Leaving Home, Bye Bye
A Beatles Story
[This was written round the time of ‘All You Need’ – the other Beatles story I posted. ‘Leaving Home, Bye Bye’ appeared in an anthology called Outside The Asylum: The Grist Anthology Of The Best Short Fiction Of 2012 alongside work by Melvin Burgess and Alexei Sayle, edited by Michael Stewart.]
The Beatles sit, left to right, George-Ringo-John-Paul, on a long pink cabriole leg sofa in Brian Epstein’s house, Belgravia, answering questions after a dinner party to celebrate the release of their new album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. It is the 19th of May 1967. George is wearing a burgundy velvet jacket with thick stripes. Ringo is looking hip in white shirt, psychedelic tie and bespoke Edwardian-style suit with velvet trim. John is sporting a green frilly shirt, maroon trousers and a sporran. Paul has thrown on a grey pinstripe jacket, mismatched trousers and a thin silk scarf in pink and red. All The Beatles apart from Paul have moustaches. A single reporter, in gray suit, white shirt, blue tie, kneels in front of them, clutching his heavy microphone, trembling.
Paul (to reporter): The first thing I saw – in my head – were these curtains, like, with the light behind them. You know those sort of curtains. Not net curtains but not solid, either.
John: The word you’re fumbling for, old chap, is cheap.
Paul: Yeah, but curtains so you can, like, see through them when there’s a streetlight behind them or the sun’s coming up, which is what’s happening when –
George: It’s five o’clock.
John: It’s fab o’clonk, pop fans.
Paul: – when we meet the girl. It’s a small house on a long terraced street, you know. Two up, two down.
John: It’s an anagram!
Paul: Nothing special, the house or the street. And I suppose that I was thinking, like, that she was nothing particularly special, either. The girl. I could see her, too.
John: Oh, we all saw her.
Ringo: Which girl?
George: None of us have girlfriends, apart from those of us who have wives.
Paul: I don’t know where these things come from, but like they just come to me. And her I saw as, you know, a bit of a Rita Tushingham type.
John (into microphone): Hello, Rita, love. How ya doing?
Ringo: Lovely, Rita.
John: Bhagvad-rita – eh, George?
Paul: Just an ordinary girl in an ordinary house. But when I saw the morning sun coming up behind those curtains, it had a kind of sad melancholy to it.
Ringo: This is in Rita Tushingham’s house? Have you been to Rita Tushingham’s house?
Paul: You know, when the day hasn’t quite begun but there are people up and quietly doing stuff that they don’t usually do. Because she’s leaving –
John: Home. Yes. And she’s never going back, is she? Not to that dump.
Paul: Well,…
John: Not in a million bloody years.
Ringo: What kind of curtains does Rita Tushingham have? They’re not cheap, are they? She’s done alright for herself, our Rita.
George: There are different kinds of light.
Paul: Yeah, George is right. They’re different, even in the same house at the same time of day. Or at least, you notice them as different when you’re doing something different that day.
John: Like leaving home. For ever.
Paul: And sometimes when I see pictures like that, in me head, I get the music starting up, too.
George: Funny that. Tell us more, Mr Lennon-McCartney…
Paul: I could hear it, all with a slow kind of flowing, and moving from one chord to the other without you really noticing when –
John: Go on, Mendelssohn! Get in there!
Paul: – chord changed into the next. I like classical music.
Ringo: Is he still talking about curtains?
Paul: I’ve been digging a lot of, like, the classics recently. They’re really cool.
John: Beethoven is a great fan of Paul’s.
Paul: And I wanted some sort of grandeur to go along with this girl, as she left her girlhood behind.
John (in horror movie persona): Forever, ha ha ha!
Paul: Well, not necessarily…
George: Paul has been educating us about classical music, recently.
Ringo: Oh, aye.
Paul: I wanted the music to follow her downstairs – to sort of tiptoe out of the house with her.
John: Bye, bye, curtains.
Ringo: I like Rita Tushingham.
George: It’s very sad, that bit. I think it’s important that people feel these emotions, and that our music is able to make people feel them. It helps them progress.
John: And then she dances off down the road, doing a jig, because she’s finally escaped –
Paul: But the song has some sympathy for –
John: Yeah, but the girl is like out of the rotten cage, isn’t she? It’s been all her life that she’s been stuck with those twisted old people, and now she’s finally free.
Ringo: I like Rita Tushingham but I like Julie Christie, too.
George: It is a kind of escape, some kind of rebirth.
Paul: Her parents aren’t really equipped to understand the new world that they’re living in – or, rather, that their daughter wants to live in.
John: Yeah, it’s hard to understand Shepherd’s Bush.
George: Even shepherds don’t.
John: Oh, you are still there, are you? Wakely-wakely!
Paul: It hasn’t been easy for their sort, going through the war and then all the gloomy stuff that came after.
John: Choosing curtains.
Paul (to John): Look, I’m trying to be serious here, alright? The man’s asking me a serious question.
George: The serious man with the serious eyebrows.
Ringo: Julie Christie has a smaller nose than Rita Tushingham.
John: You’ve got a smaller nose than Rita.
Paul: Anyway, –
George (to reporter): He’s not like this normally.
Ringo: I am!
George (pointing at Paul): I meant him.
Paul: When she –
John: He’s worse than this normally.
Paul: – leaves the house, out the back door, goes off down the alley – when she’s out, we only follow her for a while. Most of the time is spent with her mother and father. They’re really making an effort to understand. I think lots of people are like that.
John: Well-meaning murderers.
Paul: Look, it was me wrote the song. They’re not murderers.
John: They haven’t been successful, no. But they’ve been trying to kill that girl since the moment she was born. There she is, alone with them in that house, and everything she does they criticize. Every boy she wants to go out with, every thought she might express, they just rip it apart, until there’s hardly anything left.
Ringo: Are they at it again?
George: Another cup of tea?
Ringo: Don’t mind if I do.
John: What she does is absolutely justified. Get out while you bloody well can.
Paul: That is what she does –
John: And what you leave behind you’s just something that you’ve left behind.
Ringo: They’re still talking about the song?
George: Not really.
Ringo: It’s the mother I feel sorry for.
George: It’s going to be painful whoever you are.
Paul: I think George is right. But that doesn’t mean cruelty is a good thing. We all need to try and treat eachother with decency and respect –
George: And compassion.
Paul: And love.
George: And mindfulness.
John: Mind your language.
Ringo: Mind the dog.
John: Ming the Magnificent!
Reporter: If I could just interject –
John: Watch it! This is me best jacket, sonny.
Paul: Go on.
Reporter: In the song, there’s a man from ‘the motor trade’. Is there any particular significance in that?
John: Look, mate, it’s this – that poor girl’s life is so bloody awful that she’ll go off with the first pair of trousers that comes along.
George: They’re his best trousers, too.
John: Old people just don’t understand what it means to be young. They think they were young once, but they weren’t. You can only be young. You can’t look back and remember it and, sort of, be it again. Once it’s finished it’s finished, and you’re practically finished, too, if you’d only admit it. You might as well get in the box and have them nail the lid down. Unless you grab hold of being young while you’re young, you’re never going to be able to do it later, after you’ve sensibly put away for your pension and collected your Green Shield Stamps.
Paul: People do their best, you know, in the circumstances they get given. I don’t think you should blame them for being how or who they are or whatever.
Ringo: Rita Tushingham has nice legs, but not as nice as Julie Christie.
George: Sometimes, Ringo, old chum, I think you are the wisest of us all by quite a long chalk.
Ringo: Thank you, whoever you are.
Paul: Some of the people that hear the song are going to be all for the girl, and some of them will be feeling bad like for the parents, and –
John: Some of them will be right and some of them will be fools trying to stop time.
Paul: The song isn’t there to make a judgement. It’s to make people feel the situation, and then they can make up their own minds.
John: You’re dead wrong.
Paul: Look, we’re not talking about ‘A Day in the Life’ here. I think I know what –
John: I knew that girl. I saw her living in that house and dying every single moment in that terrible house.
Paul: It was in the papers. I read about her in the papers, and I thought about her, then I sat down and I wrote the song. On the piano, actually.
John: She was a lovely girl, not ordinary, and she didn’t have one single piece of bright colour in her life. Not one single moment of joy or wonder. She lived twenty years of grey, behind those curtains. Like a sparrow covered in dust. And if she saw a little moment of brightness, and made a dash for it, then I’m all for her. I’m on her side completely, and against anyone who tries to stop her. I hate people who crush people just because they think they can. No-one should be put in that position of absolute power over another human being – call them priest or father or whatever you want. That’s the worst crime in the world, to kill another person’s heart by killing their hopes. And that’s what they were doing, those two, sitting there in their comfortable chairs and waiting up for her and passing eternal judgement on her for coming back smelling of port wine and aftershave. They’d tell her off for smiling, those skeletons. They’re the sort who put plastic covers on their sofas and never take them off. And if they could’ve, they’d have put a cover on her. She did the right thing. Ran. Thousands didn’t. They’re still there now – sitting and having tea and biscuits with their prison guards.
Ringo: Rita’s not in prison, is she?
George: Yet again!
Ringo: What did she do this time?
George (pretends to whisper in Ringo’s ear): Psst-psst.
Ringo (in mock-shock): I hope they throw away the key.
Paul: I think what John’s saying is, you know, like, you know –
John: Yes?
Paul: I agree with the part about freedom. I’m all for that. But when you just do what you want to do, there’s always going to be some suffering left behind.
George (to Paul): Welcome, brother.
Paul: And if we could think about that, before we did anything, we’d all be a lot better off.
John: Some people don’t think. Some people just kill.
Paul: ‘She’s leaving home’ isn’t about killing. It’s about life.
There are five clear seconds of silence.
John: Look, right, I think it’s a great song. Really. One of the best Paul’s ever done. I’d like to pay sincere tribute to my partner of these – how long is it? – these twenty seven years. I’m going to have to look lively. Sheep up or shut out. He’s no fool, that lad.
Paul: John helped with the chorus. You should ask about ‘A Day in the Life’.
Ringo: I still can’t believe that Rita murdered someone.
George: I have to put up with this all the time. Can you imagine?
Paul: Do you have another question?
Reporter: Yes –
John: As long as it’s not about curtains.
