by Mike Ripley
Bell sent Lara back over to the rectory to get his record collection, and she returned with a cardboard box that said on the side that it had once contained tins of baked beans. A quick scan through Bell’s collection of LPs made me think we’d have had a better evening with the beans. The music was mostly folksy female imitations of the Carly Simon, Janis Ian vintage, plus a well worn copy of Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, which he may have bought because of the pun on his name but was probably there because it’s obligatory for anyone who had a stereo before 1980.
I tried the system out with a tape from the collection I keep in Armstrong. The one with no details on the cover except the word ‘Loud’ in red ink. Gerry Rafferty belted out, shaking the speakers, flashing the synchronised lights and rattling the aluminium window-frames of the hall.
‘Okay, kids,’ I yelled, ‘Let’s boogie till we puke!’
But fortunately they didn’t hear me, or the rector would have looked even more worried than he did already.
Chapter Ten
‘I don’t remember Wayne playing the disco quite so loudly,’ Bell had said over an early dinner. That was probably because Wayne wanted to work in the village again, I thought, but said nothing.
‘We’re vegetarians,’ Lara had said, warming up three tins of mushroom soup.
‘I’ve already turned down nine invitations to Christmas dinner,’ said Bell. ‘In Romford, people would at least try and do a nut cutlet or a vegetable curry, but out here they just stare at you and pretend they haven’t heard right.’
‘It must be difficult,’ I sympathised. ‘I always say to people, why is it unusual not to eat meat? I mean, you don’t eat the flesh of any meat-eating animal, do you?’
Bell considered this seriously. It was an argument Lisabeth had put to me once when I’d had a few drinks and made some crack about her vegetarianism. I hoped I was remembering it right.
‘Think about it. Humans only eat meat from animals that eat grain or grass or similar. Cows, sheep, pig, chicken, duck …’
‘I think you’ll find some exceptions – unpleasant ones – but it’s an interesting idea.’ Bell said it like he was already considering it for the next week’s sermon.
They hadn’t actually asked me if I was a veggie or a vegan, and I’d accepted Bell’s invitation to food and a bed for the night in return for offering to run the disco. He repeated how grateful he was for my standing in for Wayne, as both he and Lara had other plans. He didn’t specify what they were, nor did he mention showing me Billy’s video gear again, but now I had time to snoop around myself.
Just after seven, the front door of the rectory opened and two young girls came in without knocking. They both wore long, belted raincoats and carried small torches. I had forgotten that they didn’t run to street lights out here on the tundra.
Despite the overdone eye make-up, I recognised the first one.
‘Hello, Stephanie,’ said the rector. ‘Hello, Amy.’
‘Hello, Geoffrey,’ said Stephanie, ignoring Lara and looking at me.
‘This is Roy, he’s standing in for Wayne tonight,’ said Bell, and Stephanie rolled her eyes up until the whites showed. ‘Stephie and Amy here, they take the admission money and run the bar.’
My expression must have betrayed me. ‘It’s a non-alcoholic bar,’ said Bell quickly. ‘Alcohol-free lager, cola, crisps, that sort of thing. Let’s go across.’
I grabbed my coat from the back of a chair. ‘See you later?’ I asked Lara.
‘Perhaps. Depends what time we finish.’ She was giving nothing away.
The rector led us over to the Parish Room again and unlocked the door and hit the light switch. There was a small kitchen and two toilets off in a side annexe, and I helped him set up another trestle-table and load it with boxes of crisps and cans of soft drinks from a padlocked pantry. He gave the keys to Stephanie, telling her to get more if she needed them and to make sure she locked the takings away at the end of the evening.
The two girls knew the score, and they went round the hall pulling curtains and setting out folding chairs down the side, leaving plenty of dancing space. Then they set up a card table near the door and opened an empty cashbox. They did all this with their coats firmly belted, which I thought was a bit odd. It was no sauna in there, but it wasn’t that cold. I thought country girls were tough and wrote love-letters to the milkman in the ice on the inside their bedroom windows in the morning.
I got the Flying Fenman warmed up and tested the lights with a Bob Marley tape. The two girls looked mildly interested, and with the light show going, they flicked off half the lights at the main switch. I suspected that all the lights would go as soon as the rector did.
‘I’ll leave you to it,’ said the rector. ‘If you have any problems, I’m across at the rectory, and don’t hesitate come and get me or send Stephie or Amy.’
‘No problems,’ I promised.
‘I’ll pop back for ten-thirty; that’s closing time.’
‘Okay. Leave everything to me.’
He turned so the girls couldn’t hear him.
‘I feel I have to say this, Roy, but take it in the spirit it’s given.’ Here it came. ‘You’re in charge here, and you’ll be the only adult, so you’ll be responsible.’
For what?
‘Like I said, Geoffrey, no problems.’
He smiled, wished us all a good rave-up and left.
Okay, so he was a vicar and he had to play it straight, but there was no need to make any big deal out of playing music for a bunch of harmless adolescents, was there?
Stephanie waited until the door had closed after him, then she produced a pair of high-heeled shoes, one from each pocket of her raincoat, and dropped them on the floor, then kicked off her sensible school-issue flatties. Amy did likewise and they both stepped into their new shoes as if they’d rehearsed. They both took off their raincoats in the same, choreographed way. Underneath, Stephie was wearing a brown suede mini skirt and matching halter. The gap in the middle was vaguely covered by a cowgirl-style fringe from the halter. Amy – the elder of the two unless my eyes deceived me – wore a red lurex tube that ended just as the fishnet tights started to cover her legs.
I realised why they didn’t need central heating in the Parish Room.
By 8.00, the joint was jumping and I was a hit.
I knew I was, because Stephie told me so as she brought me another alcohol-free lager in a plastic cup. (Not half bad if cut with vodka from the quarter-bottle I keep in Armstrong’s glove compartment for emergencies.)
‘I don’t know any of this stuff you’re playing,’ she shouted into my ear, ‘but Wayne only does about four records an hour ‘cos he talks so much. Tries to be the big DJ and all that crap. You just keep it rolling.’
She was half-sitting on my knee by this stage, showing off to her friends that she had influence over the disc jockey.
If she got much closer she could prove grounds for assault to the magistrates as well.
I didn’t want to let on that I had just about exhausted my supply of music already. My taste and the taste of the audience diverged in both style and content quite radically. The rector’s taste split from everybody about ten years ago, but I had been able to use one of his Paul McCartney LPs by announcing it as a remix. They seemed to swallow that. Maybe some of them had even read about the Beatles in history lessons at school.
I flipped through the rector’s box of records one more time, to make sure I hadn’t missed anything, and found I had. The only record less than ten years old was Simply Red’s Men and Women LP. That might have a couple of tracks familiar to the more ancient among the audience, say the 14-year-olds, as it was less than three years old.
‘Wayne had hundreds of records,’ Stephie was yelling.
‘I go for quality not quantity,’ I shouted back.
I wondered if she’d have b
een impressed by the time, as a student, I ran a disco with one Rolling Stones LP and the soundtrack from A Clockwork Orange. I decided not to boast. She’d have been about two at the time.
I had the LP out of its cover, balanced between thumb and middle finger, when I noticed the writing on the sleeve. I had to hold it closer to one of the disco’s traffic light set-ups to read what it said. Alongside the list of tracks for side one had been added, next to the listing for Cole Porter’s ‘Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye’, the words: ‘Even if we cry a little, it’s for the best. Love, Lucy.’ And then there were two little crosses signifying kisses.
Interesting. I filed it away mentally and decided to play the whole of side one.
There was no indication of how long the side lasted, but I reckoned I had 15 to 20 minutes in which to have a snoop around outside, which was another reason I’d set up the disco close to the fire exit. It wasn’t much and I would have preferred a longer record that I knew better. But you just can’t trust the recording companies these days. Some of them actually extend the gaps between tracks so you can’t fit a whole LP on one side of a C90 cassette. There’s no trust left in the world.
I cued up the record and turned to tell Stephanie what I was doing. Her face was buried in the plastic cup she’d brought me, which was half-and-half non-alcoholic lager and vodka.
‘That’s not bad,’ she said, slamming the empty cup down and wiping her mouth with the back of a hand. ‘I’ve never had one of those before.’
Well, there you are: no day is wasted.
‘Listen, I’m putting the whole of this side on, okay’ She nodded. ‘And I’m nipping out to my car for a minute. If there’s any problem, just cut the amp here – ‘ I showed her the amplifier power on/off switch ‘– and I’ll hear it.’
‘Sure,’ she said, standing up. Then she leaned over to see what the record was. ‘Oh, not that! Geoffrey’s always playing it when he’s by himself.’
I wondered how she knew, if he was always by himself, but I let it go. She said she’d get some more drinks in and, as I sneaked out of the fire door, having locked the bar up so I could get back in, I watched her pour herself an alcohol-free lager at the refreshment table.
She pulled a face at the first sip, then tried another. Then she sniffed the contents of the plastic cup and finally held the can up to see if she could see why it didn’t taste the same as mine.
I decided it was a good time not to be there.
I had a torch in the back of Armstrong and, though it wouldn’t have been as suspicious as it would in London, because all after-dark pedestrians used them here, I left it there. I reasoned that I could say I’d got lost in the dark should anybody catch me where I wasn’t supposed to be.
It wasn’t far back to the vicarage – sorry, rectory – even when cutting across a piece of what I classed as waste ground but the locals probably called a field, to come at it from the back garden. On the way, I saw a couple of torch-holding revellers heading towards The Five Bells, and I wondered if they needed the torches when they left at chucking-out time.
The rectory, or at least its ground floor, was lit up almost as brightly as the pub; in particular, the large room at the back with no furniture and the French windows. I eased my way towards the windows, fearful of stepping in anything unspeakable, which was always a hazard out here in the backwoods, keeping one ear open for the muted hum of the disco working on auto-pilot.
Hugging the rectory wall, I could hear other muffled sounds from inside, but couldn’t make them out. I sneaked a look in through the French windows, pretty confident that I wouldn’t be seen unless someone was looking straight at me.
Nobody was. They were all looking at the Reverend Bell, though it took me a few seconds to recognise him.
He, and the other dozen or so people in the room, were dressed in judo gear, the full pyjama suit outfits with belt sashes, some coloured but mostly white. All except Bell and another man – and most of the others seemed to be women – were seated in lotus positions on the bare floor in an oval. In the middle, Bell was saying something I couldn’t hear and turning to each of – I suppose it was a class – in turn. Then the man with him took up a defensive fighting stance just like a kid would do coming out of his first Kung Fu movie, sideways on to reduce the size of the target he offered. (Even I knew that, and my idea of self-defence is a pre-emptive strike, preferably nuclear.)
Bell’s assistant, if that’s what he was, fixed his arms in an outstretched position and settled his legs bending at the knees, but made no other move. Bell disappeared from my line of vision for a second and reappeared with a roof tile, one of the old red, ridged sort called treble tiles, which were probably common as muck around there but fetched a pound a time among the shadier landscape gardeners operating in Hampstead these days.
The assistant took the tile in his outstretched hands and braced himself. Bell took a big pace backwards and then his right foot came up and smashed the tile to smithereens. It seemed that before the pieces had tinkled to the floor, he had landed with both feet together and his forehead touching the now empty hands of his assistant in a formalised bow.
The class didn’t applaud or cheer or anything, they just lowered their heads and put their hands out in front of them, fingers splayed and tensed almost as if they were arthritic. The assistant was now centre stage and, as he tensed himself, Bell appeared with a block of inch-thick timber, maybe a foot square. The assistant looked at it as Bell offered it, then drove his forehead into it, splitting it cleanly in two.
He didn’t even shake his head. Maybe it really didn’t hurt him. Well, he couldn’t have any brain in there, otherwise he wouldn’t have done such a thing.
I was about to change position to see if I could identify Lara in there when I sensed something behind me. If it was one of the Karate Kids, I wasn’t sure I wanted to see it coming, but I turned anyway.
Stephanie was standing about five feet away, hands on her hips, head on one side, her right high-heeled shoe tapping impatiently on the grass.
‘I told you you needed a black belt before they’d talk to you round here,’ she said primly. Then, accusing: ‘And another thing.’
‘Yes, what?’ I made flapping motions with my hands to try and keep her voice down.
‘We’ve run out of vodka.’
I got her back inside the disco just as the record finished, and I was able to slot in a tape to cover me while I charged out again, this time to The Five Bells.
The landlord gave me a funny look when I asked for a treble vodka, but it was a busy Friday night and he was not going to argue. As nonchalantly as I could, I sidled towards the Gents, and there I poured the contents of the glass into the empty quarter bottle I’d rescued from the disco’s deck, where Stephanie had left it. Then I filled the bottle with water from the washbasin tap and screwed the top back on. I hid the bottle in my jacket pocket and left the glass on the bar as I pushed through the crowd.
Sneaking back through the fire door again, I got a very revealing view of Stephanie leaning right across the turntable deck trying to talk above the music to a pretty blonde girl with glasses.
I pushed by Stephie’s proffered backside and fumbled for another record. She grabbed at my shoulder and yelled into my ear.
‘Manderley wants you to play something by Bros!’
Manderley? As if the poor kid hadn’t enough problems without being a Bros fan.
‘Sorry – got none,’ I shouted back, and Stephie leaned over again to yell in Manderley’s ear. I got the distinct impression what she actually told her was ‘Piss off!’ but I couldn’t be sure.
I got another record going and cued up my Armstrong wildtrack tape. Most of the audience were past caring what was being played, as long as it kept going. Only about a third were dancing; the rest were getting down to some serious petting in the chairs around the wall.
I liberated a
couple of chairs and sat Stephie in one. She didn’t mind. She’d already found the bottle of vodka and was adding liberal splashes to a plastic cup of coke.
‘Okay, supersleuth, you seem to know all about it. What gives with the martial arts set-up?’
There was no good reason why she should tell me anything. I could have threatened to tell on her for drinking under age, I suppose. And I could have really frightened her by telling her there was no Santa Claus.
‘It’s not martial arts,’ she said, and when she saw my look of disbelief she put on a fake resigned expression and began to explain it to me.
‘It’s Kateda. That’s what they do. It isn’t a martial art because there’s no combat involved. It comes from Tibet and is based on control of breathing. In yoga, you breathe to relax, but in Kateda you breathe to get control of your muscles, and you can therefore harness your reflexes.’
‘And it’s not violent?’
‘Well, of course it can be, but it is only used in self-defence.’ Oh yeah? ‘There are no attacking moves, only defensive ones.’
She knew her stuff, which I suspected had been picked up listening at keyholes as she followed the good rector around.
‘And Bell – Geoffrey – teaches this Kateda?’
‘Yes, he’s run classes since he came here, but he says I’m too young. He won’t take anyone under … 18.’ She had been about to say ‘16,’ and even in the flickering strobe lighting I could tell she was blushing. ‘But I think it’s because of my father. He’s in the local Hunt, you see.’
Then, because I was obviously moronic, she added: ‘Foxhunt.’
‘So he’s the local squire, is he?’
I’d better be careful; there could be horse-whippings talked about if one messed with Stephie.
‘He’s a builder, actually,’ she said, as primly as she could above the music. ‘Fox-hunting is no longer the prerequisite of the landed rich, you know.’