December

by Phil Rickman

  'It pays,' Dave Reilly, who called himself Dave Kite, said. 'It's cheap, it's naff, but...'

  'It's not cheap and it's not naff, and it's too late for bullshit, Reilly, and I'm too old for it, so get serious.'

  They were in some all-night coffee shop a couple of streets away from Muthah Mirth. Prof had prowled the pavement outside, sobering in minutes and feeling no better for it.

  Figuring Dave wouldn't hang around afterwards, not surprised to see him emerge within five minutes, winding a long white scarf around his neck, glancing worriedly from side to side, one screwed-up individual.

  Prof peered down the side of Dave's stool. 'Where's your guitar?'

  'Back at Muthah's. I stay in a room round the corner, pick it up the following day. They've got it off to a fine art.'

  'Got what off?'

  'The muggers. They'll have it off you between the taxi and the kerb, and resold before midnight. I've never been lucky with guitars.'

  'Bastards.'

  'Yeh. It's a hard life, Prof.'

  If it was, it didn't show, not until you got close. Dave was ageing like Paul Simon: from a distance you'd swear his clock had stopped at twenty-four and he still wasn't shaving much more than twice a week. How old was he now? Thirty-nine? Forty?

  Prof said, 'It's a good routine you got there, son. Psychologically acute, as they say.'

  Dave shrugged it off. 'All it is, instead of just learning the chords and intonation, you start thinking about the person, where they were at when they wrote the song - I mean, not every song will do. You know instinctively which are the ones.'

  Dave was drinking apple juice, slowly, like it was brandy. 'Thing is, these guys - travelling around, hotels, all this - have more spare hours to worry about life. And death. They die for the first time at thirty, and then it's borrowed time. So I just think about that and ... it comes.'

  'Out of thin air," said Prof.

  'Yeh.' Dave was glancing over his shoulder, like someone about to put out a line of cocaine. 'Thin air.'

  Bollocks, Prof thought. 'Takes a lot out of you, I imagine.'

  'Not really.' Lying again, Prof thought. What am I gonna do with this bugger?

  A psychiatrist would say Dave was retreating into all these other personalities because he was scared of his own. They'd first met when Prof was engineering Dave's solo album, back in eighty-seven, Dave having to be himself then, and finding it hard. Result: not a very good album, only a few hundred copies sold; the single, 'Dakota Blues', had some airplay - strictly novelty value, it probably embarrassed people.

  'Well.' Dave smiled, stupidly. 'Here we are again, then.'

  He paused. 'Prof, you going to tell me why you went berserk in there? You back on the cough mixture?'

  'What the fuck's that got to ... ?' Prof snarled, the way he always snarled at anyone who raised the booze issue.

  'You were sober when you were screaming at me?'

  'I wasn't screaming at you,' Prof said through clenched teeth. 'I was just bloody screaming.'

  'Where'd it come from?'

  'What?'

  'Deathoak,' Dave said softly. 'Or maybe I misheard.' He still wore the white scarf, like a neck-brace.

  Lifting his coffee cup, Prof's hand shook. Two raving neurotics together. 'Sod it,' he said and put the cup down. 'Not got anything I can put in here, have you?'

  'I don't drink.'

  'Aren't you the little Cliff Richard.'

  Dave shook his head. 'That's Simon."

  'Simon who?'

  Dave sipped his apple juice, cautiously. 'You said you looked me up in Time Out? What for? Why'd you do that?'

  Now he'd come this far. Prof was almost scared to talk about it. A lighted bus went past the coffee shop window. He wished he was on it.

  'Maybe you didn't say it at all.'

  'Say what?'

  'Deathoak. Maybe you didn't say that at all. Sometimes I just kind of hear it, you know.'

  'What's it mean, anyway?'

  'Bugger all. Well ... it's an anagram of The Dakota. With a T to spare. Maybe I made it up myself subconsciously and got it slightly wrong. You get a signal about something, your mind converts it into a currency you can deal in. That make any sense? No, shit, it doesn't. Sorry.'

  It did make sense, in a way Prof didn't care to fathom. He started to sing, in a tuneless wheeze, 'Seven long years since I heard the news ... '

  'I'm still wakin' in the night with the Dakota Blues. Still true, Prof.' Dave screwed up his face, drained his glass. An old couple looked over from a nearby table and the woman smiled; middle-aged drunks obviously didn't worry her.

  Dave said, 'Only it's nearly fourteen long years now.'

  Prof said, 'We all felt upset about Lennon. We didn't all get obsessed.'

  Dave said, 'You didn't all feel responsible.'

  'I need a drink,' Prof said. 'Let's find somewhere.'

  'I'm not drinking with you, Prof.'

  Sanctimonious little shit. What d'you mean, responsible?'

  Dave's eyes clouded. 'Maybe I killed him.' His face made the tablecloth look grey in comparison. 'Maybe I killed John Lennon.'

  Weasel said, 'How'd you know this geezer's looking out for your old man?'

  Vanessa didn't reply. She was curled into a giant armchair. She'd made herself some hot chocolate in a mug with the Manhattan skyline silhouetted around it.

  On the TV, Eddie Murphy said, 'Hey, man, what the fuck is goin' down here?'

  You might well ask. Weasel thought.

  'You ain't going like him, Princess?' he whispered, more to himself than her. Tell me you ain't going like him.'

  Could they? If their brains was tuned into less circuits than - got to say it - normal people, you wouldn't think they'd run to an extra circuit, would you?

  'Princess. Do you know who he is?'

  Vanessa took a sip of her chocolate. 'Who?' She didn't seem very interested any more.

  'The geezer wiv ... wiv two mouths.'

  'He's my grandad,' Vanessa said to Eddie Murphy. 'My daddy's daddy.'

  'Your daddy tell you that?'

  Vanessa shrugged.

  'He tell you about him at all?'

  'He's dead,' Vanessa said. 'Let's watch the film, Weasel.'

  She knows, Weasel thought. Whether Tom told her or not, she knows.

  Weasel remembered. It wasn't a memory he liked. It had coloured his childhood. Coloured it red.

  Weasel leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes. What the fuck was goin' down here?

  'Listen . . Prof Levin had gone red in the face. It made his white beard look pink. 'Don't you start telling me what's impossible, Reilly, I know what I bloody heard.'

  Dave said, 'Here, have some more coffee.' Catching the eye of the guy behind the counter. 'Get's another pot, would you, pal?'

  Thinking how much he liked Prof, a straight guy, one of the few. But the old man had to have been misled. Hadn't been too hard to convince himself that, when he thought he'd heard Prof screaming deathoak in the club, it had been no such thing ... just like the owls in the night, the train whistles, the screech of brakes, the crackle of twigs underfoot ...

  And now Prof was talking tapes: music from a dark place, music to pollute your dreams, bring on the night-sweats. And sliding from his stool mumbling about knowing a better place than this.

  'I'm sure you do, but we're staying here.' Dave's mind full of names. A dismal winter morning, sickly fire and a stench of paraffin. His memory had it all mixed up with the other fire, the Lotus and the Land Rover. Looking back, it was as if they'd been cremating Debbie ... and the baby, because nobody who'd been there could have imagined a live baby coming out of the scorched mess that was Tom's wife.

  Keeping it casual, he asked Prof where these tapes had come from. Prof talked of a man called Stephen Case, and a box under a bed. 'Thing is, David, he knew where to look. Steve Case. He knew exactly where to look. This made me suspicious straight off.'

  Dave's stomach had turned to frozen meat
. Fourteen years since I heard the news/Still wakin' in the night with the Dakota Blues. Fourteen years in a half-light of doubt and guilt.

  'How many tracks, Prof?'

  'Five or six. I only played half of it. That was enough, believe me. Nobody understands "Aelwyn the Dreamer". What was that about?'

  'Prof, I ...' The stifling heat in the coffee bar was not enough. His lips felt cool and raw and cracked as he tried to speak. 'Don't remember too much of what we did, only what we planned to do, which might not be the same thing.'

  'Why, what were you on?'

  'Not that simple. Well, yeh, it was. For me.' Dave looked down into his empty apple-juice. 'A woman. I was high on a woman.'

  'Yeah,' said Prof. 'I saw her once. Very gorgeous, Moira Cairns. Where's she now?'

  'I don't know.'

  'I mean, she's ... alive and everything?'

  'What's that mean?'

  Prof came over anguished. 'I dunno, mate. Some stuff on this album ... these tapes. Distressing.'

  Dave, shivering, pulled his white scarf tight. 'Did you hear a number called "On a Bad Day"?'

  Prof shook his head. 'A woman,' he said. 'A woman dying.'

  'I don't know what you're on about.'

  'The woman dying. On the tape. She's fading - the voice, the whole quality of the voice getting sort of brittle. And then - yeah - she's saying, very feebly, Help me, help me.'

  Dave said, 'I don't remember it.'

  'Come on, son, you were there.'

  'Prof, I don't remember it, I swear to God.'

  'And then ... She's on the very point of death ... don't ask me how I know this, it's in the music ... when ...'

  'This didn't happen ...'

  '… when Tom Storey's inimitable guitar comes roaring in, very offensive. Savage ... Come on, David!' Prof thumped a fist on the counter, his white beard harsh, like a nylon hairbrush. 'Talk to me. I've heard the music. It's living in my dreams. Tell me all the things you think I won't believe!'

  'Shut up, you'll get us thrown out.'

  'And tell me ... ' Prof shouted, '... tell me what it is about you and Lennon.'

  There was obsession here. Obsession of a kind Prof Levin had never encountered before. Obsession so intense and vivid you couldn't help but get pulled in. Like in the club, Muthah Mirth.

  Like in the nightmares. And the music. Especially that.

  Years ago, Prof had been on this one-day seminar for record producers and engineers, conducted by some university professor whose theory was that certain music could open up your subconscious. The guy said that babies in the womb, used to the same old sounds - the mother's breathing, the mother's heartbeat - could be kind of traumatized by some sudden vibrating sound from outside, like a door slamming.

  So here we are, Prof had been thinking, safe in our material world full of traffic and horn-sections, pneumatic drills and drums machines, and then we're exposed to sounds from ... from somewhere else ... And we say, so glibly, this music is really haunting.

  Dave kept moving his glass around on the counter, like a glass on a séance table. The walls of the coffee bar dissolved for Prof, projecting his own visions from Muthah Mirth as Dave talked of a soaring building, like a castle, at night, pinnacles and cupolas. Blenheim Palace or somewhere, only taller, and obviously in a city.

  A vision seen on the eighth of December 1980 during a recording session at the Abbey studio. People singing and wailing; somebody dying, somebody dead.

  And the same building photographed for a thousand newspapers, filmed for a thousand TV reports, beamed across the world on the ninth of December, 1980.

  The Dakota building near Central Park in New York, where John Lennon had lived and died. The Dakota building, the most forbidding edifice in New York, with gargoyle and a metal fountain like a big, black flower.

  Prof said, 'You're telling me you saw all this? You saw him ... ?'

  Dave nodding and then shaking his head. Not telling him the whole truth, obviously. Maybe not knowing what the truth was. The only constant was this monstrous building, the core of the obsession, so much a part of Dave that he'd been throwing it out like smoke as he sang, and Prof had choked on the smoke.

  Prof was off his stool. 'David, I'm not a psychic, I'm a bloody technician. I mix sounds. I'm a simple man who just wants a night's sleep and maybe a drink or two.'

  He waved an arm at the guy behind the counter. 'OK, OK, I'm making an exhibition, I'll behave myself.'

  Climbing back on his stool, mumbling at Dave. 'All right, so you have this vision. You're outside the Dakota and bang, bang ... only three Beatles left.'

  'Five bangs,' Dave said. 'I think there were five. Were there five?'

  'How the hell should I know? You were there. Go on. Five shots. You see him go down?'

  'No, you're not getting this. I went down. I couldn't see what was happening. Glasses had gone. I didn't realize his eyes were that bad.'

  'Oh Jesus,' Prof said. 'This is not what I want to hear. This is frightening, David. Also tasteless, very tasteless.'

  'They put me in a car. I was in the back of a car. 'This guy is dying." Somebody said that.'

  'I know somebody said that. It's a very famous line. It was in all the papers, which is where I prefer to think you got it from.'

  'Sure.' Dave shrugged. 'You prefer to think that, it's fine. Really.'

  'Finish it,' Prof said. 'What's the punchline? There's always a punchline. What was it like being shot? Did you suffer much? Did you die in the car or on the operating table, I forget?'

  This was not what he'd been expecting. He was not going to take it seriously. He'd been fucked up enough. This was where it ended. This was where he came out.

  'I chickened out.' Dave had gone pale again. 'I didn't stay with it. It was ugly, incredibly distressing. And also ... shit, it was irrelevant to what we were doing at the Abbey. I wanted nothing to do with it. That's the crunch - if I'd stayed with it, all the clues were there. I could've heard his voice, and it's not a voice you'd mistake. If I'd had the nerve. If I'd been interested enough. If I hadn't made the Godlike judgement that this was irrelevant. Moira sensed it was important, tried to make sense of it, but I lost it. I wasn't trying hard enough.'

  'You're saying you saw this thing, you were a part of this scene, but you didn't know who it was?' Prof felt a touch of impatience. He welcomed it. He wanted to walk out of this in anger, not make a timid retreat. 'What difference would that have made? You'd been shot - he'd been shot by then. All over. End of story. How does that make you responsible? Jesus, you're so full of shit sometimes, Dave ...'

  Dave Reilly reeled back, like he'd been hit. Like somebody had walked over his grave in Doc Martens and kicked his headstone over.

  'I'm sorry.' Prof moved unsteadily towards the door. 'I've had enough.'

  'Take it out of that.' Dave had stuck a ten-pound note on the counter. 'Sorry for the fuss.' He held open a door for Prof.

  'Come back any time,' the guy behind the counter said. 'I'll get you a bigger audience.'

  Prof shook Dave off. 'No, leave me alone, there's a good boy.'

  'I'm putting you in a taxi.'

  'Florence fucking Nightingale, now, are we?'

  As it happened, there was a minicab right outside, on the double yellows under a streetlamp. Take him home.' Dave was producing more money, a twenty and another ten. 'He lives off the Edgware Road. Don't stop at any clubs.'

  Prof started to get in the back. 'What about you?'

  'Bedsit. Walking distance. I've got a key.'

  Half inside the minicab. Prof struggled out again. 'Sod you, David,' he said. 'Finish it.'

  'I'll call you.' Dave turned and walked away, his white scarf a ribbon of light.

  'Bloody well finish it!' Prof roared. 'Why d'you feel responsible?'

  Dave stopped. He turned back.

  'Time zones. It happened around eleven p.m., New York time, right? Is that a four-hour gap, or five hours, in winter?'

  'You relived it? After i
t happened? Shit, I can't think straight, what ... ?'

  'No. Wrong way round. I pre-lived it. It hadn't happened yet. Work it out. I'd have had at least four hours to warn him.'

  'Look, I ain't got all night,' the cab-driver said irritably.

  'This is a load of balls,' Prof said, 'this is ... fantasy land.'

  'I could've reached him through Yoko. Yoko was very open to this kind of stuff at the time, and there was a woman I knew, a psychic, who was living in New York. I could've ...'

  Prof clung to the flaking door of the' cab like it was a log keeping him afloat in his sea of bad dreams.

  'David, you told anybody John Lennon was gonna be shot, they'd have thought you were a nutter and you know it. I'm going to sleep on this one, son. Correction, try to sleep.'

  'You'll be sleeping on the fucking pavement if you don't get in.' The cabbie revved his engine.

  'And that's it, you see,' Dave said sadly. 'That's the "Dakota Blues".'

  XIV

  Keys

  Tom Storey was swaying almost rhythmically above her. His eyes bulged and glittered in a face the colour of boiled ham. The knife hung limply from his right hand. His jacket was undone revealing the bottom of his tie - a ludicrous thing ending half-way down his chest.

  Silly little details you noticed when you were terrified out of your senses.

  Could be rather fun, don't you think? I do love surprises, confrontations, human friction ...

  Oh, Martin, Martin, poor Martin, your stupid schemes, all your little psychological games ... what have you brought down on us?

  I'm really quite intrigued, you know ... what will Storey be like?

  Meryl rolled her head on the floor in a fever of terror. Above Tom Storey's left shoulder there came a swift, brown blur and she was drawn again to the deep, dead eyes of the dreadful entity from the kitchen, the man with a hole in his face. He was mouthing something at her over Storey's shoulder, seemed to have no teeth, just another puckered hole.

  Please God, please Lady Bluefoot ...

  When she tried to pray, her mind wouldn't form a prayer, only presented her with a trite image of her spiritualist church, a simpering medium in butterfly glasses with a message from the Other Side about the important letter in Aunt Daisy's linen cupboard, and father is so happy now in the heavenly garden, and the Lady Bluefoot...