by Brian Aldiss
His was a melancholy room. The ruin of the abbey cast per-manent shadows into it. A light bulb burned overhead, picking out in sickly detail a profusion of birds and small animals which covered the walls. Rough shelving housed these stuffed mementoes of the living world outside; wherever one looked, dead eyes glinted. A well-loaded bookcase stood in one corner. Table and chairs and two old battered armchairs completed the furnishing. The room lacked, as they say, a woman’s touch; despite the fire, it felt cold and damp, and smelt of old seaweed, as if high tide had been known to lap over the threshold of the door – a not unlikely assumption, I reflected.
A kitchen led off on one side, its door standing halfway open. A dog barked sporadically there, as if tied up and not hopeful of improving its position. I looked in that direction, to find two pairs of eyes observing me; two heads were immediately withdrawn.
As I rose, I saw that a loaf of bread and the leavings of a poor meal lay on the table, together with a dead seabird. The seabird was stretched out on a board with its pinions taped outspread and its gizzard slit open.
Howe came awkwardly back from the door and sat at the table, where he proceeded to finish a mess of bread, cheese and pickle on his plate. As if aware of a certain social boorishness in what he was doing, he glanced up at me and gave a jerk of his head, coupled with a quick funny expression and a wink, as if to say, ‘This is the way I am.’
Drawing myself up, I said, ‘I take it that you are Mr Albert Howe, sole surviving parent of the twins, Thomas and Barry Howe.’
‘Tom and Barry, that’s right. The twins. I expect you’d like a cup of tea. Robbie! Tea, gel!’
This last call was echoed by activity in the kitchen, and presently a girl came forth with a big brown teapot. Setting it down on the table, she poured a mug of tea and shyly proffered it to me.
She was a good-looking girl in a countrified way, with big hazel eyes and a complexion as brown as her father’s. Her hair was plentiful, hanging down between her shoulder blades in an old-fashioned plait or pigtail. Like her brothers, she wore faded jeans and went barefoot, a slovenly habit, especially in women. Her figure was well developed; I judged her to be twenty years of age.
There was less unfriendliness in her gaze than in her father’s. As I accepted the mug of tea and sat down, unbidden, at the table beside the impaled bird, she said, ‘So you are the lawyer as has come to take my brothers away.’
I patted the briefcase I had brought with me. ‘I am acting on behalf of Bedderwick Walker Entertainments, with whom I understand your father is keen to come to an agreement. I have a copy of the contract here, Mr Howe, and will be happy to familiarize you with its contents. We can go over it clause by clause, if you so desire, provided I am able to meet Stebbings and his boat at your jetty in approximately two hours’ time.’
Howe crammed the last of his crust into his mouth, masticated for a while, and then said, ‘It’s for the best, Robbie, I keep a-telling you. The boys can’t hang around here for ever and a day, not now’s they’re growed up.’
‘That’s correct,’ I said, snapping open the briefcase. ‘The contract guarantees you and your sons a substantial salary, payable monthly, for a period of three years. It gives Bedderwick Walker the option of renewal of contract for a further two years, at a fee subject to negotiation. Bearing in mind that Bedderwick Walker will invest a considerable amount of money in training and projecting your sons, the arrangements are eminently generous.’
‘You’re still taking my brothers away from home,’ said the girl. ‘Who will look after them, I’d like to know.’
Ignoring her, I spread the contract out before Howe, pushing aside the butter and a jar of pickle.
‘I trust that your sons are ready to return to London with me?’
‘They’re willing enough to go, yes.’
He looked up with a helpless expression, and said to his daughter, ‘Robbie, see as they’re all packed, will you?’
As Howe picked up the contract to study it, I saw his hand was shaking. He had well-shaped hands, with long fingers. He watched Robbie as, without another word, she padded into the kitchen on her bare feet.
‘It’s hard to know what’s best, Mr …’ he said gazing at the dead bird as if addressing it. ‘May and I got on so well, we helped each other with everything as came up. That’s her in the photo over there.’
He pointed to a framed photograph of his dead wife, standing on the mantelpiece. A sepia face stared out at the world from under a large hat.
‘I’m sure she would be happy with the contract as it stands.’
Still he wouldn’t bring his attention back to the document.
‘That May was a very fine woman,’ he said. ‘One of the best, that she was.’
I offered no comment.
‘It wasn’t my fault she died. Nor did I ought to really blame the lads for her death, because they couldn’t help coming into the world the way they was. Though I feel bitter at times … Anyone would. I took up taxidermy when she went – got just about every bird as ever visits the Head pinned up here on my walls, Mister … Though I haven’t got a roseate tern, which is uncommon scarce these days …’
He managed this speech with another comic face, giving me another wink and a jerk of the head as he changed the subject away from his dead wife, almost as if he were making fun of himself. The effect was somehow as sinister as it was ludicrous, and I directed his attention to the contract.
We went through the document carefully, Howe showing himself to be less foolish than his gauche social manner suggested. In my profession, I am accustomed to dealing with people who live solely for money. Albert Howe, I discerned, was indifferent to it; he wanted a fair future for his sons and believed he had secured one; the question of remuneration was a minor one to him. This factor alone set him apart from ninety per cent of the population.
As he signed the copies of the contract, the daughter appeared again, wearing a torn plastic apron over her jeans. She began to clear the table.
‘The boys are ready, Dad,’ she said. She sniffed as if she had been weeping.
‘Come forth, lads, don’t be shy!’ called Howe, jerking his head.
The dog barked in the kitchen, and Tom and Barry came forth.
Contrary to my expectations, the twins were conveyed to London without difficulty. They loitered on the way to the jetty but raised no objection to climbing into Stebbings’ boat when it arrived. They waved farewell to their sister in rather a perfunctory fashion.
As previously arranged, the car awaiting me at Deepdale Staithe conveyed us straight to London; I surmised that a rail journey might have its difficulties. Apart from visits to hospital and one appearance on a medical programme on BBC TV (the appearance which had inspired Zak Bedderwick to sign them up), the Howe twins had scarcely left L’Estrange Head, never mind Norfolk, until now. The journey passed without incident. They were interested in everything, especially when we entered the environs of London. It was dark when I deposited them at Zak Bedderwick’s flat.
The car then drove me to my own apartment, where I was glad to take a sherry and a warm bath, and play myself Telemann sonatas.
Zak Bedderwick was every inch a business man. He was successful in the competitive world of pop music, and would have been equally successful in banking or oil. As such, he was in my opinion a rarity. Most of the big names in his field can grasp neither their own business nor rock-and-roll. At this time, there was nobody to rival his flair or the range of his activities.
He had appointed a manager by the name of Nick Sidney to concentrate on the Howe twins and lick them into promotable shape. The twins stayed in Zak’s flat overnight and no longer. The next morning, Nick Sidney arrived promptly at ten o’clock and took them down to Humbleden. I doubt if Zak ever saw them personally after that occasion; like everyone else, he had a morbid curiosity to inspect Siamese twins at first hand; once that curiosity was satisfied, his interest was purely financial.
The rest of the story
hardly involves me. Bedderwick Walker was not my only concern, and at this period I became increasingly involved with a lawsuit pending over the nefarious actions of a certain Foreign Affairs Minister of a certain African state.
In any case, little news filtered out of Humbleden. Humbleden had been designed for that end.
Humbleden was one of Zak’s country places. It was a grand Georgian mansion (with part of an earlier Tudor manor still preserved) standing in two hundred acres of ground with its own private lake and airstrip and a view across the Solent. What went on there was nobody’s business. All the same, rumours trickled out.
Nick Sidney’s training methods were known to be rather rigorous. He was a man in his late thirties, thick-set and running slightly to fat, with a shock of greasy curly hair. He had been a second division football team manager before becoming first a disc jockey and then part of Zak Bedderwick’s entourage.
Sidney went to work immediately on the Howe twins. He got them cleaned up and groomed and suitably dressed, and christened them officially with their professional name, the Bang-Bang. Tom and Barry Bang-Bang.
Musical training commenced the day after they arrived at Humbleden. There were one or two second-string Bedderwick groups which Sidney could have used for backing. Instead, he chose a heavier group, the Noise, then being led by the guitarist and songwriter, Paul Day.
The Noise was in some disarray. Morale was low ever since its leader, Chris Dervish, committed suicide by driving his Charger Daytona into Datchet Reservoir immediately following a Noise concert in the Albert Hall. The Noise wanted a new image and a new direction; the Bang-Bang wanted a new noise. The two went together.
Nick Sidney had virtually built the Noise and their multimillion dollar success story, as well as Gibraltar before that, and he set to work with a will on licking his new team into shape. He had to begin at the beginning, by teaching the Howe twins to play a few basic chords on guitar and to project their singing voices. Fortunately, the twins – like every other youngster on the globe – were familiar with the conventions of pop. They disliked being prisoners of Humbleden; they had no objection to becoming prisoners of fame.
Their rages, their frequent outbreaks of recalcitrance, were dealt with by Nick Sidney with the zest he had shown towards Nottingham Albion. On the one end of the scale, he employed cold water hoses and a new-fangled electronic stun gun; on the other, he employed the more traditional lures where pop groups were concerned, the three Ds of the trade: drugs, drink and dollies.
Despite these inducements, progress was slow. I saw Zak on one occasion, just after he had returned from what he always termed ‘the Manor’. Zak was quietly fuming at the lack of response from the Howe twins. I recommended sending for the sister, Robbie or Roberta, of whom the twins were obviously fond, to see if that improved matters, but Zak brushed the suggestion aside. He wanted the Bang-Bang to sink themselves into their new roles, not to be reminded of the old ones. A preliminary tour for the Bang-Bang, on a Northern circuit and with a tie-in with Scottish television, was already scheduled for a few months ahead. As far as Bedderwick Walker were concerned, the operation had to start earning back its investment as soon as possible – any refinements to the act could come later, etc., etc. Of course I had listened to similar talk many times before. Training hooligans to bellow and strum was nothing new in the music business. Nor was failing to do so necessarily an obstacle to a profitable career.
But the day came when my gogglephone gonged and Zak’s face looked out at me, voicing a new complaint.
‘Henry, hi. You know of a magazine called Sense and Society?’
‘I do. One of the Humanistic Sanity group of magazines. Left wing, of course. Circulation not more than 25,000 a month. Influential among middle-of-road socialist circles, you might say. What of it?’
‘I’ve just had an anonymous phone call. Sense and Society have time-tabled for future publication an article on the exploitation of teenagers by the middle-aged, treating them as another underprivileged minority. The article will instance pop groups and make particular mention of the use of freaks to attract live audiences, complete with details of cruel training methods, including use of electronic weapons. How do we stop them?’
‘That shouldn’t be difficult. Humanistic Sanity depend for their liquidity on voluntary contributions, including a substantial one from the Borghese Tobacco Corporation, who happen to be clients of ours. Will the information in this proposed article come within appreciable distance of being accurate?’
‘That’s what I’m afraid of. It’s being written up by a woman.’
‘I’m sure you can manage that better than I.’
‘This isn’t just a dolly, Henry. She’s old. Thirty-five. You know her name. Laura Ashworth. Dervish’s girlfriend. Daughter of the clergyman who was in the news a few years ago.’
‘I recall.’
‘She’s a contributor to Sense and Society or whatever the damned thing’s called. You know how she hates me, silly bitch. If she lets out some of the murkier details – particularly if she links the Bang-Bang’s name with Chris Dervish – as well she might – then our goose is cooked just as our publicity machine gets into gear. Ashworth could do us a moderate amount of damage. I want you to get her off our necks.’
While he was making threatening noises, I was thinking. Laura Ashworth was an emotional woman. She thought reasonably clearly until her adrenalin started flowing. There were ways of getting it flowing again which could guarantee she never wrote her article.
‘I don’t see why we should have to trouble the Borghese Tobacco Corporation, Zak. You have trouble with the Howe twins and you have trouble with Ashworth. Why not put the two sides together and see if the problems don’t iron themselves out? I suggest you entice Ashworth on to your payroll and despatch her forthwith to Humbleden. She will not be able to resist the chance of reliving some of her former glories.’
That was how it worked out. Ashworth accepted Zak’s offer. Whatever her intentions were about discovering ‘the truth’ about Humbleden – which she knew from Chris Dervish’s time – may never be revealed. A friend of mine wrote a letter to the editor of Sense and Society asking him if he knew that one of his female contributors had taken up employment with a right-wing organization with considerable interests in the Bedderwick Development Corporation, whose exploitation of black labour in Africa and Sri Lanka was well known. Miss Ashworth’s connection with that journal was speedily terminated.
In Laura Ashworth’s background lay an involved story which I have no intention of relating here. Suffice it to say that she was the only daughter of a Church of England clergyman who later abandoned the cloth, and that she had no real place in society. She was one of those drifters our age so characteristically throws up. Equally characteristically, she gravitated towards the pop world – one of those homes for drifters where the inmates have taken over the asylum.
At one time, Laura Ashworth had held a post in a Department of Abnormal Psychology in a northern polytechnic, after which she had qualified as a prison probationer attached to an open prison – another home for society’s drifters. Whilst at the prison, she had encountered Chris Dervish, who was there serving a sentence for drug smuggling a considerable quantity of heroin from Bahrain.
It was at this stage of her life that Ashworth got herself divorced from her college professor husband, one Charlie Rickards, reverted to her maiden name, and devoted herself to Dervish. When Dervish emerged from prison – and of course his stretch in the nick merely enhanced the glamour of his image with his particular public – he reformed the Noise and went on two extravagantly successful tours of the States and Scandinavia. Ashworth went with him. As her enemies liked to point out, Ashworth was almost exactly twice Dervish’s age. But she had stamina. She survived Los Angeles and Stockholm and all the godless cities in between, and lived to return with him to the relative peace of Humbleden when the tours were over. I was always mystified as to how she avoided finishing up in Datchet
Reservoir with him.
Some claimed that Ashworth’s influence on Dervish had a stabilizing effect, others that it was she who drove him to take his life. Nick Sidney informed me that she had a disruptive effect on the Noise as a group, by which I took him to mean merely that she was par-ticular with whom she slept. Be all that as it may, and it is pointless to bring charges where evidence is incomplete, Dervish was a psy-chotic from the word go. For all his ranting before the microphones, in private he was an inadequate little wet. Which made Datchet Reservoir a not unsuitable terminus for his existence, whether or not Ashworth was involved.
How the members of the group would take to her reappearance, I had no means of judging. That was not my problem. The vital thing at this juncture was that she should not raise any adverse publicity concerning the Bang-Bang in the media, when Zak’s plans were maturing. I let Zak get on with it and returned to my African lawsuit. He was running the freak-show, not I.
The tale of corruption in high places which I was investigating was not then public knowledge. A few newspapers had begun to leak circumspect stories dealing with one aspect or another of the scandal: some charges facing a British Cabinet Minister, the dismissal of the head of an international contracting firm, the disappearance of a well-known architect. The trial still lay some months ahead when I was flown out to the West African state of Kanzani on behalf of Beauchamp-Fielding Associates. I was able to question some Kanzani politicians. The Minister of Health himself drove me out secretly to the chief item of evidence in the case.
Fifty kilometres from the nearest river, two hundred and fifty kilometres from any township worthy of the name, we arrived at our destination in the bush. There stood a great disconsolate white building, its tiers of windows shuttered like closed eyes, its portico already in a state of collapse. This was the multimillion dollar hospital built merely to line the pockets of a few avaricious men. The main structure had been completed. Nearby, the foundations of an X-ray unit lay open to the sky. Goats wandered about the builders’ rubble.