‘I can’t… I can’t tour.’ Face it: he couldn’t even play all that well any more.
‘Right, let’s see, now.’ Prof went on like he hadn’t heard. ‘It would have to be as support, the first time. But supporting somebody tasteful — don’t worry about that, it can be arranged. REM, Radiohead… all these guys admit to being influenced by your work. You’re a cult… OK, a minor cult. But a cult is still a cult…’
‘Prof?’ Lol was resting the guitar on his trainers, his fingers among its machine-heads. ‘Be honest — you don’t even know that’s true, do you?’
‘The hell does that matter? Laurence, I apologize in advance if this sounds immodest, but if I’m the one spreading it around, everyone is going to believe it, therefore it becomes the truth.’
‘I can’t tour.’ Lol stood with his back against the partition wall again, his breathing becoming harder at the very thought of on the road.
‘You can tour! You need to tour… this will kick-start your confidence. You’re just using this therapy shit as some kind of buffer against the real world. You’re institutionalized and you don’t even know it. It’s like… like so many schoolteachers are really just kids who were afraid to leave school. Believe me, Laurence.’
And part of Lol did believe him, because Kenneth ‘Prof’ Levin had been down in the half-lit caverns, too — in his case alcoholism, the destruction of a good marriage.
Lol recalled the buzz he’d felt when he’d had the message to call Prof, a couple of weeks ago — around the same time he was concluding that knowing the difference between cognitive therapy and humanistic therapy didn’t make either of them any more effective. In fact, the day after his senior tutor had told him, not with irony but with something approaching pride: Therapy, Laurence, is the religion of the third millennium. And we’re the priests — the voice slick with self-belief, after a few glasses in the wine bar down the road from the college. Everybody needs a church. A confessional. Forgiveness. This senior tutor, this high priest, was younger than Lol, maybe thirty-four.