“It has taken a staggering number of coincidences for me to trace this back to you. At this stage in the contest, I’d go so far as to say that we were bound to meet. Our paths have crossed many times. I eventually realised that, in one way or another, Alex Bleach was always at the centre of this.”
“You were one of his managers, if Google is anything to go by.”
“I was his manager. His first manager.”
“Good, good. And how does that concern me?”
“Bleach’s confession. Subutex. Céleste. Aïcha. The Hyena. We have a lot of things in common.”
He counts them off on his fingers as one might calmly set down the cards in a royal flush. Dopalet feels his heart begin to race. He needs to hide his excitement, keep control of the conversation. He cannot reveal his amazement. He sips his whisky, forces himself to move slowly. He says:
“A charming list. But what has the Hyena got to do with anything?”
“You hired her to track down Bleach. She came to see me, back when she was working for you. I remember her well. A very beautiful woman. I was surprised to find out that she’s one of Subutex’s gang these days.”
The rush of adrenaline is so intense it is almost painful. Dopalet feels as though he is emerging from a coma – from a fog that has lasted for months. His body is exultant. He is finally facing the right person.
“Do you know where they are?”
“Would I be right in assuming that you’re looking for them?”
“That depends.”
He’s bluffing. He’s sure it’s obvious. He can’t hide his excitement. He is probably about as convincing playing the blasé guy as he would be if Scarlett Johansson offered him a handjob and he said, hang on, chérie, let me just check my schedule. Already, he sees his interlocutor in a completely different light. He’d like to be the kind of guy who can wear purple, a pair of Ray Bans and ghetto jewellery. Max sits up, baring his teeth as he smiles. Makes a sweeping gesture with his hand.
“I would imagine that someone like you, a man with your firepower, already has all the information he needs about that gang of crackpots. Do stop me if I’m being presumptuous . . .”
“It never hurts to be audacious . . . You tell me what you know and I’ll tell you if it interests me.”
“As I already said: a number of highly improbable coincidences has led me to you . . . As it happens, I know several of the people who hang around with Subutex . . . who I also know, as it goes.”
“Small world . . .”
“And I’ve taken an interest in their stories, for reasons of my own . . . I like to think that I might be able to track down Céleste, for example. I certainly know where to look for her.”
“O.K. You’ve got my undivided attention.”
Céleste. She was the one who had wielded the needle. She was the one who had branded him. Not one of Dopalet’s private detectives has been able to locate her. This guy is serious. He knows things. The producer gestures to the waiter, drawing a circle in the air to signal for the same again. Two whiskies. They have much to talk about. It is his turn to lean close to his interlocutor, to lower his voice to a whisper, forcing the man to move closer, as he says:
“Would you like to start from the beginning?”
And Max wraps both arms around the back of his chair. The smug fucker flashes a winning smile and answers pat:
“I’m waiting on a payment that has been held up; financially, I’m in a very sticky situation. I don’t suppose you could speed things along?”
“Shall we wait until our glasses have been refilled? I get the impression that we have much to toast, you and I.”
“To our fortuitous encounter.”
“To us.”
VERNON WAKES UP IN A PURE WHITE, HIGH-CEILINGED ROOM; the wooden floorboards are in terrible condition. It takes some effort for him to remember which city he is in. There are some mornings when he has time to make coffee before he resolves this question. It is the biting cold that puts him on the right track. The tip of his nose is frozen. Belfast. He’s been freezing his balls off since he got here. On the floor, next to the bed, a book in French that he found in the living room the night before and picked up, thinking he might read it, only to plunge into sleep as into an abyss. The Long Goodbye, in the Gallimard “Série Noire” edition. It is too cold for him to get out of bed, he grabs his mobile phone and pulls the blankets over his head. Max has sent him a message on Facebook. He doesn’t open it. An uncomfortable feeling washes over him: last night, he had been gobsmacked to see Max rock up in a club in Northern Ireland – a very different context from their former meetings. But after the surprise and the trite platitudes – fuck me, what are you doing here it must be what fifteen years it’s wild running into you here God it was so sad about Alex – Vernon had felt an uncomfortable sense of foreboding, one that floods back now as he collects his thoughts.
He opens the Facebook app he has been using since he left the camp. It’s not a personal profile, it’s one to which everyone at the camp has the password, allowing them to share a timeline – a profile from which no-one posts. At the top of the page is the one-liner “Lemmy out of here!” next to an ace of spades icon. At first, he doesn’t get it, but six photos later the penny drops. Lemmy from Motörhead is dead. Seventy years old, from cancer. He tries to read an obit on one of the news sites, but a bunch of advertising pop-ups make it impossible. He puts down his phone and rolls onto his side. He thinks about the last Motörhead gig he saw, November 2013 at Le Zénith. The whole arena filled with guys his age. Guys who looked like they work in the service sector who were transformed into headbangers by the opening chords of “Ace of Spades”. When he thinks about Lemmy, he pictures that photo of him in denim micro-shorts, puffing on a cigarette, looking wasted. Lemmy never took himself seriously. He never invented a public persona – he never needed to. He had the attitude, he had the sound. Motörhead were like the Ramones or AC/DC, not so much a rock band as a load-bearing wall. Love ’em or hate ’em, the house you live in was built out of that sound. Vernon has listened to Motörhead in vans, howling along at the top of his lungs with his mates. On headphones, walking down the street, chest puffed out, happy, filled with that distinctive happy-warlike energy. He’d stick on “No Sleep ’til Hammersmith” when he was opening up the shop to get his head in order, and from the first notes he would know it was going to be a good day. He got through more than one breakup listening to the old bastard’s shrapnel voice. That jagged, reassuring sound, a vital bellow that came from the pit of his stomach. This was music as therapy, music that slaps you on the back and says, “You’re gonna be O.K.”
Vernon thinks about the people from the camp. He doesn’t write to them. He hasn’t replied to any of their messages. The more he waits, the more complicated it will be for him to reappear. He knows the score. Even on the night of November 13, he didn’t get in touch. He was in Wolverhampton, where he had played a set the night before. He had feverishly scrambled to open Facebook to check everyone’s status. Lydia sent him a message. Sylvie sent him a message. Sélim sent him a message. Vernon felt too churned up to feign nonchalance and send them a few thoughtful words.
The life he lives these days is not unpleasant. He is adapting. Lots of hours spent doing fuck-all, and the rest of the time he’s on the move, and it suits him, this somewhat empty rhythm. He daydreams, he contemplates, he listens to music. It’s like social death, with two hours every night when he shows up and spins some discs.
Vernon picks up his phone again. On social media, a young woman is protesting: “Everyone’s posting tribute photos to Lemmy – can I just remind you this is a guy who collected Nazi memorabilia.” The objection is so irrelevant that even the trolls don’t bother to flame her. Lemmy was a moron. It was part of the act. He wasn’t a saint. Motörhead made music for guys who were thick as shit and proud of it, for guys who never raised their hand in class, who didn’t want gold stars, it was a rallying cry for retards, misfits and incompetents
. It was music that proclaimed, I’m happy to be a cretin. Lemmy was not made for swots and prudes. But these days, nobody wants to deal with specific cultural codes, everything that appears on the internet has to be instantly comprehensible and completely without nuance. Seen in that light, Lemmy is just a pathetic sex maniac who collected military memorabilia.
*
Vernon hears voices on the other side of the door, the other residents are awake and having breakfast. They number three D.J.s and a handful of musos – Vernon doesn’t know precisely how many of them are staying in this huge apartment. Mariana did not come with him for these dates. In Liverpool, she ran into a particularly ugly guy – scraggy beard, deep-set beady eyes, thin lips and the face of a mouth-breather. Wherever they go, Mariana runs into people that she knows – otherwise she would never have been able to get Vernon so many gigs. As they travel together, Vernon realises that she has spent a lot of her life at raves. When he first met her, she told him she did piecemeal work here and there. She had seemed like the sort of vanilla thirty-something spewed out by the financial crisis – people who don’t seem to have even started their career although they’ve been in the job market for a decade. But Mariana’s little jobs paid the bills, she was involved in techno in the same way Vernon was involved in rock. It was hardly surprising that she showed up at a convergence: she’d already travelled all around Europe to dance in the most extraordinary places. Anyway, she runs into this guy and Vernon can see, from a distance, flirting. He realises that there’s something between them, something that doesn’t make him happy. It upsets him. It makes him sad. But he no longer feels the familiar paroxysms of jealousy. He is not overwhelmed. This surprises him. He anticipates, he waits, but there it is: the wave of jealousy doesn’t come. That night, as they are walking back to the hotel, he hears himself say, “Is there something between the two of you?”, Mariana says no, Vernon presses her and she admits, “It’s ancient history. I never expected to see him again. He was disappointed to see me with someone else.” Vernon had waited until the following morning to be sure of how he felt, yet still it does not come, that irrational flare of jealousy. Maybe because the guy is so ugly. He cannot imagine that Mariana will not come and join him, as arranged, two days from now at the end of his British tour. They haven’t talked about it; they both know what she is doing. Vernon plumbs and probes his feelings and, to his surprise, nothing. Dead calm. If she were to definitively dump him, it might be different. If only because she is a brilliant manager, and because without her he would be completely lost.
He has a pragmatic explanation for this strange serenity: a lot of girls want to spend the night with him, and he’s not a big fan of monogamy himself. This makes it easier to be magnanimous. Having left the camp, he is no longer the hero of some YOLO night, but even so there’s always some girl he likes who’s thirsty for him.
Last night, he was spinning a set in a club, it was pretty basic. Then this fierce Asian girl shows up. It was like a movie: when he saw her checking him out, he had looked over his shoulder to make sure it was him she was looking at. And there had been no-one behind him. She had huge, almond eyes and a body that made him feel so freaky he had to try not to stare. And he knew – although since he left the camp, he has lost a lot of his intuition, with her, he knew: Korn. It wasn’t obvious. When you see a girl like that – savage as a panther, bearing of a queen – you don’t immediately think: Korn. Actually, as a rule, you rarely think about Korn. But that was it. He had her sussed. And she danced, my God she danced. He was enthralled. And convinced that she’d be waiting for him after the set.
And there she was, standing at the bar. Except Max stuck to him like glue so he couldn’t go and see her up close. Eventually she got bored. Vernon had been glad to see Max. They threw their arms around each other and Vernon happily agreed to have a beer with him. He never imagined he’d be stuck with him all night . . . As soon as he thinks about that part of the evening, he feels something ugly gaping in his solar plexus. Vernon doesn’t mix Bleach’s sound-waves into his set anymore. He’s stopped. When people are ripped, it doesn’t work. Drugs seem to create some kind of static interference that cancels out the effect. If you imagine a corridor two metres wide, the drug is like an elephant standing in the middle – every inch of space is already filled, and Bleach’s soundwaves have no effect. Besides, the strange gift he has for making people dance as they’ve never danced before needs the group to work properly. Without the others, without their passion, he’s just some guy with a lot of tunes loaded onto U.S.B. drives, a guy who knows a good segue. And yet, they were only onto their second beer when Max started quizzing him about Bleach’s sounds. He knew too much shit for this to have been a simple coincidence.
Max had never been a decent human being. Vernon had been surprised the guy remembered him so well. Back when he managed Alex, he didn’t waste his time hanging out with someone as unlikely to be useful to him as the local record dealer. At best, Vernon was tolerated backstage, and then only because Alex insisted. And he rarely saw Max in the record shop. He was the sort of guy who always knows what he should be listening to, what it is acceptable to be listening to. But his musical tastes had little room for honesty.
A lot of people liked Max because he had a talent for bigging himself up, and he managed to convince them that he, not the singer, was the true artist. Max talked a lot, and he had a silver tongue. A Trotskyite education. A Lambertist. Vernon had never known what it meant. The one thing he knows about Trotskyites is that they have a thing for radical feminists, with whom they indulge in passionate sexual relationships that leave Vernon perplexed. Max was no exception to this rule: the moment he spotted a feminist, he had to fuck her. Not that there were many in the music business. But the guy had radar – he could pinpoint a lone feminist in a heaving Bercy arena. Besides this, he was capable of pontificating about every conceivable market practice and selling it to you as a militant, revolutionary act, and hence no more refutable than Christian dogma. Max fed on Alex’s brain, turned him inside out, wound him up: he didn’t have Bleach’s best interests at heart, and often encouraged him in his disastrous choices. Max was always the first to champion serious substance abuse as a revolutionary act by the abuser. In this, it must be admitted, he was sincere: he himself was a premium junkie.
People were too scared of the manager to contradict him. He liked to humiliate. He wielded arguments the way he might wield an axe, and had a thirst for blood. He would never say to someone, I don’t like your ugly mug. No, he would dismiss them as a traitor to the cause, a sell-out, a conniving petit bourgeois, none of which ever stopped him making a packet off the singer. Max lived in style. He frittered money away without thinking. He had not been born into wealth. He did not have the virtuous frugality of the well-heeled.
Even back in the day, he wore preposterous outfits. Vernon particularly remembers a pair of pinstriped stretch jeans . . . Last night, seeing him appear in a lurid purple jacket, Vernon had smiled. But by the third beer, he did not know how to get rid of him. Vernon shot pleading glances at the girl waiting for him, but could not manage to interrupt Max, whose ceaseless chatter was making his head spin. Seeing the girl wander off, he admitted defeat and followed Max to a nearby bar. Vernon had no desire to drink. He has a delicate stomach, probably something to do with his age. Every time Max “went for a piss”, he emptied his glass into the sink on the other side of the bar, beneath the placid, not particularly surprised gaze of the barman.
Max had treated him like the meek little record dealer he had been twenty years earlier. The manager had lost something of his presence. No point deluding yourself – you don’t spend a lifetime pickling your brain in booze and Class A drugs without frying a few neurons. He babbled on, he sermonised, he offered flashes of wit. He did not notice that Vernon was aware that he was steering every subject back to one thing: the convergences. Max had got it into his head that he could be Vernon’s manager. Or, more precisely, that he could organise converg
ences, but not in the arse end of nowhere with a couple of candles and a megaphone, no, on a grand scale. With refreshment stalls, merchandising deals and sponsorships.
Max talked about Pamela, Daniel, Sylvie and Xavier as though they were old friends. He talked about Alex’s tapes, about mass hypnosis, about the girls from Bordeaux. He knew too much. Vernon played the role of the unsuspecting idiot. He allowed himself to be gripped by the shoulders, it was such a pity, here he was wasting his talent doing third-rate club nights when he should be back presiding over convergences, with his gang of friends, he wasn’t going to let them down, not really. Max had big plans for them. He had the contacts, the ideas, the vision. He had moved on to whisky.
He had ended the night sprawled on the bonnet of a car outside the bar, trying to bring a cigarette to his lips while Vernon listened to his perorations, forcing himself to grin and bear it. Max was no longer even looking at Vernon, he was mumbling incoherently, it was almost impossible to understand his jabbering. Then he said “. . . and we could even make a movie about your life, I’ve got this buddy, Dopalet, he’s a film producer, the guy’s under serious pressure, we can get him to buy the rights to whatever the fuck we like, you stick with me, dude, you’ll see, I’ll get you into the big time, black tie, all that shit . . .” At times of danger, playing the fool has always been Vernon’s go-to strategy. So he carried on smiling naively, giving no sign that the producer’s name had triggered a wave of panic.
“I’m gonna organise the biggest fucking convergence you’ve ever fucking seen, I’ve heard so much about them and I’m pissed I never got to experience one . . . Alex had, like, moments of genius, between your potential and his talent, we’re gonna start a revolution, swear, we’re gonna knock the world off its axis . . .”
*
It was no trivial matter. Something had happened the previous night. Max knows too much about them. He wasn’t in Northern Ireland by chance, trying to sign some local band. He had come specifically to see him. Vernon pads into the living room. Last night, when he came back to the apartment, it was dark so he hadn’t noticed the big windows overlooking a park. The room is bathed in light, he is struck by the beauty of the scene: young people sitting around a huge table, dappled with sunlight, a sense of peace that feels almost ceremonial. Their movements are graceful, they speak without raising their voices. O.K., so maybe the garish American Apparel V-neck T-shirts are a bit much, but all the same. It is a mesmerising scene. On the other hand, it’s unlikely that Vernon will get to reminisce about Lemmy with anyone at this table. It’s not that kind of place. These kids probably know Marshall as a brand of headphones.
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