by Mark Timlin
I tapped the barrel of the gun on the door and the figure stopped singing and turned to face me.
His face was like the rest of him. Gross. His cheeks and neck which bulged out over the collar of his shirt were smoothly shaven, and his forehead was covered with the bangs of his grey-brown hair. But somewhere behind the fat was the echo of the skinny young man I’d worshipped, like millions of others, when I was just a skinny boy myself.
‘Jay?’ I said. ‘Jay Harrison?’
He looked at me, and his blue eyes were the ones that had looked out at me from a dozen album covers, a hundred posters and a thousand photographs.
‘It is you, isn’t it?’ I asked.
‘My name is Brother Simon.’ His voice was soft, with the faint trace of an American accent in it.
I shook my head. ‘No,’ I said. ‘You’re Jay Harrison. I’d know you anywhere.’
He looked down at the pistol I was holding.
‘Why do you bring a gun into the house of the Lord?’ he asked.
‘Because the house of the Lord is like any other house. Sometimes it needs cleaning.’
He made to make a step towards us and I shook my head. ‘Don’t do it, Jay,’ I said. ‘We mean you no harm.’
‘What are you doing here?’
‘Looking for you. I’m a detective. My name is Nick Sharman. This is my wife, Dawn. She works with me. Lifetime Records hired us after they got your letter.’
He nodded, and the fat on his face quivered. ‘That was a mistake,’ he said. ‘I thought I was helping.’
‘Helping who?’
‘The Lord. Brother Julius. The church.’
‘How?’
‘By bringing in much-needed funds for the Brother.’
‘Doesn’t he get enough?’ I asked.
‘There is never enough for our work.’
I snorted.
‘You mock us?’ said Jay Harrison.
‘Not you. But this place. I smell a rat here, and I believe his name is Julius Rose.’
‘How did you find me?’
‘It’s a long story. I’ll tell you about it sometime. But tell me something first. Why did you pretend to be dead?’
He pulled a face. ‘That too is a long story,’ he said. ‘I was taking the devil’s path. Then something happened, and I found a way of escape.’
‘What was it?’ I asked.
‘Don’t answer that,’ said a voice from behind us. I turned and Brother Julius was standing in the doorway.
‘Hello, doll,’ I said. ‘You’re just in time.’
23
All four of us stood and looked at each other like characters in a play. I was still holding the Glock so I reckoned that I was the juvenile lead.
‘Come on in, Jules,’ I said. ‘Are you alone?’
He gave me the snake eye, said nothing, but did as he was told.
‘Shut the door, doll,’ I said, and once again he obeyed. ‘Sit on the bed. We’ve got a lot to talk about.’
He did that too.
‘You as well,’ I said to Jay Harrison. ‘Nothing personal, but you’re a big boy and this gun is getting heavy.’
Jay Harrison joined Julius on the bed, and I relaxed and took out my cigarettes and leaned against the door jamb. ‘Don’t mind, do you?’ I asked.
Neither of them objected, but then they were hardly going to. I was heavily armed and the chance of a little passively acquired lung cancer was the least of their worries.
‘Jay,’ I said. ‘Tell me what happened.’
‘When?’
‘April seventh, 1972. The morning you died. Or didn’t, as it turned out.’
He looked at Julius, then back at me, put his head in his hands and started to cry.
He looked like a big, fat baby sitting there rocking back and forth and sobbing fit to bust. Dawn walked over to the bed and sat on the far side of Jay and put her arms as far round his huge body as they’d go. ‘Don’t cry,’ she said. ‘You’ll be all right. No one’s going to hurt you.’
It was obviously just what the big man wanted, and he leaned into Dawn’s body until I was afraid he was going to crush her against the wall.
After a minute or two he pulled himself together and sat up straight, but Dawn stayed with him and held one of his big hands in both of hers.
He looked up into my eyes again and began his story.
‘I was a very bad man in those days,’ he said. ‘I can’t remember a lot of it, but I think I was trying to kill myself long before I joined the band. And when we started making huge amounts of money it got even easier. Perhaps I wanted to die so badly that what happened was inevitable. I died by proxy. But it was what I wanted to happen in reality.
‘It all started around the spring of sixty-six. I was doing a film course at Berkeley. But what I wanted to be was a poet. Rimbaud was my hero. I wanted to be just like him, and I tried my best. That was when I met Joey Loder. He was on the same course as me. He played piano in bar bands to earn money to pay for his classes. My family had money. They were rich. I had no problems with anything like that. All I had to do was to attend a few lectures during the day and hang out at nights. I was writing a lot of poetry, like I said. I showed some of it to Joey and he said he’d set it to music. He was a good songwriter. Some of the stuff I was writing was pretty far out. All about death and destruction. But Joey made me write some simple lyrics, just so that publishers would listen. We sold some stuff too. Then Joey met Jake who played guitar, and who had a friend who was a drummer. I was renting a cottage on the beach and we jammed there for a couple of months, and it sounded good. We made a tape, came up with the name Dog Soldier and Columbia gave us some studio time. I was drinking a lot and taking acid, and I wanted to record all the weird stuff. Columbia hated it, but we got a gig at a club called The London Fog. They wanted us to play covers of Beatles and Stones hits. We did it too, but we always dropped in a few of our songs. One night a guy from Lifetime came in and heard us. He liked what we did, and with a bit of a fight got us on to the label. We made the first album. They cut down “Just Do It” from seven minutes to two and a half, and released it as a single. The next thing we knew, we’d knocked The Byrds off the top of the hot one hundred.’ Jay Harrison smiled at the memory. ‘Boy, but they were mad. And Columbia too. The Byrds recorded for them, and they’d thrown us out of the studio for partying too hard.’ Suddenly he remembered where he was and sobered up. ‘And I don’t blame them. We didn’t care what we did. Then the bandwagon started rolling, and things went from bad to worse. You know about Dog Soldier?’ he asked me.
I nodded, and lit another cigarette. ‘I had all your records,’ I said.
‘You must have been pretty young.’
‘I was.’
‘Anyway, we sold a lot of records, went on TV, toured for nearly five years non-stop. It was like living in the eye of a hurricane. Crazy. We were always in trouble. Getting busted for trashing hotels and wrecking hire cars, and eventually it all had to end one way or another. The albums were getting worse. No one cared about the songs any more. All we cared about was money, drugs, sex and booze. We had such a bad reputation in the States that I decided to get out for a while. I was on bail… You know about that too?’
I nodded.
‘So I decided to come over here for a visit. I brought Kim with me. You guys in England really loved the band. More than in the States by then, I guess. But then you Brits were well known for being pretty bad people yourselves. I was taking a lot of heroin. Drinking. Taking pills. Everything. And Kim was in an even worse state than me, if anything.’
‘And all the goodies supplied by little buddy here.’ I pointed the business end of the Glock in Brother Julius’s direction.
Harrison nodded. ‘That was the way it was then,’ he said simply. ‘They were strange days.’
I silently
agreed with him. But then most of my life had consisted of strange days, and today was no exception.
‘So what happened that night?’ I asked.
‘Don’t tell him,’ said Brother Julius.
I laughed out loud. ‘You’re in no position to tell anyone what to do,’ I said. ‘You’re all alone, Jules. Brother Anthony is out of the game, no one else is around and Jay here wants to confess. It’s good for the soul, so they tell me.’
‘You always mock, don’t you?’ said Brother Julius.
‘No,’ I replied. ‘I know the truth of that. Jay. Tell me. You’ll feel better, I promise.’
Jay Harrison licked his lips. ‘That night I called up Julius to score. Kim and I were strung out on smack, and we didn’t have as much as a nickel bag in the apartment. Julius came round with Billy Sayer about midnight. He brought enough for Kim and me, and himself too. More than enough as it turned out.’
‘You were using too, huh, Jules?’ I said.
He didn’t reply, and Jay Harrison continued. ‘Billy was a virgin,’ he said. ‘He told us he was always scared of H. We didn’t care. All the more for us. But Kim kept on at him. She was high and there was plenty. She wanted him to join us. Junkies are like that. She wouldn’t leave him alone, and eventually he agreed to let her shoot him up. She made up a syringe and prepped him. She was jealous of all his fat veins. Most of hers had collapsed by then.’ He disengaged his hand from Dawn’s and rolled up one sleeve. His arms were a battleground of old needle scars. Even after all those years it was easy to see what a mess Jay Harrison had made of his own body in his youth.
He rolled his sleeve down again, took Dawn’s hands in his, and went on with his tale. ‘She was stupid. She’d made up a load enough for one of us. We were used to the stuff. Had a high tolerance level. Billy’d never used before. He turned blue. He went straight into a coma and never came out of it again.’
‘You called an ambulance,’ I said.
‘Sure. There was no phone in the apartment. We were spending all our money on drugs, and the bills were huge. Kim used to talk to the States for hours at a time. We got cut off. One night when I was high I threw the thing out of the window and was never reconnected. If we needed to make international calls we’d go to someone’s office. For local calls there was a pay phone just outside the door of the apartment block. I liked not being on the phone. No one could bother us. It drove Kim crazy. I’m sure she’d been born with a phone in her hand. But I was the boss, and what I said went.’
‘So you called from a box?’ I said.
Harrison nodded.
‘One fourteen in the morning,’ I said.
‘How do you know that?’
‘We looked into it.’
‘I waited for a minute, then went back to the flat. I guessed I’d hear the siren and go back and meet them, or send Julius down. I was freaked out. When I got back to the flat Kim was freaked out even more than me. Billy was dead by then. His heart just gave out. She gave him the hit, she was convinced she’d be arrested for murder.’
‘Manslaughter more like,’ I said.
‘Whatever. Anyway, she’d cleaned her fingerprints off the syringe and broken it up. All three of us were half crazy. When we heard the ambulance outside she wouldn’t let me go downstairs again.’
‘And they went away.’
He nodded.
‘Then Kim came up with a plan. We’d talked about what would happen if I died. Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin and Hendrix were all dead by then. They were all as messed up as me, and we used to joke that they were better off dead than alive. She said that I could pretend to be dead. Take a rest. Get the cops back home, and all the people we owed money to, off our backs. And there was some insurance. About a hundred and fifty grand, American, with Kim as the benefactor. Julius told me that he had a place down in the country that I could stay at. An old house he’d bought, miles from anywhere.
‘I told them they were crazy. But Kim said that we had a body that needed disposing of, and a pet doctor who let us have paper for drugs when we needed them. He should have been around that day, but he’d been called away to some patient or other out of town. If he’d been there when we needed him, Julius and Billy would never have come around that night. Kim went down to the phone and called him up. He was in bed, but got up and came straight over. In exchange for the promise of ten thousand pounds when the insurance came through, he made out a death certificate in my name. He insisted that we call an ambulance. It was risky, but we had to have official confirmation. Kim made the call.’
‘At three oh five,’ I said.
He shrugged. ‘The doc said he’d just arrived. That Kim had called him too. He confirmed my death, and sent the ambulance crew away. He knew the local undertakers, and called them in. He promised them five thousand pounds if they were discreet. They accepted. Who wouldn’t? They screwed down the lid on the box and took it away.’
‘It was a crazy scheme,’ I said.
But what did I expect? Logic and sense from a pop star junkie at the end of his tether, his crazy girlfriend and some dope-dealing future Jesus freak.
‘Do you think I don’t know that now?’ said Harrison.
‘And you hid out in the country?’
‘That’s right. At the house that became the first headquarters for the Tabernacle.’
‘From little acorns…’ I said.
The room fell silent. The air was thick and warm, and the rays of the setting sun coming through the smeary window panes caught motes of dust and held them floating in its embrace like tiny sea creatures in a bright ocean.
‘One thing I want to know,’ I said. ‘After all that, after you’ve got a dead body that you need to dispose of permanently, why didn’t you have him cremated?’
‘My father wouldn’t let Kim do it. He was a religious man himself. He had virtually disowned me, but he insisted that I was buried. Cremation was against his beliefs. He was my next of kin, so what he said went. He didn’t want my body back in the family vault at home. He considered my life and the way I was supposed to have died to be a sin. But I was still his son. Kim and I used to go to Highgate to visit Karl Marx’s tomb. My father agreed to buy a plot there and pay for the tomb and its upkeep in perpetuity. He didn’t come to the funeral. None of my family did. And he never visited my grave as far as I know. Nor did my mother. They’ve both been dead for a long time now…’ I saw the sadness in his face and he hesitated. ‘It suited us at the time. We didn’t want anyone from back home asking questions about what happened that night.’
‘So Billy Sayer is still buried there,’ I said. Not a question. Just a confirmation.
Jay Harrison nodded. ‘To my eternal shame, he is.’
‘But you visit the grave, don’t you, Jay?’ I asked.
He hesitated again. ‘You know a lot about me.’
‘That’s my job.’
‘Yes,’ he went on. ‘I go there sometimes at night. I find it peaceful. It takes me back to before all this happened. But how did you know?’
‘I met someone who saw you, and described you. He goes there at night too, and almost every day as far as I can gather. There’s a few of them hang out round your tomb. One in particular finds the place peaceful, just like you do. He lives rough in the cemetery. He treats your grave like a shrine. Or rather Billy Sayer’s grave. I wonder how he’ll feel when he finds out he’s been wasting his time.’
Harrison didn’t answer.
‘So why decide to write to Lifetime Records now?’ I asked. ‘After all this time.’
‘Like I said. The Tabernacle needs the money.’
‘Is that the only reason?’
Harrison thought for a moment. ‘I wanted to come back to life. I’ve been dead for twenty years. I wanted to be Jay Harrison again.’
‘And what did you have to say about all this?’ I asked Brother Julius
.
‘I thought it was unwise. But if Jay insisted I wouldn’t stand in his way.’
‘But you denied he was here. Denied even knowing him.’
‘I didn’t take to your attitude, Mr Sharman. I still don’t. I see a dark side of you that I do not like.’
Talk about the pot calling the kettle dark.
‘Why did you think it was unwise?’ I asked. ‘Because you were implicated in Sayer’s death?’
‘I had nothing to do with it.’
‘You supplied the dope.’
‘I didn’t prepare the needle.’
‘But you were there.’
‘Kim Major killed him if anyone did.’
I saw Jay Harrison flinch at the words.
‘But you were still there,’ I went on. ‘There’s still a case to be made against you.’
‘I doubt it. It was a long time ago.’
‘And then you conspired with several others to pervert the course of justice. Not a nice thing for a future man of God to do. What about that?’
‘The people involved are mostly dead now. The doctor, the undertaker, Kim. I can afford the best lawyers for both Jay and myself.’
‘I think you might still do a little time. Both of you. And it wouldn’t do much for the church you run.’
He pulled a face. He seemed to be getting more confident now that the story was out.
‘So tell me, Jules, how did you progress from dealing dope to running this place?’
He pulled another face. ‘I was called.’
‘A road to Damascus job,’ I said.
‘If you wish to put it like that.’
‘A revelation.’
He nodded.
I changed the subject. ‘Did you see much of Kim Major after the funeral?’ I asked.