I’m in the back seat of a Holden Monaro parked up the road from my place kissing a boy whose name I don’t remember when they say on the car radio John Lennon’s been shot. I tell him I have to go, and I run home. Mum and Dad have already heard on the news. Only in America, Mum says. They’re passing round a joint and drinking red wine at four o’clock in the afternoon, listening to Sergeant Pepper on the stereo. Dad gets up to change the record, takes Imagine from the place on the shelf, it’s positioned alphabetically between Help and Let It Be. He carefully removes the vinyl from the sleeve, holds it up to the light to check for scratches, then lays it on the turntable and removes the dust with a blue velvet cleaner. The record spins and we sit on the floor round the coffee table to listen. When we get to the second track, Crippled Inside, Dad says John wrote it about Paul McCartney after The Beatles broke up. Dad says the Beatles fell out over a woman from New York, they hated her in England, it should never have happened, if they hadn’t chased Yoko away, Paul and John would still be writing the greatest songs in the world, John and Yoko would be living in England with their friends and John wouldn’t have been shot outside his own apartment in front of the love of his life. Your mum takes a drag on the dooby, she says, yes. Because that’s what it’s like in America, they elect cowboys for President and everyone walks round packing heat like they think they could be the next leader of the free world, like they think they could be motherfucking John Wayne.
Gillian O'Shaughnessy is a reader and writer from Walyalup, Fremantle in Western Australia. She has work in X-R-A-Y, Splonk, Night Parrot Press, Jellyfish Review and Literary Namjooning, among others. She's a submissions editor for SmokeLong Quarterly.
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