The gloom had descended again. Sahib had kept her up all night.
Sahib was really young, and he was scared of the dark. He would move away from dark spots in the room or stare at them from the brighter parts of the room. He couldn’t sleep in his own bed. And he was deeply embarrassed about it.
I sat him on my lap, his face turned toward me but his eyes fixed on the staircase as he tracked the darkness. My stance softened, and I assured him that when I was little, I had not been able to sleep alone either.
She was by the kitchen with the red broom in her hand. Gathering up the mess. The silence felt endless, hopeless. She didn’t want saving. I thought about walking over and holding her, but she would reject me. And I would then battle with the rejection, rather than try to operate on the concrete cloud she was submerged in. I held off. I wanted to piece her together, quicker than she was crumbling.
Years before the silence we were in a place of passion and violence. When we weren’t travelling the world and being in love, the love was vicious… I was destroying my much loved guitar – my beloved ej200 – in a rage. She had pushed me too far. She knew my limits and she went there from time to time.
Prior to that, I was under the spell of this woman who spoke 4 languages. Her trips abroad to work for charities appealed to me and I was seduced by the shimmer of her elegant mini skirts.
Our conversations were like nothing before. They were filled with silence and then meanderings. I learnt from her, and she was comfortable with my being in my head thinking about clever words.
…
Sarb brought Lemon tree to the band in the year that we broke up. It unfurled like a sprawling beast. The changing time signatures and strumming patterns were so deliberate and visible, yet organic, and it all moved together so effortlessly without feeling forced.
Tom constructed the most elaborate lead, sometimes delicate and sometimes crazed. It seemed to come to him so easily. In the rehearsal room he discussed his ideas as he massaged it into something real. Zaki danced around a bass line that floored us.
In the aftermath of the break up, Sarb sensed I wasn’t content with the original lyrics and asked me to rewrite them.
I started and then stopped.
When Tom dragged us back together years later, I started thinking about Lemon Tree again.
…
Late one morning, as I played the opening of Lemon Tree again for the thousandth time… obsessively trying to nail the lyrics to the first verse, Sahib could be heard at the bottom of the stairs.
In the darkest part of the house, for that time in the morning, with the Joker and Batman in his hands… Batman shouts to The Joker ‘I could never ever sleep alone, I could never ever sleep alone, I could never ever sleep alone.’
