by Phil Rickman
From up here. Weasel could see over the fence to the road beyond, and Vanessa with a lamp standing in the middle of it.
What the f—?
'Vanessa, Jesus, what you doing? Ain't you got no bleeding sense?'
Never spoken to me kid like this before. She was Down's - you didn't.
And she was just standing there in the middle of the lane in her blue hostess frock, holding the lamp to guide Daddy home.
Like a little lighthouse.
The big car cruising down the hill towards the bend wouldn't get her in its headlights until it'd come round the hairpin and by then ...
'Noooooo!'
... she'd be in pieces, all over its windscreen.
Instinctively, Weasel arched his body, quivering, wanting desperately to hurl himself from the edge of the lawn to the top of the fence, vault over it. But his body knew it was too puny, too clapped out.
Sobbing, he ran down the other side of the lawn, scrambling frantically towards the main gate, waving his arms, screeching,
'Vanessa, Princess, get out of the bleeding way, he ain't rational!'
Headlights hit the fence.
As he reached the gates, Weasel tripped and fell headlong. It smashed all the breath out of him and he couldn't even shout at her again.
The car look the bend too fast, like they always did.
Vanessa's small, dumpy figure, as still as a little bunny frozen stiff in the headlights.
XVI
Plop, Plop, Plop
Dave Reilly couldn't sleep.
Wearing a ragged blue bathrobe, he sat in the armchair in his bedsit with the light on, the walls studio-white around him. The only colour in the room was coming out of a TV set on the plywood MFI chest of drawers opposite the chair. The TV screen was showing - standard small-hour fare - a naff, seventies rock video, blokes in tinsel jackets with blond bobbed hair; they looked like singing spaniels. Dave had the sound off. '
The bedsit belonged to Bart, who also owned Muthah Mirth.
Tomorrow he'd have to tell Bart he wouldn't be playing the next night, or the night after, or ...
And Bart would throw him out of the bedsit in which he'd hoped to see out December.
On the TV, the video had changed. Marc Bolan, the electric pixie who crashed his car into a tree and died. Prof Levin used to talk about how he'd once worked with Marc. Fey and wispy? Are you kidding? Naked ambition, from the start. My experience, David, fey and wispy is invariably a front.
Prof Levin was a straight bloke. One of the few. Too experienced for ambition, too old for bullshit.
And Prof had said,
I mean, she's ... alive and everything?
Dave's anxiety flared up like toothache. He'd heard nothing since faxing Moira's agent. He started wondering who he could possibly phone at this hour, for reassurance. What had happened that night that he didn't know about?
As if what he did know about wasn't bad enough.
Some stuff on this album ... the death sequence. You must remember that.
You mean Aelwyn?
Dave had fled the studio that night just as the song had descended to the death of Aelwyn ... his death. Maybe this was an earlier take.
Which was impossible; there hadn't been any earlier takes. Rehearsals, yes; recordings, no.
He felt starved, pulled the ancient, two-bar electric fire closer to the chair. The point was to record it live, the whole band playing, a fusion of minds and spirits. The aim: to let in the echoes from the stone. Russell Hornby, who really didn't believe in any of this shit, had said, 'This is the climax, guys, you need to build up to it, it shouldn't become blasé.' So they'd rehearsed, many times, the build-up: Aelwyn's flight from Abergavenney Castle, the pursuit across the frozen hills, six verses ... and, even in rehearsal, kept coming out of the song before the seventh verse because Russell Hornby, efficient, shaven-headed Russell, advised it. And Russell ...
... did not basically believe this shit.
Looking back, there were so many more things which didn't add up.
The candles, the dark brown candles - they never had solved the mystery of the candles. Too much had happened too quickly afterwards. And now it emerged that somebody - Russell - had conned them over the tapes. Well, with hindsight, this was understandable; no producer would like to watch his week's work going up in smoke. Inexcusable, but understandable.
And 'On a Bad Day', the worst thing Dave had ever done - was this abomination among the tapes which somebody called Stephen Case had so thoughtfully recovered?
A toxic cocktail, Moira had called the band. Moira, who didn't even know about 'On a Bad Day', the most toxic song ever recorded.
But Russell knew.
Dave's head sank into his hands. This was all too much to take.
I mean ... she's alive and everything?
Prof talking about a woman ... a woman dying ... on the tape ...
There was no woman dying. Aelwyn died. Nobody else. Tom's Debbie and John Lennon, but nobody else ... nobody on the tape.
Got to do it.
Dave sprang to his feet, switched off the TV, pulled his canvas suitcase from under the bed. There was a zip compartment underneath for stuff you wanted to keep flat. Inside the compartment was an LP record, made maybe ten years ago and long deleted. His only copy; he'd carried it around, wherever he went, for ...
He didn't know why the hell he'd carried it around.
Yes he did. It was for a purpose such as this. For an emergency.
Davey, love, we're no' safe together, we're too much.
And it would bloody well have to be an emergency because the only time he'd tried this before, there'd been a very frosty reception and two days of severe headaches. I told you, we can't even see each other again.
Dave took the album back to the armchair and the stuttering electric fire. How ironic that the picture on the front should so mirror his old fantasies (although it would be stretching credibility to think she might actually have done this for him).
He looked at the photograph for a long time, memorizing the details, the colours of the sky, the formation of the clouds, the corrugated patterns in the sand where it met the sea, the shape of the rocks in the distance. And then gradually ...
... gradually, he let his gaze drift away from the picture to a point in space, in the middle distance. Regulating his breathing, allowing his eyelids to fall, but not quite all the way, so that here was a hazy, unfocused image of the blank TV screen on the chest of drawers and the white wall behind.
And then concentrating on the noise of the sporadic night traffic, a distant radio, merging these separate sounds, letting them come into the room and join the fractured metallic chatter of the electric fire until all of it dissipated into a kind of aural fog, fading into the fuzzed images of the furniture, everything coming part of the same sensory mush and then there was
a long beach, a deep blue-grey sky
and a woman side-on to the camera and to the sea, but her head turned away so you couldn't see her face because of the black hair almost to her waist. She had on jeans and a skimpy T-shirt. Bare feet. Hands behind her back loosely clasped round the neck of an acoustic guitar trailing along behind her.
He made the woman walk, silently tracking her along the and as if through a movie camera on a dolly.
In her wake, a word was elegantly scrawled in the sand, as if it had been spelled out by the trailing guitar. He didn't look at the word, lest his attention be diverted and the woman walk out of his vision.
He heard the slumberous sighing of the sea, the skimming of a late-summer breeze, the keening of seagulls overhead. And he altered their voices until the sounds of the gulls and the sea were mixed into the rhythm of her bare feet padding and slithering along the beach and the soft bump, bump, bump of the acoustic guitar over the firm, corrugated ridges in the warm sand.
And he sent a word to the spirits of the air, a simple, spherical sound, sent rolling like a small ball along the beach.
&
nbsp; Moirrrrrraaaaaaaaa
Calling her gently, whispering to her to turn around. Sending her all his love, sweeping in on the tide.
Knowing, not caring, that he was in tears.
Moirrrrrraaaaaaaaa
But she wouldn't turn.
She just kept on walking, and him staggering behind, losing the rhythm of her even pace, the breeze awakening, turning against him and the bored, restless sea slapping petulantly at the sand.
please.
Moira, please ...
She was moving away from the shore, into the softer sand, and the breeze lifted it, made it swirl around her ankles, and the guitar was clinking on the pebbles, its strings quivering, discordant protests coming out of the soundbox, and no message any more except the remains of the word deeply inscribed into the harder sand, close to the shore, and the word was,
And as he read it, she stopped and turned slowly, but he couldn't see her face, only the cowl of smog around her head, the black, hideous bonnet.
An acrid smell of burning as Dave's eyes sprang open through a screen of tears to find the cardboard record sleeve had slid between his fingers, down behind the protective wire in front of the electric fire.
... the woman dying ... she's fading ... the voice, the whole quality of the voice getting sort of brittle ...
There was a sizzling; a peeling, laminated corner had caught fire.
And then - yeah - she's saying, very feebly, help me, help me.
As Dave tore the album from the fire, threw it to the carpet, stamped on it, he had a sudden image of fourteen years ago: thirteen candles in a circle, Tom Storey deliberately tumbling one into a pile of lyrics sheets, Simon St John languidly stamping out the names.
Dave bent over the singed and smoking album cover.
Of course, the writing in the sand read,
Martin Broadbank, his face all furrows of concern, said, 'Who knows? I might be able to help. Or ... or Meryl might be able to help.'
All the lights were on in the drawing-room at Hall Farm: four table lamps and a small chandelier. The watchful Meryl perhaps aware of a need to drive away the dark.
Stephen Case had gone, leaving his card for Shelley, in case he could help. Suddenly everybody wanted to help.
Shelley went to the window, parted a curtain to look out. There was an aura of light on the drive from the lantern over the door.
'Why doesn't he ring?'
'Your transport manager?'
Shelley smiled palely. 'He's just an old friend of Tom's, from way back. If anybody can handle Tom at a time like this, it's ... him.'
Meryl said, 'This is the little ... ?'
'The little hippie.' Shelley let the curtain fall. "With the earring and the bandana. Eric Beasley. Known as Weasel. He was Tom's regular roadie.'
Why doesn't he ring? Twenty minutes. He said five.
'Tell me about this band.' Martin Broadbank threw a small log on the fire, jabbed hard with a poker to produce more flames, more light. 'I rather think Steve has been exercising an undue economy with the truth. I'm sorry I was a party to it.'
'Wasn't your fault,' Shelley said. 'Really.'
Broadbank straightened up. He'd taken off his jacket, looked solid and ordinary, just another rich businessman in his Cotswold retreat, no special qualities. Oh, the freedom of living with someone like that ...
'Shelley, why don't I drive you home?'
'I should wait for Weasel. I need to know what I'm going into. And also ..."
Ring, Weasel, for God's sake, ring ...
'... and also, I think, the fewer cars on the road between here and Larkfield the better.'
Shelley thought of the baby she'd taught Tom to love. Vanessa. It had taken a long time, Tom looking down fearfully at his Nemesis in the cot, the impossible baby, the baby who should have died in flames, the baby with no great future, who served only as a reminder.
Vanessa the wonder baby. It had taken a long time to convince Tom that Vanessa was a wonderful thing.
Weasel had said he was going to put her into the van and bring her over here. Weasel knowing instinctively that Vanessa should not be there tonight when Tom arrived home.
Nor on the road between here and Larkfield.
Shelley gripped the curtain to hold back the hot tears building behind her eyes.
The woman was smiling at Weasel out of the darkness. He did recognize her, but his mind was too blown-out to figure where he'd seen her before.
Weasel backed away from the car, gulping in the hard, dark air to stop himself throwing up.
He stood in the road. There was no other traffic. The lights shone down from the house upon the broken fence, giant slats like railway sleepers. The car had smashed into the bottom of the fence and slammed a bunch of sleepers back, and two of them had, like, see-sawed and come flying at the windscreen.
The sleepers lay half across the car bonnet, glass all over them, the other halves inside the car.
Weasel hadn't heard any screams, only a sound like a house falling down. The engine was still chuntering away, exhaust smell on the air and another smell when you were closer - like a rusty smell.
It was probably blood. Realising this. Weasel clutched his guts and Vanessa's omelette came up.
Wiping his mouth on his sleeve, he felt better. He should do something, call the cops, get the road sealed off. Anybody came round the bend - splat.
On its side in the road was Vanessa's lamp, one of those red plastic ones with a handle. It was still on. As Weasel picked it up, he thought he heard a car droning in the distance. He should go towards it waving the lamp, warn them.
He needed help.
Thought somebody would've come by now. It was less than half a mile outside the village; even at this hour some bastard must've heard the crash.
The car noise had faded out. They must've turned off. Which was a pity; they could've helped him, gone for the cops. He couldn't risk going back to the house in case another car showed up while he was away.
No choice. Weasel ran back through the gates.
'Princess?'
She was still standing on the lawn where he'd left her, by the concrete birdbath. 'You gotta help me,' Weasel said.
She didn't move, didn't even look at him. Most likely, she was still in shock. He'd never forget her standing in the middle of the road, still as a bloody garden gnome, the car screeching and swerving to avoid her and then hitting the fence.
'You smell bad, Weasel,' Vanessa said.
'Yeah, I been sick, Princess. Listen, you gotta go back up the house and you gotta ring 999. You know how to do that?'
After a second or two, he thought she nodded.
'And they'll say: What service you want? And you say police and . .
Ambulance?
Too late for that.
'... you say police. And they'll ask you where you are and you tell 'em, you say Larkfield St Mary, near Stroud, and you tell 'em there's been a serious accident, you got that? A serious accident.'
Vanessa stared at him for a moment and he thought, Oh, Gawd, but then she turned suddenly and ran towards the house and left him there and didn't look back.
All he could do was hope she'd get it right. Weasel walked back out the gateway to the car. It had come to him, who she was, the woman who'd smiled at him. He should make sure. He had the light now.
Gawd.
He hadn't seen the man's face, hadn't tried to. Seen his neck, that was enough. What was left of it. The sleeper had crashed in through the windscreen, taken him under the chin, pinning his neck to the head-restraint. The rusty smell was strongest here; Weasel gagged again.
The engine had coughed its last. All quiet in the car, except for this dripping sound, like plop, plop, plop. Oh, Gawd help us.
He let the lamp's beam fall through the windscreen just once.
Typical. Even in his last second, Sir Wilf had been scowling. Even with a hole in his neck you could put your fist through and the top of his spine on view through the mush, his fa
ce showed no horror, only, like ... rage.
Weasel stepped back to the rear door on the passenger side, the only one he'd been able to open.
There'd been no padded head restraint on this side; maybe Lady Tulley had found it inconvenient, some people did. Where the restraint should have been, another wooden sleeper lay like a shelf across the back of the seat, in which Lady Tulley's body still sat.
Her head was tossed like a handbag or something on the back seat, and now he could see it properly, no, she wasn't smiling after all.
Wedged between Lady Tulley's head and the driver's seat was a mud-spattered wheel. They must've had a puncture on the way; no wonder Sir Wilf was scowling.
Part Three
I
Dreamer
The neat, square, grey tower most visitors thought was Abergavenny Castle, this actually wasn't it at all. This was in fact a nineteenth-century folly, once Lord Abergavenny's hunting lodge, now housing the town's museum; it just looked like a castle, see.
Eddie Edwards explained this to the vicar as they walked along a narrow path between two jutting stone walls - pinky-grey, like ash, like the colours of the Abbey. It had taken less than half an hour to drive here from Ystrad Ddu, even at Mr Edwards's famously moderate speeds.
'This, now, this is the real castle,' Mr Edwards said. 'These walls and those segments by there. Not boring you already, am I? Only you've gone quiet.'
'Sorry,' the vicar said, in a distant sort of way. 'Not much left of it, is there?'
'Ample, for our purposes,' Mr Edwards said, striding forth. 'Now, Vicar, you follow me round by here, and you'll see what a sound defensive position this was.'
It had been his idea to come today. He knew the vicar didn't want to, but the boy needed taking out of himself. Mr Edwards was, quite frankly, fed up with seeing him mooning about the place, looking preoccupied and generally out-of-sorts.
He led the vicar around the side of the high wall, where the castle hill fell away to reveal a magnificent expanse of countryside, out across the river. On the other side of the castle was the town itself where they'd parked, not a terribly important town, architecturally speaking, but pleasant and lively.