Blame It on the Bossa Nova (30 page)

“Who?” She gave me that famous Gallic snort of contempt and dragged on her fag.

“Who d’you think. The CIA, Cuban exiles, the Southern Whites... The Mafia... The CP for all I know.”

“What did Frank tell you?”

“He didn’t know much. All he knew was that there’s a network across the States, the same network that set up the Bay of Pigs. They hate the Kennedys, Bobby particularly.... Johnson they can deal with....”

It was all very much on the macro scale - lots of broad canvas, most of it applied in the sort of areas of colour that professional decorators put on with twelve inch wide rollers - very little technical detail. It overwhelmed me. I don’t know whether I believed it or not. My brain told me it was rubbish, the intensity of Pascale’s fear I could not discount. It said more to me than her words. I had seen all this before, from Chris. And they had got him. Perhaps it was an occupational risk. Danger and death had seemed so far away back at the Chelsea Arts Club and the previous September.

“..... And now you think they’re out to get you.”

“They are, Alex. They’re going to kill me. They’ve tried already.”

She had grabbed hold of me in terror as she had said it. I looked across at her as she lay peaceful in her sleep. What if it were true and that all our activities of the previous winter assumed the perspective of the group huddled round the ice cream lady at the foot of the screen, while up above the main drama is playing played out in Technicolor? What if we’d accidentally got in the way of the projector and our shadow was being cast on the moving image? The two of us, keepers of the biggest secret in the world - The only ones who knew. And what could we do about it? Who were we? Two shitty little nobodies in a bed-sit in the Fulham Road.

I phoned up the Father Christmas factory and told them I wouldn’t be in for a few days. Pascale couldn’t be left alone in the state she was in. We steamed the clothes dry in front of the gas fire, taking in great draughts of what felt like bottled pneumonia. She didn’t want to go out anywhere, but I made her. First of all to the corner pub where we sat in the private bar and went over and over again with miniscule variation the conversation we had gone through the previous night.

“Who was that guy you were with?”

“Just a kid... a Party Member. He doesn’t know anything about it. He was keen on me, that’s all. I’m glad I’ve got rid of him, he might have got hurt.”

I suppose it was some kind of strange compliment from her that I was now considered sufficiently durable to risk exposure in her company in these revised circumstances. Before we left the pub I had to humour her by going to the door to check if there were any suspicious characters hanging about outside. I couldn’t see any.

For the next couple of days we kept to unlikely pubs and workers’ cafes, always on the move at Pascale’s insistence. She was wearing me down. Since I had seen her in the coffee bar, anger had turned first to compassion and then to irritation. Try as I might I couldn’t buy the image of ruthless killers pursuing her relentlessly around the capital. We walked and walked, returning to the flat in the early hours of the morning. Even there she couldn’t relax. She still felt they could get her. I was beginning to wonder how it was going to end, if this hysterical rhythm could ever be broken. But on the third night she began to relax. She still thought every shadow was out to get her, still jumped at every unexpected sound. But she was beginning to get some objectivity on it. She could understand how some folk couldn’t see it that way. They were misguided and mistaken, she knew that for sure, but she could understand how they had been deceived into their wrong thinking.

We were sitting in a pub just off the Commercial Road in Stepney. We’d taken a taxi there. I knew it - a haunt of dockers, a place where all the goods they had nicked, or were thinking of nicking were exchanged or sold - a sort of commodities futures market. It was a pub where no one would ever think of looking for a girl in Pascale’s predicament. The bell was rung for closing time and, although the landlord wasn’t heavy about such matters, we rose and prepared to leave. She had been expounding on different aspects of her involvement in politics over the past five or so years in a way that I had never heard from her before, reflectively - non-partisan. Almost as if it was all in the past. Outside the pub we stopped on the pavement to do up our coats. It was still pissing down with rain.

“You see, Alex...,” she said, continuing her mood of mellow imparter of wisdom, ‘the question is... is man’s ability to believe in the myth intrinsic evidence of the validity of myth?... because, as that’s the point all philosophy eventually boils down to... if you don’t particularly care what the answer is, it’s all a bit of a waste of time.”

I could see it. She was finished. Through all my ups and downs with Pascale I had never doubted her potential to get herself as deeply hurt as she ever managed to hurt others, whether intentionally or co-incidentally. And now, as they had frequently over the previous months, my thoughts returned not to the Pascale I had known but to my image of the Pascale I had never met - the young girl growing up in the village with an embittered father and an intelligence that would drive her mad unless she got out. Why couldn’t the world find a place for the likes of Pascale? Why was it they had to keep going until they’d fucked themselves up completely, and only then be allowed the rest they would never know as long as their senses could pump messages to their brains. I had never known what I felt for Pascale, but whatever it was, it had found its way into every crevice and corner of my body.

We finished buttoning our coats and I stopped for a second to make a choker of my scarf. She was halfway across the road when I heard the van. It came screaming out of a side street behind us and headed straight for her. It had hit her before I’d even registered what it was. Its momentum seemed to lift her and carry her pinned on its front before it buried itself into the brick wall of the docks opposite, a long blank wall, about fifty feet high, without door or windows, that stretched into the distance in either direction. It made a muffled sound of crumpling metal and something else. I’m not sure if I heard Pascale scream or not. Maybe I imagined it but it sounded like the scream of fear she’d given that night when Frank had picked her up and knocked her across the room. I was in such a state of shock I’ll never know if I really heard it. The van backed off - it was a fifteen hundredweight - leaving her broken body lying at the foot of the wall. It roared off towards the Commercial Road putting on its lights..... I ran up to her. She was quite still, quite dead. No one except me had seen it happen. People came out of the pub and out of houses and pushed past me and soon I was standing at the back of a small crowd. Someone went off to call the police. I turned away and walked back down the street.

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.