Murder by Illusion

by Giles Ekins

  ‘Oh, sure, y’all, I’ve looked back, looked back at four failed marriages, four fucking alimonies, looked back at Uncle Sam who wants my balls for back tax, ‘cept the wives have already had those. You know man, they were great girlfriends, pretty good wives, but as ex-wives, absolute total fucking bitches. They skinned me to the bone, to the fucking bone. Which is why my friend, I’m breaking my balls doing these shitty tours year after year, I’m gonna be on this treadmill for fucking ever just to keep ahead of those grasping bitches and Uncle Sam. Every dollar I earn, 80 cents goes back stateside to feed the bloodsuckers,’ and Billy Boy gives himself another admiring look in the mirror, another stroke of the ponytail.

  Billy Boy definitely had a glazed look to his face, the Bourbon finally getting to him. ‘Yeah, you know, I never thought myself a songwriter, I mean, the Beatles, Dylan, Springsteen, Bowie, they were songwriters, great songwriters. Me, I just wrote stuff that somehow came out as songs, ‘Wild Hearts;’ ‘Love is the Sweetest Pain;’ ‘Tides of Sorrow;’ ‘Nothin’ I Won’t Do for You;’ Take it all and Don’t Look Back;,’ wrote that one after the first marriage broke up, and for fucking sure, Shelley took the lot and did not look back. ‘Long Roads, Hard Nights,’ that was about being on the road for months on end. Like I say, never really thought of myself as a great songwriter…’

  Billy Boy paused, obviously waiting for Charlie to deny that, no, no, Billy Boy, you’re a great songwriter, up there with the best but Charlie could no more tell a Billy Boy Boston song from a jingle for a breakfast cereal advert. Getting no reaction from Charlie, Billy Boy closed his eyes again and Charlie though he was finally done and got up, a bit unsteadily, to go back to his own room, his head starting to buzz. Better get some aspirin down else I’m going to have one fucker of a hangover, when Billy Boy jerked upright again.

  ‘Say, y’all, how’d you get onto this tour so damn quick, eh man? his tone suddenly aggressive again, probably a bit pissed that Charlie hadn’t praised his songwriting. ‘Shit, it was supposed to the ‘Attack Dogs’ as the warm up act and I end up with some fucking …conjuror.’

  ‘Attack Dogs?’

  ‘Yeah, l meant to raise this earlier but got side tracked with all that reminiscing shit, been wondering ’bout this all along, ever since you came on board, who wants a fucking…magician as warm up. Fuck no.’ bourbon belligerence taking over from the genial Billy Boy of earlier. ‘Attack Dogs,’ look I got a handbill here’ and he picked it up from the desk where it had been lying face down and passed it roughly to Charlie. He read

  The Billy Boy Boston Summer Tour

  Starring

  Billy Boy Boston

  Supported by

  ‘Attack Dogs’

  With Special Guest Star

  Alyson Wonder

  The handbill had photos of Billy Boy, the ‘Attack Dogs’ and 'Alyson Wonder' in the appropriate places and a list of dates and list of venues. The ‘Attack Dogs’ were a 5 piece leather clad rock band, snarling and sneering at the camera to conform to the image of their name and Alison Wonder (no relation to Stevie) was a pouty blond in a mini-skirt and managing to look insipid and stupid.

  ‘See? It says ‘Attack Dogs,’ not Charlie fucking Chan. The ‘Dogs’ are a great band, worked with them before, they really work the crowd and get it going but the first I hear of it is, what ten days ago when I get a call saying the ‘Dogs’ are pulling out and I got this magician instead. Now, what the fuck is that all about?’

  ‘Ten days ago? But I knew…’six months or more ago. Keith had given him the only playbill he had ever seen and it for sure had Charles Chilton and Selene with the Devil’s Guillotine as the second act on the bill.

  As we’re talking about Keith: Keith was now it seemed a permanent a member of the Charlie Chilton entourage, manager, roadie, driver, stage technician, minder, security, banker and let’s say it, jailer, Charlie could hardly take a crap without Keith hovering around as if ready to wipe his arse. And Jon, Keith’s new assistant, a young man with short blonde hair and startling blue eyes; Jon never spoke, never said a word, not to Charlie at least. Charlie might say ‘Good morning; and get a grunt and a nod in return.

  ‘Is Jon mute?” he asked Keith.

  ‘Nah, just shy.’ Charlie never asked where Jon came from, he simply appeared one day at the workshop, ‘This is Jon,’ Keith said, ‘my assistant’ and Charlie knew by then that it was pointless to ask questions of Keith who either did not reply or simply said, ‘No worries, Charlie’ and left it at that. Keith and Jon were eerily efficient, and Charlie was happy see let them handle all t heavy duty lifting and carrying, and for Keith to sort out all the details of the tour

  Just before the start of the tour, Keith simply handed Charlie a schedule of tour dates and venues, and told him be at a London address on this date to meet everyone and get on the tour bus for the short journey to Southend for the first gig. Keith, Jon and Selene (presumably) travelled in the Iveco van with the props…Or maybe she flew in on a broomstick or turned into a bat by night.

  Or flew in on a scheduled flight with SatanAir? Good morning Ladies and Gentlemen and welcome to this flight from Beelzebub International Airport to Arseend–on-Sea. Passengers are reminded that the use of mobile fangs is strictly forbidden during this flight and that due to the propensity for some passengers to emit sulphur fumes, smoking is only permitted in the toilets. All passengers are reminded that they must retain the shape they boarded in at all times. Now please sit back and enjoy our inflight entertainment where today’s movie will be a re-envisioned version of ’The Last Temptation of Christ.,’ directed by Martin Sorcere and produced Steven Spellbound. Or alternatively we are screening a documentary, ‘How to Piss Off the Americans without Really Trying,’ produced by the Ayatollah Khomeini and narrated by Osama bin Laden. As you probably know, Osama has been working for us part-time, but we look forward to welcoming him at Headquarters when he joins us on a full-time basis.

  After take-off we shall be serving complimentary drinks.

  ‘Yes sir, good morning, would you care for e a drink?’

  ‘Yes, please, a Bloody Mary.’

  ‘Certainly, sir, we have a choice of O Negative or B Positive this morning.’

  ‘You don’t happen to have an AB Negative, do you?’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir, we are only serving that in Business class, it is very rare, you know.’

  ‘Of course, the B Positive please, I find the O Negative a bit too acidic.’

  Whatever, Selene had been waiting at the hotel when the tour bus pulled in to the hotel forecourt.

  And now, as icy chills began to creep into his bones, Charlie looked at the playbill again, just to make sure he had not been seeing things, JD induced deliriums perhaps, or they had shared that joint a while back and Charlie did not normally smoke grass but Billy Boy seemed to insist without actually insisting. Maybe that was it, not being used to it and I’m having, what, dope delusions? Hash hallucinations?

  But no, there it was, Billy Boy Boston, supported by the ‘Attack Dogs’ not Charles Chilton. He had known for months he was on this tour but up until ten days ago it had been the ‘Attack Dogs’

  Those icy chills crept deeper and colder into his veins, slithering through his bones, eating into his quivering flesh.

  ‘So, so, what… happened to the ‘Dogs,’ to make them pull out like that?’ he asked, aware that he probably already had a good idea what the answer would be.

  ‘The weirdest fucking thing, Jimmy McGuire, he’s the lead singer, and Sal Capello the bass player, they just disappeared off the face of the earth, and nobody knows where the fuck they’ve got to.’

  But Charlie knew of a certain gentleman who probably knew exactly where Jimmy McGuire and Sal Capello had got to, a Mr. Asmodeus Tchort, and he didn’t think that Billy Boy really needed to know the answer to that particular riddle.

  ‘It’s Tchort!’ he still exclaimed in anger, more to himself but Billy Boy did not hear, he was sinking fast, eyes closed
his head slumped down onto his chest.

  ‘Just fucking disappeared, man,’ Billy Boy, repeated, slurring his speech badly as the bourbon now really took hold and he had slid to a heap on the floor, out stone cold.

  ‘Told you I don’t take prisoners,’ Charlie said with satisfaction, looking down at the prostrate Billy Boy. He turned him onto his side so he would not choke on his own vomit should he be sick, put a pillow under his head and covered him with a duvet, Charlie was in no state to lift him onto the bed, the room had revolved alarmingly when he had bent down to place the pillow under Billy Boy’s head and he had to steady himself against the wall.

  ‘Just fucking disappeared, aye man, just like Richey Edwards from the Manic Street Preachers, Charlie thinks, but that was probably not down to Asmodeus Tchort. How many more? Charlie whispered. How many more as the cold dread claws seized his heart again? ‘Michaelmas, Jack Yates, Michaelmas’s assistant and now Jimmy McGuire and Sal Capello and how many others I’ve not yet heard of?

  What the fuck is going on, but the only thing Charlie knew for certain was that Tchort had his balls in his hand and was tightening his grip.

  It was not a comfortable feeling.

  ‘Would y’all look at that,’ Billy Boy Boston said, pointing at the line of people, mostly women, queuing up outside the Cliffs Pavilion Theatre as the tour bus made its way down Station Road. ‘That’s my girls.’

  Charlie said nothing; he knew from Keith that bookings for the Billy Boy Boston summer tour had not been encouraging, attendances falling year after year. ‘Man, that takes me back to the first tour I ever made, came over with Cassidy, ‘Billy Boy continued, ‘Mayhem, absolutely fucking mayhem, couldn’t hear your own voice, couldn’t hear yourself sing, so much screaming going on. Not a dry seat in the house, those chicks wetting themselves in excitement, you’d see ‘em carried out on stretchers when they’d fainted, skirts up to here, no panties on ‘cos they’d taken them off to throw on the stage. Man, they was the days, and it looks as though the good times are back, looking at all those chicks queuing up to see good ol’ Billy Boy.’

  Well, only by dint of a prodigious stretch of the imagination could the women lining up in the queue be called chicks. Chickens maybe, Charlie thought, scrawny necked chickens at that. No doubt some of the women were there to see Billy Boy, Charlie he knew that Billy Boy had a hard core following of middle aged ladies called the Boston Girls (girls?) who might once been groupies, probably now thoroughly respectable who followed him around from gig to gig and were shocked and horrified at the behavior of their daughters.

  But Charlie knew that a considerable number of those queuing to get in the theatre were new bookings, there had been a massive upsurge of on-line booking since the ‘Wonderful Word of Magic’ had been broadcast and these women, for they were mostly women, had come to see Selene get her head chopped off, had come to scent the blood, had come to revel in the horror of the guillotine and that they could very easily be transplanted back to the Coliseum to watch the Christians torn to pieces by lion. Or they could as les tricoteuse, those Parisian women in Revolutionary France at the time of the Terror who knitted as they avidly watched the heads of the aristocracy fall to the deadly blade, sitting as close as they could to the guillotine and they might equally be any of the milling spectators at the original execution of the Comtesse Marie-Josephine de Blacam.

  ‘Hey man,’ Billy Boy was now saying, ‘it was here or somewhere like this that the chicks were coming in four, or five or six at a time, and I tell you, they walked out again bowlegged and stayed that way for the best part of a week afterwards.’ Billy Boy took another drink from his best friend, having a restorative JD to top up his hangover.

  Charlie felt surprisingly well after his session with Mr. Jack Daniels and vowed to make him his new best friend from now on, deciding also that he no longer very much liked Billy Boy Boston, what an egotistical dickhead’ he thought, his only topics of conversation are the life and times of Billy Boy Boston, the musical genius that is Billy Boy Boston and the sexual exploits of Billy Boy Boston. Full of himself. More edges than a broken piss-pot. No wonder four wives dumped him. And Charlie could not imagine why he had thought him an OK guy last evening. Must have been the bourbon. Or that spliff.

  The bus drew up outside the stage door entrance and Charlie and Billy Boy and his backing group, the Boston Crew, (who also thought him an egotistical dickhead but he paid their wages so they kept quiet) Alison Wonder and two girl singers who backed her and the tour stage crew trooped into the theatre for rehearsals, sound and lighting checks.

  Southend on Sea, Charlie Chilton and the Devil’s guillotine has landed.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  June, the Embassy Theatre – Skegness, Lincolnshire

  ‘Why won’t you ever talk to me? Why don’t you answer? For crying out like, woman, I’d get more conversation from a fucking tailor’s dummy, waddy you call ‘em. Mannequins, aye, mannequins.’

  THE LINE STRETCHES FROM THE GLASS FRONTAGE of the Embassy Theatre, around the curved wall of ‘The Litten Tree’ pub and along the sea front down Grand Parade. There is an excited buzz about the crowd as they press forward, anxious to get to their seats, avid for their first glimpse of the guillotine and the beheading of Selene.

  The billboard for the tour now reads:

  The Billy Boy Boston Summer Tour

  Starring

  Billy Boy Boston

  AND

  CHARLES CHILTON

  WITH SELENE

  Featuring

  ‘The devil’s guillotine’

  as seen on

  ‘the wonderful world of magic.’

  With Special Guest Star

  Alyson Wonder

  Billy Boy Boston was not best pleased, in fact, according to Keith, he is phoning everybody and their dog to get Charlie removed from the bill, or at the very least to get him reduced back to supporting act on the bill. ‘It’s the fucking Billy Boy Boston tour, not the Billy Boy Boston and some other cunt of a magician tour,’ he was heard screaming at the promoter and getting precisely nowhere. Charlie is big news and he is putting bums on seats big time, in fact Hector Ricciardo, the promoter who put the show together is seriously considering putting Charlie top of the bill and reducing Billy Boy to support with only the threat of court action by Billy’s manager stopping him.

  ‘Don’t worry yourself about that, Charlie,’ Keith tells him as the rumours about Billy Boy’s attempt to remove him from the tour reach his ears. ‘No way is the boss going to allow that, now is he? He’s invested far too much in you for that to happen, hasn’t he now?’ the first tacit admission that Keith is in fact part of the Asmodeus Tchort establishment that now… controls Charlie. ‘No worries, Charlie, OK?’ patting him paternally on the arm.

  ‘Wouldn’t bother me, man, if it gets us to Vegas a bit quicker, like.’ but Keith tells him, no. you stay with the tour and then goes off to check the sound system again, the dread-bell had sounded tinny and weak in rehearsal… Charlie just shrugged; he was on a fast moving treadmill and knew there was no way off. Go along with the ride, Charlie boy, that’s all you can do. He was keenly aware that the dynamics of the situation had changed and that Keith was now very much the man in charge and that he spoke with the voice of Tchort and that he, Charlie was now just the hired hand, powerless to make his own decisions.

  All his life Charlie had been a drifter, he became a professional magician almost by accident. It just so happened that the night that Charlie appeared on ‘North East Tonight’ as a very nervous sixteen year old, another local magician, Fenton Goad, who mostly worked on the working men’s club circuit as the ’Amazing Fentini’ was looking for another assistant after Paul Bairstow suddenly quit on him after 6 years on the road.

  He saw Charlie’s TV debut, was impressed and contacted him through the Tyne Tees station to offer him the job. Charlie, who had no real intention, never given any real thoughts to becoming a professional magician, thought about it for all of
three minutes before accepting. It was a means to get out of a dead end existence in Durham where his only prospect of a job was as a delivery boy for a bakery. He toured with Fenton Goad for three years, as his assistant, dogs-body, stage hand and once he had passed his test, as driver whilst Goad slept off his hangover. The one job he did not take over from his predecessor was that of Fenton’s bum-boy, he made it clear from the outset that he was not that way inclined and Fenton took it in good grace, he was usually able to find willing partners back stage, or dogging in public toilets or local parks.

  After three years in which he learned a great deal, Charlie branched out on his own, again quite by accident. Neil Bannock, a theatrical agent saw him working with Goad, whose star by then was falling fast, if not already fallen, and suggested that Charlie start out on his own and so ‘The Great Santini’ was born, the similarity in name to the ‘Amazing Fentini’ entirely coincidental. Or so he believed. He bought an old Bedford CF van, which of all the vehicles he ever owned, he had loved this one the most.

  Whist on a tour of London clubs, he met Doreen, liked her, courted her in the Bedford, fell in love with her and married her less than four months later, very much to the chagrin of her mother, who wanted far better for her only daughter than an itinerant stage magician with no money and (to her mind) limited prospects (and who was to say she was wrong) and she never let both Doreen and Charlie forget it. Charlie trained Doreen as his assistant and they toured together for two years until she grew disillusioned with both life on the road and with Charlie’s infidelities which lead to the breakdown of the marriage and their eventually amicable separation. So Doreen ‘retired’ to the apartment they rented on the Hartshorn estate, she later met Dennis who brought into her life a stability and let’s be honest, a degree of safe boredom, something she could never aspire to whilst with Charlie.

  Ever since that first chance appearance on television, Charlie has simply gone wherever he was blown and no matter how virulent his complaints against his agent for placing him in dumps like Whitburn on Sea he still went along, (incidentally, Neil Bannock, Charlie’s agent, is still asking for 10% of Charlie’s fees for the Billy Boy Boston tour, even though he had nothing to do with getting him the booking) and his present situation is no different, he could have refused Tchort’s offer but did not, he went with the flow, however he does not care to consider what the consequences of refusing Tchort might have been. Probably none too pleasant.