The Sick Bag Song. Nick Cave

dejected corner of my sick bag sits a tiny Bryan Ferry in a pair of blue swimming trunks, in West Sussex, in the summer of 2000.

      •

      The stretched sky was blue and so hot my wife was sick with it. She was eight months pregnant with the twins, swollen and gasping for air, unrecognisable from the willowy woman I married a year ago. She stepped out of the car, a beautiful elephant of woe, stepped out and onto Bryan Ferry’s driveway.

      My wife and I had come to visit Lucy Ferry. Bryan was away on business. I was relieved. Who wants to meet their childhood heroes?

      Lucy showed us around the grounds. We saw the walled garden all in bloom, we saw the orchard full of apples, we saw the swallows and the martins, we saw the foaling horse prancing in the fields.

      In the noonday sun the women were as white as snowflakes. I drifted away and found a swimming pool surrounded by a high hedge. I took off my jacket and sat down on a lounger under an umbrella and fell asleep.

      I awoke to find Bryan Ferry in his bathers, standing in the swimming pool. He was white and handsome and very still.

      I haven’t written a song in three years, he said.

      Why? What’s wrong with you? I said.

      He gestured, with an uncertain hand, all about him.

      There is nothing to write about, he said. Then he pushed off into the water.

      That night I sat at my desk writing in a frenzy – page upon page – song after song – I couldn’t stop! But weeping too! Hot, sobbing tears pouring down my cheeks. Hey, what’s the matter, baby? said my wife, propped up on the bed.

      I’m a fucking vampire! I cried, thinking of Bryan Ferry and his bursting flowers and his prancing horses and his flight of swallows and his hedged swimming pool and his lovely wife.

      No, you’re not. Come here, she said.

      I crawled onto the bed and she pulled the sheet away.

      Listen, she said.

      I put my ear against her distended stomach, her knapsack, and listened. I could hear little trapped people swimming around within.

      They are eating me from the inside, she said.

      Lucky them, I said.

      I’m serious, she said.

      But she had fallen asleep and I crawled off the bed across the floor, up the wainscot and along the panelled ceiling. I pressed my ear to the ceiling and listened. I could hear people gathering on the floor above. The ceiling vibrated. I recognised the voices as past collaborators, going back many years. They sounded fatigued as if depleted of oxygen, maybe, or as if someone had siphoned their blood away. I could hear them sobbing and cursing and consoling each other.

      I fell asleep.