by Neil Cross
Outside, it was cold. He turned the engine over several times before the car would start.
III
Lenny had greatly enjoyed planning their encounter with Dryden.
The day of the Hot Zombie Revue’s penultimate show at Papa Doc’s, he went to a dealer in Mayfair that retailed surveillance equipment to paranoid businessmen. He returned with three digital audio recorders shaped like pens and a tiny digital camcorder whose lens fitted through a buttonhole.
‘The audio footage alone,’ he told them, ‘will be priceless.’
They called a minicab. It arrived twenty minutes late, then honked its horn urgently and impatiently on the doorstep, as if they were being inexcusably tardy.
There had been some discussion on how best to dress Holloway. It was important that nobody recognize him and he should therefore not stand out in any way. Although they were expecting a mixed crowd at the club, this might be difficult: Holloway would probably be the oldest person there. Equally, in order that Dryden took him seriously when finally they met, it was important that he dress soberly. So Holloway wore a charcoal-grey, single-breasted suit with a black polo neck and wire-rimmed spectacles with non-prescription lenses, which Lenny for some reason had stashed away in a drawer somewhere. Dressed like that in Islington, Lenny assured him, nobody would notice that he even existed—let alone suspect him of being the fiendish killer of Joanne Grayling. Lenny chose to wear the suit he’d worn in New Zealand, which he had still neglected to have cleaned or pressed. One of his skateboarding shoes had split along the instep. He wore them without socks, and when he crossed his leg the knob of his ankle glowed like a night-light through the thin skin. Shepherd wore greasy blue jeans, and a washed-out American army-surplus jacket with dark olive stripes still visible on the breast.
The three of them squeezed on to the back seat of the minicab. The car stank of vomit and tallow and semen and unwashed clothes. The driver smelled like a palm that recently had stroked a wet dog.
They rode in silence. Holloway was reminded of an earlier journey: stripes of lamplight passing over them in modulated frequency; detritus on the street, human and otherwise; a snarl of traffic outside Finsbury Park tube station, angry horns being honked. The minicab driver cranked down his window and screamed at the driver of a car that had legitimately blocked them behind a red light. The other driver unfolded his middle finger, then looked away as if fascinated by the architecture of Rowan’s Gym and Leisure Centre.
They stopped on the way. Lenny squeezed himself out of the car and ran across the road to buy himself some tobacco and a cold can of Coke for Holloway.
Back in the car, he said: ‘You have to do something about that blood sugar thing you’ve got going.’
Holloway snapped the ringpull.
‘Stress,’ he said.
Shepherd said nothing. He rode in silence with his hands clasped in his lap.
He looked out of the window and watched north London scroll past. His eyes felt heavy and he was calm. It seemed like everything was over already. He experienced a surge of fondness for Lenny, as if he were already missing him. For Holloway he felt little. In fact, he didn’t much like him. Alone in Shepherd’s company, he seemed uptight and taciturn. Shepherd supposed he might well be, given the largely unspoken-of death that fluctuated like a mild charge between them. But still.
He mourned his lost idea of William Holloway. The William Holloway in his head had been an unmet friend, a kind of soulmate. And Lenny’s easy friendship with Holloway irritated him. He wondered what the two of them had in common, what on earth they found to talk about—they always seemed to be talking.
Then he began to daydream that Lenny might be right: that the book and film rights for this disorderly sequence of error and misapprehension might in the end make them rich. He dreamed about becoming a celebrity.
He remembered being a boy, the holidays in Wales. The sound of rain drumming on the roof of the caravan; the warm, wet calor gas smell. His first kiss. The fumbling loss of his virginity with a girl called Tina, whose family took the caravan three along. He rolled down her bikini top, made tight and twisted with sea water and sand. Her skinny white thighs rippled with gooseflesh and she smelled of seaweed and lotion.
He did not think of these things as belonging to another life.
The rotten stench on his father’s breath in the weeks before he died. The barely animate skeleton on the hospital bed. His father had not become reconciled to death. He died angry and bitter. His corpse was like a bundle of twigs, something to be tossed on a bonfire at the foot of the garden.
He remembered the way Rachel ushered the children from the kitchen when he sat at the flour-smudged wooden table and tried to tear chunks of hair from his scalp because his father was in a box in the ground. He imagined him, quite still, gazing at the lid of his coffin. He remembered the terrible dreams that followed, the death and the sorrow that ejected him into wakefulness. He remembered what his doctors had said. What Rachel had said, who knew him so well. And he wondered how he came to be here, in this stinking car, in this disintegrating city with these men—trying to prove that a stranger had not committed a murder in order to prove that he had not, all those months ago, simply gone mad.
He looked sideways at Holloway. He was tensing and relaxing his jaw. The muscles rippled and clenched under the pale, delicate skin. And Shepherd didn’t know any more.
He didn’t understand what had brought them here.
Then he thought about the key under the plant pot outside his house in Bristol, and the new bed in his old bedroom. He looked again at Lenny and Holloway. He felt something to which he could not put a name.
He reached under a spectacle lens and touched an eyelid. It flickered like the wings of a moth.
The cab pulled up outside Highbury and Islington tube station. Lenny paid the driver. No tip, because the driver smelled. They stood in the weak lamplight, their breath billowing in the cold. The door to Papa Doc’s was sandwiched between a newsagent and a charity shop. The club broadcast its existence with a neon sign, an accrual of pasted billposters and two bored bouncers who stood with their hands clasped across their genitals. A good queue stretched down Holloway road. The punters were overwhelmingly male, mostly young, white, scruffy and middle-class, although there was a smattering of suits and goatee beards. These people Lenny called the Islington Curious.
They joined the back of the queue and shuffled forwards, hunched for warmth, their hands buried deep in their pockets. The bouncers allowed Holloway to enter after the most cursory of body searches, which was fortunate because he’d brought along his lock-knife. Lenny too walked straight in. This probably saved him some larger inconvenience, since various recording devices were secreted about his person. But the bouncers stepped back and looked at Shepherd with something like wary regard. He had their bulk, if not their stance and musculature.
Shepherd said: ‘Hello,’ and smiled tightly behind his beard.
They submitted him to a long and intimate search.
He found Holloway and Lenny waiting for him outside the box office, squeezing themselves against the wall while the queue of young men shuffled past.
‘Come on, Jack,’ said Lenny. ‘Fuck have you been up to?’
‘My name is Andrew,’ said Shepherd, angrily.
The words touched Holloway like a live wire. He twitched erratically, jostling two dreadlocked punters, to whom he turned and tried to apologize.
‘What did you say?’ said Lenny.
‘Nothing,’ said Shepherd. He squeezed them back into the queue. He stooped almost double at the box office window.
‘Three please,’ he said.
Behind him, Lenny said to Holloway: ‘Are you all right?’
Shepherd didn’t hear Holloway’s reply.
They passed the press of musty bodies outside the coat check and entered the club through a
double swinging fire door. A mixing desk stood in the centre of stained, sticky wooden dance floor. Posters promoting ancient gigs were plastered over the available wall space. A bar extended along the far wall. It was illuminated white like a distress flare. The crowd pressed three deep, like scrabbling insects drawn to the light of a false moon. At the other end of the room was a stage and a battered lighting rig.
Lenny pushed in to the crowd at the bar, a £10 note clasped visibly in the fist he held above his head as if wading in deep waters. Shepherd noticed a similar display replicated up and down the bar, with no visible effect on the service. Since it seemed to convey no advantage, he wondered what the function of such a behaviour pattern might be. He resolved to ask Lenny when he got back. Lenny was certain to have an informed opinion.
Holloway was speaking to him.
He looked down and raised his eyebrows.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘What did you say?’ said Holloway.
‘What?’ said Shepherd. ‘When?’
‘Just now. About your name.’
Shepherd wanted to hit him.
‘Nothing,’ he said.
‘You told him to call you Andrew.’
‘No I didn’t.’
‘Yes you did.’
‘No I didn’t.’
Lenny returned, clutching three plastic pint mugs to his chest. He had spilled lager over his jacket and down one leg.
Holloway supped chemical scum from the surface of his pint. The plastic glass was sticky with spilled lager.
Holloway looked at Lenny over the rim of his glass.
‘Didn’t he just say his name was Andrew?’
‘Yeah,’ said Lenny. He turned to face Shepherd. ‘What was that all about?’
Shepherd looked at them both.
‘Nothing,’ he said.
‘Well,’ said Lenny. ‘It was a bloody odd thing to say.’
Shepherd shrugged. He took a long draught of lager. Thin foam flecked his tangled moustache. Tiny bubbles refracted and popped in random sequence.
‘I was joking.’
‘Right,’ said Lenny, dubiously. Supping on the lager, he shuffled left and right. He said: ‘Good crowd.’
But Holloway wouldn’t let it go.
‘Is your name Andrew?’
‘No,’ said Shepherd. ‘My name is Jack. As you well know.’
‘Andrew what?’ said Holloway urgently. ‘Your name is Andrew what?’
Shepherd thrust his beard into Holloway’s face. Holloway backed off a step. A strand or two of beard attached to Holloway’s five o’clock shadow and shone red under the beer light.
‘Stop it,’ said Shepherd.
Holloway moistened his lower lip.
‘Is your name Andrew?’
Shepherd clenched his teeth.
‘I said stop it.’
‘All right,’ said Holloway. He held up his hand. ‘All right. Sorry.’
He broke Shepherd’s gaze and looked around the club. It was filling with students and the Islington Curious.
A shambling, indifferent man in a shapeless T-shirt took his place at the mixing desk. He put on a country and western compilation. Then he slipped a set of headphones over his ears and twiddled at the mixing desk to no noticeable effect. But he seemed pleased enough. He smiled privately and dutifully, like the pilot of a nuclear bomber.
For a few minutes, they made awkward conversation. Holloway kept snatching curious sidelong glances at Shepherd. Lenny and Shepherd kept pretending not to notice. Then the lights dimmed. There was a smattering of applause. A few whoops bounced across the crowd like an inflatable ball.
The darkness hung there for a second. Then the curtain rose.
It revealed a backdrop on which was printed a truncated pyramid, topped with a human eye. The incomplete pyramid was enclosed in a net of stylized penises. From the urethra of each protruded a hand that grasped an object: a spear, a clock, a skull.
Top-and-tailing the image were the words: The Hot Zombie Revue.
Lenny whistled through his teeth. ‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘That’s the all-seeing eye. It’s a Masonic thing—it’s on the American dollar bill …’
He talked about it for a while, but nobody was listening.
By degrees, a vibration in the soles of their feet swelled into a shrieking, atonal symphony that went on, in darkness, for longer than seemed tolerable. It was combined with quick-cut visuals, projected on the pyramid backdrop. What at first seemed to be a Technicolor autopsy, with rich, glistening reds, revealed itself to be a gender-realignment operation shot in unsteady close-up: it was just possible to discern a penis being degloved before being sliced down the median, folded in on itself like a sock and tucked inside a hairy, ambiguous orifice. This was followed by the rapid flicker of war atrocities. The images passed too quickly for the eye to settle. They were followed by a looped clip of the grainy, over-colourized Zapruder film: Kennedy’s head snapped back. Jackie clambered madly over the body. The car reversed: Kennedy’s head snapped forward. His brains flew back in. Jackie crawled backwards like a lizard. The car froze, accelerated again. The head snapped back. Another blur of images; the face of a dead baby with opal eyes emerged from a halo of rubble: skeletal creatures in torn, stripy pyjamas: a black man hung from a noose. Horseback men in white shrouds. A burning Vietnamese child. Adverts for washing powder and perfume. Close-up of a porno actress feigning orgasm. Detail of tortured bodies. Burns. Chechnya. Kosovo. Genital mutilation. Whip stripes. A meat factory. A blood-smeared huntsman. Patty Hearst. Timothy McVeigh. Congenital birth defects. National flags. Lopped heads like pineapples on a Chinese road. David Koresh. Billowing smoke from the Branch Davidian compound. The Heaven’s Gate website. Bill Gates.
The atonal squealing increased in volume. Holloway covered his ears. So did others, scattered through the bludgeoned crowd. Other young men mimed approval to one another. The screen flickered.
Lenny took a notebook and pen from his inside pocket. He wrote MTV goes to Nuremberg and showed the pad to Holloway and Shepherd. But Holloway and Shepherd still weren’t paying him any attention.
The music fell away and Rex Dryden took the stage.
Lenny put away the notepad.
Dryden’s triumphant deportment suggested he was prepared to receive rapturous applause which then didn’t come. One or two punters clapped: there were some whistles and a couple of whoops. But mostly the audience stood in silent ranks before him.
He surveyed them. He wore a sober, single-breasted grey suit. A ring on the little finger of his left hand glinted under the lights.
He took the microphone.
‘Please allow me to introduce myself,’ he said. ‘I was born on TV. Just like you, and just like Jackie, I got Kennedy all over me.’
Behind him, a close-up of Kennedy on the slab. A vaginal, black and crimson burrow through his skull.
Dryden did a half-turn and looked at the picture. Then he took the microphone from the stand and walked the stage. More images flickered behind him: Kennedy, alive and waving; Mussolini swinging from a lamp-post; Saddam Hussein in a jaunty Homburg with a feather in the band; Pol Pot: Muammar Qaddafi with his eyes rolled white; Jesus Christ; Peter Sutcliffe; Josef Stalin; the Reverend Jim Jones; Mao Tse-tung.
‘Look at these men,’ said Dryden. ‘All these good men. What do we know about them? What do they have in common?’
He stalked the stage like a polar bear.
‘People believed in them,’ he said. ‘Some people thought they were God. Some still do. And some people thought they were the Devil. Some still do.’ He paused, seemed to think. ‘Let me ask you a question,’ he said. ‘How many of you in this room believe in God?’
He waited as if expectantly, his face extended as far forward as his stumpy neck would allow.
‘Go on,’ he said. ‘A
ny believers here, raise your hand. We won’t laugh.’
A ripple of nervous laughter.
Dryden feigned great surprise. He put a hand to his breast.
‘Nobody?’ he said, shocked. ‘Not one of you?’
He mimed sadness. ‘Goodness me,’ he said, shaking his head. He jutted out a fat lower lip. ‘What does that say about England in the twenty-first century?’ He looked up. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘This evening is all about belief. I want to talk to you about what you believe, and why you believe it. And I can’t do that if you don’t know what belief is. Come on, now. Somebody here must believe something.’
He shielded his eyes from the bright lights, put his foot on an audio monitor and pretended to sweep the crowd with his gaze.
‘Nobody?’ he said. ‘Nobody here believes in anything? Don’t we have any revolutionary socialists? No free market libertarians? No anti-vivisectionists? No pacifists? No anarchists? No racists? Blimey,’ he said, muttering into the microphone. ‘Tough crowd.’
More nervous laughter.
‘I’ll tell you what.’ He gathered the cable into a loop and replaced the microphone in its stand. He put his hands behind his back and leaned into it. Then he checked himself. He said: ‘Fuck me. What am I like? Liam Gallagher?’ He grinned at the catcalling response from the audience and seemed for a moment unrehearsed and natural. Then he collected himself. He quietened the crowd with his hand. ‘I’ll tell you what,’ he said. ‘What if we start the evening by introducing an unbeliever to God? What about that?’
He scanned the close-ranked bodies.
Abruptly, the lights went up. The audience blinked.
‘So,’ said Dryden. ‘Which of you unbelievers and heathens believes in God the least? Which of you faithless young scumbags needs salvation the most?’
Hands pointed at heads they did not belong to and names were called out. Friends jostled friends and nervous smiles became affably predatory.
‘Ah,’ said Dryden. ‘Now then. That’s more like it.’ He put a finger to his lips and appeared to talk to himself.