by Phil Rickman
The pianist was white and luminous in some kind of loose shirt which somehow made his body hazy, seem to shimmer in the air with those beautiful chords, da da da da-da ...
The pianist turned his head. He looked directly at Prof, and Profs hand tightened in the dark around his slippery glass.
For the man's eyes were white and waxen circles, like two communion wafers. When his head bent over the keys, the light glimmered from small, round, wire-rimmed glasses.
Everyone was very quiet. The playing softened. The pianist looked up, almost drowsily drawing breath, and began to sing into his microphone, this calm, human, painfully familiar, flat-vowelled nasal drone.
Imagine...
A shivery glow lit Prof up inside, like old malt whisky used to, once.
... Imagine there's no audience ...
The singer looked up, peered over his little round glasses into the sparseness, continued in sardonic Liverpudlian.
... that's not so fuckin' hard ...
Everybody laughed. Except for Prof. All around him, outside the toxic circle, all the other people laughing, the stupid crass bastards, as he threw down the rest of his whisky and tried to blank out the heresy - that the guy should come down to this - by amplifying the white noise in his head into a black roaring, screwing up his face to close his ears.
He closed his eyes too, but he could still see the man at the scuffed and battered grand piano, his cold, white eyes, his blank, pale face and small mouth spewing its cheap parody.
'Scumbag,' he muttered. Then saw the bearded man starting to advance, and shut up.
There probably hadn't been as tense a meal as this, Shelley thought, since the Last Supper.
Seven of them at the long dining-table in the panelled hall. Sometimes she thought there were eight and counted them again: herself and Tom, their neighbours Sir Wilfrid and Lady Tulley (call me Angela, my dear), the thin man with the ponytail, Stephen Case - Tom's fan, allegedly - and Broadbank and the startling Meryl.
And although only she and Tom appeared on edge, that was enough tension to go round, twice.
Meryl, in black, part waitress, part hostess, was in motion much of the time; perhaps this was why she kept thinking an extra person was present. This and the empty chair.
Shelley was having difficulty finding sufficient saliva to savour the meal. 'Wonderful,' she remarked periodically, smiling stiffly at Meryl.
The dinner was meatless. A melon and cherry starter, followed by vegetable soup. Then an expertly conceived risotto-type thing with a marinated meat substitute. It clearly fooled Lady Tulley, who twice commented on the succulence of the pork.
Actually, Shelley - in whose honour the dish had obviously been prepared by Meryl - would, for Tom's sake, have far preferred it to be real meat. Something to weigh him down, make him tired and lugubrious.
Instead, his jaw remained rigid and his face shone with sweat in the light from half a dozen silver candlesticks, arranged in a straight line down the old oak table. He hated candles.
In fact, Shelley would have preferred them to be dining from a table with a vinyl top and metal legs inside some fluorescent-lit chromium conservatory with glass walls - preferably assembled in a factory less than six months ago.
'More wine, Shelley?" Broadbank offered.
'Not for the moment.' She covered her glass.
'More, er, orange juice, Tom?'
'Cheers,' said Tom, without enthusiasm.
He was at the top of the table, his back to the reconstituted Jacobean panelling. He was looking isolated and his expression was frozen. Shelley, next to him, kept squeezing his cold and rigid hand and getting no response, because Tom was very angry with her for deceiving him about this place and how old it was. Stephen Case, on his other side, opposite Shelley, kept trying to engage him in conversation, to which overtures Tom replied monosyllabically without even glancing at the guy.
Case was 'a record company executive'. Well, he would be, wouldn't he. Hmmm, Shelley thought. Bloody hmmm.
Next to her was Martin Broadbank himself, opposite the dramatic Meryl in her black dress and her diamante choker. Sir Wilfrid and Lady Tulley (Angela) were down at the bottom end, furthest from Tom, which perhaps was as well. The seat opposite Tom, at the bottom of the table, was the one that was empty.
'You know, TMM,' Case was murmuring to Tom, 'is not the philistine, profit-oriented monolith you might imagine. Our directors are all enthusiasts, and if I mention the name Silas Copesake ...'
Tom turned and observed his neighbour for the first time. 'Sile Copesake?'
'The man they call the Godfather of British Blues,' Case said proudly, spelling it out for everyone to whom the name would mean nothing - i.e. everyone here except for the Storeys - 'has been a non-executive director of TMM for some years. It's about musical integrity, Tom. Recognising our roots. You were in his band once, of course.'
'Yeah. When I was a kid,' Tom said and turned back to his meal.
And Shelley knew for certain now that this dinner was about Tom rather than her. Tom and Stephen Case. Seated together at the top of the table, with Broadbank himself centrally placed to deflect conversation away from them if necessary.
I've been bloody well set up, Shelley thought, outraged.
'Tried your cheese-substitute,' Broadbank said, as if he'd picked up on this. 'Been right through the range. Preferred the smoked, actually, is that terribly naff of me? Angela, what about you, have you and Sir Wilfrid been carried along at all by the healthfood revolution?'
'Well, you know,' said Angela, Lady Tulley, 'I do have to say that when in Stroud now one does find oneself drawn increasingly towards Love-Storey. Such an appealing little shop in itself.'
Shelley had seen her in the shop twice, buying fruit mostly. certainly nothing that might be construed as cranky. She was solid, square and red-cheeked. A walker - or rather, a strider, and clearly more at home in the Cotswolds than Sir Wilfrid, who was looking rather shrivelled tonight.
'Indeed,' he kept saying, in a non-committal kind of way. 'Indeed.' Perhaps he always looked shrivelled. Previously, Shelley had only seen him from a distance, pottering aimlessly in his acre of cottage garden, on one occasion prodding about with a dangerously new-looking shotgun. He was supposed to have been an environmentalist - although she supposed being a Senior Something at the Department of the Environment was not quite the same thing.
'If you'd like to meet Sile again,' Case was saying to Tom, 'we could arrange something, no problem ...'
Not the way, Case, Shelley thought, hostile now. She'd known too many record company execs to trust any, particularly specimens like Stephen Case with his Armani suit and his greying pony-tail. Anybody who'd survived to grow grey hairs in this business had to have his poisonous side.
'Got nuffink in common wiv Sile no more,' Tom said. 'Must be due a bus-pass by now, anyway. If not a bleeding bypass.'
'He keeps himself fit,' Case said. 'He's working with a number of young musicians.'
'Figures.' Tom shovelled in the last of his risotto.
'Tom's a hopeless carnivore,' Shelley found herself saying, almost shrilly, as a way of hauling him into their own chat. Aren't you, love?'
Sir Wilfrid looked up with grudging approval.
'Nothing wrong with that,' Broadbank said. 'Besides, a chap needs a bit of muscle in Tom's profession. Must burn up a terrific amount of energy in one of these two-hour rock concerts. Saw that chap Springsteen on the box the other week, didn't we, Meryl, absolutely drenched in perspiration.'
An unfortunate comment, Shelley thought. Although a good few miles from his Telecaster and wielding nothing more demanding than a knife and fork, Tom, at dinner, wore the surface moisture of a musician at the end of a very heavy gig.
Shelley sneaked a glance at her watch: not yet nine-thirty, and the sweat was already rolling down his checks like lava from Vesuvius. If she could just get him through another hour without an eruption, then perhaps they could make an excuse to leave.
'I don't know why we're talking about boring old rock and roll,' she said with a light laugh. 'Tom hasn't done a concert in years.'
'Gets plenty of practice, though,' Sir Wilfrid said grimly from the end of the table. 'Round the clock, sometimes, if I'm any judge. Sounds like a damned horse having a tooth pulled.'
Shelley dropped her fork. 'I'll prepare the pudding,' Meryl said.
It was less offensive for a while.
After that one song as John Lennon, the singer abandoned the piano and took up an acoustic, a working guitarist's Takamine with the built-in pick-up and a little Trace amp.
He did Paul Simon, clipped and clear, comically over-playing the Noo Yawk vowels. Then he gave himself messed-up hair, an amiable shamble and a wonky grin: Neil Young to the life.
The bloke was actually good, even better between numbers, staying in character, fumbling at his machine-heads, mumbling at his audience or giving them the phoney history of some song: dates, times, women. Sometimes you could even forget it was an act. When, during his Leonard Cohen spot, he politely invited a lady from the audience to sweeten his night, the woman actually looked charmed, and flushed, silly bitch.
No real harm in this. Prof relaxed for the first time since he'd rolled off his sofa around mid-afternoon. The man on stage was screwing a harmonica around his neck, putting on dark glasses: Bob Dylan.
Prof caught a waiter's eye, pointed at his glass. He still couldn't see anything about the man himself that he recognised.
He was in hiding, deep cover - Bob Dylan being as good a place as any if you wanted to confuse the issue.
Prof leaned over the table and closed his eyes, head in his hands, a five-pound note trapped under one elbow.
The Dylan opened with what you'd call an affectionate pastiche, the young, rasping, incisive folk-rocker of Highway 61 days, mid-sixties.
Prof heard a clinking, lifted an elbow. The voice from the speakers had loosened, deepening and warming up before your very ears, into the phoney, countrified, down-home, big-brass-bed Dylan in a cowboy hat.
A big whisky had materialised at Prof's elbow in exchange for the fiver. He was wondering how this act would sound on record. Probably less effective; you closed your eyes and the actual impersonation was not all that hot; what made it work was the guy's obvious understanding of his subjects, where they were coming from emotionally, psychologically. Like he'd been there too.
Like he was there now, in fact.
Dylan was into this one-to-one dialogue with his ole buddy God. After which, in a scruffy little Tombstone hat, he progressively frayed - you could hear this happening, the artist growing slovenly and decrepit like the lyrics - so that in the end you couldn't tell whether these were Dylan's own duff words or substitutes. Clever, very cruel: the transition from freewheeling hero to a kind of embarrassing vagrant, in ten minutes.
Prof laughed, the booze making it easier. He'd a pretty good impression by now of who this bloke approved of, who made him suspicious and which one - just the one - was causing him some personal pain. With a few songs he changed all the lyrics, with others none at all, bringing out the irony through emphasis, at sometimes he'd alter a single line or maybe just one word and it reflected back on the composer. In some way he was telling you more than you'd learn if you saw the guys themselves in concert.
And then at the end he dropped the satire. It just fell away; the whole atmosphere changed. He strolled around a couple of times, looked up at the ceiling. Sat down to present again the man who caused him pain. And for real this time.
The communion-wafer glasses again. Could the bastard see through those glasses, or had they been sprayed white, so that when he was wearing them all he could see was light?
And what else? What else can he see?
He sat on a stool, up front, with his guitar. He said, by way of introduction, Lennon's voice - his speaking voice, which was different, deeper. 'This is one for me old mates.'
It went as quiet as these clubs ever did.
In my Life. Tissues out, folks, Prof thought cynically. People and things that went before. Tears in the whisky: poor bastard, this was his personal epitaph five years before the event.
He had a drink, closed his eyes. Rooms didn't even swim any more when he did that, lead in his boots nowadays.
Places he remembered. Some had gone, some remained.
Prof thought about when he had lived in a real house. Fulham. Wife and kids. Cherry had been remarried two years now - an estate agent, what could you say? Saw his kids, occasionally, two at university, the eldest girl, Carla, in what she called 'a serious long-term relationship', which meant he was going to be a bloody grandad by Christmas. This is your grandad, he once re-mixed an album by Marc Bolan, dead now but he was famous for a few years.
People he'd known. Some deceased and some still living - just about. In his life he'd loved them all.
Prof took off his glasses, rolled the sticky whisky glass across his forehead.
Had he ever really loved anybody when he was totally sober? He pushed the base of the glass into an eyelid, bringing up a night sky full of pulsing nebulae, like he used to do as a kid, a swirling orange-coloured blob coming at him, expanding and then dissolving into many scattered fragments of light, like lights in windows, rows and rows of windows in a great, wide tower block, bigger than any tower block he'd ever seen, bigger than ...
places I remember
This was one he didn't remember. He just felt this overwhelming loneliness, damp and gassy, heavy in the air. Something had happened to make everybody lonely.
And all the people were singing, Hey Jude.
Something wrong. How could you be listening to one song and yet hearing another sung by many voices, mostly out of tune?
Prof, floating above it all in the miasma of loneliness, thought suddenly, I'm looking through his glasses, I'm seeing this through the wrong bloody glasses.
Out, he thought, get out of this. This is nothing to do with you, Kenneth, don't get involved.
But he was involved. He'd been involved since he conned his way into a cramped listening studio under a tatty South London record shop and ran some tape that should have been left to bake to a crisp.
When he managed to open his eyes, the room seemed bigger than he recalled. He was looking up at the ceiling, so far above him it disappeared into shadows. The atmosphere was dense and smoky, too many bloody cigarettes.
It was all a blur. He patted the table, trying to find his glasses. The table was damp.
He peered at the bleary people at the tables, men and women, mostly men. He wished he was with them, just part of the crowd, normal, invisible. And yet they were all idiots, they knew nothing.
places I remember ...
He was still alone in his little circle - what am I, radioactive?
In his own atmosphere, a different sphere, not part of their world, thanks very much ... please let me in ...
... though some have changed.
Glasses, glasses, where the hell ...
A white hand beckoning. Prof took a tentative step up a long passageway into a white place. There were people in there. White people. People like gas.
... some forever...
Stop it!
The whisky glass exploded in Prof's hands as he cranked himself to his feet, his limbs unfolding stiffly like a rusty crane.
'Stop it. Stop it! Get me out!'
He was closing his lists, forcing the spearpoint shards of glass into his flesh, urging the fresh blood to run. He knew he was screaming again, just like last night, his whole body wracked with painful shivers.
In the tumult, he couldn't hear what he was screaming until the bouncers, two of them now, were escorting him, feet off the ground, towards the exit and he could hear the echo of it and see the singer's eyes flaring up behind the glasses and the hands freezing on the strings.
XII
Reassurance for the Living
'If this turns out a disaster,' Meryl said, 'it'll be no mor
e than his own fault. I did warn him not to invite the Tulleys. Sir Wilfrid is not a pleasant man, I said. My old uncle, that's Geoff Thornton, from Shackleys' old cottage, up by the church - were they there in your day, the Shackleys? - he once did some gardening for the Tulleys my uncle Geoff. Never again, he said. Never again.'
She was chatting to the Lady Bluefoot. The ghost, a sensitive soul who did not like upset of any kind, had been the first to leave the dining-room, gliding ahead of Meryl across the back hall and into the lung, low-ceilinged kitchen.
Meryl could hear the swish of taffeta as the Lady Bluefoot passed through the wall.
'But he'll likely smooth things over. He usually does. Be a challenge for him. He's bored, you see, is Martin. Could have twice, three times as many supermarkets. Not interested.'
Meryl, who prided herself on her discretion, became unusually garrulous when talking to the Lady Bluefoot - who, after all, knew everything that went on under this roof, so where was the harm?
'A challenge for him. Which his work isn't any more, that's the problem. So he sets up these situations - confrontations, people who he knows'll be rubbing each other up the wrong way - almost as entertainment. Which he shouldn't do, m'lady, and he knows that, too.'
Meryl held up a cut-glass sundae cup to the soft, concealed lighting. 'There now - what do you think?"
A former domestic science teacher at a high school near Cheltenham, she herself had found it an interesting challenge to prepare a sophisticated dinner involving no animal products whatsoever. She'd used soya cream for the raspberry mousse and was pleased with how it had turned out.
'Rather like the old syllabub,' she explained, still trying to calm the ruffled spirit. 'You used to have those in your day, m'lady. I'll bet you did '
To her abiding sorrow, Meryl had never actually seen the Lady Bluefoot, nor even the tiny blue shoes after which she was named and which, it was said, could be observed sometimes padding from the hall to the dining-room, where Lord Rendall's body with its broken neck had been laid when the servants carried him into the farmhouse.