Chapter Text
There was always a wave of customers to Anthony’s Records and Music at about four in the afternoon. Of course, that only meant that around ten or so people showed up in an hour, but it was more than the rest of the day ever got. As it was, at high noon, the shop was vacant.
Of everybody but Paul, that is.
The man in question was leaning against a record stand, reorganizing the old labels for probably the third time this week. It was the thing he’d do after taking inventory and cleaning and sorting and anything else that actually needed doing – he’d find a new way to order them. Alphabetically, by genre, by year, by popularity – hell, even by color.
It took no stretch of the imagination to gather that he was bored.
His constant reshuffling of the records confused the few regulars the shop ever had, but they eventually learned to take it in good humor.
Paul McCartney worked in a rather small, out-of-the-way music shop in downtown Liverpool, not too far away from his family’s house, which made it convenient. He could pop home on his break for lunch, and would usually have done so today, had he not remembered just as he was about to leave that he’d forgotten to do the shopping. He made a note to do it after he got off work, before his father could chide him.
Half of the shop sold instruments. Mostly guitars and basses, but a few brass and woodwinds, too, and a single drum kit. They’d had it for about a year now, and nobody was interested. He didn’t really mind; once it goes, the owner wouldn’t get another one, and Paul quite enjoyed banging out a rhythm when he was so bored that not even shuffling the records could help.
The rest of the shop had CDs, old records, and sheet music. There was a small upright piano pushed against a wall, just in case somebody wanted to test out a book before they bought it. Hardly anyone ever did, and the few times Paul sat down to it, he noticed it to be terribly out of tune. The piano was so seldom used that it wasn’t worth the money getting a tuner in.
Most of the records in the unsorted pile were one-hit wonders or short-lived fads of the 60s and 70s, none of the more famous bands or artists one would usually see, since those were already placed on the racks. Paul was familiar with all of the more obscure ones the shop carried, and he even liked a few, but mostly, he could see why they hardly sold.
He grabbed the top record. The sleeve had a picture of four men – boys, really – and was titled The Best of the Silver Beatles. He couldn’t recall any of their songs without flipping the sleeve over and reading the song list.
It had some covers of older songs and a few things he knew weren’t famous. “Please Please Me”, “Help!”, “Norwegian Wood”, and “Girl” were listed as being sung (and probably written) by a John Lennon, according to the credits, since those weren’t the familiar titles.
Paul remembered having listened to the record before and he liked the band well enough. The drummer never seemed consistent, and some of the guitars buzzed and rang, making it obvious that the Silver Beatles didn’t make it big for a reason, but the singer had a good voice. Powerful, passionate, versatile.
Members were John Lennon: Vocals, Rhythm Guitar; George Harrison: Guitar; Stuart Sutcliffe: Bass Guitar; Pete Best: Percussion. All no-names, long forgotten dreamers.
It made him think for a few moments about misfortune and wasted talent. Paul really thought the band had potential, if their drummer didn’t speed up during the songs, or if one of their guitars would stop buzzing, or if the basslines weren’t so hesitant. They just needed a bit of shuffling, different members, maybe practice or refinement, and the Silver Beatles really could have been something.
He had always been able to notice voices. If he’s heard it once, he’ll recognize it any time later, though he may not remember where it was from. He’d read before that smell was a person’s most nostalgic sense, but Paul was the exception to that rule.
The singer’s voice had been untrained, unprofessional, and raw. Some could make it like that; they got famous with very personal, emotional music. People like Jim Morrison or Alice Cooper did it well; the voice itself was by no means ‘pretty’, but its emotive ability was endlessly captivating. Paul could list dozens who got famous trying, but those who succeeded were rarer. And this John Lennon, whoever he was, could do it.
Paul shook the oddly melancholy thoughts from his head; it’s useless to dwell on such things so long passed. If half of these old musicians weren’t dead by Paul’s time, they had to be old as dirt.
He finished sorting out the records quickly – this time, he ordered them by every five years, then by genre. He’d have to make new labels for the sections of the racks, but until then, if he did have any customers, they’d just have to figure it out themselves.
By the changing tone of light coming through the windows, Paul knew that the sky was darkening. It had been overcast all day, so he was not surprised, but he had hoped the rain would wait until he’d gotten home. Now, he had to hope it let up before he had to leave.
He hummed along to the song that softly played over the speakers from the back of the shop when the rain began to fall lightly. It provided a soothing backdrop to Paul’s sleepy day, and might have lulled him into a light sleep right there on the floor, had it not been for the chiming of the bell on the door as it swung open.
Paul glanced up to see a familiar slight figure ducking into the shop, clad in a raincoat that near engulfed him but holding no umbrella. His hair was soaked and drops of water dripped from the tip of his nose as he shook his shaggy head.
“Hey, Ritchie,” he greeted. “Have a nice shower?”
Richard Starkey looked up at him as he shrugged off his raincoat, dropping it by the door, and ran a hand through his hair. His malleable face held the sad, depressed sort of expression that Paul knew was an act as he lamented, “There’s no hot water left, Paul. Why’d you use it all?”
Ritch was one of the few frequent customers at the record shop. His visits used to be strictly of an economic nature, as he was new to this neighborhood, and the record shop (surprisingly) had a better selection than the one closer to his old place had. Now, though, since he’d bought most everything worth anything, he stopped by just to chat on occasion. He had Paul had become very good friends.
He had a very level voice. It was the sort that was small, but that carried, and sounded quite clear; he probably couldn’t whisper if he tried. On occasion, when he’d hum the song stuck in his head, Paul noticed that his range was rather limited, but the notes he held were strong, confident.
Paul hoisted himself up from the floor by the record racks and sat in the revolving chair behind the register as Ritch hopped up on the counter.
“So, what’s up? Aren’t you usually at work now?”
Ritch dug a pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket, plucked one out, and lit it. He offered the pack to Paul as he took his own between his teeth. Paul shook his head; he wasn’t much into smoking.
He shrugged, “Took off. About a week ago. Supposed to go out to London with some mates, ‘cause tomorrow’s me birthday, y’know, but they all cancelled, on account of the rain an’ all.”
“Well, actually, I didn’t know,” Paul said. “How old?”
“Don’t you know it’s rude to ask a lady’s age?” Ritch put on a creaky falsetto, sounding more like Graham Chapman in drag than an aging woman, and batted his lashes. “I’ll be twenty-one.”
He grinned. “Congrats, mate. You’re ancient.”
Ritch hunched over, putting his hand on the small of his back. “It’s no fun getting’ old, truly,” he said. “Least I’ll get that seniors discount, eh?”
Paul scoffed. “Yeah, right.”
There was a comfortable silence, in which Paul listened to the rain as it fell against the window panes, and Ritch slowly exhaled a cloud of smoke. He leaned towards Paul for his next breath and blew the smoke out with force, aimed directly at his face. Paul pushed back against the counter and rolled away in his chair.
“You arse, Starkey, that stuff stinks something awful.” He cleared his throat and glared playfully at his friend.
“Still smells better than you.”
Paul kicked him lightly in the shin just as a clap of thunder echoed from the skies above. It was the sort that rang like a sheet of metal shaking; it was thick and voluminous, much like the clouds it came from.
“Well, I can see why they’d wanna cancel. Still, it’s a bit of a downer.”
Ritchie huffed another breath of smoke and nodded. “It is. But, honestly, I think those lads jus’ wanted to go get pissed in some London pubs with London girls instead o’ Liverpool ones. Me birthday was just an excuse.”
Paul glanced at his digital watch. “Well, if you feel like hanging ‘round for a few hours, you can come over to mine once I get off. Won’t have cake or anything, and you’d have to deal with Dad an’ Mike, but it’s no worse bein’ alone.”
He could tell that Ritch was tempted but didn’t want to seem too eager, so he looked out of the window into the rain and said, “Might do, if the rain’s not letting up.” He didn’t want to admit it, but he didn’t like being left alone on his birthday. Since it was a Friday and he didn’t work Saturdays, he saw no harm in hanging around with Paul for however long they could bear each other.
Ritchie worked at the railroad. He directed routes and made sure the rails were up to snuff; he had some amount of authority over the construction and maintenance workers, and it wasn’t necessarily a dead-end job, but it didn’t give him much intellectual or creative stimulus. For that, he turned to music.
He wasn’t much of a singer, but he could drum a mean beat, and every chance he had to actually play with someone – not too often, mind, but occasionally – he reckoned it sounded pretty good. He’d played some with Paul before, and they worked well, but hardly had the chance to do anything.
“Get to those drums, Ritchie, I’ve had a song stuck in my head all day.”
Ritch hid a grin to himself, glad for a distraction and wondering what Paul would play; it could very well be on piano or guitar, and given Paul’s wide range of musical tastes, it could nearly be any song.
Since the piano was grossly out of tune, Paul grabbed one of the old acoustic guitars off of the shelf. He liked to tune the things weekly, just in case a customer came in and wanted to try them out (they hardly ever did, but one thing that could not be said of Paul was that he did not take his job seriously). He sat down in his chair and rolled it over in front of Ritchie, who’d made himself comfortable on the stool behind the drums.
“Just join in once you recognize it,” he told him. Ritch nodded.
He recognized the opening two chords immediately. He grinned and joined in with a beat that fit seamlessly with the rhythm of Paul’s guitar.
“This thing,” he sang in his best Elvis impression, “called love,” even if the song wasn’t by Elvis. “I just can’t handle it.” And, admittedly, though Paul thought he could sing reasonably well, he couldn’t sound anything quite like Elvis.
Joining in, Ritchie put on his most obnoxiously southern American accent. The rain made an interesting contrast to their mixed-up lyrics and out-of-order verses. They both knew the song, of course; it was a classic, but messing about made it feel more carefree. It felt more improvised, more alive.
As Ritchie rapidly hit the symbols as some sort of conclusion to their impromptu performance, another clap of thunder sounded.
“Well,” Paul set the guitar back up on its spot on the wall, “if that wasn’t ominous.”
Ritch shrugged as he left the drums, laying the two sticks down flat on the counter. “Even the heavens above can’t handle the power of the King and Queen.”
They drummed and strummed out a few more bits of music before the rainfall got so loud that they could hardly hear themselves anymore. It distantly occurred to Paul that the weather wasn’t usually this malevolent, and that something like this wasn’t forecasted, but he never really concerned himself with the weather beyond its immediate impacts.
“Looks like you’ll be here a while,” he said to Ritch as he put the guitar up.
“Pity.”
He hummed to himself as he settled back behind the counter. Even after playing all those songs just now, he had one of those songs stuck in his head – one from that record. He didn’t remember it well enough to recall the name or even most of the lyrics, but it was catchy, and he couldn’t rid himself of the earworm.
As Ritchie occupied himself with some paperwork that must have been some sort of train schedule or other boring tripe that Paul couldn’t bother to be concerned with, Paul pulled out his phone and went to the internet, typing in ‘silver beetles’ to the search bar.
The first results, once they had the courtesy to load in such bad weather, were webpages about soldier beetles and stag beetles, which Paul assumed were the actual insects, and lead him nowhere he wanted to go. Back up to the search bar, he added ‘band’ to the end of the key words, which gave him slightly better results.
They had a Wikipedia article, of course. Paul figured that nobody cared enough about the esoteric group that nobody would bother putting false information up about them, so it was his best bet for clear information.
As it turned out, they were the Silver Beatles, no Beetles. Though he couldn’t erase the image of literal insects playing old music from his mind, he had to admit that the pun on ‘beat’ was slightly clever.
The page was concise, much like the band’s lifetime: formed in 1960 and disbanded by 1963, they released three haphazard, messy records that failed to make any impact in ratings or bring in royalties. They became quite popular here in Liverpool, but fell apart when they never gained traction in other cities. They went through two other drummers besides Best, neither of which worked out, and Stuart Sutcliffe quit when he realized that his passion was not in the performing arts.
George Harrison slipped into a quiet obscure life and passed away some ten years ago from cancer, while John Lennon moved to America after the band’s failure and fell into the rampant counterculture drugs and promiscuity that characterized the following two decades. Apparently, he died before he was forty years old.
The same part of his mind that entertained theories of faked moon landings and Adolf Hitler’s secret bunker in Antarctica wondered if his death was something common, like an illness or cancer, an overdose or suicide, or if he’d been murdered. The article didn’t say, but it did hint at involvement in a few anti-war demonstrations which, Paul discovered once he pressed the blue link, often turned ironically violent.
There were only a few pictures of the actual band on Google Images, all of which were slightly out of focus, and mostly of their album covers. Their hair was done up in some sort of Elvis-like style, and Paul reckoned that they could have made relatively good impersonators, if they weren’t so thin and angular. The two who were the clearest in the photographs, the two in the middle, each had sharp jawlines, and one had quite a striking nose. They may have been handsome, but it was only a photograph.
“Whatcha up to, Paulie?”
He grimaced at the nickname; it was what his mother used to call him, and only her. Ritchie wasn’t to know that, though, so he did his best to push the feeling of emergent pain aside. “Just lookin’ up some stuff ‘bout an old record. Nothing good, though. Didn’t seem to age well.”
Ritch neatened his stack of papers and slid them back into the pocket of his oversized coat on the floor as he nodded. “I’ve no bloody idea how this place is in business, Paul. You’ve got so much shit no-one buys.”
“Well, we’re still here.” Paul had wondered the same thing quite often, though. This was just a little shop; the owner certainly wasn’t making any profit, and Paul certainly couldn’t live off of what little he, as just an employee, made.
He was only nineteen, after all. He finished school with good marks – excellent marks, really – and he could have gotten into a good school, but there was the problem of money. Only that he didn’t have any, that is, so he couldn’t pay for anything worth his time. Another issue was that he had no idea what he wanted to study.
Well, he knew what he wanted to study, which was music, but he didn’t know what he could study that his father would approve of. Legally, he didn’t need his father’s permission for something like this, but he did love his dad, and he was essentially bumming in his house for the entire year until he can make up his mind of what worthwhile degree he wanted to pursue, so he felt a certain obligation. Sometimes he envied Ritchie, who was a couple years his senior, and who had known what he was going to do with his life (whether he was satisfied or not) since he was sixteen and first got his job at the rails.
“What should I do, Ritchie?” he asked, not entirely meaning to. Not aloud, at least.
“Wha’?”
He shook his head. “No, never mind. I was jus’ thinking.”
“Dangerous pastime, that.”
“Yeah.” They were quiet for a moment longer, until Paul decided that he may as well get whatever advice out of Ritch that he could. “I meant, when I go to school, what should I study?”
“I dunno. What d’you wanna study?”
He shrugged. “Some kind of arts, probably. Music and such. But that won’t give me anythin’ I’d need to earn a living, according to me da’.”
“If you’re just gonna listen to your da’, then do whatever he wants you to do. Be a lawyer or a doctor or a bloody chartered accountant or whatever. If you won’t do what you want to anyway, then it don’t really matter, right?”
Paul heard a bit of snideness in his tone, and that made him shrink back in his chair a bit. He was aware of how he must come across; he sounded like he was simply complaining but wouldn’t do anything about it, so he just let the subject drop with a “Yeah, I guess.”
“I didn’t mean it like that,” he said, sensing Paul’s resignation. “I’d be no help to you, really, ‘cause I jus’ found a thing that worked well enough and stuck with it. Guess I was lucky; never had to actually decide what to do.”
“How d’you mean?”
“I mean, when I turned sixteen and me family decided they needed me working, the only place that’d hire me was the rails. I never had to choose what to do or where to go like you do.”
Paul looked at his feet contemplatively. “And I need to choose right the first time,” he said. “I’ve got enough money to go to school for a while, but not enough to switch halfway through when I decide I hate what I’m doing.”
“I s’pose it’s a risk everybody takes.”
And he did understand his father’s perspective. Pragmatically, if he were to spend so much money learning something, it should be something that would pay him back in the end. His father was well-intentioned and the rational part of Paul’s brain told him to trust the advice of someone far older than himself. But was pragmatism really so valuable, if it came at the risk of Paul’s lifetime happiness? He would be miserable behind a desk, doing arithmetic or envelope pushing all day. He wasn’t argumentative enough to be lawyer, to begin with – and his perpetually pacific expression didn’t make him scary enough to compensate for it. If he could live through so much schooling, he could go into medical. He fondly remembered his mother’s nursing and midwife career, and how happy it made her to help people, but he also recalled how depressed she would be when she came home if the baby or the mother didn’t make it that day, or if she went into work and found that one of her elderly patients’ beds was now occupied by someone else.
And he remembered seeing his mother herself grow weak and pale, looking much older than she should have, when he was only fourteen, old enough to remember in vivid detail but too young to cope. And if he were a doctor, he could hardly imagine having the skill to diagnose such an illness, but not quite – so tantalizingly close, but not quite – the power to treat it. He could not be a doctor.
Paul spent quite a while watching Ritchie turn the ring on his index finger out of boredom. That was the first thing he’d noticed about the man; he always had multiple rings on each hand. None of them seemed particularly valuable, but they must have had some sentimental value to him, because they rarely varied.
~
After a while, the rain stopped falling with such intensity. There was still a light drizzle, and since it was summer, the sun wasn’t setting quite yet, but Paul decided that five thirty was close enough to the closing time of six to head home. With his luck, if he waited any longer, the rain would come back with a vengeance.
“Let’s head out now,” he announced to his friend, tearing him from his reverie. “I doubt the weather’ll get any better.”
As Ritch gathered his raincoat from the floor, Paul grabbed his jacket. It hadn’t been raining when he left for work this morning, and the weather hadn’t warned him of such a downpour, so he was woefully unprepared for it.
They left the shop and adopted a brisk pace pack to Paul’s house. “The weather on me phone said it’d be dry today,” Ritch began. “I think it must’ve just been the storm slowin’ down the service, stopping the updated weather from loadin’.”
“But it showed up on mine different from yesterday’s,” Paul said, “and it said it wouldn’t rain.”
“I wouldn’t have expected it to be quite so wrong. Meteorology’s gone to the dumps these days.”
Paul scoffed. “I really doubt was any better fifty years ago.”
Ritchie shrugged.
As they walked, the rain regained some of its weight, and it started to soak right trough Paul’s jacket. He glanced at his friend, who was mostly dry underneath his raincoat, with the hood protecting his hair. Paul didn’t even have a hood on his jacket; he made a mental note to keep an umbrella at the shop from now on.
Cars raced down the street beside them. People always drove more recklessly in the rain, and the slick streets didn’t make it any safer. Paul could drive, himself, but he never really needed too; everything was either a walk, bus, or train ride away, and paying for the transit system was less expensive than paying for gas and insurance. On top of that, with the type of job he had and the hours he worked, he hardly had time to get in any exercise, so his walks to and from work and the shops were his only chance.
“What’ll we do once we get to your place?” Ritchie asked.
Paul hummed, thinking. “Mike’s staying over tonight with some friends, I think. I’d forgotten ‘til now. And Da’s been working late for a while, so maybe we’ll have the place to ourselves for a bit. Why, what’d you want to do?”
He laughed lightly, “I was mostly concerned with what we’d have for dinner.”
Shrugging, Paul answered, “I dunno, I think we have some Ramen in the cabinet somewhere,” winking at his friend to let him know that they wouldn’t be eating Ramen for dinner. His father would never allow such an insubstantial dinner; Paul had learned too cook after his mother’s death, and Jim McCartney expected him to do it. “Nah, I’ll make something. Not sure what we have, though, since I haven’t gone to the shops yet this week.”
“How domestic,” Ritchie quipped, and Paul sent him a look that said, Do you want to eat my food or not?
The following events have left Paul’s mind in a deep sort of existential regret, the sort that makes you rethink each of your habits and actions, but the sort that has such little impact on true events that you lose your resolutions as quickly as you make them.
Thinking back on it, he remembers the doppler effect that the car engines have when they race by him. He heard the noise grow steadily louder and higher as they neared him, then heard it recede as the car disappeared off into the distance, so often that he hardly noticed it anymore. That’s where he went wrong. Not noticing.
Nothing registered in his mind as being out of the usual when he heard a car horn blare from behind him; people in Liverpool were quite trigger-happy when it came to horns, so it wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. He’d become numb to what was supposed to be an alarm, and he always thought bitterly in retrospect of how ineffective people’s use of the car horn has made it.
Since he did not notice car engines or car horns anymore, it was no surprise that he did not notice when both of those sounds grew louder and closer than they normally would.
What he did notice, however, was Ritchie’s frightened cry of, “Paul! Move!”
He felt a sharp tug on his arm, pulling him towards the rows of buildings and away from the edge of the sidewalk. Just then, Paul twisted around to see what exactly was causing the alarm in Ritch’s voice, and in doing so, resisted his attempt to get Paul to safety. It was no conscious decision on Paul’s part to wrench his arm out of his friend’s grasp; instinct told him to look at the danger and flee, instead of jumping blindly.
Instinct was, quite contrarily, the greatest threat to his wellbeing. His inaction the moment Ritchie tried to pull him to safety left him in the direct path of the black van barreling towards him, skidding diagonally along the wet road.
“PAUL!”
He felt only two things, then. The first, a great splash of cold water against his legs as he stumbled away from the car, only just overcoming his deer-in-the-headlights shock. The second, a flat sort of impact that seemed to hit every part of his front at once and blanketed his vision in darkness.
~
Paul hadn’t made the smartest move, turning to see what was coming at them instead of following Ritchie’s plea. But, then again, Ritchie hadn’t made the best decision, either, as he rushed after his friend on impulse, right into the vehicle’s path.