Waiting for Jones. Was that to be the next stage of my life? Two weeks, she'd said. Two weeks waiting for Jones.
Eventually I walked back outside through the revolving doors. My right hand gripped my bag. The sky was still the most incredible blue.
32
I walked for a while, but my heart wasn't in walking. I passed a lot of coffee shops, and eventually it began to sink in. I was in Seattle, the place where the great western coffee boom had begun. Starbucks. Others might dispute it – there's no denying, of course, that Peet's Coffee & Tea came first – but the great explosion that had spread around the western world, turning us all into coffee junkies, had really kicked off from here.
I went into a Starbucks, paused to take in my surroundings, then looked up at the menu board.
Much of it looked familiar, but there were some products that we didn't sell in our branch. Maybe we did now. It'd been a while since I'd been there. There were always new products coming and going; I was bound to have missed something.
I ordered a caramel ribbon crunch Frappuccino. Iced coffee made with caramel syrup, drizzled with caramel sauce, topped with whipped cream, caramel and crunchy caramel sugar. When it was placed on the counter I could feel my heart bleeding just looking at it, and I thought that I ought just to have asked for as plain a white coffee as they could bring themselves to serve me.
On the plus side, at least for a moment I hadn't been thinking about Jones, and although the thoughts quickly returned, it was a start. After seventeen years, there was a tiny voice in the wilderness inside my faraway head telling me it was time to move on, move on from Jones, currently in bed with Piotr, the Polish movie star.
I also ordered an apple and a cinnamon muffin, sat in a seat near the window and looked out at the beautiful day. I began to notice that everyone was dressed for spring. I tentatively drank some of the Frappuccino, took a small spoonful of the cream from the top. No wonder people are fat, I thought, then guiltily looked around the café to see if anyone had read my thoughts. But I was no Jigsaw Man, I was just a normal guy, and no one was paying me any attention.
I finished the muffin and then the apple. Customers came and went. This Starbucks followed exactly the same model as the coffee shop I ran at home. I could have been in Bristol. Of course, that's the point, the same with Hilton Hotels and Hertz Car Rental. Wherever you go in this homogenised world, you'll feel at home.
The sky turned a slightly darker shade of blue. My iced coffee began to heat up, and with that the sweetness became more and more evident. I went to the counter and ordered some Pike Place Roast, got a glass of water and returned to my seat.
Surely Jones and Piotr would be finished by now. Could I go back there? I had to spend the night somewhere. But going back risked the possibility of seeing them walk together through the lobby, or sitting at dinner holding hands, or worse, talking intimately. Or laughing. Laughing would be worst of all. What if Piotr made her laugh? How tragic. I didn't make her laugh. Never had done. Yes, she smiled all the time, but she always smiled at me, humouring me. I didn't know how to make her laugh. Perhaps Piotr did.
Perhaps Piotr thought the same things I did.
'Is everything all right for you today?'
I looked up at the waitress who was standing over my table. I glanced quickly round the café and realised that it had quietened down a lot since I'd entered. She must have had time to spare, time to spread a benevolent, helpful word around the joint.
'Yes, thanks.'
'You all right? You seem kind of troubled?'
She was holding a small black tray with one large, empty cup on it.
'I'm fine, thanks.'
A blind, deaf child would have been able to tell that this wasn't the case.
'You're a visitor to Seattle?'
'Yep,' I said. 'Just got here.'
'Great day for it,' she said, smiling. 'Seriously, it's not usually like this. Where are you staying?'
'The Hilton.'
'Oh, cool, that's a great place. What will you be doing while you're here?' she asked, almost unconsciously wiping around my cup of coffee with a dry cloth as she spoke.
I hesitated before answering. She was American after all, so maybe I ought to have answered in best Hollywood style. I'm following my heart, I could have said.
'Looking for the Jigsaw Man,' I said instead. The words just seemed to appear in my mouth.
'Oh, cool,' she said again. From her tone it appeared that this was even cooler that staying at the Hilton. 'You mean the Beatles guy? He's in Seattle?'
I stared at her for a moment, then glanced around the café again. No one seemed to be paying any attention.
'What d'you mean the Beatles guy?'
'You're not a fan of the Beatles? I thought all British people loved the Beatles.'
'Yeah, I like them, I just.... how do you mean the Beatles guy?'
She glanced at the counter, another look over her shoulder to check that there was no one about to enter the café, then she sat down, but without tucking her legs under the table so that she could quickly extract herself again.
'You know, there's all sorts of guys are the fifth Beatle. Like Andy White playing the drums on Love Me Do, and Stu Sutcliffe, George Martin... Billy Preston on keyboards on Let It Be. The Jigsaw Man was the extra guy on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. I mean, that's what they say. No one really knows who he was. Just some guy hanging around Abbey Road studios, who became part of the whole thing. That's why I wondered if that's who you're looking for. I guess not.'
'Why was he called the Jigsaw Man?'
'I don't know. I guess he just pieced everything together. You know, the idea for the band. Sgt. Pepper...'
'I thought that was McCartney.'
She made a small movement with her eyebrows. 'That's one theory.'
'So, the Jigsaw Man? He played instruments, he was a producer? What exactly did he do?'
She shrugged. 'No one really knows. But you must have asked yourself how it happened? Sure, they'd been experimenting with various things, and Revolver's a pretty good album, 'n' all. But where did that whole Sgt. Pepper thing even come from? How did that even happen? Because someone, The Jigsaw Man, got them to do it. He pieced the Beatles together when they were fed up touring, and got them to make their greatest album. Question is, who was he? I like to think it was Bobby D.'
She shrugged again.
'I've never heard the story of the Jigsaw Man,' I said.
'Who's your Jigsaw Man then?' she asked.
The same guy, obviously, although it wasn't Bob Dylan.
'I think we're talking about the same person,' I said.
'Cool. He's in Seattle?'
'I don't know.'
'OK. Cool,' she said.
We shared another look across the table, the door to the café opened, two customers left and another four entered at the same time.
'Things are picking up,' she said. 'Gotta go.'
She noticed my barely touched Frappuccino, gave me a glance. I nodded, and she placed the nearly full drink on her tray.
The waitress got to her feet and headed back to the counter. Things were indeed picking up. Certainly, for the first time in a couple of days, I was thinking about something other than Jones. Just like that, I felt I was back on track.
Had the cord been cut? Not entirely, but many strands of it had been. It wasn't that I suddenly didn't care about her, or even that I was no longer infatuated. All that was still true. But the mental block where I could think of nothing else was gone.
Coffee and the Beatles.
I had no idea where I was going to go next, but it wouldn't be back to the Hilton.
*
If I imagined that I would step out of the café and immediately be rewarded with inspiration I was wrong. I walked around the streets of downtown Seattle for several hours. There was a lot of cafés. I spent some of the time down at the waterfront. Over an hour leaning on a railing, watching the water, watching a coup
le of ferries head out across the sound, watching a large cruise ship prepare to leave. A pleasant temperature. I still hadn't found anywhere to stay, but there were plenty of hotels and I wasn't worried.
I walked past Pike Place Market. Where it all began. Where Starbucks began. I thought about going in, but it didn't feel like the right time. Not just yet. I wasn't sure where that feeling came from, but the market was much larger than I'd imagined it would be and now didn't seem the right time to investigate. If investigate was what I could call it.
I had never heard of the Jigsaw Man being part of the Sgt. Pepper story, but there was no doubt about the connection. That one thing. The album cover attached to the wall, the picture which had three of the Beatles crossed out.
As evening fell I found my way to the Grand Hyatt, booked myself into a suite on the second to top floor. I went straight to my room and stood at the window, realising at once that I'd made a mistake in delaying coming up here. The sunset would have been unbelievable. Nevertheless, I stood for a long time, looking out over seven blocks worth of buildings, to the water.
I didn't have to lie to myself. I picked the Hyatt in the hope that Jones would make a connection with where I stayed in Warsaw and have some idea where to find me.
At some point I called room service. I ordered prawns and noodles and a bottle of white wine. I sat at the window looking out at the night and the lights of the city. I tried not to think about Jones but it was tough. Every now and again I'd look at my watch and calculate how long she had been with Piotr. Were they still in his room, banging away? Had she been sitting on top of him for eight long hours, his penis engorged and raw, as she ground into him?
I didn't want to think those thoughts, but found it unavoidable, so I made them as grotesque as possible.
The wine began to taste bitter long before the end, so I didn't finish the bottle. At just after ten I realised that I ought to be suffering jetlag, as it had been more than twenty-four hours since Jones had woken me in my bed in Poland. Within seconds I was dog-tired, so I quickly cleaned my teeth and collapsed into bed.
33
I had no more than the vaguest of plans for the next day. Walk around Seattle until something happened, was about the extent of it. I suppose it was a plan, of sorts. I'd maybe stay for a couple of days. If nothing happened, I could go off somewhere else to see if anything happened.
I had never heard the story of the fifth Beatle on Sgt. Pepper – other than the obvious one, George Martin, and I really didn't think that George Martin was our Jigsaw Man – and perhaps that was the only reason I had been brought here. I'd had to come all this way to hear that story. Now that I'd been told, perhaps I could go.
I thought I might as well stay until I knew where it was that I was going next.
I had breakfast in a coffee bar down by the waterfront. The place was busy. None of the staff had time to talk. I wasn't learning anything interesting here. I began to wonder if I needed to talk to Paul McCartney or Richard Starkey.
Seriously? Was that what I was contemplating? They'd think I was completely nuts. I wouldn't get past the first line of security, and, after what happened to John and George, presumably there were many lines of security.
I could read about Sgt. Pepper, but I thought I already knew everything. I was a Beatles scholar after all. I wrote about the Beatles. The waitress might well just have been recounting some crazy internet theory. The internet is so full of crazy stuff that just about every theory imaginable about every event in history has been postulated by someone.
There was some mysterious fifth member of the Beatles that no one's ever heard of before? Sure, why not? Someone, somewhere will believe it.
Late morning I found myself outside a second-hand record shop. Old records. Vinyl. It drew me in. It would have entered anyway, even if I hadn't been searching for answers.
There were no other customers, and one guy behind the counter. He looked like a refugee from ZZ Top. The longest beard I'd ever seen in my life. A big guy too, and not just big, but fat. I wouldn't want to have guessed at his weight. He caught my eye, and we nodded at each other.
I turned to the first row of vinyl. Straight up front a lot of Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden. You would have thought that everyone in Seattle who was going to buy a Nirvana album on vinyl would have done so by now. I wondered if second hand record shops in Liverpool all have their Beatles discs up front. Tourists might come up this way looking for old, original Nirvana LPs.
It got me thinking about Seattle, which was something I hadn't been doing on the way over here, what with being too busy thinking about Jones. Starbucks, grunge, Boeing, software industry, Amazon, Frasier. That's a lot for a small city stuck up in the north-west corner under a permanent cloud (albeit a cloud that had lifted for the moment). Sure, everywhere's got something, but Boeing is a phenomenon and Starbucks have changed the world. At least, that's how people in my line of work see it, even if many of them are grudging with their credit.
I looked though the grunge titles, but wasn't particularly interested. Next to them were some thrash metal. I stopped looking and made a more strategic sweep of the shop. It was pretty large for a small second-hand vinyl store. I wondered if he did much business.
He noticed me looking round, so I said, 'Beatles?' and he pointed to a row at the far end. I passed a lot of Blondie albums on the way, leading into other exporters of American punk.
The Beatles and their solo albums had an entire row to themselves. I stood staring at the albums at the front of each stack. Impossible to use the word treasure trove without stumbling horribly into cliché, but that's what I was looking at. I immediately thought of the agency credit card in my pocket. Would they stand for this? It was one thing aimlessly travelling around, but buying up a horde of Beatles LPs? And where exactly was I going to play them?
I started looking through the thick stacks of records. There were American editions of Beatles albums; bootlegs from all four solo Beatles, including Cold Cuts and a couple of versions of All Things Must Pass outtakes; there were pre-anthology Beatles bootlegs, several from the Get Back sessions, naturally. There was a Ringo bootleg containing songs I'd never heard of before. There was pre-New Morning Dylan/Harrison session. An alternative Brainwashed. A lot of John, acoustic versions and outtakes. Yes, a treasure trove. It was a treasure trove.
I found an old copy of Sgt. Pepper. Vinyl, not in particularly good condition. I hoped it would be a bootleg, containing songs I didn't know, and perhaps some clue to the Jigsaw Man. This version, though, was the regular release.
There are a lot of different Sgt. Pepper bootlegs floating around, of course, yet it's well known that there were no leftover songs from those sessions. Nothing that even turned up on Anthology 2. Apart from "Strawberry Fields", "Penny Lane" and "Northern Song", all released elsewhere, what they recorded, ended up on the album. So the bootlegs tend to be slightly different edits of the songs, usually with the odd layer or two removed.
The great Beatles goldmines, of course, are the early days when they more or less recorded every song ever written, and then the Get Back sessions, albeit on the latter the quality of the gold was pretty ropey.
'You don't have an Alternate Sgt. Pepper?' I threw over the shop at the guy.
I already had the Alternate Sgt. Pepper at home anyway. What I was really looking for was the Alternate Alternate Sgt. Pepper. The one that had five guys standing in brightly coloured, shiny tunics, the Jigsaw Man in the middle.
Not that that was going to help me find him over forty years later.
'Who's asking?' he said, which was a bit of an odd thing to say.
I'd kind of glanced over when I'd asked the question, but now I put the album back in its slot and walked over towards him.
'What d'you mean?' I asked.
'I gotta be careful,' he said. 'Sometimes I get the Feds in here asking questions about where I gets my stock from. Sometimes they don't like what I'm selling, says it ain't legal 'n' all.'
'You have masses of bootlegs out on display,' I said, indicating the shelves. 'The Alternate Sgt. Pepper can't be any more illegal than all that stuff.'
He barked out a rough laugh. His teeth were perfect movie star teeth, which seemed at odds with the huge beard and the enormous girth. I wondered if this man, right here in front of me, could be the fourth Jigsaw Man. Why not? Great disguise, covering your entire face in hair and then growing so large that you just looked like some huge generic American dude, your face podgy and distorted out of recognition.
'Do I look like I'm with the Feds?' I asked.
'D'you think they send guys in suits into places like this?' he countered.
'Probably not,' I said, 'but seriously, I'm not with the Feds.'
'That's all right then, son, I'll just go right ahead and believe you. What's your name?'
'James Kite,' I said.
'Hmm,' he said, the sound almost dismissive. 'You mean like Tom Kite, the golfer?'
I didn't follow golf.
'I guess.'
Then he let out a strangely high-pitched little snort of a laugh, or at least, it seemed strange coming from his large frame.
'Kite,' he said. 'Like Mr Kite, in the song. Nice.'
He grunted, then started running his hand down his beard as he considered the fact that he was talking to someone called Kite, which seemed to be of interest to him.
'You ever heard of the Jigsaw Man?' I asked.
He grunted again.
'That's what you're looking for, is it?' he said.
'What d'you mean?'
'You asked for the Alternate Sgt. Pepper bootleg, so you're looking for the Jigsaw Man. But that bootleg's not what you're after.'
I shook my head. It wasn't, after all. It didn't mean that I actually knew what I was after. Since I had no idea what that was, I thought it best to say as little as possible and hope that the guy with the beard filled the gaps. Some people don't like silence, and usually it's a good idea to use that fact.
Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite! Page 20