The Darkening

“what’s making me insane is that music was always so beautiful.  It was the most beautiful thing in my life, but all it ever did was draw me further into darkness.  It’s a power that comes from outside my mind and moves everything around and I can never catch it.  When I was a little girl it was free but now it’s all machines and money and death.  How can the world exist like this?  How can it go on?"  Tears rolled down her face. 

(on her deathbed)
"They’re here, Victor.  They’re here to take me away.  Don’t be frightened.  I’ll always love you…"  she closed her eyes.

(a different scene, Becky discussing Goth)
"When we were goth we thought that death mattered,” said Becky.  “We were mourning the death of England.  We were reminding London that she used to represent something to the world and that Thatcher was killing what was left of it.  We didn’t want to be punk, we weren’t fighters, we were just finding ways to live in the darkness we felt was our inheritance.  But now there are almost twice as many people in the world.  What does death mean when you know that not only will there be a new child born to take your place, but three?  That the future is going to be a continuous crushing noise of more and more people, more and more forgetting?  Civilization is drowing beneath waves of people.”

(Jennifer, playing music)

“Who do you sing, when everything is song?” was the chorus.  Finally she finished.

“It’s beautiful,” said Victor.  “It’s haunting.  I’m sure you’ll haunt everyone who hears it.”

“It’s my last song.  It’s my last question.  I never figured it out, my whole life long. I just made music and everything in my life was this huge, empty space filled with sounds and I never found out who I was until I married you, Victor.  I never became anyone.  No one ever saw me.”

He put his arms around her.  “It’s my fault.  I should have married you twenty years ago.”

“I don’t know what it means!  I don’t know what it means!  There’s some presence, some presence I was always trying to reach with music, listening to it or playing it, I was trying to reach this presence and talk to it, but I never understood it and now it’s over, there are no more chances and it’s coming for me to take me away.  Did  I do anything?”

“You did something.  You did something.” he repeated.  “You were with me.  You made me love you and when it comes for you a part of me will go away with you and it and whenever I hear your music you will be with me.”

“I don’t want to let go!  I don’t want to let go!"  She made a fist and struck his shoulder as she cried.  "I want to bite you!  I want to kick you!”

“Go ahead,” he said, “You can’t do anything to make me stop loving you.”

(Becky and Victor, discussing goth and politics)

“There has to be something for me, Victor.  I spent my whole life helping people, and it doesn’t mean anything.  I spent my whole life reading books and thinking about writing and now every day meaning slips away.  We’re even going to war over imaginary weapons now, Bush and Blair just make these goddamn speeches about nothingness and the money moves and everything I ever believed about England is getting crushed into oblivion.  Do you remember when we used to talk about the Western Mind?  About what literature meant to the Western Mind?”

“Yes I do,” replied Victor.  “I remember.  Nothing mattered.  It didn’t matter what we said or did.  It was dying from the time Thatcher got elected, it just took twenty years.  Thatcher got elected and then John Lennon got shot and that was it.  It’s funny now that I think about it.  Could you think, maybe, of Goth as a kind of extended funeral for John Lennon?”

“That would be a way of looking at it, wouldn’t it?  I mean, at the time we thought there would be other things coming.  I did, anyway, I thought dark things would happen but I know I saw us as doing something, going somewhere.  I wish I could go back and relive that experience of hearing an album with a new sound and feeling like the world had moved.  I guess that’s what I miss the most.”

“How much of goth was a funeral for John Lennon, and how much of it could have existed outside the shadow of Margaret Thatcher?  I mean, a lot of them might not see it that way but the older I get the more I see it that way.  And I wonder about responsibility, you know?  That’s really something I might be able to figure out now.  At the time I was so confused.”

“I forgave Maggie a bit after I graduated school, going to work myself and all that.”

“I never did.  I hate her worse.  I hate her soul.  I hate her bloody soul and all this talk of nostalgia makes me think I should write a novel where a rock star discovers that the PM is a vampire and hacks her bloody head off.”