“But what about her parents?”
“Jack Braithwaite’s response made me sick!” Shotgun slammed his palm down on the armrest for emphasis. “He probably had something to do with the whole thing being kept quiet.
When he came back from Leeds I called him from London and gave him the edited version. Angie wouldn’t let me go into details but I told him enough to make him see his little girl had been ruined in the eyes of Yorkshire society. I think it says it all that he didn’t care enough to go after his daughter’s rapists—or that Angie felt there was no point in contacting her mother. Vera only ever does what Dad tells her. In her own way Angie was as alienated from her parents as I was from mine and that provided the core of our initial bonding.
“You see, in a way, by taking her off his hands I’d secured for Angie what he had always wanted for her. In his eyes, I was a lord of the manor.The only problem was that when I ran away to London, my father cut me out of his will.
“So there we were, Kip and Angie, living in a damp and moldy basement we’d rented in Earl’s Court. It took a few months before she was ready to have sex with me. She was traumatized and I suppose she should have had counseling. But all she had was me and I tried to be as patient and understanding as I could—even though I was panting for her. We made love for the first time on a mattress on the floor and I swear we had group sex with a ton of fleas but it was worth waiting for.”
He sighed and sitting beside him, I felt as if I were intruding on an intimate moment.
“I am never—ever—going to forget those first few years with
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Angie. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that we were both giving—and receiving—love for the first time in our lives and it was nothing less than explosive.”
His voice had a longing in it that echoed the tenderness I had caught in Angie Marriott’s when she had talked about him. She had called him a decent man, wonderful and kind. And I think it was at this point that I knew it was not the rambunctious life of a hell-raising rock star that I would be writing, but an intense and poignant love story.
I surreptitiously looked down to see that the tape was still running as he got up and stretched.When he returned to the sofa he perched on the armrest with his arms folded and I sensed he had turned a corner in his narrative. I shifted a little now that he had left me more space on the sofa and settled down to listen to the rest of the story.
“I only had about a hundred pounds on me when we arrived in London,” he said, and I could tell he had regained control of his emotions. I made a mental note not to interrupt him unless I had to. “And although it was an absolute fortune in those days, it lasted about twenty seconds because we had to use it on renting a flat and buying food and getting established in London.We were living pretty much hand to mouth. Everything ran on a meter that you fed with coins—gas fires, electricity, phone. If you ran out of shillings, you froze.We used to go looking for empty bottles in the streets and we’d take them to pubs and get money to live on in exchange. A bit different from the life we’d been living up in Yorkshire.
“I bought Angie a battered little secondhand Remington type-writer and she taught herself to type, sitting at our rickety kitchen table till all hours of the night, bashing the keys in time to music.The faster the tempo, the faster she had to type. Sometimes I accompanied her on my guitar and she typed to that. She
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taught herself a kind of speedwriting too and once she was up to ninety words a minute she went out to get a job.”
I reached for my pad and started to scribble a few notes, confident that he was now on track to deliver the practical facts of their life together.
“She found one right away—as a secretary to a bank manager—
and there she was, going off to the office every morning leaving me to loaf around London wondering what on earth I was going to do with myself all day.There was a little record shop in a basement in Soho where they had all the American imports and I used to go there and listen to them. I drove them mad because I couldn’t afford to buy anything. Finally the owner took pity on me and invited me to accompany him to R & B all-nighters at the clubs—the Marquee, the Scene, the Hundred Club—where my heroes, Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson, B.B. King, played when they came to London.
“I was always on at Angie to come with me but she had to get up to go to work the next day, she couldn’t stay up till four in the morning every night. I offered her some of the speed I was taking to stay awake, Dexedrine I think it was, but she wasn’t into any of that. And you know I rather liked having her there all warm and sleepy when I crawled into bed with her every morning and we had a couple of hours together before her alarm went off.
“But I wished she’d been there one night at the Marquee because the support band was the one that had played at her dance and I went up and chatted to the guy who had let me have a go on his Gibson. He told me he was about to quit the band, said he’d had enough, wanted to form his own setup. Of course one thing led to another. Instead of going home to Angie that night, I went out on the razzle with Jimmy and the next morning, when he heard me play in his hotel room, he told me I was a natural and
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I should keep in touch with him. He gave me the names of a few places where I could go and sit in with a band to get some practice and pick up a few bob. Angie kept asking when I was going to get a job and I kept telling her ‘I’ve got one, I’m a musician,’
and she’d say ‘Yes, but when are you going to get a real job?’
“Well, I kept in touch with Jimmy and his Gibson and when he formed a band—the Suits—I was part of it and when he OD’d from a lethal speedball a couple of years later, I moved automatically into the lead slot. Suddenly it was Shotgun Marriott and the Suits and when we released a record and it went straight to number one, Angie found herself married to a rock star.”
“So was she along on the road with you or did she stay home to take care of Sean?” I felt it was time I started chipping in a bit.
“Neither,” he said, “we were together for years before we had Sean. We put off trying to have a kid but then when we decided it was time, it looked like we weren’t going to be able to. It was something of a miracle she didn’t get pregnant when she was raped but I began to wonder whether maybe something had happened to her then—you know, to prevent her from having a child.”
“So if she wasn’t at home with Sean and she wasn’t on tour with you, where was she?”
“Building a career for herself. Angie, it turned out, was a lot more straight than I was.”
“Straight?”
“The word didn’t have as much sexual connotation in those days. When we said someone was straight, we meant they didn’t do drugs, they had a boring office job, they were straight-up responsible, normal people. I suppose we thought they were un-cool. But Angie had a good head on her shoulders and she was shrewd about money. God knows, she had to be, she worked in it. She’s a financial adviser now, did you know that? Tells people
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what to do with their pensions. Can you imagine anything more boring?”
“So she was a suit?”
“Totally.We always thought it was hilarious that my band was called the Suits. And of course the druggy flower power didn’t come along until the late sixties. Early on she slotted in okay because everyone had boring jobs by day and went to sophisticated nightclubs at night. The class barrier collapsed and it became fashionable to be working class. Angie’s Yorkshire accent was a plus.”
“She sounds like she’d have been a big success in the eighties.”
“Oh, she was—the nineties too. She was dot-comming it all over the place before we’d even heard of it. Poor Sean. He barely saw his parents for the first ten years of his life—Angie was at th
e office all day and I was away on the road or in the studio. But look, I’d better tell you about the early days, when the marriage first started to go wrong.”
“When did you actually get married?”
“Not till 1980. At Chelsea Register Office in the King’s Road.
It was all over in a few minutes.”
“Why then?”
“Sean was born. Angie wanted to make him legit. So did I, as a matter of fact. It was important to me even though things were already pretty bad between us.”
“Because Angie never participated in your career? Never came out on the road with you?”
“Actually,” he said, “she did in the beginning. That was part of the problem. When I began to hit the big time, she really tried.
She gave up her office job—whatever it was at the time, I forget, working for an accountant or something equally boring to me—
and she insisted on coming on the road.”
“And she hated it.”
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“Absolutely right. She didn’t fit in at all. She was so straight.
There was me with my hair halfway down my back, a shark’s tooth hanging off my ear, wearing a snakeskin waistcoat over my bare chest and high-heeled boots and God knows what else. And she’d be sitting there at the side of the stage in her tailored frock and her cardigan and pearls and an Alice band and little black shoes with grosgrain bows on them. It was a fucking joke. I mean, I was like a reptile.” He grinned. “I smelled foul most of the time, all that sweating on stage. And there were all those hangers-on.We were never alone. Angie’d be sitting up in bed in our hotel room in Birmingham or Sheffield or wherever with the cocoa she’d ordered from room service, and there’d be people passing out and sleeping on the floor beside us. Not that we did much sleeping. Sometimes I didn’t get any kip for as long as forty hours.”
“So she gave up and went home and you drifted apart.”
“Don’t write her off too soon.” He wagged a finger at me.
“What you have to realize about Angie is that she’s tough. Much more than I am. She loved me. She was in it for the long haul and she found a way to deal with it and that’s where it all began to fall apart.”
I noticed that talking about this period, he was getting quite animated. His accent was slipping into the Mockney mixed with a mid-Atlantic inflection that he normally presented to the outside world.
“Angie decided it was a question of if you can’t beat ’em, join
’em and although she’d always steered clear of it before, now she began to take speed to stay awake. Dexedrine. And she drank.
Rum and Coke. Scotch and Coke.Vodka neat. She was an out-of-control lush before I’d even realized what was happening. It was—” He paused and turned away from me. “It was pitiful,” I heard him say softly.
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I waited for him to go on.
“I put her in rehab. It was for her own good, of course, but I have to admit that I just didn’t want to deal with her. I was pretty strung out myself. I’m lucky I’ve never had a problem, but I was living a pretty wild life.”
“Did she resent you doing that?”
“At first. But she got her act together.When she got clean she went back to work. She got her career in finance off and running.”
“And she stayed clean?”
“More or less. We began to live separate lives. We came together in London whenever I was there—and it was wonderful.
There was this incredible bond between us despite the fact that our approach to life was totally different. But I fucked it up.”
“How come?”
“The usual way. You have girls screaming at you every night that you can have them whenever you want, what are you going to do? It got lonely on the road.”
“Groupies?” I’d finally brought it up.
“Actually, no.” He shook his head. “I didn’t go in for groupies much whatever people said. I just found myself girls to keep me company. Girls I could talk to.There had to be some intelligence there.”
“But there was a groupie in your bed—that night—in London?”
“Yes,” he said, and I noticed his hands were clenched together so hard the blood was draining out of them. “Yes, there was.”
Then, as he’d done at our last session, he suddenly got to his feet and started pacing round the room.
“I can’t do it. I’m sorry. I know I said I would, but I can’t. Not right now.We’ll have to come back to it another time.”
And that was it.
Once again I found myself driving home in a state of confu-
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sion. He’d talk for just so long and then he seemed to go into a kind of panic. I’d left the tapes lying on the sofa. He hadn’t even wanted me to go up and transcribe them as we’d agreed.
I stared straight ahead with my chin up as I approached the cabin, driving slowly along the dark stretch of road with only the blinking light of the radio tower in the dunes to guide me. My resolve broke down and I glanced in the rearview mirror, expecting to see the twin circles of two headlamps following me.
But it was pitch-black all the way. I pottered about the cabin for a little while, making myself a cup of tea and heating up a bowl of clam chowder for my supper. When I’d finished it I picked up my notepad and lay down on the bed to make yet another start on Tommy’s letter.
I got as far as “My dearest Tommy, I was devastated to hear about your losing” before I fell into possibly the deepest sleep I had enjoyed since arriving in America.
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THE BACK ROOM OF THE OLD STONE MARKET
looked extremely inviting when I walked in the next morning. The smell of freshly brewed coffee wafted around the room and Franny had laid out a plate of doughnuts and placed a vase of brightly colored anemones in the middle of the table.
“She make coffee shop,” explained Jesus, “she want people come in here, sit, drink coffee, be happy—and buy something.”
It made sense to me. But I could tell the minute I walked into the store that her mood did not match the welcoming atmosphere she had created. She didn’t even acknowledge me and went right on yelling at Rufus who was trying to edge his way out the door.
“Why did you have to tell him? Why? Couldn’t you have just left it where it was?”
I looked at Rufus.
“She’s talking about the bow and arrow,” he said. “She’s pissed that I told Detective Morrison about them.”
“You know about this?” she asked me.
“I was there.”
“See!” She advanced upon Rufus. “Lee didn’t go running to the police and tell them my son’s bow and arrow had been found at a construction site.” She paused for a second in her onslaught.
“You didn’t, did you?” I shook my head.
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“I didn’t say they were Dumpster’s,” said Rufus wearily. “And he was going to find out about them anyway sooner or later. I wasn’t the only one to see them.”
I had an inkling of how Franny must be feeling. She was worried sick about Dumpster and the fact that she didn’t know where he was half the time. She couldn’t even defend him anymore. She’d gone on record at the arraignment saying she hadn’t been home the nights Sean and Bettina were killed so she couldn’t be his alibi.
“I gotta go,” said Rufus and I followed him out the door.
“I had to tell Morrison. Didn’t I?” he appealed to me.
“Of course,” I said but I wasn’t really listening to him. My attention had been distracted by a car that had drawn up to park alongside Rufus’s truck. Louis Nichols, the president of the Stone Landing Residents Association, got out and went into the store but the person who had caught my attention was his passe
nger. It was the woman who had appeared on the beach in the middle of my mother’s commitment ceremony. She didn’t look quite the same. As she stepped out of the car I saw that her hair, which had been long and flowing as she walked along the beach, was now scraped back into a French twist. Nor was she wearing the hippie caftan I had first seen her in; she had on a crisp white shirt and jeans. Her face was tanned and weather-beaten, and up close I could see it was etched in lines that told me she was well into her fifties, but even so she was definitely what Tommy would call a looker.
She was looking straight at me but she didn’t seem to register me. She went into the store and I said good-bye to Rufus and followed her, intrigued. Louis Nichols was ordering breakfast. I noticed he followed Franny as she moved about the store doing a stock check, trying to engage her in conversation. The woman I had followed went straight to the back room and poured herself
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a cup of coffee but instead of sitting down at the table, she stood before the notice board, studying it intently. I moved up to stand behind her and saw her remove the card about the wedding dresses and slip it in her pocket. Was she someone who was interested in buying a wedding dress—or was she the person who had put the card there in the first place?
She was the latter, I discovered with a little frisson of excitement when she sat down at the table and smiled at me, patting the bench beside her. I was a little taken aback. I had come in to get breakfast, not to socialize, loner that I was, but before I could politely decline, Franny came over.
“You two should get to know each other,” she said. “Lee, this is Martha Farrell. Martha, this is Lee Bartholomew. She’s the daughter of the woman Rufus’s dad married.”
“They weren’t married,” I said automatically.
“Yeah, well, whatever.” Franny didn’t look convinced. “But Martha, Lee here is a writer. I mean, a professional writer. She’s published, unlike most of the folks who hang out in writing groups around here and never get anywhere.”
“Like me,” said Martha, giving me a wink. “Only I don’t even go to groups. I just slave away on my own, getting nowhere.”
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