The Cure of Souls Read Online Free PDF

now, you know the score, you know all the traps. I’m telling you honestly: you don’t do this now, you’ll be a very embittered old man one day. Jesus, what am I saying,
one day
? How long you been out of it now – ten years, fifteen? That’s three whole generations in this business! How much time you really got left? How long now before the looks start to fade, before the winsome little-boy-lost turns into some sad, wrinkled—?
Listen
to me!’
    ‘I can’t… I can’t tour.’ Face it: he couldn’t even
play
all that well any more.
    ‘Right, let’s see, now.’ Prof went on like he hadn’t heard. ‘It would have to be as support, the first time. But supporting somebody
tasteful
– don’t worry about that, it can be arranged. REM, Radiohead… all these guys admit to being influenced by your work. You’re a cult… OK, a minor cult. But a cult is still a cult…’
    ‘Prof?’ Lol was resting the guitar on his trainers, his fingers among its machine-heads. ‘Be honest – you don’t even know that’s true, do you?’
    ‘The hell does that matter? Laurence, I apologize in advance if this sounds immodest, but if I’m the one spreading it around, everyone is going to believe it, therefore it
becomes
the truth.’
    ‘I can’t tour.’ Lol stood with his back against the partition wall again, his breathing becoming harder at the very thought of
on the road
.
    ‘You
can
tour! You
need
to tour… this will kick-start your confidence. You’re just using this therapy shit as some kind ofbuffer against the real world. You’re institutionalized and you don’t even know it. It’s like… like so many schoolteachers are really just kids who were afraid to leave school. Believe me, Laurence.’
    And part of Lol did believe him, because Kenneth ‘Prof’ Levin had been down in the half-lit caverns, too – in his case alcoholism, the destruction of a good marriage.
    Lol recalled the buzz he’d felt when he’d had the message to call Prof, a couple of weeks ago – around the same time he was concluding that knowing the difference between cognitive therapy and humanistic therapy didn’t make either of them any more effective. In fact, the day after his senior tutor had told him, not with irony but with something approaching pride:
Therapy, Laurence, is the religion of the third millennium. And we’re the priests
– the voice slick with self-belief, after a few glasses in the wine bar down the road from the college.
Everybody needs a church. A confessional. Forgiveness
. This senior tutor, this high priest, was younger than Lol, maybe thirty-four.
    ‘All right!’ Prof Levin had finally backed off. ‘Enough. We’ll talk about this again. For starters, we just do the album.’
    ‘
Album?
’
    Prof had spread his arms magnanimously. With his own studio set up, he was at last able to make these decisions without consulting anyone in a suit.
    And Lol had thanked him for the offer – very profusely, obviously, because having Prof Levin produce an album for you was kind of like having Spielberg take on your screenplay – but then pointed out, reasonably enough, that he had only four songs: not quite
half
an album.
    Prof had smiled beatifically through his white, nail-brush beard.
    ‘You have the whole summer, my son. This summer… is yours.’
    And he had shambled smugly away to his room in the adjacent cottage, leaving Lol to switch everything off before climbing to his own camp bed in one of the old haylofts.
    Like he was really going to sleep after this?
    Instead, he’d stumbled out, bemused, into the warm night, to commune with the Frome. But the river was already asleep and that was how he ended up following the track running down a line of poplars and out the other side, close to where the hopkilns stood. The sky was now obscured by a tangle of trees, and he was aware of a high, piercing hum that somehow translated itself into
Everybody needs a church. A confessional. Forgiveness
.
    Not exactly the