by Phil Rickman
He'd never been back to Scotland.
OK, read this carefully. Read it twice.
The official time of the Liverpool blackout was 1.13 p.m.
It was the thirteenth minute of the thirteenth hour of the thirteenth
day of December.
Fact.
Another one of those untimely coincidences the electricity company was on about.
It spooked me, kid. I couldn't keep a limb still when I read that. I don't like December, how could I? What about you? Do things happen to you in December? Do you start to get nervous when the nights are growing longer?
It's November now, coming up w a year since the big Liverpool blackout. Worried? Me?
Bloody right I am.
Here's another untimely coincidence that never made the papers - they probably thought it was too bloody stupid to mention.
Nineteen ninety-three. Thirteen years since December 1980, when people were crying in the streets of Liverpool, everybody gathering in Mathew Street, where the Cavern used to be. Do you remember that woman on the radio? 'He was still one of ours, was John. He'd never really left. It's a death in the family.'
The lights went out in Liverpool in the thirteenth minute of the thirteenth hour of the thirteenth day of the month in the thirteenth year since the murder of the city's most famous son.
And that happened on a Monday too.
Moira, what can I do?
I'm heading for the loony bin.
Which was still better - or was it? - than being dead.
Maybe not.
'I'm the same age as you now, pal,' Dave told the picture of John Lennon. It was the one from the front of the Imagine album, Lennon hazy in the sky. Lennon the seer, Lennon the sage.
Mark Chapman, the killer, in his spurious role as crusading Holden Caulfield from Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, had claimed Lennon was the ultimate phoney. Self-justifying shit.
'In a year's time,' Dave told the picture, 'I'm gonna be older than you were. That can't be right.'
John observed him sardonically through glasses like the bottoms of school milk bottles.
yeah, well, you shoulda thought of that at the time.
A white cloud blossomed like ectoplasm from the centre of John's forehead.
'I was scared, pal, I keep explaining.'
that's nothing to do with it, Dave, if you don't mind me saying so. we all get fuckin' scared, when you're scared, that's the time to act, man.
'Look ... I didn't know. I didn't know it was gonna be you, did I? I've explained that. Loads of times.'
so what you're saying -let me get this right - is that it'd've been OK if it was some other poor fuck. You wouldn't be agonizing ...
'No, that's not ...'
you're sooooooo full of shit, Dave, you hated me, man.
John's thin lips were slightly parted; a small puff of white smoke drifted from his mouth into the clouds.
Dave lowered his face into his hands.
If you die tonight, who has the last laugh?
Far above the bungalow, a seagull keened.
He often had the idea that wherever Moira was, there were also seagulls, maybe the same ones flying back and forth.
He gathered up the letter. It was almost unreadable. He wondered if his ma still had her little Olivetti. One way or other he'd have to get this one typed.
Meanwhile, Jan. He couldn't put this off. It was just over an hour and a half's drive to Jan's place. He would make it before nightfall. There was no point in considering what he was going to say to her. It all depended on how far she'd been able to come to terms with what he was. And on what the doctors had said about Sara.
Out of his hands. It was always out of his hands.
Bloody Lennon was sneering benignly from behind his cloud.
fuckin' useless, Dave, you know that?
'Now listen, you smug bastard,' said Dave, rallying. 'You were becoming a sanctimonious sod, and just because you're bloody dead doesn't give you the right…'
There was a small thump on the window. He turned in time to watch coffee-coloured seagull shit sliding slowly down the glass.
II
The Next Big Thing
'That guy, what was his name - found Tutankhamen's tomb ...' Prof Levin was fumbling with a penknife.
'Howard somebody ...'
The elegant, if frayed, Stephen Case, greying hair in a ponytail, was keeping his distance, not wanting dust on his clothes. Plonker.
'Anyway,' Prof grunted, putting down the knife to wipe condensation off his rimless glasses. 'I feel like him.'
Somebody apparently had said to Steve Case that he ought to take a close look at the junk in Epidemic's attic. As a result of which - what a surprise - they'd discovered this box, like a long, wooden cashbox, under Goff's bed.
'He was cursed, though', wasn't he, this bloke?' Prof replaced his specs, slid a blade under the lock. 'Didn't they all get cursed? Didn't they all die horribly?'
'Yes, well, we're not archaeologists, and this isn't a tomb.' Stephen Case smiled thinly. 'It just feels like one.'
They'd clambered up the linoleum stairs by torchlight, their echoing footsteps making it sound like there was at least fifteen of them, and the beam had been suddenly flashed back by the darkly glittering eyes of Jim Morrison, of the Doors, twenty-odd years dead.
Jim was stripped to the waist, a floor-to-ceiling, black-framed photo blow-up, full of scorching menace. 1943-1971. Singer, poet, shaman - this on a tarnished brass plate.
Prof had remembered how Morrison had had a major drink problem. He knew everybody famous who'd ever had a major drink problem. Not that his own problem had ever been major ...
They'd moved up two more flights of stairs and found similar figures looming over the landings: Jimi Hendrix and then John Lennon, both in black frames the size of coffins, leaning out at you over the stairs. A memorial gallery of dead rock stars; was this natural?
Tell you one thing,' Prof said, feeling the lock of the wooden box begin to loosen. 'If there's tapes in here, they ... see that?'
'Mould? Can't have got inside though, can it?'
'Want to bet, son?'
Prof was still suspicious, because Steve had known exactly where to look: not in the actual attic, if there was one, but in mad Max Goff's private apartment, this once-luxurious penthouse, now stripped of everything but the giant bed and these godawful, black and purple funeral-parlour drapes framing the 'rural' side of Luton.
The building used to be a shoe factory before it was the headquarters of Epidemic Independent Records, with the founder sometimes living over the shop. Now the founder was dead and Epidemic, leaderless and crunched by the recession, belonged to TMM, Steve's faceless, multinational employer.
Place had been closed only two or three months, but already these top windows were the only ones not boarded against vandals. There were security men and dogs in the grounds, and Steve'd had to produce verifiable ID before they'd been let in.
'What's A and R mean?' The chief security guy had demanded, studying Steve's card.
Arrogant and ruthless, Prof Levin had thought, having known Stephen Case since before he'd sold his soul to TMM, back when he was just another hustler, and having no basic reason to think he'd changed.
Steve had sighed in annoyance, his shoulders thrusting under the imitation Armani jacket he wore with creamish, stonewashed jeans. 'Artists and Repertoire. Means I get to decide who we're going to record. My colleague here is one of the people who push the buttons. That's what "recording engineer" means.'
The security man's face had read, I'll remember you, pal, but, for now, he'd just nodded. 'OK, you can go in, but we have to keep a record of anything you may remove from the premises.'
'Jesus, we own the place now,' Steve had moaned, then had thrown up his hands wearily. 'All right, all right.'
Finally, they levered up the lid of the box, the edge of it splitting.
'Careful now, Prof, we don't want to ... Is that an envelope
on top?'
'Yep.' A thick A4-size one, made of heavy parchmenty stuff, adding to the feeling of phoney antiquity coming off the black-painted wood of the box with its greenish brass shoulders - built for doubloons, Prof thought, rather than sensitive recording tape. This was going to be messy.
Steve was snapping his fingers impatiently. Prof handed him the envelope over his shoulder, thinking, Why me? Why not one of the smart-arsed, hi-tech boy wonders always hanging around his office, please, please, Mr Case, Sieve, just gimme a break ...? What's he want with a sixty-four-year-old alcoholic with a long-established attitude problem?
Except, of course, that the boy wonders maybe wouldn't know where to start with the kind of tape that might have been stored for years in a wooden box under the late Max Goff's well-used kingsize bed. Whereas Ken Levin was known as Prof not only because of his glasses, his pointed beard and his encyclopaedic knowledge of the British music scene since 1955, but on account of an expertise with recording tape which some distinguished producers considered was verging on the extrasensory.
Also, another point - Steve Case had obtained work for Prof at a time when his drinking was causing some consternation (this in an industry fuelled by dope!) and therefore was aware that Prof owed him one.
There was a certain type of bloke, especially in this business, who was never quite as good as his reputation. Who only survived at the top by doing people carefully-judged favours at the right time and recouping later.
'What you were expecting, Steve?'
Steve looked at Prof furtively, down his nose - not many people could do this.
Prof said, 'You'll let me know then, will you? One day?'
The box had actually been in a cupboard set into the panelling in the base of the bed, this enormous four-poster - repro of course but starkly impressive all the same, even though stripped of its curtains, sheets and pillowcases.
Which would all have been black, of course. Best not to even imagine what the founder of Epidemic Records had got up to here with various girls and boys. And sheep and donkeys and Alsatian dogs, probably.
Max Goff must have been dead a couple of years now, knifed by some little glue-sniffing teenager deluded into thinking the great man was going to turn him into a rock star, allegedly driven into a homicidal frenzy when he found out the truth. Well, obviously, there was more to that, wasn't there always?
It hadn't happened here, of course. But this was still a murdered man's bed, wasn't it?
Aw, leave off... Prof shook himself.
Didn't seem to bother him - straw-haired, fortyish Steve standing in the shadow of the four-poster, prising away at the parchment; you could almost see his long, bony nose twitching. Stephen Case: twenty years in the business, cynical, manipulative .. . but still prepared to be romanced, if not fully seduced, by the Next Big Thing.
He was going to be disappointed, however - Prof extracting the first tape-carton from the box, blowing off the mould - when he saw this lot.
Grimacing, Prof slid the tape back and counted up. A dozen cartons of two-inch tape in ten-and-a-half-inch reels. Masters, obviously.
Steve was fondling the stiff paper like it was an erotic love letter oozing scent.
'What you got then, Steve? Gonna trust old Prof, are we?'
Which he knew he could or they wouldn't be here together. Prof Levin's discretion was legendary. Even pissed. Prof stayed shtumm. Even his ex-wife would accept this.
'It's an album,' Steve said guardedly. 'Or part of an album.' He folded the papers, leaned over the box. 'How many in there?'
'Twelve.'
'Super. It's probably all here then.'
'In a manner of speaking,' Prof said.
Problem was, even if Elvis himself, in his undeniably cranky final years, had secretly signed to Epidemic to record his farewell opus, it quite possibly wasn't going to matter a flying fart any more.
Prof held up one of the reels, unrolled a couple of inches of tape. 'Steve, this tape is knackered, mate.'
He dropped it back into the carton.
'Unplayable,' he said. 'Kaput.'
This boudoir was the size of a modest dance hall. Its walls were all white. Had been white; there was a coating of dust now, except for the etiolated rectangles where pictures had hung. Prof didn't like to think what kind of pictures these had been.
He brushed some mould from his cuff. If Steve was expecting some help here, he could be a little more forthcoming.
'I'm only guessing,' he said, 'but from what we know Max Goff used to get up to, the atmosphere in here would have been pretty humid much of the time. And then cold as the grave again, when he went away.'
Steve Case was staring at him, his hands hanging limply by his sides. A thin vein meandering along his left nostril seemed to throb.
'Look ...' Prof held up a reel between thumb and forefinger, going into his Sotheby's routine. 'This is late seventies, early eighties, right. What you had then were manufacturers experimenting with new synthetic materials. With unfortunate results. You got a class of tape which, if left for too long in unsuitable conditions, could turn out worse than the BBC museum pieces, you know what I'm saying? Look ... feel it.'
Steve drew back.
'These conditions,' Prof said. 'Hot and cold and bucketsful of evaporating sweat and other bodily secretions ...'
Steve had let the papers from the envelope fall to the mattress. The papers looked quite crisp and fresh. There was typing or print of some sort on them. Prof made out one word, in capitals.
DEATH.
He blew out his lips. Terrific.
'What you're saying,' Steve said tensely, 'is that the oxide ...'
'Oxide, right. There's like a binder. Which holds the oxide on to the base film of the tape - stop me if I'm being oversimplistic for a man of your experience ...'
'Don't piss about.'
Prof grinned. 'So you get humidity in the tape, it causes the binder to kind of exude on to the surface. When you play it, the tape glues itself to the heads, the machine stalls, everything gets very, very gooey.'
He took out four cartons one by one, each grey-green with mould.
'Look at the state. How long you say this lot's been stored? Fourteen, fifteen years?' Prof shook his head, enjoying himself. 'You could be screwed then, mate. Be like black treacle on the heads, chocolate fudge ...'
'Shit.' Steve Case looked about to kick the box across the room. 'Shit, shit, shit!'
'This a disaster then, Steve?'
Steve looked about to kick Prof Levin across the room.
'So what was it then, mate? What we looking at?'
Steve turned away and walked over to the window, sighed. 'The Stone.'
'The Stones? When? How? You're kidding.'
'No, Prof. The Stone. Singular.'
Prof looked blank. He was freelance, wasn't getting paid for this, had agreed to tag along because he owed Steve and also because Steve had implied there was a big project on the cards if they struck oil. This was it? This was the big one, the contents of the Ark of the bloody Covenant?
Steve was gazing out of the window across a grey field with a shed in it. 'You don't remember this?'
'Should I?'
'A band put together for Epidemic in seventy-nine?' Steve turned back into the room, 'Tom Storey?'
'I see.' The old wheels turning. 'Recorded nineteen-eighty, you say. December eighty, would that be?'
Steve said, 'Full title was the Philosopher's Stone.'
'That's a mouthful, Steve.'
'This was the item medieval alchemists believed would turn base metals into gold. Metaphorical, apparently.'
'Didn't do a lot for Tom Storey, though, did it? Not in December eighty. Are you saying then ...' Prof unearthed another reel of tape, scraped at the mould with a fingernail, 'that this is the actual album Storey was working on when he had his fabled accident?'
'The Black Album. Recorded at the Abbey at Ystrad Ddu - ddu being Welsh for black. In the Black Mountains of South W
ales. And black also because of... what happened.'
'Piece of history,' Prof said. 'Who else was in it?'
Steve took the papers from the mattress. 'Disappointingly, except for one of the session men, nobody who counts for shit any more. There was a folk singer, Moira Cairns, and a refugee from some string quartet called Simon St John ...'
'I remember Cairns. Nice voice. Smoky.'
'And someone called Dave Reilly.'
'Dave?'
'You know him?'
'Well, I ...' Prof decided to cool it a little, until he knew where this was headed. 'I did know him. I worked on his solo album. Eighty-six, eighty-seven.'
'You know where he is now?'
Prof shook his head.
'Was he any good?'
Prof shrugged.
'All nobodies, you see,' said Steve. 'Except for Tom Storey.'
'Who's also a nobody now. Reclusive, they say. And a session man, you said? Someone who does count for shit?'
'Drummer. And some backing vocals, possibly. In effect, the fifth member of the band.' Steve paused for effect. 'Lee Gibson.'
Last Sunday Prof had read a feature in the Independent about Lee Gibson, who'd left Britain over a decade ago and was now monster in the States. These things happened.
'Really? Well, well.' Prof pinched his beard. Storey's swansong and the launching of Lee, all in one album. 'Pity about the tape.'
'Come on, Prof, stop fooling about.' Steve sat down on the bed which Prof suspected would be cold and damp. 'There are, at the end of the day, things you can do with this tape, are there not?'
Prof raised an eyebrow, saying nothing.
'What I mean is you can bring this stuff back from the dead. And discreetly.'