Baby You're a Rich Man

Fourteen

            Ringo woke up and couldn’t breathe. There was a heavy pressure on his torso, limiting his inhalations to long shallow breaths, and as he struggled to breathe more deeply, his lungs felt confined.

            The next thing Ringo was aware of was a mass of something warm and soft pressing down onto his nose, smothering him. His first thought was that Paul had been sleepwalking again, and was now attempting to “take care” of him.

            He stirred slightly and the shaggy pillow suffocating him stirred as well, and finally with a final struggle of desperation, Ringo took his first long, full breath.

            Martha whined at him and tried to wriggle back onto his human warmth but Ringo fended her off. “Bad,” he whispered. “Bad girl.”

            Ringo didn’t know how Paul disciplined her, and he assumed he wasn’t being very intimidating with his whispered commands, but he didn’t want to wake John and Paul.

            John and Paul.

            Ringo’s interest perked up and he shifted in the bed, trying to get a better view. When he saw the bed opposite him, he clapped a hand over his mouth, snickering quietly; he now had a real reason to let them sleep.

            Ringo fumbled in his bag that was lying beside his bed for his ever-present camera. He fished it out and, still in the bed, pointed it at John and Paul’s bed, and adjusted the focus.

            The image he was about to take could be explained away, but it would take some imagination. Ringo supposed that John could claim that he had a furry, black volleyball resting on top of his chest that morning, and that he’d grown an extra pair of arms which, tangled in the sheets, he was now using to hug himself.

            It wasn’t the clearest of pictures, what with the limbs that were tangled and whose owners weren’t clearly identifiable; and the sheets that had crumpled over the night into which Paul and John were hopelessly tangled, but there was very clearly someone’s head of dark hair, resting on a sleeping, open-mouthed John, and the someone whom the head presumably belonged to was clutching John like he was the last lifeboat on the Titanic.

            Paul was groggy that morning, and the slow waking up process of realizing his surroundings was taking a little longer than usual; for now he was happy to process that he was warm and comfortable and didn’t want to wake up.

            Murmuring from somewhere else in the room cut through his in-between, half-asleep state, and Paul’s face scrunched slightly, and his arms tightened. He didn’t want to know where he was, and it was still time to fall asleep again.

            Then there was squeaking and an amount of noise as something was dragged along the floor that seemed impossibly loud to Paul, and he shifted again, his arms loosening as he began to be conscious of them, and his toes, which were digging into the sheets in a fruitless attempt to have the noise stop.

            There was the sound of soft clicking, and Paul knew he would have to eventually wake up, and was conscious of this sort of pillow he was resting his head on and curling his arms under.

            Then the pillowlike thing was moving, and Paul fluttered his eyes open in confusion. Suddenly the picture came together disastrously quickly; John looking down at him quizzically, rubbing an eye, and Ringo holding a camera.

            Paul let John go and bumped back into the wall, his mind racing for an explanation; but nothing came, there was no way to make this better. Paul went for the only strategy he knew for embarrassing moments: ignore it and move on.

            “Morning!” he said brightly, and was greeted by silence. He looked at John almost pleadingly, knowing that it was no use with Ringo, who no doubt wanted to develop the pictures as soon as possible.

            “Morning,” John said, and Ringo noted once again that John was getting treated with the last-lifeboat-on-the-Titanic look.

            Paul nodded quickly and hopped off of the bed, tripping slightly over his feet in his haste.

*   *   *

            “Today is a free day,” George said at breakfast, his grand speech demeanor earning him a few stares from the handful of people who happened to be at the hotel’s lobby. “A day to free your inner soul, that is. The deeper you go, the higher you fly.”

            “Let’s go to the pubs,” John later said to Paul, the incident from the morning apparently forgotten.

            “Oh, Ringo ‘n I were going to go to the record shop,” Paul said. “But you can go if ye want…”

            “S’fine,” John muttered, still regretting the loss of a chance to go to the pubs, but preferring going with Paul to—wherever, really, as long as he went.

            And of course a record shop wasn’t the worst place they could have chosen. John was briefly tempted to complete that record collection he’d started; but being around Ringo and Paul, he’d developed a sort of aversion to flaunting his money and social status; they were the working class heroes, and he was just a bloke whose big achievement was being born into a family where he was showered in money.

            But he was sure part of the reason Paul was so friendly was that he was the owner of Pear Records, and had the potential power to eradicate his dreams, but also fulfill them, all with a phone call to the right person.

            John sighed moodily, remembering the contract. He’d really believed, for a few days, that Paul’s kindness was just because he liked John – but then again, who could ever really like him?

            Cynthia had worshipped him, and then learned to see him as a business partner. Julia had been his mother; she loved him because they were family. Stu was stuck with John as a flatmate then a bandleader.

            No one had ever really liked John for a silly reason like “he’s a nice bloke,” or “he writes nice songs.” This was part of the reason why he never showed anyone his songs anymore.

            John pushed away his musings as Paul beckoned him into the record shop.

*   *   *

            “Bought nice things, darling?”

            Paul froze behind John in mid-laugh, the grin fading off of his face. He looked almost frightened now, clutching his brown paper bag stuffed with records a little too tightly now, his doe eyes widening as a child caught doing something wrong.

            John set his face into a tight, stony expression, facing Cynthia off. “Yes, we did actually,” he said tersely.

            Cynthia felt a little bad for Paul, who was obviously trying to edge back into the record shop. Cynthia knew what was happening, though she suspected John didn’t yet. It hurt her heart to see the whole thing unfold, but it was happening, and she was properly sure of it now, and she knew that in this particular situation Paul was as much as fault as any other.

            “Good,” Cynthia said, and she planted a little kiss on John’s lips before her husband could react, looking Paul in the eyes the whole time.