The World Spinning Round (Beatles/Paul McCartney)

31. We All Shine On

January/February 1970
Paul

I leaned against the door of the spare bedroom, watching Alice scribbling something in a notebook. For the past month, she had spent the majority of her time in her makeshift home office poring over old issues of Vogue and Women's Wear Daily .

"What're you working on?" I asked, pushing off the door and walking further into the room.

"Have you ever heard of Gertrude Moran?" she asked, not looking up from her notebook. Her hair was beginning to grow out and just barely skimmed her shoulders clad in a silky dressing gown. "The American tennis player."

"Errr... no?"

I bent down to kiss her shoulder and tried to peer over to see what she was writing. But she was much more clever than me and closed the notebook before I could take a look.

"The press called her Gorgeous Gussie," she continued. "But that's not important-- what's important is that she essentially created the mini skirt as we know it today. "

"I... wasn't aware of that," I replied. "But I love that you are."

"She played in the 1949 Wimbledon Championships and asked an American designer to create a more feminine take on whatever tennis players wore at the time. So he created a white fitted dress with a short skirt -- practically indecent for the time. The press went crackers for her and her skirt, but she was banned from Wimbledon for bringing indecency to the sport."

I once again tried to peer over her shoulder. "Is that what you're working on, then?"

Alice looked up, raised an eyebrow and then pivoted topics, holding up a copy of The Daily Mail. "Have you seen this?"

I squinted, barely making out the bold-faced headline:  All You Need is... Solitude? Macca's Mysterious Vanishing Act. Beneath it was a photograph from me in Scotland in which, to be fair, I did look a bit barmy. My hair was too long, my beard was insane, and my eyes looked a little too intense, mostly because I had been wickedly hungover and trying not to show it.

"Fucking hell, what're they writing now?" I asked.

I debated ringing Derek to ask him to put out another statement that I was alive and well and spending time with my family, but that necessitated actually talking to Derek and I couldn't be bothered communicating with anyone at Apple.

Alice cleared her throat and began to read.

"Beatle Paul McCartney has been conspicuously absent from the public eye for months, leading fans to worry about the future of Britain's beloved mop-tops."

I rolled my eyes. "Oh, yeah, absolutely absent. Is that relative to John and Yoko? Should you and we cut our hair in public, do you think? Plant some acorns? Put up adverts all over the place declaring that war is over if we deem it to be so? Fuck's sake, man. Anyway, all they've gotta do is talk to the gate birds... they know I'm not absent. I'm here all bloody day."

Alice raised an eyebrow. "Don't worry, they did." She looked down at the paper and continued to read. "Devoted fans camped outside his residence report that on the rare occasions they've caught a glimpse of the star, he's seemed uncharacteristically glum and withdrawn."

The buzzer rang five or six times, no doubt one of those little fuckers who had ratted me out of the press.

"Glum and withdrawn?" I exclaimed. "Certainly not the most chipper, sure, but glum? I've never been glum in me life."

Alice didn't respond, just continued to read. "With tensions already rumored to be high within the Fab Four, one can't help but wonder: is this the beginning of the end for the Beatles?"