December

by Phil Rickman

  Tom sank his chin into his chest. He'd taken off his jacket and his shirt to expose a grey vest with holes in it and a small, forlorn tattoo just below his right shoulder: DEBS, in a blue heart.

  'See, in those days, hotels was still a bit prudish. Band shows up after a gig, one lady apiece, fine - they could be your wives or your regulars. Two ladies, difficult. Free ... well ...'

  Meryl smiled. She was almost touched to think that this man thought he could shock her.

  'Now Sile,' Tom said. 'Some nights, he'd want four.'

  'Greedy,' Meryl said calmly.

  'Yeah. Suppose it was, really. But you got to remember this was his heyday. He'd done his time, twenty years of it, seen kids he d taught to play turning into superstars while he's still slogging round the clubs. Here he is, 1970, forty years old, blues is back, Sile's at the centre. He knows it ain't gonna last - he wants his share.'

  'Sad, really.' Meryl was trying to remember who Sile Copesake had been.

  'Yeah, it was. Sad. But the point I was making wiv motels is you got your own access from the car-park, no reception desk to pass, no stairs. The roadies could ferry the ladies in and out, nobody the wiser. Yeah.' Tom expelled a philosophical sigh. 'One fing you could say about Sile, he knew where to find the motels. Otherwise, he was a tit.'

  Meryl said, 'And you? Did you use to have your four girls, Tom?'

  'Me?' Tom smiled self-consciously. 'Nah. I used to like to talk a bit as well, those days. Maybe I was lonely. And when you talked to 'em ... well, tell the truth, they wasn't all slags. Nah, one girl a night was enough. Wiv one girl, you could pretend.'

  He looked strangely vulnerable. She tried to imagine him as a young man. Long, blond hair in the Viking warrior style and matching moustache. Meryl had never been a great follower of rock and roll. She realised she must be about the same age as Tom Storey, but you probably had to be a generation younger to have idolized him.

  She supposed Viking was right, the rock musicians descending on some country town, raging through their concert. And then the orgying among the local girls.

  But Tom Storey had only taken one girl into his chalet. He liked to pretend. Pretend she was his girlfriend? Pretend they were married? Pretend he had emotional security?

  Meryl said gently, 'Pretend?'

  'Piss off,' Tom said abruptly. He grinned cruelly. 'Look at me now, eh? Look at what's waiting outside me chalet nowadays. How far can you fall, eh?'

  Meryl felt her face tighten and burn. The bastard. She felt a deep, savage need to hurt him back, emotionally and physically, but, other than the stool she was sitting on, there was nothing to throw at him. She sat very still, bit her lower lip. A heavy lorry rumbled past.

  Tom had his legs apart; there was a small hole in the crotch of his trousers. Hardly what you'd call erotic. Poor Shelley, Meryl thought.

  And then she said, without thinking, 'Who's the man with the hole in his face?'

  She hadn't meant to say it. There was a raging silence. Then the light, functional, modern furniture in the room seemed to grow darker and heavier and more cumbersome, the atmosphere suddenly musty, the air stained brown. For long, long moments, it was an older room, from an older, poorer time.

  And now Meryl finally was shocked. Tom Storey stared at her for shattered seconds, and then he began to weep.

  All the way back to London, mainly motorway, Prof Levin kept on at Dave, wouldn't let him think, roaring over the grinding of big trucks, the hiss of air-brakes in the damp gloom of late November. 'What's your problem, David? You're the Angel of fucking Death. Get in there, man, go back, work it all out.'

  Dave wouldn't think about it. He just drove, racing the retreating daylight to the end of the motorway. Resisting questioning Prof about the two words which had so rapidly relieved them of Russell Hornby's company: Soup Kitchen.

  Prof, well pissed - several more drinks before Dave could prise him from the Crown - was still euphoric about getting the dirt out of Russell Hornby. Drink and euphoria, dangerous combination: it meant Prof was seeing the funny side.

  'Maybe you need it, son, eh? Work with Storey again? Think that's possible? Think Case's gonna lure Storey out of his bunker? And Moira? Like that, wouldn't you? No, really? Think she's still got it, David, that special something?'

  'I don't know what she's got,' Dave said soberly. He was thinking of the dark, smoky cowl, the hideous bonnet.

  'And what about the other guy?'

  'Do us a favour. Shut your gob, Prof.'

  'And Soup Kitchen, and Barney Gwilliam. I'm getting old, David, I'm allowed to ramble. Hey, you know how they identified Graham Bond after the tube train got him? Thumb print. That was years ago; that don't matter. What's now is Soup Kitchen. And Barney Gwilliam, a little pool of blood in studio ninety-seven.'

  'For God's sake. Prof, what are you on ...? Shit!'

  The lorry driver had started blasting on his horn. Dave couldn't do anything about the situation; he was blocked on each side, the fast lane all Porsches and Jags and BMWs, an endless tin river. One small tug of his right hand would toss them into oblivion, a swift, blurred death, couple of burnt-out nobodies in a ten-year-old Fiat. The lorry was screaming, Do it! Do it!

  'Barney Gwilliam, David. You ever hear about Barney Gwilliam?'

  'I don't even know who he is.'

  'What a short, selective memory you have, son. Barney Gwilliam was your engineer at the Abbey in December 1980.

  'Oh. Barney. I never knew his last name. Very quiet guy, got on with the job, didn't have a lot to say.'

  'That was the boy. Brilliant. Drove a studio like a DC10. You're right. Didn't have a lot to say. But the manner of his passing, David, was truly ... truly eloquent.'

  Passing?

  The big truck was screaming for space. In his mirror Dave saw that the figures 666 were part of its registration. The lorry bombarding him with bile from behind, Prof into a death trip in the passenger seat. And in the flat fields either side of the motorway, his mind constructed buildings: a fortress, massive, forbidding, many-windowed, all of them black; above it soared archways and buttresses of wind-worn, pink-grey stone; through the archways a woman walking, a woman with her head wrapped in black.

  A blue sign said SERVICES 1M.

  But he hadn't really seen her, had he? Not really. This was only his own projection, from a ten-year-old photo. A mind game. Contaminated by Prof's rambling about some death song on the album, a song that hadn't existed.

  'Simon, yeah? Simon St John? Played cello and flute and that. And bass. The only member of the band could read music, am I right?'

  Sometimes, anyway, when you played mind games, they came back on you in a negative way, as if to teach you a lesson - don't mess with this stuff unless you're serious.

  'Where's this Simon now, then, David?'

  But he had been serious, desperately serious. Oh God. Oh Jesus. Not Moira.

  'David, I'm tryin' a talk to you.'

  'Last I heard he'd become a Christian,' Dave said. 'Like Cliff Richard.'

  'He never! Dylan did that once. Never made a really good album since. They don't, do they, when they find God? Proves the old saying, don' it, 'bout the devil having all the best tunes?'

  'That's all bollocks. It's only fanaticism makes bad music. The rule is, believe what you want but don't preach, it just sounds naff.'

  'Used to call the blues the devil's music. Robert Johnson selling his soul at the crossroads at midnight, getting himself murdered. Graham Bond, remember him? The Aleister Crowley fixation? Poor bloody Bondy, flattened by a tube train. Late sixties, was that? Feels like yesterday. This is a sick, sick industry, David. Ambition fuelled by dope and sex and they all get cored, too young. Reach the point the only thing they got left to sell is their immortal fucking souls.'

  A great black truck, transcontinental job, was coming up hard behind them in the middle lane, wanting to get past, too heavy to move into the fast lane.

  'And the roll of the dead. Hendrix and Morrison an
d Brian Jones and Bolan and Joplin and Lennon and Kurt Cobain ...'

  Dave loosened his hands on the wheel. The wheel was wet.

  'I'm getting off, Prof.'

  'I think you better had,' Prof said soberly.

  Moving from room to room in the big yellow house, Shelley kept looking over her shoulder.

  It occurred to her that she was looking for Tom.

  And not, to her shame, because she wanted to see him. It was the first time she'd been alone in this place and in some perverse way she was relishing the freedom. It was the kind of freedom which the mother of a dependent, handicapped child must feel when the child is taken temporarily into a home to give the parents a break.

  Vanessa bustled around, making coffee. There was no question of needing relief from Vanessa. Shelley had never considered her to be handicapped, merely different.

  Tom was the handicapped child - getting worse, as Weasel had noticed - and Shelley was breathing easier without him. It was an unnerving sensation.

  She was also surprised to find she was not worried about him. He was, after all, a big strong man, an intelligent man, a man who was not mentally ill in any clinical sense. And if he'd been in an accident, the police would have known.

  Martin had dealt with the police. Martin had driven her home, and the police were waiting, taking measurements and photographs around the demolished fence. The Tulleys' car had been removed, thank God, as had several pieces of timber from the fence. When a senior officer had asked to speak to the householder, Mr Storey, Martin had taken him on one side and Shelley had watched him talking smoothly and casually, the policeman nodding.

  'I, er, said that Mr Storey was away from home at present,' Martin had explained afterwards. 'I'm afraid I implied - I hope you don't mind - a certain marital discord.'

  And Shelley had erupted into laughter; this was when the terrifying sensation of freedom had first hit her, like a burst of wind in a flaccid sail.

  'Call me when you need anything,' Martin had said as he slid into his white Jaguar. 'As soon as the police are finished, perhaps I could send my gardener to reorganise your poor fence. And we'll speak again, of course, about the Love-Storey displays.'

  He was talking breezily, as if last evening had been a total, unsullied success. Shelley liked that, was somehow warmed by it.

  Outside, the sun shone with unseasonal energy. She heard a policeman laugh lightly.

  She was exhilarated and confused. It was as if, through their appalling deaths, Angela and Wilfrid Tulley had in some way opened up her own house to her - it was, after all, her house as much as Tom's fortress.

  Shelley went to the kitchen stereo radio and tuned it, for the first time, to Classic FM, sprinkling Vivaldi into the room, like moist flower petals.

  And then she began to cry, because this was all so very, very wrong.

  Vanessa watched her solemnly.

  Tom, very maudlin now, was saying what a good man he had been really, how he'd always worked hard, done his best for his family, could be harsh and forbidding, when he was sober, always generous when drunk. Like the night he'd brought home the big red. cracked Gretsch Chet Atkins, changed his son's life for good and all.

  This was the old man, Tom's dad.

  Bermondsey days. Tom's ma at the biscuit factory, the old man down the docks.

  'He didn't know nuffink about rock and roll,' Tom said. 'But he sensed it was a way out the East End. Working down the docks'd made him restless, the way it done wiv a lot of blokes shifting gear from foreign ports. But he was trapped, my old man. Married to a good, steady breeder. My six older bruvvers was already grown-up, one had a kid. Here he was, a bleeding grandad.'

  'And you were the seventh son,' Meryl said huskily. 'It's true then. It's really true.'

  Tom laughed. He was still sprawled on the bed, and now Meryl was kneeling on the floor at the bedside, the acolyte at the feet of the great guru. This was ridiculous, and yet it wasn't.

  Meryl had been introduced over the years to several spiritual teachers who'd been neat, sleekly attired and quietly spoken. And self-deluded. Or phoneys.

  'Seventh son of a seventh son,' Tom said. 'What a load of old cobblers, eh?'

  'Is it?'

  What was so convincing about Tom was his attitude towards the psychic world. Resentment. Contempt, even. Something which he despised in himself.

  'Is it really cobblers, Tom?'

  'I wish,' Tom said ruefully. 'The old man, he hated it so bad, anyfink happened to him he'd go off and get pissed. Or he'd fight it off.'

  'How would he do that?'

  'Fight. Literally. He'd go and pick a bleeding fight. Anyfink he seen he couldn't hit, he'd need to take it out on somefing he could hit. Kind of reinforced his hold on reality. Wasn't hard to find a punch-up in dockland, those days. My old man done five terms for GBH, maybe six. He didn't come home nights. Ma never worried - he'd be safely banged up somewhere, poor, mad git.'

  'When he came home ...' Meryl said tremulously, 'from work, from the docks, did he smell of oil? Engine oil?'

  'No,' Tom said.

  'Oh.' Meryl was deflated. Nothing about this was simple, was it?

  Tom said, 'When he came home from the garage was when he stank of oil. My uncle, ma's bruvver, had this little garage, doing up old bangers, motorbikes. The old man used to help him nights, when he was frew down the docks. Then they'd go and get pissed.'

  Meryl caught her breath.

  'One night - I'd've been fourteen, fifteen at the time - these geezers wander in suggesting a little extra business for the garage, respraying nicked motors, changing plates, all this. Now, one fing about my dad, he was honest, right? Yeah, yeah, he had his share of hookey gear, like anybody else, else I'd never've got the Gretsch, would I? And yeah, he got pissed and he lost his cool a lot. But crime with a capital C, no way, this was a straight garage. So he slings these geezers out. I mean slings, adjustable spanner round the ear job, you know?'

  'Were you there, Tom?'

  'Me? Nah. I was up my bedroom, as usual, pretending I was Muddy Waters. I knew about it, though, later that night. I woke up, hurting. Like toothache. Yeah. I knew about it.'

  'About the men who came to the garage?'

  'Nah. About the geezers waiting for him when he come out the boozer. The geezers wiv the hooks. Docker's hooks? They ever have fights wiv docker's hooks down at Gloucester quay? See, the hook, what you'd do is sharpen the point. Flick knives? Knuckle dusters? They was toys, next to the docker's hook.'

  Meryl shuddered.

  'He come home,' Tom said. 'He made it home. I heard Ma screaming. When I come downstairs he's standing in the kitchen door, swaying. The man wiv two mouths.'

  'Oh my God.'

  Tom shrugged. 'You wanted to hear it, darlin', I'm telling it you. The bastards'd laid his face open, shoved the hook in, thrust it up. Not much blood. Surprisingly little blood.'

  Closing her eyes to shut out the pain in Tom's face, Meryl saw again the image of the man, like a brown column, swaying in her own kitchen doorway. She smelled again the thick odour of engine oil, and another, metallic smell, maybe blood. She felt nauseous.

  'What'd happened,' Tom said, 'the hook'd gone up into his brain. Poor bastard couldn't even speak. Staggered home like a zombie. And we stood there, Ma and me, and we watched him collapse. Slowly. Like a tree. Nuffink we could do.'

  Meryl felt a pressure behind her eyes.

  'And he died there,' Tom said. 'On the living-room floor. The man wiv two mouths.'

  'Thirty-odd years, Tom. Over thirty years and he's still ...?'

  'He ain't far away, ever. Give him a disturbed atmosphere, summink to latch on to, he's there, the poor old bleeder. See, lady, I... what you called?'

  'Meryl.'

  'See, Meryl, I don't know the science of this. It could be me what creates him, brings him into form. Like, the atmosphere, if it's disturbed, it works on me and what materialises - frew me - is the worst fing I ever saw. You know what I mean?'

&nb
sp; 'Yes,' she said. 'But he's more than that.'

  Meryl, still kneeling on the motel carpet, looked at Tom, with his lank yellow-grey hair and the misshapen moustache emerging from his face like the stuffing from an old sofa. She saw a curiously heroic figure.

  'He comes as a warning, Tom,' she said. 'He comes as a portent.'

  'That's what you fink, is it?' Tom struggled up on his elbow, leaned against the padded headboard.

  Meryl didn't move. 'He manifested, surely, to show us what was going to happen to Sir Wilfrid and Lady Tulley. Is that naive of me?'

  'You know,' Tom said, 'the first time I seen him, I must've been seventeen, and I done some serious praying.'

  'To God?'

  'I knelt down, 'side the bed, just like a bleeding seven-year-old, and I prayed to the Big Geezer never to let me see the old man again. Prayed wiv everyfink I'd got. And after that, it was only in dreams. He come to me in dreams. Well, you can cope with that. You wake up, bit of a sweat on, but that's all, no harm done. This was how it was, until ...'

  'Until your wife died.' Meryl was alarmed. She didn't know where this idea had come from. Martin had told her about Tom Storey's first wife, how she'd died, that was all.

  Tom said, 'You're a witch, lady. You know that?'

  'Nothing so exotic,' Meryl said, uncomfortable. One of her shoes had come off; her toes curled on the carpet. Her face was growing hot.

  'We was doing an album,' Tom said. 'Four of us, all wiv the same problem, seeing more'n we oughter see, knowing more than was good for us. But not understanding any of it.'

  Meryl found her eyes drawn to his pathetic blue tattoo. What a strange, sad life he'd had.

  'The others was kids. That age, you got no responsibility. It excites you a bit. It scares you sick, but when you're young you like being scared. On account of you fink one day you're gonna understand.'

  'I know about the album, Tom. Stephen Case ...'

  'That ponce.'

  'I didn't like him either. Tom, I need to ask you something. The vision? Those people lying dead at the dining table?'