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Before everything went to hell, they must have been in the studio, recording the album that would be their last. Everyone had known, but no one had realised it until afterwards. At the time, no one had been brave or foolish enough to suggest that they were at the end of the line. From where they were, they couldn't see the terminal.
Before everything went to hell, John had been sure that the situation he had found himself in was only as temporary as everything else in his life had been; except, of course, for the band— and for Paul. And then that turned out to be just as fleeting, and all that he was left with was a crumbling marriage to a woman he was sure he had loved, at one time. By May it was all over. Bitterly, he reflected that it had been over long before that, but hindsight was only 20/20 once the spotlight glare had faded. Irrationally he blamed everyone but himself, though at night he was racked with an unshakeable sinking guilt.
On the 25th of March, a jet took off from Fairford and a series of events was set into motion. John didn't know it yet, couldn't have known, but something had been set off inside him, a time-bomb ticking steadily down. Someday it would have to blow. Till then he was more depressed than he ever recalled having been before, even though he'd gotten what he wished for, in the end. Instead of a weight lifted from his shoulders, it was like a cold blow to the heart.
Paul divorced in '72, and everyone seemed surprised, including himself. John couldn't keep the bitter edge from his voice when he noted how they had seemed like such a perfect couple. And it killed him, but he couldn't help but feel a selfish sort of satisfaction as he watched them fall apart.
He got what was coming pretty quickly, though, when for months following the ordeal Paul didn't visit, didn't phone, didn't write a letter or even mention John's name to the press. Later it would become obvious that he'd been in pain, that being alone was hurting him, and that seeing John and Yoko seemingly as close as ever only reminded him of that hurt, and deepened it. Of course, John's relationship was itself unravelling at the seams, and it was only a matter of time before the cracks started to show. By the end of the year it was obvious to them that they were through, but they stubbornly hung on. The Lost Weekend should have been the last straw, but John kept up the delusion that it was simply the way things had to be. He slept his way through half his social circle, drank himself half to death, watched his reflection in the mirror turn into that of a much older man, a ghost of a man, half of a man.
He went to parties every week, cut an album, played shows, gave interviews. He became more social than he thought he'd ever been before, made himself up nice most nights, took a lot of pills and had a lot of sex. His life seemed quite marvelous. He wanted to die.
Finally, just when he thought he'd had enough, Paul started phoning again. The relief John felt at the sound of Paul's voice made him feel sick. They met for the first time since the breakup at the cafe of a hotel in Albuquerque.
If speaking to Paul over the phone made him feel sick, then the sight of him must've been like a gunshot in the way his tired eyes seemed to tear through John as if he was made of paper. They sat face-to-face by the window, which was covered by a heavy brocade curtain, blocking out the morning sun.
"Good to see you again," he said, even though it wasn't. He knew faintly that it was supposed to be.
"Yeah."
Paul looked as exhausted as John felt, his eyes hollowed out and his mouth drawn, shoulders hunched, his movements and speech dry and brittle like the desert wind had embedded itself into his bones.
John didn't remember when they started sleeping together. It might have been that night, in the hotel in Albuquerque, but then it might have been in New York or London or Los Angeles for all he knew. At any rate, after that they started having sex quite a lot. Hookups replaced conversations, phone calls took place only to suggest hotels, and all the while John couldn't help but feel increasingly miserable.
The sex itself was good, was fine, he liked it, he liked sex. He liked doing it with Paul. He liked being held and kissed and getting hard and coming and making Paul feel good and he liked the smell of Paul's hair and the shape of his mouth and his long legs. And he had been craving this for a very long time.
But although it was what he thought he wanted, and although Paul seemed to lose himself in it the way John was lost, and though John loved him loved him loved him he couldn't shake the feeling that Paul was very far away from him, torn away after some cataclysmic event, and that nothing could draw them back together. And in a way it was true; they'd never really gone back to the way things were before the breakup, and they never could.
He wanted Paul to promise him the past, but all that their love promised was red-eye flights and brief secluded meetings, keeping out of the eyes of the press and never feeling as though anything was really assured, the two of them perpetually afraid that this time would be the last. He wanted them to be together, but they couldn't in the real world, not really. So John could never be satisfied with what they did have, because at the end of the day it was sort of meaningless.
Over time, it started to hurt less. By the third time they'd resigned themselves to the fact that this was the way things were, and the way things would be. They were still in love, and the numb feeling that John got when he woke up alone was just the price he had to pay.
Still, a change was coming, though it would be years in the making.
John lay awake in the Renaissance hotel just north of Heathrow on the 21st of January, 1976, curled on top of the bedsheets like a child. He was smoking his second-last American cigarette and it damn near fell out of his mouth and onto the sheets as a mechanical roar outside shocked him from his daze and shook every organ in his body. Planes had been taking off and touching down all night and all morning, but there was something different about this; it sent John reeling and made his heart race with a bright exhilaration he hadn't known he was still capable of.
The whole hotel room was rattled and the ground trembled beneath him as he hurried to the window, catching only a glimpse of the aircraft soaring past. It flashed in his vision, a sleek white blur with a long black stripe down its side, trailing two thin plumes of grey smoke. John stood motionless for several long seconds after it was gone, listening to the receding roar of the engines.
He put one hand on his hip and tapped out his cigarette against the windowsill with the other, his pulse loud in his throat and his eyes blown wide, feeling the world pass through him like wind through a hollow doorframe. He shivered, not knowing why.
Hours later, Paul arrived at the door with a bottle of airport whiskey in his hand, already noticeably drunk, his eyes swollen. John drew him up into a kiss, tasting cheap red wine and Marlboro menthols he must've been sold on the plane. Paul held onto his shirt-front when he pulled away, as if steadying himself. Outside the window, it was getting dark; with a dull roar a plane went by, leaving or coming from somewhere. Red lights blinked on across the tarmac.
They sat on the bed to drink the whiskey. The moment John uncorked it the room was filled with the sharp smell of rubbing alcohol.
"Oh, Lord," he muttered.
"Cost me 20p," Paul said absently. John shook his head.
He watched the planes from the window as they passed the bottle back and forth. Eventually, Paul reached over, frowning, and pulled off John's glasses. He set them on the bedside table and runway 27R was reduced to a red blur; John turned to look at Paul instead. Paul, seeming satisfied with this, downed the last of the whiskey and started to undress.
The sight of his body, even blurred and distorted in the darkness, reminded John of the thrill he'd been chasing, the roar of that plane, the flutter in his chest the very first time Paul had kissed him. Paul looked up and met his eyes, tossing his shirt aside and drunkenly stumbling over, cupping John's face in his hands. John smiled, sad and more than a little drunk himself. He put his hands on Paul's waist and kissed him, slow like he was waiting for something.
Time seemed to slow to a standstill as Paul slipped his tongue between John's lips. John angled his body towards him, allowing his thigh to brush Paul's as he deepened the kiss and Paul brushed back John's hair with one hand, the other still holding his cheek. The floor swam beneath him. They finally drew back, lips wet, and the faint runway lights flashed on and off, lighting shifting patterns of red and green and orange over Paul's face as John watched with wide eyes.
"You're beautiful," John said, his voice barely above a whisper. His whole body felt numb. He wanted to cry.
"Christ, your hands are freezing," Paul whispered back, covering them with his own and gently pulling them off his hips. Wordlessly, John drew back and slowly started to take off his shirt, fingers moving clumsily over the buttons as Paul finished stripping and sat down on the edge of the bed.
"Oh, don't wait up for me," John called to him as he kicked off his jeans. A roar outside the window; a plane came in to land, skidding across the wet runway. Paul made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh and stretched out on the bed as John laid down beside him. When their eyes met once again, John saw that Paul's cheeks were wet with tears, glistening in the runway lights, shifting red-orange-green and back again.
"What's wrong?" he asked as he pulled him in close, bodies pressed flush yet they remained distant, in their own worlds. Paul wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.
"I don't know."
So John held him close all night long and made impossible promises and in exchange Paul pressed kisses all over his face and laid willing and pliant in his arms until morning.
Paul left early that Thursday morning. John went into town. He sat down on a park bench and read the Evening News from the night before. The headline read, "I fly on the great Concorde dream."
John felt a strange rush, like when he had been caught stealing as a child; his heart hammered as if he'd just sprinted across the road, weaving between cars with horns blaring all around him, throwing glances back over his shoulder at his pursuer as he ran. He thought of Paul, and wondered if he'd seen it.
After that, they stopped having sex. They didn't make a conscious choice on the matter, it just seemed to stop happening, and neither of them was lucid enough to care much anymore. John didn't mention it. Paul didn't even seem to notice. There was a brief influx of phone calls which quickly dwindled, and they rarely took the time to make plans to meet. When they did, they sat for hours in bars and cafes and hardly spoke at all.
The next time they saw one another was late in the autumn. Paul flew Concorde. John did not.
They met at the old house, the one John was moving out of. He didn't mention the why; there was no need. Paul knew already, had to have known. The divorce was all over the news by now, and by then they both knew it was a disaster that by all accounts should have come years sooner. They stood where the kitchen table had been, tracing over the indentations in the linoleum tiles with their pacing and speaking remotely as the November sky darkened with storm clouds.
A supersonic jet didn't contend with storm clouds. It didn't even have to concern itself with turbulence. John and Paul, caught up in the troposphere where the air thinned to nothing, were rocked by it. An unnamed tension stretched between them far beyond the point of breaking; it was tearing them apart and still neither of them could bring themselves to voice it. John felt as though he were held in place by invisible hands, dragging him back as he fought imperceptibly to break from them and somehow take those short paces across the floor to where Paul stood, waiting.
He was finally free to do what he pleased, and yet this was still the only way that Paul could reach him; here, in this house, in this brief window between afternoon and twilight, less than one day in fifty. All the world seemed to conspire to keep them apart even as they fought to cling to one another the way they had before, as if they could return to the way that they'd been and everything could be alright again— if only it could all just be alright again and they wouldn't have to be here in this house inches apart and unable to touch.
Paul always said that he wished he was not a boy who cried; but he was.
John wished that he could speak, but the words stuck in his throat as he watched the tears run down Paul's beautiful face and drip down onto the yellow linoleum floor of the kitchen of the house that he did not live in anymore. He watched helplessly and could not move or speak for a long instant stretching on as the rain began to fall and the windowpane rattled. Out in the yard, dry brown leaves whirled into the air and fell again, rose and fell like the world was breathing, waiting. The sky had acquired an orange cast.
He imagined that he was dead; dead like his friends and like his mother, dead like the little sparrow he'd found in the attic of the old house the summer before they moved away.
He wanted to run, needed to run, needed to get out. Fly up through the tops of the clouds into the stratosphere. Fly down the stairs and break his jaw. Crash on the wet asphalt in a sunburst of yellow-orange flames, send up sparks into the cold autumn air, lie there torn open and bleeding, hear the sirens far-off in the hazy blue distance, though he'd know they would never arrive in time. Not ever.
Finally he willed his frozen body into action, taking two shaky steps across the tiles and putting his arms around Paul, who said nothing. He only allowed himself to be held and, after a moment, let his head rest on John's shoulder.
The rain was coming down and John realised that he had never been struck by the weight of being before; though he had coasted through all his life this way it brought tears to his eyes which stung but did not fall. The weak evening light flashed and wavered over the floor where they stood, like a wash of rain inside the house. Concorde rose up over the Atlantic, chasing the setting sun.
In spring of '77, they were finally set into motion.
It happened like this: they had finally agreed one day that they had taken enough. It happened over the phone; by then they had stopped meeting altogether, not exactly occupied with their own lives but not able to admit to the truth, that being together had become too difficult. They were lazy by nature, they had lived a decade of everything coming easy, and now they were living in the real world again, faced with the apparent reality that the one thing they wanted most seemed to be the only thing still out of reach. And so gradually they decided that it just wasn't worth the effort.
And why try? The sight of one another was becoming painful again, nothing but a reminder of what they didn't have. And it had been decided some wordless evening that neither of them was worth the price of love. They hadn't tried before, when they were able, so now they didn't deserve the chance.
It happened like this: Paul had telephoned on a rainy evening. John was sitting in the living room of a flat he didn't really feel like he was living in, smoking and staring at the wall, when the phone rang.
"Hello?"
Hearing Paul's voice on the other end he didn't feel anything but tired. He sat down on the floor, idly twisting the phone cord around his finger as they quickly ran out of pleasantries and fell into a lull of silence.
"Hey," Paul said after a while. "Can I ask you something?"
John blew out a plume of smoke.
"Yeah, shoot."
"Do you think it's too late to start over?" Paul asked wearily, and John took a long drag of his cigarette, cradling the telephone handset against his shoulder and feeling the smoke fill up his lungs. He exhaled slowly. Out on the street, rush-hour traffic crept by. Inside his chest, a time-bomb had ticked down to zero.
"Never, right?"
Paul stayed silent for a while. When he finally spoke, his voice was strained.
"John, I'm so fucking tired of this."
"Okay," John replied. "Okay."
I miss you, he was trying to say. I miss you and I miss loving you.
There was a long silence and John's mind was filled with the roar of engines backburning orange flame and trailing silver smoke, and with a sound that was not a sound the fabric of the world tore just slightly. He was sixty thousand feet above the sea; a white streak in the black sky, an impossible thing.
"John, will you come live with me?" Paul said suddenly.
"What?"
(The plane seemed to hang motionless with nothing but a flat dull sheet of white clouds below it and the cold vacuum of space above.)
"I mean it."
Then, after a pause, he added, "Please?"
The sick desperation in his voice made John's stomach twist into knots. Please, John, please don't leave me alone… Concorde flew at twice the speed of sound. Paul loved him, an impossible thing. Paul still loved him.
"Promise you'll not give up on me," John found himself saying.
"Of course not, love," Paul answered softly. "We've been through enough of that already."
"Promise me."
He could feel his heart pounding.
"I promise." Then, "As long as you'll do the same."
John slumped back against the wall, relief flooding through him.
"Cross my heart," he said.
And so the arrangements were made, and an apartment on the West Coast was bought off the sale of the old house in London, and Paul flew subsonic on the day they were to meet. They moved in together in early summer. The new apartment sat on a hill overlooking the sea, and floor-to-ceiling windows along the west wall allowed the setting sun to flood the space with orange light in the evenings. The single bedroom had high windows instead. When they arrived that first day, after unlocking the door most carefully and tentatively, they had been struck suddenly by the fact that this was real. They exchanged glances, then with a sudden burst of motion set to chasing one another down the hall and through the sitting room, into the kitchen and then back again, stepped into the bedroom with their hands clasped together and their eyes filled with adolescent wonder as if waking from a beautiful dream just to find that it was real all along.
For the first time in what seemed to him like years, John called their new place Home and meant it.
The first night in the new apartment, they'd slow-danced drunkenly to the music on Paul's old handheld radio, having been unable to find a record player among the stacks of moving boxes. John hit the lights as they fell back into the bedroom and flung their clothes off and embraced, their faces already wet with tears and it was impossible to tell whose; with John's arms around him, Paul seemed to have a physicality to him which he had lacked before, as if they were touching for the first time and indeed as if all their life before this moment was one long dream. John couldn't help but smile as Paul threw him back on the bed; laid back, letting himself stretch out languidly as Paul kissed every inch of his body.
They rolled and John found himself on top, slid down to kiss and suck the pale flesh of Paul's thighs and Paul arched up into it, involuntary soft sounds spilling from his lips. These quickly dissolved into breathless laughter as John suddenly sat up, lurched back to throw his arms around Paul's shoulders and buried his face in his hair.
"I missed you," he mumbled.
"Oh, John," Paul sighed, relaxing into him. John squeezed him gently, waves of elation washing over him at the simple contact. He closed his eyes, feeling Paul's soft hair against his cheek.
There was a brief silence broken only by the sound of their breathing and a quiet breeze rattling the windowpane.
"Right," John said, sitting up, and Paul smiled coyly.
"Right," he echoed.
They kissed again and John came as soon as Paul had settled himself on top of him, that slight friction alone bringing him over the edge.
"Oh!" Paul's eyes widened with soft surprise. Then he laughed at John's look of embarrassment and leaned down to kiss him on the lips. Quite lightly he asked, "What, you nervous?"
"No," John said, his face heating. "It's been a while, you know."
"I know." He grinned, then bit his lip. "Fuck, I'm close."
His earnest manner broke through John's self-consciousness and he smiled despite himself.
"Well, go on."
"Mhm."
He looked up at Paul above him, at the way strands of black hair fell and hung down around his face and shone silvery in the moonlight and swung with the motion of his rocking hips; the slight strain in his features, pleasure blooming behind his eyes. He was so beautiful. Quickening breaths, his hand moving between them, the quiet wind, creak of bedsprings. It didn't take long.
They took a shower and hurried back to bed, lay talking for hours, drifted off by midnight content with one another's presence. It was the best John thought he had ever slept, a silent dreamless sleep, as if they were gliding along the bright blue line of the atmosphere and the endless dark sky above was blanketing them in stillness. The friction of flight kept them warm.
John woke to afternoon sunlight streaming through the high bedroom window. He rolled over in bed, smiling at the sight of Paul's sleeping face across from him. He slid closer and put his arms around him.
Blearily, Paul opened his eyes. "Hmhh?"
"Good morning, Macca," John said sweetly, kissing him on the cheek. Paul yawned.
"What time's it?" he mumbled. John leaned over the nightstand, picking up his watch and holding it up to his face, squinting. He frowned, rubbed his eyes, put on his glasses. He read the time.
"Half past one," he said, lying back down. Paul rested his head on John's shoulder.
"So you ought to have said 'Good afternoon,' then," he murmured. John smiled.
"Sure."
They stayed in bed until two, then made it in the living room. If John had a hard time believing it before, now it should have been impossible; but there they were. He felt dizzy and weightless and wonderful as the sun streamed in and painted all the floorboards and caught in every strand of Paul's hair. Even his own body seemed to be a miraculous thing.
The two of them held one another through months of bad dreams, slept curled in each other's arms. At night John was Concorde One and he soared supersonic through the black nothingness of fifty-six thousand feet, the first of October, gleaming far above the Atlantic. Though he knew that he was one of a pair, he was alone that night; up there in the stratosphere with only Blackbirds for company…
The rain turned into droplets of glass which fell and shattered against his white body as it soared through the black sky. It was so cold and he was burning up. He recalled waking up in the night, naked and frightened, only to find that he was home. Paul was holding him.
"You alright?" Paul asked. John closed his eyes.
Alright. Alright. Right. Stop, try again. Stop me if you've heard this one before. Concorde. Concorde. Are you there?
"Yeah, I think so."