by Jonathan Coe
PENGUIN BOOKS
THE DWARVES OF DEATH
Jonathan Coe was born in Birmingham in 1961. His most recent novel is The Rain Before It Falls. He is also the author of The Accidental Woman, A Touch of Love, The Dwarves of Death, What a Carve Up!, which won the 1995 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, The House of Sleep, which won the 1998 Prix Médicis Étranger, The Rotters’ Club, winner of the Everyman Wodehouse Prize, and The Closed Circle. His biography of the novelist B.S. Johnson, Like a Fiery Elephant, won the 2005 Samuel Johnson Prize for best non-fiction book of the year. He lives in London with his wife and two children.
The Dwarves of Death
JONATHAN COE
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published by Fourth Estate Ltd 1990
First published in Penguin Books in 2001
This edition published 2008
Copyright © Jonathan Coe, 1990
All rights reserved
Cover design: gray318
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-191835-8
Thanks are due to the following people: Ralph Pite, for writing the words to ‘Madeline/Stranger In A Foreign Land’; Brian Priestley, for copying out ‘Tower Hill’ and teaching me most of what little I know about music; Michael Blackburn, for publishing ‘Middle Eight’ in the first issue of his Sunk Island Review; Janine McKeown, Paul Daintry, Andrew Hodgkiss and Tony Peake for inspiration and help; and Kinmor Music (publishers) and Tom Ross (translator) for permission to quote from ‘Fadachd an t-seòladair’ (‘The Sailor’s Longing’) by John McLennan: the version William hears as he stands outside Karla’s window being from Christine Primrose’s wonderful LP ’S tu nam chuimhne, available on Temple Records (TP024).
The epigraphs in this book are reproduced by kind permission of Warner Chappell Music Ltd. Words and music: Morrissey and Johnny Marr © Morrissey and Marr Songs Ltd.
Contents
Intro
Theme One
Theme Two
Middle Eight
Interlude
Solo
Turnaround
Key Change
Coda
Fade
Nuair chi mi eun a’ falbh air sgiath,
Bu mhiann leam bhith ’na chuideachd:
Gu’n deanainn cùrs’air tìr mo rùin,
Far bheil an sluagh ri fuireach.
Intro
this night has opened my eyes and I will never sleep again
MORRISSEY,
This Night Has Opened My Eyes
I find it hard to describe what happened.
It was late in the afternoon, on a far from typical London Saturday. Winter was mild that year, I remember, and although by 4.30 it was already good and dark, it wasn’t cold. Besides, Chester had the heater on. It was broken, and you either had it on full blast or not at all. The rush of hot air was making me sleepy. I don’t know if you know that feeling, when you’re in a car – and it doesn’t have to be a particularly comfortable car or anything – but you’re drowsy, and perhaps you’re not looking forward to the moment of arrival, and you feel oddly settled and happy. You feel as though you could sit there in that passenger seat for ever. It’s a form of living for the present, I suppose. I wasn’t very good at living for the present in those days: cars and trains were about the only places I could do it.
So I was sitting there, with my eyes half closed, listening to Chester crunching the gears and giving it too much throttle. I was pleased with myself that day, I must admit. I thought I’d made some good decisions. Small ones, like getting up early, having a bath, having a proper breakfast, getting the laundry done, and then getting up to Samson’s to hear their lunchtime pianist. And then the bigger ones, as I sat alone at a table, drinking orange juice and letting ‘Stella By Starlight’ wash over me. I decided not to phone Madeline after all, to let her contact me for once. I’d sent her the tape, and made my intentions pretty clear, so now it was up to her to make some sort of response. I’d got one unit left on my phonecard, and I could use it to phone Chester instead. That was the other thing: I’d decided to take him up on his offer. I didn’t owe the other members of the band anything. I needed a change of scene, a new environment. Musically, I mean. We’d grown stale and tired and it was time to get out. So I left just before the final number, round about three, and phoned Chester from a box on Cambridge Circus, and asked him what time he wanted me to come over.
‘Come now,’ he said. ‘Come to the flat and then I can give you a lift. They’re rehearsing at six so you can come and meet them all first. They all want to meet you.’
‘They’re rehearsing tonight? What – you want me to sit in?’
‘See how it goes. See how you feel.’
Before taking the tube up to Chester’s I stood at Cambridge Circus for a while and watched the people. I watched while the sky turned from blue to black and I don’t think I’ve ever felt so good about London, before or since. I felt I’d reached some kind of turning point. Everyone else was still rushing around, panic on their faces, and I’d managed to stop, somehow, to find some time to think and take a new direction. That’s how it felt, anyway, for about half an hour. I would never have believed that things were going to get even worse.
‘You’re not nervous about meeting these boys, are you?’ Chester asked me, as we drove on into ever darker side streets.
‘What are they like?’
He gave one of his short laughs, and said, in that funny, friendly North London drawl: ‘Like I said, they’re a bit weird.’
‘Who’s the one I saw that time?’
Chester gave me a sidelong glance, and I wondered whether I’d been tactless to mention it. But then he answered, readily enough: ‘That was Paisley. He sings, and writes the words. He’s good, too. You know, he’s got real presence. He looks really manic on stage, throwing himself about. I just wish I could keep him off the drugs. It’s the same with all of them. It’s costing me a fortune. Perhaps you’ll be a good influence on them. Someone sort of straight like you, you know – perhaps it’ll set them an example. Like, Paisley, he hasn’t written a song for two months. He’s been too stoned.’
The car lurched and made a sicke
ning grinding noise as Chester negotiated the difficult business of arriving at a main road, stopping, starting and crossing it.
‘You ought to get this thing seen to,’ I said.
‘Well, I’ve been meaning to. Like, when the money starts coming in, right, from this band and everything. I’m going to have it done up. Or maybe get a new one. I’m just a bit hard up right now.’
Chester drove a 1973 Marina, orange. The sidelights didn’t work and the heating was broken and there was something wrong with third gear, and yet somehow (like its owner) it inspired trust in spite of appearances. You knew that one day it was going to let you down, badly let you down, but perversely you continued to rely on it. It amazed me to think that the car was only a few years younger than Chester himself. He was only twenty-one; but for some reason I’ve always looked up to people younger than me.
‘Nearly there,’ he said.
We were driving down a handsome, sad sort of road, with high Georgian terraces on either side. It was that hour of the evening when the lights are on but the curtains are not yet drawn, and through the windows I could see families and couples, bathed in a golden glow, preparing their suppers, pouring their drinks. You could almost smell the basil and the bolognese sauce. We were in North Islington. I felt a sudden desire to be inside one of those houses, to be either cooking or being cooked for, and all at once I realized that I had not made a proper decision today at all. I began to wish that I had phoned Madeline, and I knew that I would, at the first opportunity. I ached for her after just one week’s absence. And that was the first sign that things weren’t quite as simple as I’d thought.
The next sign was when Chester parked the car, pointed up at a window, and said, ‘Good. They’re in.’
I looked up and saw, not a soft square of amber, framing a domestic scene, but a curious, distant, flickering beam of pure white. It was luminous but muted, eerie. I must have stared at it long enough for Chester to get out and open the door on my side.
‘I’m warning you, it’s a bit of a tip, this place,’ he said. ‘The landlord doesn’t care what they do to this house. He doesn’t give a toss.’ He found his keys and locked the door. ‘When I was looking for a house for them, I heard about this place through a friend. Well, perhaps friend isn’t the word. Through a business associate, if you like.’ He chuckled, for some reason. ‘Anyway, the deal was, he didn’t mind what kind of a mess they made of it, so long as he was able to use it himself now and again. Just sort of one evening a week. Well, I knew that was ideal for these boys, ’cause I knew, any place they moved into, they’d have it looking like a pigsty in no time. So, I mean, it sounded like a dodgy deal to me, but handy with it.’
‘What does he want to use it for himself?’
Chester shrugged. ‘Search me.’
‘Doesn’t anyone ever see him?’
‘Nope.’ He looked up at the window again. ‘Listen to that bloody racket. I don’t know how the neighbours put up with it.’
Incredibly loud music was issuing from behind the barely lit window. A wail and swirl of saxes and synths and this drum machine pounding out some robotic backbeat. The noise in the adjoining houses must have been unbearable.
Chester went up to the front door, which was falling off its hinges, and began pounding on it with both fists.
‘You have to do this,’ he said, ‘or they won’t hear you.’
While we were waiting for someone to answer, I mentioned a matter which had been worrying me.
‘Look, Chester, if I decide to join this band, then The Alaska Factory – you know, they’ll fold up. I won’t have time to play with them, too, and I don’t think they could carry on without me.’
‘Yes, I know. That’s all right.’
‘But we’re your only two acts. It’ll halve your income.’
‘I’ve got other money coming in. Besides, what am I making out of you at the moment? Two gigs a week, at ten per cent of fifty quid a time? I’ve told you before, there’s no money in live music, it’s all in the record deal and you boys are never going to get a record deal. Are you? I mean, when did you ever make a decent demo?’
I fingered the tape in my pocket – the one we had made only last week, the one we had made for Madeline. But all I said was: ‘So?’
‘Whereas this lot, you know, they’ve got potential. They’ve got image. They’re young.’ He went back down the steps into the street, and looked up at the window. ‘This is bloody ridiculous. Oy!’
Cupping his hands and shouting did no good either. Finally a handful of pebbles thrown hard at the window brought a puzzled pale face, with long red hair dangling over the sill. He smiled when he saw Chester.
‘Hi!’
‘Are you going to let us in, or aren’t you?’
‘I’m sorry, Chess. We can’t hear much, with the music.’
‘Well hurry up, will you? It’s freezing out here.’
In fact I think I was the colder of the two, in my thin old raincoat, whereas Chester, as usual, looked impeccable : fur-lined gloves, leather jacket, cloth cap, with those steely round eyes and stocky figure which seemed ready to take on anyone. He tutted to me and rubbed his hands together briskly. Then the door was yanked open, at last, by someone I recognized: it was Paisley – taller, more angular, more sallow even than I had remembered him.
‘Hi, Chess,’ he said. ‘Come in.’
‘About time too,’ said Chester, as we stepped inside. ‘Paisley, this is Bill.’
‘Hi.’ He shook my hand coldly.
‘We’ve already met,’ I said. Chester coughed, and Paisley looked puzzled, so I added: ‘Briefly, down at the Goat. Remember?’
‘No,’ said Paisley. ‘Sorry.’
We picked our way down a dark corridor, past a rusty bed frame standing against a wall, and several black bin liners from which rubbish was overflowing on to the floor.
‘Watch out for the holes,’ said Paisley, as he led us up the staircase. Two of the stairs were missing.
Chester turned to me and whispered: ‘Is it all right to introduce you as Bill?’
‘I prefer William,’ I said. ‘It’s… well, it’s not so short.’
‘OK.’
I paused at the first landing. A window pane had been smashed and broken glass was still scattered over the floorboards. Already the music from upstairs was getting oppressively loud and a curious filthy smell had begun to infect the air, so I put my head out of the empty window frame for a little while, looking at the tidy back gardens of the other houses. Chester went on ahead, while Paisley waited for me further up the stairs.
‘You coming up?’
On the second floor, the mystery of the luminous glow was solved. Paisley led me into a large room – two rooms knocked together, in fact, running the length of the house. There were no carpets, no curtains, no furniture at all except for a huge dining-table and six or seven wooden chairs. On the mantelpiece in the back half of the room was the only source of light: a long phosphorescent tube, obviously pinched from the strip lighting of some office or tube station or something. It gave off a ghostly sheen, scarcely touching the shadows in the corners of the room but throwing into unearthly relief the faces of the four people sitting around the table: three men and a woman. They were eating a massive takeaway meal: tin cartons, paper buckets and bits of old newspaper littered the table and the immediate floor area, which led me to believe that the meal was a compound of Chinese, Kentucky Fried and fish and chips. The air was thick with the smell of stale dope. There was an electric cooker in one corner; all four rings were on, which seemed to be a way of providing heat as well as making it easy to light up. My arrival had no impact. They went on drinking and smoking as if I wasn’t there.
In the front half of the room, nearest the street, was the stereo system. Not a domestic hi-fi, but a huge disco console with twin turntables, mixing desk and 200-watt speakers. The noise of that maniacal, volcanic music was deafening. I put my fingers to my ears and Chester, noticing this, tactfu
lly turned it down a little before announcing to the room in general: ‘OK everyone, this is William. William’s going to be your new keyboard player, right. William – meet The Unfortunates.’
There was a muted grunt from one or two of the eaters. The woman looked my way. That was it.
‘Hi,’ I said nervously. ‘Nice place you’ve got here.’
This produced a short outburst of mirthless laughter.
‘Yeah, it’s got character, hasn’t it?’ somebody said.
‘Sometimes you can smell the character of this place half-way down the street.’
I decided to try another subject.
‘Is this one of your tapes?’ I asked.
‘What, this music? No. It’s too tuneful for us, this is. We used to sound like this, when we were trying to be commercial.’
Chester switched it off.
‘Here, I’ll put one of their tapes on,’ he said.
What I heard was disconcerting, but if you listened closely, there was a kind of sense behind it. The rhythm section was loud, fast and minimal, while the two guitarists – one using some sort of fuzz box, the other playing strange funk patterns high up the neck – seemed to be playing songs all of their own. Meanwhile, Paisley’s voice was jack-knifing all over the place, from the top to the bottom of the register:
Death is life
Death is life
And black is the colour of the human heart
Death is life
Death is life
You have to die before you can live
You have to kill before you can love
‘Nice lyrics,’ I said to Paisley, when it came to an end. ‘Did you write them?’
‘Yeah. You think so? I don’t like them. Too soppy.’
‘Yeah, you want to… darken them up a bit,’ said someone at the table. ‘We don’t want to start sounding too friendly.’
‘We don’t sound too friendly, do we?’ Paisley asked me.