“They’re really noisy too,” I said, between devouring forkfuls of omelette. The cheddar was just right. “That’s another reason I never got one. The vacuum cleaner is unshielded you see, and they make such a racket that you have to wear ear pads when you’re using one. To avoid damaging your hearing.” I grinned at her.
“Yes, I get the irony. Losing your hearing in pursuit of audio perfection.”
“Plus the cats would hate it.”
Nevada reached down and patted Fanny, who had become excited by the sound of us happily eating and was now inward bound for her food bowl. “And we wouldn’t want to hurt your little ears, would we, would we, would we? Little ears, little ears.”
“Plus I could never afford to buy one.”
She looked at me across the table and smiled. “You’ll be able to afford to buy one now.” She helped me carry the plates back into the kitchen and dump them in the sink. “So where do we get one of these machines?” she said.
“It’s not that simple.”
She followed me back into the living room. “No, of course it isn’t.”
“If we rushed out and bought a very expensive record cleaning machine, and someone happened to have us under observation, don’t you think they might find it a tiny bit suspicious?”
She looked at me, the realisation surfacing in her eyes. “Of course. Why would you want a special record cleaner? Perhaps to clean a special record.”
I nodded. “We wouldn’t want the Aryan Twins to put two and two together.” I looked at her. “And get an Aryan four.”
She snorted with amusement. I sat down again and reached for another piece of toast, the last survivor lying lonely on the breadboard.
“So we don’t buy one of these cleaners. Instead we find someone who already owns one, for business or personal use. Someone we can trust.”
“I was going to have that piece of toast,” said Nevada. “And do you know such a person?”
I divided the piece of toast with her. “I do, but he lives in Wales.”
“I don’t want to sound as if I don’t immediately love the idea of driving to Wales, but is that the only option?”
“We could send the record to him in the post.”
“Right,” she said. “Wales it is.”
* * *
Once she was sold on the idea of driving to Hughie’s to clean the record, Nevada wanted to set off right away. “So let’s go,” she said.
“Not now. First we want to spend the day combing the charity shops.”
“What? Why?”
“We don’t want to give any indication we’ve found the record.”
“Of course not. So we don’t want to change our usual pattern of behaviour.”
“That’s right. We have to behave in a way calculated to pull the wool over their little Aryan eyes.”
“And if they think we’re still looking for it, if they see us doing that, they won’t guess that we found it.” She grinned at me. “You’re so sneaky. I can’t believe it. You have a natural talent for this.”
So we devoted the day to making the rounds of the charity shops, this time in Chelsea. The poshest neighbourhoods of London tend not to have charity shops. Too downmarket. Which is a pity. The King’s Road, though, was an interesting exception and the shops here were always worth a look. Today we hit all of them. It was fun. I didn’t find anything, but that didn’t matter. I was sated, content, like a fisherman who had already landed his limit.
Landed a whale, in fact.
That night in bed I said, “By the way, do you ride a bicycle?”
Nevada rolled over and looked at me. “Do I look like I’ve ridden a bicycle since I was twelve years old?”
“That’s kind of exactly my point.”
For someone who allegedly hadn’t been on a bike since she was twelve, she did surprisingly well the following day. We slipped through the Abbey grounds, ghostly in the early morning mist.
It was Sunday and we generally didn’t go record hunting on Sundays, because so many charity shops were closed for the day. “So if we can just prevent them from discovering that we’ve slipped off…”
“Assuming they’re watching us at all. For all we know, they take Sundays off, too.”
I had borrowed the bikes from the two nice women, Ginnie and Sue, who lived next door. Because their bungalow was adjacent to mine, we could step out of my back gate and in through theirs virtually unseen. The two bikes had been left out for us, equipped with rather impressive heavy-duty steel locks. We unlocked them using the keys Ginnie had slipped through my letterbox the previous night and walked the bikes out, ticking and whirring, into the dark and quiet of the foggy street.
We closed the gate behind us and stood in the small access road that paralleled the rear wall of the Abbey. There was an opening in the wall about a hundred metres down on our left, which allowed pedestrian access into one small section of the Abbey complex, a public thoroughfare for centuries. We threaded our bicycles along the footpaths here, guided by the low amber footlights that marked the path, both of us gaining in confidence as we got used to the machines. “It’s just like riding a bike.” My voice seemed to be muffled in the fog. No one else was around, so I spoke a little louder. “You never forget how.”
“So, who did we borrow these from?” said Nevada.
“Lovable local lesbians.”
She shifted around on her seat. “Do you think I’ll catch being a lesbian from sitting on this bicycle saddle?”
“We can but hope.”
Having taken our meandering, roundabout route through the Abbey grounds, we now came out onto the main road about half a mile from the exit of my estate. We would proceed to ride back past that exit, as though approaching from another direction entirely, and hopefully only recognisable as a couple of anonymous dawn cyclists.
We whizzed down Abbey Avenue, towards the Upper Richmond Road. The avenue was silent and empty, wreathed in fog. The amber streetlights were discreet glowing clouds flowing above us. I could sense Nevada relaxing beside me as she got used to the bike. She looked over and flashed me a grin. She was beginning to enjoy the ride. So was I.
The air was damp and cold and clean. You could smell the promise of snow.
Up ahead glowed two soft red circles, ill-defined and floating in mid-air. The traffic lights. We slowed to a halt and waited, balanced on our bikes. The eerie green glow of the traffic lights shone through the fog. We took off and turned right.
There were no cars in either direction. The only sound was the drone of a passenger jet descending towards Heathrow, high above us in the immensity of the morning sky. We pedalled towards the next set of lights. As we slowed, there was a wet whispering sound behind us.
The sound of bicycle tyres.
A cyclist appeared out of the mist and fell in beside us. An indeterminate lean shape with helmet and goggles, dressed all in black with a yellow stripe down the side, he or she stopped and waited poised on his or her bike for the traffic light to change. Through the fog the soft red light shone down on us all.
Just then there was the sound of a second bicycle. It whispered to a stop on the other side of us. This rider was also dressed in an entirely black outfit with a yellow stripe. This rider was bigger, undoubtedly a man. My heart began to beat raggedly in my chest. The light changed.
We all surged forward together. The two riders in black were tight on either side of us. I could see Nevada was pushing as hard as I was, but we weren’t making any headway. Our escort kept pace effortlessly.
We moved down the empty streets in perfect formation. I was going full out now, sweating profusely. My rucksack felt hot where it was strapped against my back.
Inside the rucksack was a box. Inside the box was the record.
I looked at Nevada helplessly. The riders to our right and left kept pace with us like automatons. There was no one else in sight. We were alone in the street. I began to realise just what a miscalculation I’d made.
Then t
here was the sound of a third bike.
Then a fourth and fifth. They came out of the mist. All wearing the same black outfit as our escort, black with a yellow stripe. They fell in all around us, all identically dressed. More and more until it was finally a dozen cyclists, all with the same team colours.
They were all around us, like a school of fish surrounding two of a different species. They were riding with us, and then suddenly they were gone, pouring on the speed and contemptuously pulling away from us—the two Sunday-morning amateurs—as they disappeared into the mist. Quite possibly on their way to the Olympics.
Nevada and I looked at each other and slowed down.
My heart was pounding, and not just with the exertion of cycling.
* * *
At the car rental place in Putney we loaded the bikes into the back of the Volvo we’d hired and set off towards Hammersmith and the M4.
I was driving, Nevada beside me with a large book of maps, prepared to supplement the in-car navigation system if necessary, and a rather more useful bag of oranges that she was all set to peel on demand, then neatly segment and pass across a piece at a time to refresh the driver.
“Are they seedless?”
“Now you’re starting to sound like Tinkler.”
Speaking of Tinkler, we had to drive along the Fulham Palace Road and right past the Charing Cross Hospital. But we didn’t stop. “They might have it staked out. They might be watching for us.”
“Do you really think so?”
“No,” I said. “But we can’t take the chance.” She nodded and started peeling an orange, releasing its lovely scent.
So we agreed we wouldn’t stop in to see Tinkler.
It was something I’d live to regret.
* * *
The sun was coming up and burning off the mist as we drove west out of Hammersmith and onto the motorway. Nevada napped for a while and then woke up and resumed our conversation as though it had never stopped.
“So tell me about your friend.”
“Hughie Mackinaw,” I said. “The Scottish Welshman.”
“That’s what Tinkler calls him.”
“That’s what everybody calls him. Good old Hughie. What can you say about a white man with an afro? At least it’s not ginger.”
“There is that,” she said.
“He has a wife called Albina and a boy called Mickey and a little girl called Boo.”
“Is that short for something? Boo?”
“I don’t know. But she’s nice.”
“It’s a nice name.”
“I like her a lot better than the boy.”
“Why?”
I considered. “Hughie is one of those macho guys who has spoiled his son completely rotten. So the kid is this sulky, tantrum-throwing, petulant little pudding.”
“You paint an attractive picture.”
“So, anyway, what I’m driving at is that the son’s the antithesis of the guy himself.”
“I get it. In what way is Hughie a macho guy?”
“He used to run with a motorcycle gang in Scotland. He was their mechanic. Great precision mechanic—could build spares from scratch. He could make anything. But then he discovered it was safer and more profitable to build turntables.”
“Strange career U-turn.”
“Not really. He always loved music. Had a good ear. That’s the connection.”
“And he now makes a living from making these turntables?”
“He sells a few each year. Mostly to the States and Japan. They’re not cheap, they’re high-end kit, but it’s never quite enough to make a living.”
“So he now also grows huge swathes of weed, right?”
“Yes, he has rather reverted to type there.”
“What’s the wife like?”
“Common-law wife actually.”
“Nothing wrong with that,” said Nevada, “in this day and age.”
“She’s all right. Nice, but a bit ditzy.”
Nevada’s stomach suddenly rumbled, dramatically loud in the confines of the car. We both laughed and she said, “I hope we’re going to get lunch.”
“Oh, we’ll get lunch all right. That’s going to be a strategic and diplomatic minefield.”
“Why? What do you mean?”
I said, “Because she’s probably the only pagan earth mother operating in Wales who doesn’t know one end of a green vegetable from the other.”
“How ironic.”
“So lunch is going to be an application of the triple arts of the freezer, the can opener and the microwave.”
“Oh joy,” said Nevada.
There was a long silence as we watched the landscape flashing past and the traffic, which was sparse but growing as we drove west. Finally I said, “When we get the record cleaned will you have to take it to Japan?”
She looked at me. “Japan?”
I took the plunge. “I checked that number that called you. On my landline. The night your phone wasn’t working.”
“My, you are sneaky. Yes. My employer is based in Japan.”
“But your card says GmbH.”
“Yes. Fiendishly cunning ruse, isn’t it?” She smiled, staring out the window into the distance. “Made you think it was a German concern, didn’t I?”
I said, “Actually, I began to smell a rat when Tinkler asked you about that German Rolling Stones album he covets and you didn’t know what Sonderauflage meant.”
She looked at me, askance but fondly. “The vinyl detective,” she said.
* * *
The sun was high and shining down onto a brilliant winter’s morning, the trees bare and the fields limned with gleaming pockets of frost. We reached Hughie’s just before eleven, feeling a little weary with all the miles we’d driven.
We made our first stop at his factory, as we’d arranged on the phone. Hughie was there to greet us, wearing gleaming black Doc Marten boots, tattered jeans and a navy blue donkey jacket. His only concession to the cold was what looked like a Cambridge University scarf. If it was, it would be a garment he had no right to wear; but then that was the least of Hughie’s misdemeanours. He was bare-headed, as if to proudly reveal the afro as advertised.
He was smoking a rollie and threw it aside as he waved to us. He had a lean yellow dog at his side. They were standing in the narrow approach road that came off the main road and ran past the low two-storey building which served as his factory, into the grounds behind. I drove in and around and pulled up by the back door of the old brown building, beside Hughie’s battered vintage BMW.
We got out of our car, yawning and stretching, and locked it behind us. I almost forgot to take the record, which was on the floor in the back of the car, safe in its box and rucksack and as far as possible from any sunlight or heat source.
We heard Hughie’s footsteps as he came down the road beside the building. The dog’s claws were clicking on the frozen surface.
I looked at Nevada. “Whatever you do, don’t mention his afro.”
As soon as Hughie came into sight she said, “I love your hair.”
Hughie grinned and rubbed his head happily, as though discovering it for the first time, and I knew that, once again, she’d got away with it. “It would make a really good Jewfro,” he said, “if only I was a Jew.” And he came forward to shake hands with me and give Nevada a rather impertinent hug and kiss on the cheek. On both cheeks, in fact.
I had to remind myself that we were in neo-hippy territory here.
The dog promptly disappeared, clattering through a large dog flap in the factory door, sensibly getting out of the cold and leaving us to our human concerns.
The grounds behind Hughie’s factory extended back a long way before coming to a high wall that overlooked parkland beyond. All of which was just as well, given the privacy required for Hughie’s agricultural operations on the site. I was familiar with the general layout, having driven down here with Tinkler when he’d had his Thorens restored, but there was now a large new structure loom
ing on the left of the yard.
It was an odd-looking water tank rising from four steel legs like a squat alien giant who had grown tired and given up his attempt to invade our planet.
“What’s the water tank, Hughie?”
He shook his head. “It’s not a water tank. It’s a fuel tank. To feed the generator.” He proudly pointed towards a shed near the rear wall. I realised that was new, too. “I’m now energy self-sufficient.”
“By burning petrol?”
Hughie grinned. “More importantly, it prevents any spikes on the electricity grid from running the lights or the watering system. To grow you-know-what.” He indicated the greenhouses that occupied most of the yard.
“I understand you’ve had a bumper crop this year,” I said. Tinkler always kept me updated on developments at Hughie’s.
He nodded his head, his big afro bobbing. I noticed some streaks of grey in there amongst the brown. “That’s true. That’s how I was able to pay for the generator. Not to mention the fuel.” He looked at me, his eyes a little wild, but no wilder than usual. “I got an entire tanker full. I swapped it for a load of weed.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No, it’s the alternative economy.” He gazed fondly at the greenhouses. “You just plant things in the earth and up they grow and then you can swap them for an entire tanker full of fuel.” He nodded at the tank, walking over into its shadow. “And I had to store it somewhere, so I built this.” He gazed up at it proudly, then looked at me. “Now we’re energy self-sufficient,” he repeated.
Nevada was staring at the greenhouses, which were fashioned of heavy-duty transparent plastic. They were big long tunnels sealed at each end, essentially like giant versions of the poly tunnels in which commercial growers cultivate tomatoes. Which was appropriate enough, because all you could see from the outside was the blurry red of tomatoes growing in dense clusters within.
They looked cheerful and festive in the winter landscape.
Of course, behind the screens of growing tomatoes was the real crop, which could just be glimpsed as a rich green background of foliage.
The greenhouses rested on flat rectangles of earth with deep trenches dug all around them, like moats. There was frost in the bottom of these, making a neat white pattern around each greenhouse. You gained access to the greenhouses by crossing the trenches using rather precarious miniature bridges or walkways. These were sheets of corrugated aluminium, which hadn’t been fastened down at either end. They were worryingly unstable under foot, as I’d discovered on my previous visit.
Written in Dead Wax Page 17