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Joanne has known Jamie for five years now and they have been sleeping together for the last two, although as fas as she can recall he still hasn't asked her out. And despite having many important things in common (they are both musicians, for example), their relationship is becoming increasingly sex- oriented as they run out of things to say to eachother.
Joanne's routine is much 'cushier' and physically cosier than Jamie's, but equally repetitive and often unstimulating. She works in a downmarket, grotty, backstreet recording studio which is run by penny-pinching cowboys who probably don't even listen to music. Since the 24-track conked out, mixing and mastering have been reduced to haphazard, spur-of-the-moment guesswork for Joanne, who is presently lumbered with a primitive eight-channel Fostex replacement with four-track buss and, incredibly, an ancient 244 Teac/Tascam Portastudio as a stand-in tape machine for the one-inch reel-to-reel which has experienced a memory relapse.
On the subject of recall, Joanne's memory has also been showing signs of interference from similar, older memories. These are germane to the flashbulb experiences of déjà-vu which Joanne has learned to cope with since their onset in early childhood. But this interference is much more intrusive since she is starting to confuse the real events of her distant past with things which happened only yesterday, or last week.
Sipping at a machine-vended, lukewarm anaemic coffee, Joanne is playing unconsciously with the abrasive sliders on the cheesy contraption which was once a state-of-the-art mixing-desk and is now possibly her closest friend. She has learned to empathise with her antiquated and dilapidated studio pals so well that she is starting to think like a machine herself. Jamie surely does not love her, and any emotional bond which remains between them is clearly no more than habituation to the sheer physicality of their relationship. And even this has been empty of the thrills and excitement of young love for some time, becoming predominantly functional and almost as anaemic as her tepid coffee. Joanne muses that, since Jamie stole her heart two or three years ago her motivation and innate ambition have plummeted: it's about time she set about getting her heart back. And if Jamie has somehow sold her heart, she can always reclaim it from the next punter; all men have been reduced to punters, and mirrors in Joanne's head. Perhaps she might learn to perceive things objectively once more following a break from them.
*
Jamie is sitting in a West End bar aftter being moved on by some poncy, faceless minor Underground official and is feeling very pissed-off. Not because of lost income or the inevitable sllight on his ego this scenario always produces. He is pissed off because Neuropharm won't let him get pissed. Once an incurable romantic, Jamie tries to remember the early days with Joanne, when they used to empty his bank-bags together on to this very table, laughing and joking and always in high spirits, even without the beer.
Then again, Jamie was probably in danger of becoming an alcoholic when he was approached by Neuropharm, on his regular Central Line pitch, at the foot of the escalators at Tottenham Court Road. Every day as he walked past the EMI building, on the way to meet Joanne, Jamie could feel that elusive record deal slipping further away, displaced by the emotional and alccoholic habits he was nurturing, in escape from a growing lack of confidence in his singing ability. The drink was really more of a pattern than a problem in itself, but Joanne was certainly a dangerous catalyst in the early days of their relationship.
It was also in this very pub that Jamie was introduced to Dr. Victor Abram, Neuropharm's chief executive, who, after buying into Jamie's insatiable craving for another beer was rewarded with some more than candid revelations about his future subject. For example, Jamie had started to hear voices saying unkind things as he was tuning up; things like You can't sing and On yer bike, you talentless sponger. Victor surmised that these phantom criticisms were more than likely to be self-generated since, from what Jeff had told him after picking Jamie up, the poor bastard certainly could sing, and his finger-picking style had developed well beyond the standard claw-hammer and ripple patterns usually taught at intermediate-level guitar classes. The interesting thing was that these short-lived paranoid attacks from the cerebral underworld were apparently context-dependent: they always happened at the same tube station, at the same pitch and only when Jamie was tuning his guitar. They might even have been selectively responsive to nonspecific frequencies produced by the dissonance resulting from the differential pitch shift/resonance of the string being tuned to the one with which it was being matched. Whichever way, it seemed like a good idea to buy Jamie a good, sealed-and-solid practice amplifier and external, rechargeable dry cell, so that his unique and distinctive finger-picking style could be better appreciated (without the mediation of a plectrum), and the reciprocal relationship between the neural volleying of individual fibres of his auditory nerve at frequencies between 400 and 5000 Hz, and which particular neurons are actually firing - the determinant of pitch after this stage - might be better understood.