by James Brodie
Epilogue
August 1963
And now Chris too was dead. He’d had his two weeks of celebrity and notoriety during the trial, something that probably amazed him. But his exterior gloss was brittle and thin and it hadn’t taken long to crack him and he had decided he couldn’t take any more. They’d got to him, probably far more easily than any of them expected. And I helped them to do it.
They had both been used, Pascale and Chris, wittingly and unwittingly. Both in their separate ways had been considered dangerous, expendable. But Ronnie Forsythe and Toby had come through unscathed. Perhaps that was it; perhaps you had to be a berk to survive, to come through. It was all part of a master-plan to make this a world fit for the Ronnie Forsythes and Tobys to live in.
It didn’t seem possible that Pascale and Chris no longer existed. I used to often get this waking nightmare, sometimes as I lay on the beach. My mind would go back to those trips the three of us made together, especially the last one in the van up to Norfolk. I would be in the back of the van watching them talking and laughing. Only somehow I would know that they were dead, different from me, and I knew that I couldn’t tell them, and I was afraid that by association I might join them. Then the picture of Pascale trembling with fear on Hungerford Bridge in the rain would take over. Once, on the beach someone caught me in the middle of one of these sessions. I was shaking and sweating, but inside I was stone cold. I looked so bad that they wanted to call a doctor, get me to a hospital. But I told them I was alright and went up to the bar and got myself a brandy.
That year Antibes was a different world. Sarah Vaughan and Miles Davis were at the festival. We went to see them though we didn’t understand a note he played of course. I discovered Grand Marnier crepes which we’d walk along eating late at night. At three in the morning we’d run through the sand and push the beached pedalos out to sea, and then swim naked, watching the night lights of the town disappearing one by one like exploding stars. A dentist in Wimpole Street had done a pretty good job drilling in some new teeth. Time, the Great Healer, took care of most of the scars. One, more obdurate than the rest, remained. It was just under my left eye. I was getting round to feeling that it gave an element of glamour to my face. ……The Great Train Robbery in England sent its tremors round the world and reached me on the beach at Juan Les Pins. I thought of those guys, the objects of derision in that strange pub, and took vicarious pleasure in their success. The robbery itself was just one more quiver on a seismographic fault that was throwing up all kinds of different activity. At the time we thought them all unconnected and just thrilled at the spectacle of an individual edifice crumbling. We didn’t know, couldn’t see, that they were all linked and this really was it - At last we were on the move into the twentieth century. It spelt the end of corner pubs and everything that went with them, quite a lot of which, although we didn’t know it, we treasured. But sitting on the beach at Juan Les Pins with an unfrozen bottle of Ambre Solaire being emptied on my back, it didn’t seem to matter. I didn’t see it then, and Pascale never would.
Françoise Hardy was on the video jukeboxes of all the quayside cafes, singing ‘Toutes Les Jeunes Filles’. We were always playing the Stan Getz Bossa Nova albums and wherever you went in night clubs or bars that beat was always somewhere around in the background. It was a leitmotiv for our existence and it reinforced my certainty that nothing was for real and that I mustn’t pinch myself in case I woke up. I knew in my soul that I wasn’t responsible for anything, not now, nor what had happened in the year before. I just blamed it on the Bossa Nova.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Front Matter
Title Page
Publisher Information
Quote
Dedication
Blame It On The Bossa Nova
Prologue
September 1962
October 1962
November 1962
December 1962
January 1963
February 1963
April 1963
Epilogue
Also Available