by F. G. Cottam
‘Personally?’
‘I’ve served a life term, Ruthie. Do the crime, do the time. No complaints. But I’ve been deprived of the people I love, and it’s been worse for them and for forty years I’ve thought I’d die this way. Figured we all would. Die, lonely and alone.’
‘But now you’ve been born again.’
‘When I opened the door to this cottage and saw you standing in front of it, I thought everything was over. Finished, right there and then. But it’s only now starting. Thanks to you.’
‘All told,’ Ruthie said, ‘I think it’s only what you deserve, Martin.’
There was a guitar leaning against the wall by the cottage door. It was acoustic, and the lacquered varnish of the body was worn away in patches with use. This instrument seemed more poised than recumbent where he’d leant it, to Ruthie. As though it was only waiting patiently for its moment as this scene between the two of them played out. He saw her looking at it and went across and picked it up. He put its strap over his shoulder and gripped the neck with his left hand and strummed the strings with his right thumb. The sound resonated with loud clarity between stone walls. The instrument sounded perfectly tuned. Martin Mear cleared his throat with a cough.
‘Any requests, before we leave, Ruthie?’ he said. ‘You might have to forgive a little rustiness. It’s a very long time since I last got to play to an audience.’
She wanted to cry, when he said that. Instead, she went across and he put the guitar back down and she hugged him, and he hugged her hard in return. She held on until the sobs stopped shaking him.
THIRTY-THREE
Eddie Coyle was extremely pleased with the way the rehearsal went. They weren’t going to call the installation at the V&A a Clamouring event, but that’s what it was in all but name. Six sumptuously high-end belt-driven Rega turntables, each equipped with an SME tone arm and an Ortofon cartridge, all wired to play ‘Cease All Mourning’ simultaneously as the punters filed past the artefacts so painstakingly gathered together by Carter Melville for the forthcoming exhibition celebrating Martin Mear’s enigmatic life and splendidly inglorious times.
Krell integrated amplifiers. Martin Logan electrostatic speakers. No-expense-spared kit, which Carter would gain a large dose of very public kudos from, in donating it all to a list of strategically chosen inner-city schools and orphanages once the exhibition wrapped up at the end of January. He could afford the gesture, Eddie thought. The show was a sell-out. Ghost Legion dead were an even bigger draw than they’d been alive. Ticket sales had earned four and a half mill and counting. Merchandise might bring the eventual profit up to around the six million pounds mark.
Carter was talking about touring the exhibition. New York, Barcelona, Paris, Milan – maybe Rio and Beijing. It would keep Eddie a busy man throughout next year, he thought. And his contribution was flawless, the synchronicity perfect, the overall effect with 800 watts of power produced by each of the Krells almost overwhelming in its weight and detail, the width and depth of its soundstage, the energy and clarity and sheer, brutal melodic force. Music could move you. And it could remind even Eddie Coyle afresh of just how good a band the Legion had been; of the energy and drive they’d possessed, their unstoppable, hypnotic, relentless propulsion. Man, they’d fucking rocked.
Afterwards, after the adrenal rush and precise calibration of setting up and triggering everything just right, after the triumphant glow of getting it all absolutely perfectly on time, on song, on the nail – Eddie needed a drink to calm himself down, a liquid sedative self-administered somewhere quiet where he could reflect on his achievement in anonymity. The opening chord of the song reverberated through his mind. He couldn’t get it out of his mind. Martin had originated that chord, had come up with it, so the legend insisted, at a recording session at the studio on Eel Pie Island in the middle of the Thames at four o’clock in the morning.
Martin had played it and James Prentice had named it. Christened it, if that wasn’t sacrilegious, because Prentice had dubbed it the Lucifer Chord. The nice, well-spoken, expensively educated and delightfully cooperative staff at the V&A probably didn’t know that and weren’t going to hear it from Eddie Coyle, but he believed the story to be true. Lots of the stories about the Legion were fanciful and some were utter bullshit, but that one had about it the ring of authenticity.
The chord itself had been played on a red sunburst solid-bodied Gibson Les Paul guitar given to Martin by the man himself. Usually, Martin had played a white Fender Stratocaster, but he’d played the arguably more resonant and tuneful Les Paul recording ‘Cease All Mourning’ and the guitar had recently been valued by Christie’s at £800,000. It was proof to Eddie that the Legion’s excesses hadn’t died with them. But the vial of pure Colombian product in the breast pocket of his jacket was also proof of that. He was part of the Legion himself, he considered, one of the band’s rightful heirs, privy to the secrets, first-class ticket aboard the gravy train, front-row seats for the only show in town really worth seeing.
In the street between the V&A and the Kensington pub that was his destination, Eddie called Carter Melville. It was eight o’clock in the evening. Darkness had fallen, but it wasn’t late. He wanted Carter to know how well the rehearsal had gone. But Carter’s phone went straight to messages, which it had been doing now for a couple of days. That was a bit disappointing and a bit frustrating too, but it wasn’t unprecedented and didn’t really ring alarm bells.
On a whim, he rang Ruthie Gillespie. ‘I’ve perfected a rendition of the Clamouring,’ he said to her. ‘The synchronicity is fucking awesome. You need to hear it. It’s got to be referenced in the essay you’re writing. Just as a piece of performance art it’s honest to God flawless.’
‘Except I’m no longer writing the piece, Eddie,’ she said. ‘I’m off the project. No hard feelings. But I’m done with it.’
Eddie Coyle took a moment to process this. He said, ‘I lied to you, darling. Biker guy who grabbed your tits is one of my best buddies. We were at school together.’
‘I knew you were lying,’ she said.
‘I’d like to apologize sincerely for his abysmal taste in women.’
‘Goodbye, Eddie,’ Ruthie said. ‘It’s been a blast.’
Eddie Coyle felt a bit hollow after that. But he wasn’t going to let a vacuous goth bitch like Ruthie Gillespie rain on his parade. He’d just enjoyed one of the most creatively fulfilling experiences of his entire life. His status now was, as he’d just implied, surely that of performance artist. The Lucifer Chord was still reverberating around the echo chamber of his head. He reached the pub and ordered a bottle of champagne at the bar and then pondered on how discreet he’d need to be to get away with a fat line in the toilets. Not very, he didn’t think. It wasn’t the sort of pub that employed bouncers on its doors. The clientele was more an affluent trickle than an uncouth flood.
Carter had said he was paying the Gillespie bitch twenty large for the think-piece on the Legion. Eddie didn’t really understand how she could readily walk away from that. But then it occurred to him of course that she hadn’t walked away. She wasn’t up to the job was all, and Carter had fired her. It was probably why he wasn’t taking calls, he was looking for a short-notice replacement to write a crucial element of his pet project. It was a tall order. Eddie could help with that by texting him a couple of likely names.
The champagne went down quickly and well. He’d order another bottle when he got to his hotel suite. It was a boutique place, pricey but worth it. And he was expensing the cost of it entirely justifiably to Melville Enterprises.
He wasn’t the wealthy man he’d told the Gillespie bitch he was. His father, a louche figure at Mayfair’s blackjack tables back in the day, had dribbled away most of the family money gambling. The country house was grand, but heavily mortgaged. The land surrounding it, he’d had to lease out. But the exhibition, his part in it, stood to make Eddie so financially secure, he might have to elevate himself back to Edward. The Clamouring eve
nts had always been profitable for their principal organizer. With the travelling show, they stood to make him seriously rich.
Eddie got back to his suite buzzing slightly from the coke. He ordered his second bottle of champagne and drank it unable to concentrate fully on something almost surgically hardcore on the porn channel. He finally dropped off at just past 2 am having snacked half-heartedly on a bowl of pistachio nuts he thought might come back to haunt him in the small hours of the night. Though his final feeling before slipping from consciousness was one of unmitigated pleasure at just how immaculately the evening’s Clamouring rite had gone.
It was the smell that awoke him. The stink of decomposition smarted in Eddie Coyle’s nostrils and he blinked awake and looked at his wristwatch reluctant to breathe it in. It was 3 am. He’d slept for only an hour. His mouth was dry and the thud of a hangover reverberated dully already inside his skull. He sat up all at once aware of the dreadful conviction that he wasn’t alone in the room.
He could hear breathing that wasn’t his. A sort of wet-bellows clatter that was raggedly arrhythmic. There was an excited, aroused quality to the sound. In Eddie’s ears, it signalled a gleeful struggle.
He raised his head and saw that there was a seated figure in an armchair under a window opposite where he lay. He hadn’t closed the curtains fully after switching off the TV and there was enough ambient light in the room to see by, at least in a gloomy, black and white sort of way. At first, it looked to Eddie like his visitor was wearing a mask. His face appeared too pale and sort of granular to be made authentically of skin. Except that it moved and shifted, as though restless and somehow uncertain. Masks didn’t do that.
The stench was awful. Eddie’s eyes teared up with it. He wanted to heave, but was too afraid for his chest to permit the movement required for that. He was terrified, he realized, in the presence of this pasty, coarse featured, reeking intruder. He didn’t dare switch on the bedside light a foot from his trembling right hand. He was afraid of the detail that further illumination would reveal to him. His visitor’s hands were disconcerting. The fingers cradled in its lap appeared too long. Then their tips glinted bonily in a shutter flash of moonlight and Eddie realized it was their nails that gave the fingers their implausible length.
‘Who are you?’
‘You know who I am. At least, you know who I was.’
The voice to Eddie’s ears had a slurred, sloppy quality, like an approximation of speech, more an impersonation than the real thing.
‘What do you want?’
But recognition was dawning now in Eddie’s frightened mind. There was a familiarity about the mannerisms and the posture. The face and the voice were horribly incomplete and therefore wrong, but the figure was tall and thin and the velvet rags clothing his pale limbs was recognizable as the remnants of a suit he’d seen in photographs taken long ago. Decades ago, really. Before his own birth.
Eddie Coyle repeated, ‘What do you want?’
The odour was overpowering. It interfered with clear thought, miasmic, polluting, contagious in its corrupt, oozing potency.
The figure spoke again. ‘You’ve summoned me back without a soul, Eddie. So I’ve come for yours.’
Eddie Coyle swallowed. ‘You’re James Prentice.’
The figure in the armchair gurgled laughter. ‘Not quite. Not yet.’
‘You’re all wrong.’
That wet chuckle again. ‘It’s an imprecise science.’
Shienshe.
‘This is a dream, right?’
‘Of course it is, Eddie,’ the apparition said. ‘Just a bad dream.’
Ruthie Gillespie thought that April Mear’s reconciliation with her father would likely leave her friendship with Paula Tort intact despite the long decades of persistent deception. April would come to know that only faking his death had kept Martin alive. And that Martin’s survival was the consequence not only of Paula’s scheming, but of Paula’s subsequent, heartbreaking sacrifice.
She thought that Martin might remain in the Scottish Highlands, because he really did love all waste and solitary places. Or he might relocate to somewhere else quiet in the world, his name legally changed to something slightly less attention-grabbing than the one he had. He’d receive regular visitors there. Or he might share his home on a permanent basis. Paula was past retirement age, had nothing further to prove to herself or to anyone else, and was probably intent on making up for a great deal of lost time.
Ruthie didn’t honestly think Martin would perform publicly again. He had a voice he hadn’t used much in recent decades, so it was likely intact in its power and range. He’d still possess the physical dexterity to play the guitar. The talent wouldn’t have diminished. And he still possessed that extraordinary, high-voltage presence that seemed to charge the air in his orbit. He’d sell out stadia if he did decide to perform, either solo or with a replacement version of his original band as their front-man once again.
But Ruthie didn’t think he’d do it, for the same reason he’d never cut another record. His gift had been compromised and tainted. He’d heard his Master’s voice as his share of a corrupt bit of bargaining and his silence now was the price paid for sincerely repenting that. She thought now that he really had been capable at one time of levitation. That might have been the least of his accomplishments. She sensed he was afraid now of powers in which he’d once revelled because those powers were unnatural. Perhaps he’d fear that performing again might revive them. Permanent retirement was certainly a wiser option than a comeback seemed to be.
She was in Ventnor with Michael Aldridge, four days after reading about the apparent hotel suicide of Eddie Coyle, when she got a call from Frederica Daunt.
‘Dad’s received an invitation.’
‘All fathers love the prodigal,’ Ruthie said.
‘He’s beside himself. New lease of life. Asked me to thank you.’
‘I didn’t really do anything.’
‘We both of us know that’s not true,’ Frederica said.
‘I think most of it was fate, Freddie.’
‘Will you come and stay for a couple of weeks in the spring?’
‘If I’m invited,’ Ruthie said.
‘You’ve got a standing invitation.’ Then, ‘Anything going bump in your night?’
‘Yes. An architect unfamiliar with his new surroundings who can’t find the loo in the dark.’
That made Frederica laugh. But she still said, ‘Nothing else?’
‘It’s all stopped,’ Ruthie said, thinking, until the next time.
She’d taken the call outside the Spyglass Inn. The sunset had painted the water crimson where it descended out over a tranquil sea. Faraway yachts ploughed through the brine indifferent to all but their course. Michael was seated beside her, a serene expression on his face, watching it all, watching nature draw the curtain spectacularly on another autumnal day. A feeling had spread through her she thought might be wine-based, alcohol coursing merrily through her bloodstream, prompted on its path by her beating heart. It wasn’t the wine, though, she knew. It was her. And what she really felt, watching the orb on the horizon ripple in its descent, was a sweet and quite straightforward sort of contentment.