December (16 page)

      
It was Dave pointed him in the right direction. Dave gives him
the name of Tom's business - Love-Storey, get it? Two weeks later, he's - you
ready for this? - E. L. Beasley, Transport Manager, Wholesale Division.

      
With certain additional duties, which become apparent when Tom
and Shelley and the kid, Vanessa, move into the new house.

      
The Weasel sometimes wondered about Dave Reilly, who knew
where Tom lived yet never came round to visit, He wondered about Simon St John
and Moira Cairns. (It was no surprise they never heard from Lee Gibson; Lee was
on a monster earner in the States now, no cause to look back.)

      
But most of all, Weasel wondered what
really
happened that night in December 1980 when he was in the
hospital and Tom drove a Land Rover all the way to hell.

      
The kitchen door opened. No lights were on inside.

      
'You really know how to choose your bleeding moments Weasel,'
Tom said, from the shadows. 'Come up.'

As long as the Weasel had
known him, way back before his old man was killed, Tom had been a big time
record collector. Blues mostly, in those days; John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters
and, the pride of his collection, some old Robert Johnson at 78 r.p.m.

      
Johnson - who died half a century ago at, what was it,
twenty-seven? - was just about the best, Weasel always figured. It used to be
said he'd sold his soul to the devil on account of all the devil-bits in his
songs and the fact that he was just so good, so young and that he died so
mysteriously - murdered, wasn't it?

      
And where was Robert Johnson now? Not in Tom Storey's record
collection any more, this was for sure. Neither was Muddy Waters. Although, as
Weasel could see even from here, - John Lee was certainly still on the shelf.

      
The music-room was at the top of the house. The way it was
arranged now, you came in through the door at one end and all the records were
stacked at the other, a good twenty feet away. Between you and them were a beat-up
pub table, a sprawly old easy chair, two fifty-watt practice amps arranged like
a barrier, and the clutter of all Tom's guitars, about fifteen of them.

      
So, what with the beams and trusses and that, getting across
to the records was like some kind of commando training-exercise.

      
Weasel took the Stones'
Goat's
Head Soup
from under his arm.

      
Not a bad album,' Tom said gruffly. 'Coulda been worse,
considering.'

      
Weasel moved towards the shelves to put the album back.

      
'Leave it,' Tom growled. 'Leave it on the table'

      
Yeah,' Weasel said. 'Right. I, er... I fought I could maybe have
a lend of one of the earlier ones.'

      
Slung 'em out,' Tom said straight off. 'They was knackered.'

      
The room was stifling. Tom had this pot -bellied stove on a
flagstone plinth on the boarded floor, with an iron flue going up through the
roof. There were a couple of buckets of coal. Most mornings, Weasel awoke in
his 'van to the sound of Hilda, the cleaner, filling the buckets and clattering
off with them to the house and up all the bleeding stairs, poor cow.

      
'So,' Tom said. 'What's the beef, Weasel? Ain't we paying you
enough or summink?'

      
Tom's eyes burned with challenge. He was still a scary sight
sometimes, despite Shelley keeping his tough white hair trimmed and his
moustache blunt.

      
'Yeah, well.' The Weasel shuffled about near the doorway,
pushing some of his long grey hair behind his cars. 'Fing is … you and Shelley,
you done all right by me, ain'tcher? Pulled me out the shit.'

      
Tom sat down on one of his amps. 'So put a word in for me for
the New Year's Honours. Count for a lot, that, coming from you, Weasel.'

      
Good guy, Tom, generosity itself, if you could take the verbal
abuse.

      
'What I mean ...' Weasel pushed on, as best he could. You know
I'll watch out for yer - you and Shelley and the Princess. You know that.'

      
'What we pay you for,' Tom said, all heart.

      
'So, like, if there was someone after you. Or Shelley. Or the
kid. Then you'd tell me, wouldn'tcher?'

      
'Maybe.' Tom's eyes had gone dull. 'If it was summink you
could fix. If it wasn't, then I wouldn't. Some fings, you talk about it, it
don't help. Makes it worse.'

      
Weasel nodded at the pot-bellied stove. 'That safe, is it? Up here
in the roof space, all this wood, joists and all?'

      
Tom shrugged.

      
'Only I figured maybe an electric heater'd save a lot of, you know
...'

      
'Useless,' Tom said. 'Wouldn't ...'

      
'Wouldn't burn vinyl,' Weasel said, easing back into the doorway.
'Am I right?'

      
Tom was at the door before him. Tom had moved faster than
you'd reckon he could, given his size and his gut, and he'd cut off Weasel's escape
route with one crunch of a Doc Marten on the door panel. The door shuddered and
the latch went clack and Tom turned, his back and shoulders flat to the door.

      
And Weasel feeling like he was locked in with a monster.

They'd been up there too
long in silence. Shelley was worried. The times Weasel came round, Tom would
put albums on or maybe play a little. Weasel fumbling along on bass. What they
didn't do was talk.

      
Tom, it was fair to say, was not what you'd call a great conversationalist.

      
Shelley finished her coffee. Decaffeinated was something Tom
accepted now. Accepted that caffeine was a drug, just like tobacco, alcohol and
cocaine and the other stuff. None of which Tom had gone near since their
marriage, although her attempts to turn him into a vegetarian had been
abandoned some years ago when Tom had pointed out - and he was right - that a
no-meat diet lightened his senses, made him more receptive.

      
No
way.
Just what he
didn't
need.

      
Shelley washed her coffee mug. Vanessa was in the TV-room
watching a video. She watched the same ones three and four times, Eddie Murphy
usually.

      
Shelley sighed over the sink. What a long, debilitating
journey marriage to Tom Storey was. A woman taking on Tom loaded herself up
with an incredible amount of sheer craziness, was obliged to acquaint herself
with a body of knowledge uncatered for in the smaller branches of W. H. Smith.

      
No question of bringing the books home. ('Whassis shit?' - Tom
hurling Colin Wilson and Brian Inglis into the Jetmaster in a kind of furious
terror.)

      
In the end, what she'd done had been to install little
carousels of New Age-type paperbacks in the shops on the basis that many vegetarians
were into this kind of thing as well.

      
And she'd read them all herself, in the shops, of course, never
again bringing any home. And ordered others, more specialised. Indeed, for
someone with no psychic ability at all (would Tom have gone near her if she'd
had any?), she was becoming quite an authority on aspects of the Unexplained.
      
Or, in this house, the
Unmentionable.

'Explain,' Tom said.

      
His voice had gone hard and dry. He looked ready to pick up
the Weasel and snap him in half.

      
The Weasel stood in the middle of the room, sweating. There
was a glass panel in the front of the iron stove and he could see deep red
coals. The stove shimmered in its own heat.

      
Weasel looked away, half afraid the face of Robert Johnson,
the bluesman, would materialize smiling in the coals and the white-hot ash.

      
'Goat's Head Soup
;
Weasel said. 'Heavy stuff, innit? Goats' heads, the devil, right?'

      
'Devil, bollocks,' Tom said. 'It's a try-on. Creepy picture. Means
nuffink.'

      
'
You said you ain't got
Beggar's Banquet.
      
'Maybe that is a nasty one,' Tom
said reflectively.
'Sympathy for the
Devil.
That festival in the States where the poor bleeder got murdered in
the crowd when they were doing
Sympathy
.
Maybe a bad vibe running frew it.'

      
'You ain't got no Stones albums before that, though, either,
right?' The Weasel standing his ground. 'No Doors. No Hendrix. No Bolan. No
Elvis. And no Beatles. Wassat telling me, eh?'

      
There was a long silence. It was nearly dark and the windows
were narrow and high in the walls, so you could only see the sky, no village
lights, and the only light in the long room was coming out of the stove.

      
'All dead,' Weasel said. 'All dead 'uns. You got rid of all
the old Stones albums wiv Brian Jones on 'em, 'cause he's dead, drowned, whatever.
And the Doors, 'cause of Morrison, snuffed in a bath. And the Beatles - this is
down to Lennon. Soon at somebody dies you dump their albums. They comes off the
shelf and into the stove. Up the chimney. Gorn.'

      
Red lights gleaming in the silvered machine heads of an
acoustic guitar on a stand. Red lights in Tom's eyes like distant aircraft at
night.

      
'Weasel', eyes started roaming the junk, the guitars and the
amps and stuff, wondering what he could pick up to defend himself. Then he saw
the monster was crying quietly.

      
He sat down on one of the practice amps, looking down at his
hands in his lap. Couldn't look at Tom, couldn't watch this.

      
'I been in Paris wiv Morrison,' Tom was whispering. 'Dead in
the bath. Bloated.'

      
Weasel went cold.

      
'I've heard the crash of Marc Bolan's motor going into that tree.
Time and time again.'

      
Weasel wanted to be out of here but couldn't move.

      
'I can't take the sound of a car crash, Weasel. Why I can't
live in a city, no more. Always brakes squealing somewhere. I can't stand
that.'

      
'Yeah,' Weasel said faintly. 'I can understand that.'

      
'Most of 'em was twenty-seven when they snuffed it. You know
that? Hendrix, Morrison, Jones, Joplin?'

      
'And Robert Johnson.'

      
'Yeah. Free times free times free? Wossat mean? I dunno, I
don't read those books. Who needs fucking books like that?'

      
Weasel said, 'You're saying you play the records and you see 'em,
how they died.'

      
'Dead,' Tom said baldly. 'I see 'em dead.'

IV

Protection of the Ancestors

Standing by the ragged
hole, dug out of bitterly resistant stone and clay and already waterlogged, the
vicar had intoned the usual.
      
Man
born of a woman hath but a short time to live and is full of misery. He cometh
up and is cut down like a flower ...

      
It was, he thought, a depressingly long-winded way of expressing
a fairly simple
 
truth: Life's a bitch
and then you die.

      
And then what?
      
He wished he knew.

      
It was his first funeral here. A farmer of eighty-six, who'd
died in the same house he'd been born in, raised hundreds of thousands of lambs
in the same scrubby fields, protected them against the climate, the crows and
the foxes and then sent them off to market and to die.

      
The farmer, one Emlyn Roberts, had apparently gone out
cursing. Life at Ystrad Ddu seemed to be all about cursing - cursing your
neighbours, the council, the tourists, the foxes, the crows, the weather. Until
the day you claimed your reserved chunk of the churchyard.

      
As the mourners trooped away in apathetic silence, the vicar's
surpliced arm was clutched by Mr Eddie Edwards.
      
'Did you see it?'

      
'No,' the vicar said. 'The family were merciful enough to keep
the lid on.'