl’s indiscretions, although Carl sometimes tells him, knowingly or not. Peter is very adept at reading him, after all this time. He knows Carl is just as good at reading him. They have no secrets, wouldn’t be able to even if they wished to.
Peter knows Carl still drinks, although not as much as before. Peter too has kept his own vices, but they are both beginning to find that excess is no longer as alluring as it once was. A layer of bemusement tints Peter’s early memories, and it is then that he realises that at some undateable point the tension that had dogged their early years dissipated, leaving behind something he cannot easily put words to. Their closeness, even their possessiveness, remains but its raw edges have been softened to a warm, comforting and constant presence. Peter is not sure he can envision this life without Carl, and in flights of fancy he tries to map the outcome of the many times they could have diverged, but his imagination always falters.
-
“Guess what,” Carl asks him one day.
“What?”
“I’m going to be a father. I’m going to have a daughter.”
Peter turns and smiles at him, wide and friendly. He doesn’t see his own son very often, and the child barely acknowledges him as his father. Peter doesn’t think about it often, and when he does it is not always with sadness, or regret. “Congratulations,” he says sincerely as they wrap their arms tight around one another. “I’m very happy for you.” He doesn’t have to say much else. Carl knows.
“Thanks,” Carl replies, lighting a cigarette. “You know,” he says, smoking deeply, “when she’s born, then I’ll stop with everything.”
Peter studies him, with his head cocked to one side. “D’you mean all this time, all your vices, they were just a convoluted Freudian drama, parental issues and all that? And here I could’ve sorted you ages ago by getting you a kitten...”
“Fuck no,” laughs Carl. “It’s just as good a time as any other.”
But Peter is not fooled.
“You, a father,” he muses later. “We’ve come far, haven’t we?”
“We have,” Carl agrees, contentedly. He lights another two cigarettes, gives one to Peter without asking.
All these years, Peter thinks as they smoke, all these years spent together so that I can no longer tell where my life truly ends and where Carl’s life really begins, but only make a guess as to where the boundaries may lie, if they exist at all.
-
The rest of their career is unremarkable because it is the same as what preceded it. The only change is the aging of the audience, the passing of the years. Peter’s son grows old, Carl’s daughter is born, then another one. There are birthday parties to organise, night-time stories to read, scraped knees and, later, bruised teenage hearts to soothe. Carl has kept his promise and not touched anything since his first girl was born.
Tours are short and nights end early with soft good nights on the phone to young sleepy heads. John is married too and does not like being away from his family. Peter makes his way through an endless sequence of men and women, and Carl smiles at him with sympathy and affection both when it is time for a new one. Peter goes over for dinner on Saturdays. Carl’s girls call him “uncle,” Peter’s son calls thrice a year.
There is never enough time for music, nowadays, and work becomes infrequent, a reward rather than an obligation. They do it only because they like it, and because they can and they don’t have to do anything else, and in a fashion this is all Peter ever dreamed of when he was young, and it is also as free as he has ever been.
This is a surprise. He never expected that freedom would be born from the responsibilities of adulthood.
-
They stand on Primrose Hill, two old men granted anonymity by the grey in their hair and the veins in their hands and the long sleeves of their coats. They survey London in silence, its changed geography - all the new skyscrapers along the river dwarfing all the old church towers - and even though detail is made invisible by distance, it seems to Peter that he can make out the entirety of their lives in the narrow streets stretched beneath him. He can remember every high and every low, and every moment in between with a startling clarity poets before him have ascribed only to forthcoming death.
It’s cold in the November night and Carl tugs at his scarf. Peter turns to watch him and studies his profile in the fading light. His jowls have sagged with age, his skin become rougher after countless encounters with a razorblade, and with the excesses of his life. His tongue has retained its sharpness, his eyes their clarity although the eyelids droop heavier above them, and wrinkles marr their sides. Peter knows it is the same with him; they are together even in their decay.
He coughs, dry and deep, and Carl looks at him in turn. “Let’s go?” he asks.
Peter nods. Arms around each other for added stability they begin their cautious descent.
“I was not,” Carl confesses in the growing darkness, at the bottom of the hill, “ever expecting to last this long.”
“I know,” Peter says. “Neither was I.”
---
4.1.2008, Hyderabad, India.