The Attic

Thirteen

It happened after Paul was asleep, under the influence of some of the sleeping pills from the hospital John had crushed and mixed into a cup of tea as a powder.

            “No, I don’t want any more of that sleeping stuff,” Paul said, pushing away the glass of water, and the brightly colored assortment of circles, and ovals, big or small, gel-filled, shiny, or rough and grainy, in a rainbow of artificial greens and reds.

 

            “Your shoulder will be hurting,” John said, coaxing the glass slightly closer, but Paul pushed his hand back.

            His face was set in that certain stubborn expression.

 

            “How about a cuppa, then. To soothe you.”

 

            “No, I—“

 

            “Trust me,” John said, boring his eyes into Paul’s.

            The light flickered and John frowned, looking up from his book. The lamp next to his bed seemed to have some kind of loose part, because whenever he moved in the slightest, the tall lamp swayed and the light faltered. John reached out the steady it, and the pale orange glow stilled.

            He reached blindly under the lampshade and drew his hand back out quickly, burnt from the heat. John waved his hand and the lamp leaned backwards, off-balance again.

            Lennon stood up suddenly, raking a hand through his hair and lumbering out of his room. Of course the insomnia would continue. Yoko had given up on trying to have him sleep and he was always the one to leave their room in the middle of the night to be in the living room, rustling old pages of music, wide-eyed and unthinkingly.

            She’d come find him sometimes, wrapping a robe around herself, her with puffy, bleary eyes, and him looking down at songs that didn’t quite have a melody yet, surprised at her apparition like he’d forgotten where exactly he was.

            Sean would come find him too sometimes, when the monsters or a dream would scare him, and he’d crawl into John’s lap, and those were the rare times when he could coax stories out of him, of Aunt Mimi and Julia and Stuart and Brian Epstein, stories that made John acquire that wistful look in his eyes, like they were old dusty characters in a forgotten play; but only when John didn’t tell Sean to go back to sleep.

            Paul was asleep like a baby in his crib.

            A drugged baby in his crib, John corrected himself, and he chuckled at the mental image.

            Mussing his hair with his free hand, John trailed the other along the walls to guide him in the semidarkness of the sleepy house and its long, trailing shadows. These shadows were welcome after the unnatural, permanent brightness of the hospital that, after a while, made you lose track of time, but they weren’t quite the familiar shadows of his flat he’d learned by heart.