by Frances Vick
Miriam said, “Come and have a boogie!”
And then the men in the kitchen heard the noise of the stereo being overturned and the dull slap of records hitting laminate flooring. The women all let out the same low gasp –as if they’d been collectively punched in the stomach. Miriam said, “What did you do?” Kathleen said, “Bob...Bob...really, come on,” and someone shrieked, “Wanker! Wanker!”
The men in the kitchen looked at each other and a few moved uneasily towards the living room.
“Wanker!” It was Miriam. Lydia laughed senselessly and too long, and Peter, hearing it, shivered in irritation. He said, “Someone should get her out of here.”
Dom, at his elbow, replied, “She’s got a right. We’ve all got a right. But I knew it’d end up like this. Didn’t I Ange? I said so.”
“He did,” Angie was solemn as a child. “He said so.”
“Best get your dad.”
Angie nodded, disappeared into the living room and came back with a silent but shaking Bob. Someone had thrown a drink at him. It had soaked his hat. Angie was cooing to him, holding his arm tight and matching her steps to his. They both left the house without saying anything to anybody. Miriam shouted “wanker!” again and the music came back on in the living room, but nobody sang along and nobody laughed any more.
The men in the kitchen began to shrug on their coats. Kathleen collected glasses and plates and shouted at her girls to push the hoover around. Only Miriam and Lydia stayed where they were, Miriam maintaining a mutinous and aggrieved silence, while Lydia was simply unaware that the atmosphere had changed. Eventually Kathleen told Peter to take her home.
“I don’t know where she lives,” he lied.
“And I don’t care. She’s a young girl in a state and if you were any sort of a gentleman you’d look out for her. Take her to yours. Or her mum’s,” and she stood over Peter with her hands on her hips until he agreed to leave with Lydia.
He had to pull her up out of the chair and her legs gave way. She giggled foolishly, apologised, and Peter, seething, dragged her out through the kitchen, past Kathleen and her scornful daughters, into the street.
“You’re being nice to me,” Lydia said, too loud near his ear. Her head was lolling. Peter gripped her harder, pulling her towards the main road. Maybe there was a taxi rank, or a bus stop. Just dump the bitch somewhere.
“Do you have any money?” he asked her.
She fumbled in her bag and gave him a fistful of change. “I’m glad you’re being nice to me. Carl would have wanted you to be nice to me.”
Peter said ‘Jesus’ under his breath and tried to get her to speed up, but her legs seemed boneless. She’d lost a shoe somewhere and her big toe was bleeding. “Jesus,” he said again.
Up ahead he saw a mini cab office. “Where are you staying? Where are you living at the moment?” She blinked at him slowly, not understanding. “Where do you want to go?”
She blinked again, and began to cry, “I want to see Carl.”
“Oh fuck off Lydia. Really. Fuck OFF. Where do you want to go?” but she kept on crying and Peter felt like hitting her, shaking her out of this stupid act. It had to be an act. Nobody could change that much, lose all their gumption, turn into a rag doll, in a matter of weeks. “Is this all the money you’ve got? Will it get you to your parents’ house?” He thought she might have nodded. “OK, get in this cab.”
She banged her head on the way in. She couldn’t work out how to fasten the seat belt, so he leaned in and did it for her. Her breath smelt of vomit and her skin was grey. The taxi driver eyed her warily in his mirror.
“Go to your parents’, tell him the address. Go to sleep,” Peter told her and he slammed the door and walked quickly away without looking back. How dare she make it all about her! It was fucking typical. Even on the day of Carl’s funeral, it all had to be about poor lonely Lydia. Well, she could fuck off, he didn’t have to have anything to do with her anymore. He’d done his duty and got her safely home, and that was the end of it.
He strode quickly down the street but ducked into a newsagent’s when he saw a group of teenagers in Chinaski t-shirts heading his way. He felt stupid, hiding. Carl wouldn’t have hidden. Carl would have lived his life, gone where he wanted, regardless of fans, regardless of anyone. But then he remembered, Carl hadn’t been living his life, at the end, at all, had he? Carl had been holed up at his grandmother’s house, hiding behind net curtains. Peter didn’t even know how long he’d been there or why he’d gone there in the first place, but it can’t have been a happy decision. Something must have driven him there and kept him from leaving, and no-one now knew what it was. No-one knew his mind.
He wandered out of the shop and took his time lighting a cigarette. He’d seen a pub that didn’t look too bad from the window of the funeral car and decided to try to find it. Even if fans were in there, he’d go. Maybe it would be good if some were, it meant he’d have something to do, some role to play, just to get him through the next few hours so he could feel like a normal person.
But there were no fans in the pub, just a taciturn barman and a couple of silenced TV screens. Peter ordered his drink and slouched over towards the corner near the window when a hand snagged his trouser leg on the way, making him spill some beer on the floor. Dom Marshall sat with Chris Harris, both perched on high stools, both smiling mysteriously.
“Sit,” Chris told him, and Peter did sit. He was drunker than he thought and misjudged the height of the stool, banging his shin painfully on a metal leg.
Dom slid down and handed a plastic bag to Chris, “It’s there. All in there. All you’ll need. I trust you.” Chris jiggled the bag and nodded. “There’s the books there too,” Dom went on, “And the charts. You’ll need them. To do it right.” He hesitated, smiled, with tears in his eyes. “Do it right. Promise?”
Chris said nothing but stared at him until he left. Then he said, “Jesus,” and shook his head.
“How was that for you, Peter?”
Peter looked confused, gestured at his leg.
“No, no, not that. The thing. The funeral. How was that for you?”
“It was – not as bad as it could have been.”
Chris pulled a face. “Not bad enough. Not enough of an event, no? All too civilised. No blood on the walls.”
“That’s good though.”
“Oh, no my friend, it isn’t. They had me going about the suicides, all those little girls. I got quite excited, but it’s not so is it?”
Peter nearly said ‘Sir?’. Instead he said, “Huh?”
“What I mean is, Carl’s going to be forgotten quickly, unless something happens to keep him in the headlines. And a suicide or two would have come in handy. If he’d killed himself even. Or heroin. No heroin?”
“No heroin. I mean, I think. Wouldn’t they have found it in his system?” Peter was faintly appalled at how matter of fact he was sounding. He didn’t feel ready yet to expose his lack of feeling to anyone, even Chris. He must have looked vulnerable, though, because Chris backed off, changed tack.
“Ah. Yes. Sorry. It’s crass of me to talk about this now. I’m sorry.” He paused. “But, you have to admit that there ought to be more of a story here. Young people don’t just die. For no reason. I mean, it’s ludicrous. It oughtn’t to be.”
“I suppose it happens all the time.”
Chris made a sour face, “To the ordinary, maybe. To victims. Or the terminally unlucky. But not to Carl. It doesn’t fit.”
“What’s in the bag?”
“Ah,” Chris rattled it, “potentially gold, perhaps just shit.” He tipped out the contents onto the table. Cassettes spilled out onto the floor, a couple of notebooks landed in the ashtray, all marked with a date, all clustered around six years ago. Next to each date, in halting capitals, was written ‘Carl Howl speaks’.
“What’s this about?”
“A book deal. A book. And, if you want to be a part of it, here’s your chance.”
“I �
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“Look, Peter, I don’t know what your plan is, but by my calculations, you have about one more year of mileage in this before you either get a proper job or join another band. Less for the latter. Carl died with a lot of interest attached to him. A lot. Most of which I’ve generated, and that interest has got to go somewhere.”
“You’re going to write a book about Carl?” Peter knew he sounded stupid.
Chris smiled. “I’m going to write the book about Carl. And I’ll need your help. Probably.”
“And there’s a lot of money in it for you?” Peter tried to sound angry, offended, but just came off as tired.
“There’ll be some. If it creates and maintains an interest in Carl, and by extension the band, there’ll be some in it for you as well. It’ll keep you in the public imagination for long enough that you can make your next move in relative comfort – by which I mean that if you wanted to start another band, and I assume you do, you wouldn’t have much work to do. Just ride the wave.”
Peter tried one last time to be upset, “You’re a cynical bastard.”
Chris smiled and spread his hands, “I am what I am. I am an opportunist, but then don’t we all have to be, Peter? Carl sure as holy hell was. He didn’t drift, he made himself. Built himself. And now all his hard work has got to be kicked over simply because it’s tasteless to celebrate him? Well, that’s bullshit. I know that and so do you. Or you ought to.”
Peter realised dimly that he was being manipulated, that Chris had no great opinion of his intelligence, his talent, his loyalty. But at the same time, he was being offered that irresistible role of trusted sidekick that he had enjoyed so much with Carl. Peter felt the parameters of his self image harden and lock around him in a protective shield. He felt the relief of someone else doing the thinking for him. But still he hedged.
“Where did all those tapes come from?”
“Dom. He made them years ago apparently. Bit creepy. Recorded conversations. Want to listen with me?”
Peter shuddered and shook his head. Chris blew some ash off one of the notebooks and opened it, widened his eyes, and handed it to Peter.
The same painstaking block capitals crowded together on the lines. Something about Will. Something else about Freedom to Lead. Astrological symbols arranged around bisected circles. An exclamation point. ‘Leo/Cancer! Gemini Moon!’. Chris fished another book out of the ashtray and cocked an eyebrow.
“Fucking hell,” he muttered and shook his head at Peter. “You don’t want to see this.”
“What is it?”
“Madness.”
“Let me see.”
It was a diary, or it was written in a diary at least. Some pages had normal enough reminders written down – sign on 11am, give Tess £5, 27 bus to Fairfax Ave. Others were covered with spidery graphs, improvised flow charts mapping a trajectory from birth to death, obscurity to fame; a plan, a forecast. There were surprisingly deft pencil sketches of a young Carl with his eyes closed, perhaps asleep. And here was an envelope carefully sellotaped onto one page containing six polaroids of Carl naked in a sleeping bag. He looked asleep in these too, and very pale, very young. This would have been when he stopped going to school, Peter thought. Or maybe before. How old would he be? 14? 15? There was a note in Carl’s handwriting, half missing but the other half firmly fixed into the centre of a whole page with sellotape. “–ing famous means never having to sa–”; this last obscured by a coffee stain and a smiley face drawn with a marker pen. On the last page Dom had stapled in a postcard from Paris. Again Peter recognised Carl’s handwriting, but he’d only written the address, there was no message, the card was blank. Turning it over again he spotted a tiny stick figure drawn in biro tumbling off the Eiffel Tower.
Chris glanced at the naked Polaroids, grimaced, and put them back in the envelope. “Well, thanks for the crazy, Dom.” He shut the book up and lit a cigarette. “I have a pretty good chance of making this book thing happen, and it would be better to do it with your help. I’m off to the States next week, but before then or after, or maybe even during if I can get you over there, I’ll need to interview you, get it all down. You know. And soon. Are you in?” And Peter nodded. “Good! Good. I mean, there’s no point in all that –” he waved irritably at the window, and Peter understood that he meant grief, the funeral, “– if I can really make something out of this. Really do the best thing for Carl, well. That’s the plan.” He was getting up, collecting the tapes, putting on his corduroy jacket, stubbing out his cigarette, on to other things. Peter wanted to stay with him, but didn’t want to ask.
He couldn’t get those Polaroid pictures out of his mind. He’d never asked Carl if he’d been, well, if he’d been alright during those lost two years. Had he been safe? You heard of bad things happening to runaways, and Carl had been a runaway really, hadn’t he? Most parents try to find their kids, raise the alarm, but not Carl’s. Everyone had let him go, his parents, even Peter. And Carl had been so young! Too young to be alone, no matter how in control he’d seemed.
Peter stayed in the pub for a few more hours, hoping that some Chinaski fans would come in, give him something else to think about, but none did. When he left, unsteadily, he ended up getting lost in the nearby estate, but was too drunk to feel scared, and he woke up the next morning with no memory of getting home.
* * *
For the next few weeks Peter expected Chris to contact him. He got excited about being flown to America, and he waited in for the post every day and checked his answer machine, but there was nothing. Eventually he began, in a desultory way, to work on some songs with John. They would meet ostensibly to rehearse, but spend most of the time remembering Carl and talking about what the memories meant, although John did most of the talking. In the intervening months, he’d taken Carl’s death increasingly seriously. It was, he explained, a delayed reaction.
“When I heard from you, I didn’t feel much. I mean, I felt so tired after the album, the promotion, all that, that I kind of didn’t have room, you know? To mourn? I didn’t even go to the funeral,” John shook his head, teared up. He must have been reading self help books, because all his talk nowadays was couched in these terms. ‘Space’, ‘room to breathe’, ‘the inner me’. “And now that there’s been a break, I can kind of see what it means to me. He was like a brother to me –” Peter rolled his eyes behind his hand. “– we were such a –” don’t say family, don’t say family, thought Peter. “– a unit. You know? A team. Almost like family. I mean that’s how I feel, that kind of loss. You know?”
John wanted them to support one another. He suggested tributes, a farewell ceremony involving writing down questions for Carl and burning them while holding hands. It was too much. It was too late.
They wrote nothing and they played nothing. Peter was reminded that John had never contributed much anyway; he and Carl had done most of it. Chinaski had been their band, his and Carl’s. When John stopped showing up to rehearsals Peter was relieved, and when he told him that he was going to India to get his head sorted out, Peter gave him his full support, offered to store some of his stuff in his flat and got happily drunk with him at the airport. Since seeing him off, he’d barely thought of him.
And still there was no word from Chris about the book. Carl receded from the front pages of the papers. Autumn and winter drifted by, and by February Peter began to think about setting up another band.
And then he was summoned to the inquest.
22
The day of the inquest fell on the fourth consecutive day of rain. The grey sky leaked drizzle, and people had stopped looking each other in the eye, stopped smiling unless they were indoors. Peter had been asked to read a prepared statement on Carl’s state of mind the last time he’d seen him, and he had more or less decided when that was. With the help of his lawyer and for the sake of argument, he’d decided that it was the last week in July, just after the video had aired for the first time. Carl had been a little anxious about the tour, Peter was to
say, keyed up, but not overly so. No they hadn’t spoken for long. Yes, Carl had had a drink, but he wasn’t drunk.
Peter found these drill sessions initially alarming, despite his lawyer’s reassurance, “It’s just in case someone decides to question you, has an agenda,” and it was meant to sound soothing but felt just the opposite. Peter was hazy on why there even was an inquest anyway. In the intervening months there had been a steady but not increasing mutter of discontent amongst some fans, talk of conspiracy, of cover-up. Peter, having these crazies following him in the street, sending him letters, forcing him to change his phone number, felt like he knew them by now, and he knew that they wouldn’t let go of this unless it was starved of media oxygen. An inquest would only muddy the water even further – any nut job who wanted to would be able to have a say, badgering people about half remembered conversations, petty grievances, dates and times. But his lawyer said no. No. It won’t be like that. It will come out as an open verdict,”...although...”
“Although what?” asked Peter.
“Well. Wouldn’t suicide be more likely? He’d been taking that medication for years and knew not to mix it with alcohol but what does he do but take a handful and wash it down with vodka? Seems...unlikely.”
Peter felt weary. He knew he was being asked for an informed opinion, and he wished he could give one. But the truth was that he simply didn’t remember how Carl was, how he was behaving at that time. He rarely saw him. There was also the tiring idea that if his friend had killed himself, he had done it in the full knowledge that his doing so would confuse everyone, and that seemed in character, even if self harm didn’t.
“I can’t see it. Carl had too much to live for.” Peter said what was expected from him. Young people, people like Carl, beautiful people, loved people, they don’t kill themselves. Not without leaving a note. “He would have left a note,” Peter told his lawyer firmly. He kept that in the front of his mind, whenever he sensed that Carl was hovering around the edges of a conversation, when he saw the question form on people’s faces, when he woke up in the night. He would have left a note. Surely.