by F. G. Cottam
Her computer powered up. Her homepage clarified. But before she could look for anything, her phone began to ring.
It was Carter Melville. He said, ‘Couldn’t turn in without asking you how it played out tonight, honey.’
‘It’s only just after eleven. I didn’t think people in your world turned in anywhere near so early.’
‘Give me a break, baby,’ he said. ‘I’m close to seventy years of age.’
She nodded, thinking about this. Melville had once been the same age as his best friend Martin Mear, who still looked slender and beautiful on the posters and on celluloid and who had never and never would reach the age of twenty-eight. She said, ‘I’ve been thinking about April and Paula and Terry.’
‘That would be Sir Terence, to you.’
‘I can kind of understand why they’re prepared to break their silence.’
‘It’s because the project has integrity. It’s the last, definitive word.’
‘What I can’t understand is why they’re prepared to speak to me. I’m nobody. Don’t they want some famous rock journalist with a heavyweight by-line?’
‘Celebrity writers bring agendas, Ruthie. They have opinions of their own and the egos to want to channel those opinions stridently through their subjects. They’re victims of their own myth, too often mired in their own bullshit.’
‘So basically I’ll just be transcribing statements.’
‘You’re misunderstanding me. You can ask any of them any questions you want. I’m just trusting you to ask the right questions for the right reasons and they will be too because I’ve told them that and because they’ve seen your resume.’
‘Martin doesn’t strike me as all that black and white.’
Melville paused before replying. He said, ‘And you haven’t answered my question. How did it play out tonight?’
‘It was odd, Mr Melville.’
‘Carter, baby, please.’
‘It was odd, Carter. It was scary too.’ She told him what had happened, its apparent effect on the medium, her suspicion that the event had been both genuine and unprecedented.
Again, he hesitated before saying anything. Then he said, ‘Cold feet?’
‘Not at all,’ she said.
‘Cool. That’s my girl. Sweet dreams, Ruthie.’
She reached for the curtain behind her monitor, stretching over the width of the table to open it a chink and look at the night. Rain, made silent by double-glazing, spattered on the outer pane. It dribbled and blurred the view.
She looked to where Veronica’s car was parked, on the street below, and frowned because she thought she saw the green light glowing under her dashboard that would signal the CD player was switched on and playing the contents of its slot loader to an audience of no one. It was a trick of the light, night refraction, some random collusion of neon and wet glass. What would be the point, otherwise? She didn’t know all that much about magic, but she assumed that its practice required some sort of purpose.
FIVE
King Lud had been written and recorded over the late summer of 1969. Martin had got the money from somewhere – Ruthie would eventually have to try to determine exactly from where – to hire mobile studio equipment and set it up in a derelict house on the edge of Brightstone Forest on Wight. Ruthie learned this thinking Mear’s Wight connections were strengthening in her mind and then remembering Michael Aldridge’s words about fate.
Playing all the instruments himself, he laid down the album’s seven songs on a four-track tape machine and got an engineer he knew at Abbey Road to mix the finished record before having a thousand copies pressed.
Someone from the Shaftesbury hippy commune where his daughter had been conceived contributed the cover artwork. He persuaded a handful of influential record shops to take and display a few copies. Within a week the entire production run had sold out and they were re-pressing as fast as four plants given over to the job could stamp and package the discs.
The King Lud of the title was a legendary ancient King of London, and London, at various times in its rich history, provided the thematic basis of the album. ‘The Ruler’s Return’, the track to which Ruthie thought she heard the intro at the séance, wasn’t about this titular king. It was a song about a druidic high priest returning by barge up the Thames to the capital at the time of the Roman occupation.
His mission was to enchant the occupiers, who had driven out the old religion, filling their minds with poisonous dreams so they died as they slept in the night. The drone was meant to symbolize a druidic death march. Instruments producing such sounds had been used at their ceremonies of human sacrifice. The Ruler of the old faith in England was about to sacrifice his enemies and the drone delivered him and their impending deaths. The cymbal clash marked the rude moment of departure from mortal life.
It was grim stuff. It was no more sinister than the folkloric material Fairport Convention had interpreted on their landmark album Liege and Lief. That release too would deal with witchcraft and curses and the restlessness of those who still stirred beyond their mortal death. But the house in Brightstone Forest had been huge and derelict with a bad reputation. Martin had been there alone, without the provision of heating or lighting, when he wrote and recorded King Lud. Little wonder the music evoked the mood it did.
These thoughts ran through Ruthie’s ruminating mind early on Saturday morning. She hadn’t hit Veronica’s Chablis bottle hard the previous night. She’d slept surprisingly well. Veronica wasn’t there, had slipped off for a long weekend in Normandy with her French boyfriend leaving for St Pancras and the Eurostar straight from work. She was alone there and would be until Monday evening.
She turned her attention back to her computer. She sourced and read a few feature articles about Frederica Daunt. Their character was essentially soft and sympathetic. She was not made to look in any of them like a crank or a fraud, profiteering from the gullibility intense grief tended to inflict on those mourning lost loved ones.
Instead she was portrayed as a sensitive and compassionate woman putting a selfless gift at the disposal of those who needed it most.
She had a connection in life with Martin Mear. Or at least, she claimed she did. Her father, Sebastian Daunt, had been a member of an artists’ colony in Dorset, not far from the Dorset town of Shaftesbury in the 1960s. He had done the cover artwork for the Ghost Legion debut, King Lud. At least, he claimed he had. There was no design credit on the sleeve.
‘Small world,’ Ruthie said to her screen, aloud.
The Martin Mear who came to the medium to communicate from the other side did not deliver portents of droning death, either. He sounded sweet and harmless and as devoted to Frederica as might be a surrogate son.
Did the dead not age? Ruthie supposed they didn’t. Alive, Martin would be two decades older than the medium who’d described his puppyish visitations. But he wasn’t alive, was he? He was and would always be twenty-seven, like Hendrix and Jim Morrison, both of whom he had known in life and it was said had rubbed along with pretty well.
Whatever, the ghostly Martin experiences described by Frederica in these interviews bore no relation to the sinister event Ruthie had experienced in Chiswick the previous evening. Her instinct was that this stuff was all wishful thinking intended to generate trade and that what she had undergone, by contrast, was a real and powerful psychic experience.
The obvious, further and uncomfortable conclusion was that it had been staged specifically for her. Martin Mear had never bothered to conjure a posthumous performance such she’d endured for the sole benefit of the medium. She wanted to call Frederica Daunt and have that suspicion denied or more likely confirmed, but she’d left the woman in no condition to chat casually on the phone and anyway, it was too early in the morning to try to interrogate her yet.
She thought Sebastian Daunt’s artists’ colony probably the same ramshackle commune of hippie caravans at which April’s mother had lived back in the days before her premature death. Martin had bee
n familiar with that place. It might have even been a sort of second home for someone intent on living the life of a performing artist intent on pushing the boundaries of convention to their limits. It was where he had learned to play his guitar before a public of sorts. It was where he had extemporized musically and first encountered sex and probably drugs and their impact on his own burgeoning creativity.
King Lud had not come out of a vacuum. It had come out of an isolated and abandoned mansion on Wight, a place allegedly haunted on the edge of a gloomy wood, remote from the nearest habitation. Ruthie decided that she would fetch the disc from the car and give it another listen. The CD sounded much fuller than the music file of it on her phone. There was more detail, more of what audiophiles termed bandwidth. And Veronica’s flat housed a high-end hi fi system, all Naim components lovingly assembled in Salisbury and bought a few years earlier with one of Veronica’s auction-house bonuses.
She was humming the melodies from the album an hour later as she brewed her mid-morning coffee quite able to see how it had become so successful. As the 1960s reached their end, as pop aged and evolved into rock, it had answered the unspoken need for something deeper and more beguiling than what the Beatles and Beach Boys clones were churning out at the moment of its release. It had seized and defined a mood no one had known until then was upon the record-buying public.
The success of King Lud enabled Martin Mear to recruit the musicians of his choosing as band members. They were a conventional enough foursome; with a rhythm section of bassist and drummer and a keyboard player on piano, organ and later Mellotron. Martin sang lead vocal and played lead guitar. In either role, he suffered by comparison with no one.
Ruthie had only just finished her coffee when Frederica called her, agreeing to see her at three o’clock the same afternoon, on neutral ground at a riverside pub at Barnes. It was the weekend and therefore Ruthie assumed a day off for her. This was a presumption though that felt immediately foolish, because the notion that the dead paid strict attention to the calendar seemed absurd. The medium sounded improbably bright on the phone and Ruthie was slightly surprised to discover they were now on first-name terms.
‘Standing on ceremony seems a bit pointless after last night’s occurrences.’
‘I suppose it does.’
‘You saw me at my worst. I’ve never been reduced to such a state. Sorry about the blood.’
‘I’ve never been particularly bothered by the sight of blood. Also, I wasn’t the one doing the bleeding,’ Ruthie said.
‘You were exceptionally kind.’
Ruthie didn’t know what to say. She said, ‘Maybe I’m a kind person.’
‘I don’t doubt that you are. It’s one of the reasons I’ve agreed to meet you today.’
The sun shone palely on the Barnes afternoon. Sixes and eights toiled over their oars, barked at through megaphones out on the still water. It was warm enough for them to sit outside in the pub garden, which sloped down to the river’s edge. Frederica wore her hair down, loosely brushed, and was slender in boot-cut jeans and a hacking jacket. She lit a cigarette and exhaled smoke and smiled. She looked younger than she had the previous evening. Her eyes sparkled, but her nostrils were still pinkly edged.
‘The first thing you need to know is that I’m not a fraud.’
Ruthie thought about saying that the suspicion hadn’t occurred to her, but it would be a blatant and obvious lie. So she didn’t say anything, merely nodding in response.
‘I’ve exaggerated my gift. The gift is real enough. I feel the presence of the dead and sometimes believe they communicate with the living through me.’
Again, Ruthie restricted herself to a nod.
‘I’ve never had any complaints from people trying to contact their loved ones on the other side. There is another side, you see, Ruthie, and as often as not the dead seek contact with the same ardour as the living.’
Ardour. In this context, the word seemed more than distasteful, almost obscene. ‘Why do they?’
Frederica shrugged. She tapped ash into the circle of foil provided for the purpose on the table. She said, ‘They do so because their deaths have been violent, or unexplained, or just abrupt, because they’re premature. They do so because there’s a need for closure.’
‘And Martin Mear?’
She smiled. She looked up at the sky and then out over the river. She ground out her cigarette. She said, ‘In my entire professional life, two fairly famous inhabitants of the spirit world have contacted me with a degree of consistency. They are the ballerina Juliet Devereaux and the romance writer Dorothy Harrington.’
‘You made up Martin Mear?’
‘I think last night proved pretty conclusively that I didn’t make up Martin Mear.’
‘But you fabricated contact with him?’
Frederica lit another cigarette. She said, ‘I needed someone dark and glamorous. It’s a precarious living. Dorothy Harrington wouldn’t have got me the exposure, bless her. Martin Mear did.’
‘It’s interesting that you chose to present him so sympathetically.’
‘He was sexy and enigmatic and the whole world has heard of him.’
‘He’s as much notorious as famous, though.’
‘Making him out to be a good soul provoked interest. There’d have been no point, otherwise.’
‘You might have been completely misrepresenting him.’
Frederica shrugged. She said, ‘There’s dark and light in everyone. My dad really did know him, really did provide the artwork for the first Ghost Legion record. He liked Martin, wouldn’t have obliged like that if he hadn’t.’
‘But last night was the first contact with his spirit you’d regard as genuine?’
‘It was. And he chose to expose us to the darkness.’
‘Is that the reason you’re telling me this? You aren’t just telling me because you think I was kind to you last night.’
‘I’m telling you because I think I’m obliged to. I think he’s taken exception to the deception, if you will. I’m telling you because I suspect if I didn’t do so, he’d pay me another visit and I wouldn’t honestly relish that prospect.’
‘Your secret’s safe with me,’ Ruthie said. ‘I’ve no interest in exposing this. I’ll just omit you completely from my research. My job’s to verify facts, after all. It’s only facts I’m being paid for. I’ll assume you’re giving up on Martin? On the pretence of Martin, I mean?’
Frederica didn’t answer that question. She toyed with her cigarette packet, turning it like a fat playing card between her fingers. She said, ‘He’s extremely powerful, frighteningly so. There’s more than darkness, there’s some kind of turmoil there on a scale I sensed last night was nothing short of vast. You need to tread very carefully, Ruthie. This is quite something you’ve taken on.’
Saturdays were no different really to Paula Tort from any other day. The volume of work she had, the number of balls she juggled, the fact that she was where the buck stopped; all of this meant that she never really relaxed. That was how she liked things. She didn’t delegate anything important. She employed capable people, but she made every single important business decision she faced.
It was years since she’d given any serious thought to this. She was ambitious and she’d proven in her character to be something of a perfectionist. But she had been thinking a lot recently about Martin. Her years with Martin, she thought, her place in his story, had been the spur that drove her business success from the outset.
She’d discussed it with April, only the other day. It was a big deal, breaking the silence of what seemed like a lifetime. It threatened to bring the sort of naked exposure that she thought made both of them understandably nervous.
She was in her studio, editing a fashion shoot, selecting the twelve pictures the editors would be sent and the four they would use for the spring women’s-wear ad campaign. Except that her mind was half on Martin while the images flashed sequentially on the large screen in front of her.
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br /> Those days seemed a world distant from the present. People thought of it all as the apogee of depravity, the last word in decadence, rock stars as powerful as medieval kings and with fortunes and fawning retinues just as large, indulging their divine right to rule everything that surrounded them.
And it had been like that. There had been the drugs and the sex and the scary sensation-seeking that brought them into contact with all sorts of mystical shit. There’d been a swaggering, exotic, self-destructive sense of intoxication. But there’d also been a perverse sense of innocence back then, a quality that the modern world simply wouldn’t comprehend. Martin had been as idealistic as he was corrupt, as purely artistic as he’d been morally and physically tainted. That was the truth, but it was a complicated truth she thought people now would never be able to appreciate.
She’d return the call made to her by Ruthie Gillespie. She’d meet the woman and answer the questions posed by Carter Melville’s researcher. But she’d never get that across about the man she had loved. Martin would remain contradictory and somehow always teasingly beyond the focused clarity of objective truth. At least he would, taken out of his own time.
She watched the images wink and shutter seductively across the screen in her darkened studio. The photographer had done a good job. The shoot had been done in Thailand, not for the weather or the scenery, because it was a beach shoot and logistically, somewhere like the coast of Spain or Bahia California would have been far less complex and probably cheaper options.
The shoot had been done where it had because the photographer was exiled there, a fugitive from child-porn charges he didn’t wish to face in a European court. He was a very good photographer and everyone, despite these allegations, still went to the expense of trekking out to South-East Asia to use him.