The Day Has Gone

The day is over

The night has come

The sky is dark

The sun is lost

My heart is beating

Right out my chest

Where are the hours?

There are none left

My heart is screaming

It feels so sore

My soul is bleeding

Can’t take much more

And as I’m ly-

ing here awake

I’m wondering how

I lost the day

The day has gone

My mum used to say that David Ernest raised me. I was a difficult child, with a proclivity for crying and night-waking, which drove her to her own cycles of weeping and insomnia.

As a first-time and single parent, she was laden with advice, both solicited and not. Each night, this plethora of conflicting advice swirled around her head, as she oscillated between taking me out of my cot and keeping me in it; feeding me and refusing to do so until the next scheduled meal; keeping me as warm as was safe or as cold. One night, exhausted having exhausted all the advice, she got her phone and put on David Ernest, an artist she had always liked and who calmed her. She set it to random, and ‘The Day Has Gone’ was the first one that came on. On hearing it, I was immediately calmed.

This last part is my own fabrication. My mum never actually remembered what song came first, but as ‘The Day Has Gone’ was my favourite, I claimed it as the one she played that night. Instantly, I began to quiet. If the song was ‘The Day Has Gone,’ it would have been on the violin strings; if ‘Are You Lonely?’, it would have been the lead vocals; for ‘I See the People Passing By,’ it would have been the birdsong after the first chorus. Whatever the case, the song played and I stopped crying.

“I was so shocked,” my mum later said, with a slight laugh. “I thought something was wrong. I’d spent my whole life wanting you to stop crying, but when you did, I didn’t know what to do. I almost felt lost in a way.”

But as each night came, and each deluge of tears was doused by the sounds of David Ernest, she stopped worrying. When nothing else worked, she would grab her phone, and would put on an Ernest song. She would sit down on the armchair in the living room, holding me in her arms, and we would listen to him together.

When my mum said David Ernest raised me, it was obviously meant as a joke, or a metaphor. Yet as I got older, it became less clear that it was not meant literally. You can insert any cliché about a single mother here – how she was a saint, how she did the best she could under difficult circumstances – and all the corollaries about my absent father being a bastard. Another cliché would be that, despite all she did for me, my mother was largely absent. She didn’t work two jobs (that would be the ultimate cliché), but the solitary job she worked may as well have been two. She was paid by the hour, and as she always said: “there aren’t enough hours in the day for me to make enough money to keep a roof over our heads.”

Even though the roof was shared with the kebab shop below, and our heads were often clouded by the fumes from the shop, our rent was still exorbitantly high and my mother struggled to pay it. I spent my childhood flitting between friends’ and neighbours’ houses for dinner and sometimes sleep. As a teenager, I began to look after myself. It was not unusual for my mother to be gone before I woke up and returned once I was asleep.

After school, I would come home to the empty flat and fill it with Ernest’s songs. His music was magic, alchemising any mood into one of joy, conjuring smiles and laughs from me no matter what had happened in the day. I would sit there, blanketed with the music, cocooned in my duvet, and shut myself off from everything in the world other than Ernest. I knew the lyrics to every song instinctively – even the demos, live versions and rare tracks – despite having a terrible memory. (Mum used to joke that I did bad in my exams and at school because all other knowledge was ‘pushed out of the way so [I] could remember David Ernest stuff!’)

On those nights, and during the endless, solitary holidays, it really did feel like David Ernest raised me.

How could the hours

Have slipped away?

How is it they

Won’t come again?

How could my heart

Beat so still?

How can I be well

When I’m so ill?

How could this pain

From which I’m reeling

Be all the love

That I am feeling?

I toss and turn

I try to sleep

I turn again

I start to weep

The day has gone

Of course, everyone was stunned when they heard the news. David Ernest may not have been the star he once was, but even when half as powerful, his star shone brighter than almost anyone else’s. Even in his twilight years, he was still a huge celebrity, so when it happened, it sent shockwaves around the world. For a few days, it was on the front of every newspaper, the main page of every website. For those days, it was as if everyone in the world was as obsessed with him as me and other fans.

I was sitting on my bed, encircled by a mass of newspaper clippings and magazine cuttings. In so many of these, there was Ernest, himself encircled by fans. And, in many cases, not even fans. David Ernest was a popular artist, but had risen into the upper echelons of celebrity status where even those who didn’t like his music were enraptured to see him. Witnessing David Ernest was an event, even if you had never heard a song of his. (Or willingly listened to a song of his; he was so ubiquitous that it was not really possible to avoid his music, whether or not you liked him.) If you didn’t know who he was (again, not really a possibility), you would think he was a statesman of some sort, standing there with his sunglasses and strange outfits, surrounded by police and security – in some countries the army – who escorted him to his car or hotel. What was particularly noteworthy about this was how much of this was in the days before social media. Now, with the ubiquity of these platforms, and celebrities’ utilisation of them to orchestrate ‘random’ appearances, or ‘unwanted’ paparazzi shoots, that a mall or theatre gets swarmed by people is not too surprising or uncommon. Back then, it was, and the effect was random. Ernest would visit somewhere, a few people would spot him, and by the time he left the crowd would resemble that of a group queueing to be the first to secure tickets for an eagerly-awaited comeback concert.

For many years, Ernest was the most popular artist in the world. Whatever metric you wanted to use – sales, chart positions, number of streams, social media followers, video views – he was at the top. Yet there was a strange paradox about him, that drove this popularity. If you enjoyed his music, you did so with millions of people around the world. Yet at the same time you felt as if he was some obscure artist only you knew. You had wandered into a second-hand record shop one rainy afternoon and found a CD of his in some cellar or bargain bin. He was in the backwaters of a streaming service, generating listens in the low thousands each month.

This paradox came partly from the music – with its soft, ethereal sounds and trickling guitar rhythms. And it came partly from him. For all his fame, Ernest was a shy, somewhat unusual man. A significant factor in his fame was his rare public appearances, the perception of his behaviour being strange whenever he did appear. He had a habit, for example, of singing as he walked. He would walk past journalists and fans, singing to himself, with a small, serene smile on his face, like he was the only person in the world. Some people thought that this was affected, others believed it genuine and attributed it to his oddness, his freakishness (‘freak’ was a word often associated with him). But I, like so many others, found solace in it.

I was a lonely child. Not bullied at school, but left alone to such an extent that at times I almost wished I was. In the same way that neglected kids might exhibit bad behaviour, the resulting punishment a form of attention better than none, I sometimes considered saying or doing things that might lead me to be targeted. On some days, when Mum was home late, I wouldn’t see anyone.

Now, I sat on the bed, combing through the cuttings. Among them was one of the rare interviews Ernest gave. During it, he was asked about his singing. He said that, when he was younger, he too used to spend many hours alone. His parents were often absent from his house, and he had no friends.

“I would sometimes go days without speaking to anyone. I would go to school and come home and not say anything. I found that my voice used to get rusty and my throat would get sore if I didn’t speak. I didn’t want to talk to myself, so I started singing. First of all, this was just to keep my voice. Then I realised I loved doing it, and that singing might be something I’d want to think about for a career.”

I remembered when that interview came out. This was later in his career, when he was not as popular as he’d once been. The very fact he’d given the interview in the first place was testament to this. Notoriously reclusive, he rarely gave interviews, even ahead of album releases. It was widely believed that, after years of declining sales and attention, he had been forced to give this interview ahead of the release of his 2018 album The End by his record label in order to advertise it. If this was the case, the label would have been successful in one aspect – getting Ernest back into the spotlight. But what they had not anticipated was the negative reaction. After the interview, Ernest was derided as a freak and a weirdo. Things such as this, or when he said that he spoke only to his cats, or that he would have his food delivered outside his bedroom so he didn’t have to talk to people, cemented his perception as an oddball. When you were doing well and still popular, this kind of thing was seen as endearing. When your sales were declining and your star fading, it served only to put the spotlight of ridicule on you. The album came out, sold terribly, and the biggest reactions to it came in the form of memes and parody videos of the interview.

It was things like that – the very things that led some people to call him a freak – that made people like me feel like we were the only ones who knew him. For all his stardom, here was this vulnerable, lonely person that I could relate to. I had not sung, but had talked to myself to keep my voice. He also spoke about how he would go on long walks.

“I never went anywhere, and I never met anyone, but I just wanted to be outside, because that’s where people were. Sometimes I would go and stand at a bus stop, or go inside a shop and walk around, because there would be people there. I could stand next to them, and for all someone walking past would know, we could be friends.”

Even before I heard him say these things, I felt it in his music. His songs were suffused with loneliness. Many artists will sing about loneliness or heartbreak or whatever. They are talented enough that the songs are good, and that you may even believe that they might be a lonely or heartbroken person, but no amount of skill can replicate these true emotions. I knew, without ever listening to or reading an interview, that David Ernest was genuinely lonely, that he sincerely felt alone. And to have someone so beautiful, so beloved and popular, be like that gave me a great deal of comfort.

With one final look, I brought together all the cuttings, the CDs, the t-shirts, merch and other assorted Ernest paraphernalia, and chucked them into the box.

And all the things

I wished I said

Are voices whispering

Inside my head

And all the tears

I never cried

Are rivers raging

Inside my mind

And all the love

I’ve ever felt

Is all the pain

That I’ve been dealt

And everyone

I’ve ever known

Is everyone

Who’s ever gone

The day has gone

The night has come

The boxes were bulging. Then again, while they were heavy for me, they would be light for the drivers. I looked around the room, ensuring that I had not missed anything. As I looked, I saw the posters.

Encircling the square walls, they would have been prominent to any outsider. Potentially the first thing they saw. Yet it was this exact profusion that rendered them invisible to me. I saw them every day, so no longer saw them. And perhaps there was also a touch of my subconscious at work, too. The posters were the oldest things I had of Ernest’s. Some of them were from when I was a child. Maybe some distant part of me was trying to stop me from discarding them.

As I took the first poster off the wall, I was hit by the smell. A damp, musty, basement odour. I was confused, wondering if it was something to do with the material the poster was printed on, or the adhesive I used to affix it to the wall. I removed the poster fully, and then I saw it on the wall: mould. I reached for another poster, and there was mould under that too. With the exception of the poster on the door, all my posters of Ernest had been secretly festering mould underneath them.

This too, I now realised, had been ubiquitous. Whenever I had entered my bedroom, I’d always noticed a smell. Partly attributing it to a ‘house-smell’ (in the way you dismiss a floorboard creak in the early morning as a ‘house sound’) and partly to the garden outside my bedroom window, I’d never imagined that its origin could be from behind the posters.

I removed the posters one by one, finally taking off the one that had always been my favourite. Taken from behind, it showed Ernest on the final date of his World Tour, at Wembley. He was half knelt on the floor, and in tears. I had been there that night, and had seen him cry. When he had spoken about it afterwards, he had said:

“You have to understand, I have spent my whole life alone. I have always struggled with people. Especially if I was in places like school or work, I’d feel like my presence was unwelcome. People wouldn’t want me there because of how awkward I was. But when I was there, there were 80,000 people, all to see me, all cheering for me, all singing along to my songs. To think that I could make that many people happy. That I could bring that much joy to people. That I was surrounded by that much love. I didn’t know what else to do but cry.”

I stared at the poster for a moment longer, and then put it with the rest. Almost unthinkingly, I wiped at my eye, not having realised that I had been crying. To distract myself, I reached for the remote, and unmuted the television. Despite being forty minutes into the hour, the news was still focussing on Ernest.

“Yes, that’s right Julia. When Ernest is sentenced, which will be on 4th of May, he is expected to get at least thirty years in prison, due to the severity of the crimes, and the number of victims. And the reason the judge refused bail is the fear that Ernest would try to flee the country. He still retains a devoted following in some parts of the world, and there were rumours that certain countries that do not have extradition treaties with the US were planning to offer him sanctuary, so that is why he is continuing to be held despite not having been sentenced yet. And, as you say, the news has sent shockwaves around the world, and not solely amongst his legion of fans. I in fact spoke to some of his fans earlier, and the message they all kept on repeating was how hurt they were, that they felt almost…duped, that someone they loved and respected, and who seemed like such a nice person, could be capable of such vile, heinous crimes. And of course, with something like this, there will never be a sense for the victims that things are okay or that you can put it behind you. But, hopefully, with today’s conviction, there will at least be the sense that justice has been done and, also hopefully, that David Ernest will never spend a day outside prison.”