December (25 page)

      
'Steve?'

      
'Hello, Prof. I wondered when you'd call.'

      
'Did you?'
      
Something wrong.

      
In a sham-breezy offhand tone, Steve Case told him he'd be
getting a cheque, plus remittance note detailing two weeks' session work, plus
taxes. More than he deserved was the inference.

      
'So you've finished with me. That's what you're saying?'

      
'I thought you'd be glad.'

      
'You sound happy, Steve. Buoyant.'

      
'I'm a buoyant sort of guy.'

      
'I'm not. I'm feeling bloody awful. You want to know why that
is?'

      
Steve said he was sorry about this, in a tone implying he was
not sorry. 'Prof, you need to go back to AA, mate. Sorry to be so blunt, but
word gets round. You want to work again, you should be sensible.'

      
A pause.

      
'You shit,' Prof said. 'I've never been an AA member.'
      
'I'm trying to help you.'

      
'You want to help me, tell me something. You listened to it
yet?'

      
'Prof, nice to talk to you, as always, but I've got a meeting
at four thirty.'

      
'The tape.'

      
Stephen's voice went high
and airy. 'It needs remixing, but, yes, I think we can make something of it,
with a little padding.'
        

      
'Did nothing
happen
?
When you listened to it? Afterwards?'
      
'I'm sorry, I have to ...'

      
'Don't you fucking hang up on me, Steve, else I'll be round there
... I'll make trouble, embarrassment. You tell me ... what did you
feel
?'

      
'I don't know what you're talking about. You've been paid.
Let's leave it there, shall we?'

      
'Thanks for services rendered and goodnight. Great. Listen,
I'll take your money. I'll take your money, and I'll give you some advice. You
get
rid
of those tapes, you don't
even
contemplate
putting out an
album.'
      
'Mr Levin, let me get this right -
you're telling me what we can and can't release?'

      
'I'm telling you it would be ... irresponsible. Don't laugh.
Don't you
dare
fucking laugh at me!
Steve ...'
      
Lowering his voice.
'That music messes people up.'

      
'Other alcoholics, you mean?'

      
'Christ ...' Prof bit off a breath. 'Steve, I'm swallowing
what's left of my pride. I'm telling you this thing is not healthy.'
      
'It's just an album.'

      
'The fuck it is! Listen to me. Barney Gwilliam. Did you know
Barney Gwilliam engineered this session?'

      
'Does it matter?'

      
'Barney ... Barney
died
.'

      
'People do die, Prof. People die all the time.'

      
'No. People don't die all the time like this man died. Listen,
I trained Gwilliam, OK? In the mid-seventies. Very quiet guy, very unassuming,
but a bloody whizz. Full of ideas. Any kind of new technology, Barney'd have it
in his head soon as it was available. The goods, was Barney Gwilliam. Could've
been making five times what I was turning over, no question.'

      
But then, suddenly, aged twenty-eight, Barney had given up the
music business, gone to work for the BBC as a radio engineer in Cardiff. Prof,
amazed, had given him a bell, asking what the hell was he
doing?
Barney had said uncomfortably that he needed a break. Prof
said, listen, we should meet some time. Barney had said, yeah, sure.

      
But it never happened, and three months later ...

      
He heard Stephen Case's bored sigh.

      
'Jesus, the more I think about this ... Listen, radio editing
at the BBC, it's razor blades. Editing block and a blade. Primitive but
efficient. So in Studio Nine, eighth of December 1981, Barney Gwilliam - you
telling me you never heard this?'

      
'Nor do I particularly want to, by the sound of things.'

      
Barney Gwilliam, all alone, twenty-eight years old, had put
himself in a comfy swivel chair in Studio Nine - now closed down, Prof gathered
- and swiped one of these keen little blades, as used for cutting tape, hard
across his throat, five, six times.

      
'How very distasteful,' Stephen Case said.

      
He knows, Prof thought. This bastard knows.

      
He said, 'The best, most promising young engineer ever worked
under me, gives up a potentially brilliant career and bleeds to a lonely death
in a radio studio, and all you can say is, "
How very distasteful'
?'

      
'These things happen,' Steve said. 'I suppose people at one
time used to talk about a promising young-ish sound engineer who turned to
drink.'

      
'Bastard,' Prof said; they seemed to hang up simultaneously.

The rest of the afternoon
went by in a fever, Prof bumping up his phone bill like someone else was paying
it. He drank one or two whiskies and he made call after call until it was dark
outside and for some reason his fingers weren't hitting the right numbers any
more.

      
He wanted to know about TMM: who was inside the company that
he might be acquainted with, that might listen to him telling them: do not on
any account make this album available to the impressionable public.

      
Sile Copesake, now, the old bluesman, ringmaster of the
sixties R and B circuit. Sile was a big-wheel in TMM these days. And old
bluesmen, by the nature of their calling, were always superstitious. Maybe Sile
would give him a hearing. He called TMM, got nowhere. Sile Copesake, they said,
came in infrequently. Prof could leave a message. No, they were not able to
release Sile's home number.

      
The Abbey then. What had happened to the Abbey? Years since
he'd heard of anybody recording there.
      
Prof looked up some music
journalists he used to know. When he called the numbers, two of them turned out
to have been dead over a year. God almighty, the way time went by, rock music
journalists dying of old age!

      
Around five-thirty, a freelance hack called Peter Marriott
said, 'The Abbey? An unlucky studio that, Prof. Had it in mind to do a piece
once, but it'd closed down, nobody cared any more.'

      
'This was when? After 1980? After the Storey tragedy?'
      
'No, no, this would be eighty-five,
eighty-six. After the Soup Kitchen business.'
      
'After the what?'

      
Peter Marriott said they - meaning this Soup Kitchen - were
not big enough to make much of a splash in the Press, even the music papers.
They weren't even a little name. Peter Marriott said that if Prof was on to
something, he would like to know about it, and Prof said, 'Yeah, yeah, you'll
be the first, Pete, I promise.'

      
'Sure I will. If you even remember making this call.'
      
'I'm clean these days. Dry. Trust
me.'
      
'OK,' said Peter Marriott. 'I may
have a couple of cuttings in the files. I'll photocopy them, put them in the
post. Where you living now?'

      
'Tonight? You'll post them tonight?' He was sounding too keen.
'What I mean is, I'm going away, I'd like to see it before I go.'

      
'Sure. Tonight. But you remember who sent them, Prof, OK?'

      
'I'm writing it down in my diary.'

      
Prof put the phone down and went to lie on the sofa. He was
too old for this.

      
But when he felt himself dropping off to sleep, he sat up in
panic, snatched up the phone again and summoned a minicab.
      
Dave Kite, he thought. What kind of
stupid name is that?

Where do you actually go to when you are dead to
find redemption for all your sins?

      
Do you
indeed go anywhere? Or are you distilled in a bottle and uncorked now and then
as a reminder to the living? A scented breath of love. A gasp of pain. A rancid
stench of hatred?

      
Where
do you go to find redemption?

      
Simon St John had written this in his journal before lying
back in his chair and closing his eyes, the Bible on his knees.

      
The journal was an old cashbook from his father's estate
office. His father had been a prosperous land agent in Kent, with pretensions,
who had disowned Simon when, at twenty-eight, his son had left the string
quartet to become violinist/cellist/bass-player in a damned pop group.

      
He would undoubtedly have thrown him out sooner had he known
what Simon was up to with Jeremy, the quartet's angular, bearded viola player.
Might have
welcomed
his switch to an
otherwise heterosexual folk-rock band.

      
And the church? His father didn't know about that. His father
had died by then. It made no difference; whenever Simon sought to justify his
apparently-drastic career-change, it was his father to whom he would try to
explain it.

      
Do you
remember when they brought me home from Sunday school, Dad? In hysterics, aged
six? Palm Sunday, 1965.1 can still remember it in detail.

      
You
see, kids can be very callous. It's usually the stupid, theatrical things that
frighten them - witches and evil stepmothers. Little boys, you tell them about
the Crucifixion, they're scrabbling for their drawing books. Giant nails and
splatters of red. Me I could feel the agony. Not just the physical pain, but
the passion, and because I couldn't understand what that was about, I went into
hysterics.

      
I
remember the bandages on my hands. The Sunday school teacher telling you and
Mum I must have shoved a sharpened pencil into each palm. Oh, the disgrace, get
him into the car quick.

      
The
passion. I think it must be like this for a lot of priests. They love Christ,
and it's a physical thing as well. They're so deeply moved by His image in all
those Renaissance paintings and statues. His beautiful, slender body dangling
there.

      
So that
first Palm Sunday, when I was six, that's when the spark was kindled. And then
going into churches, the energy in those places. All the other kids bored out
of their minds or just getting into the singing. I couldn't understand why I
was the only child in the pews who felt the energy. It wasn't like, let's all
be hushed and
subdued until we're called upon to raise the rafters with the ghastly rhyming
couplets of a bunch of pompous Victorian gits, for we are on holy Ground. It
was ... wow. And I still can't explain it, except that it can be better than
sex, which is how many of us have been able to put up with celibacy - or even
get an exquisite satisfaction from it. You see ... the essence of it is very
close to what we're taught is blasphemy. Dangerously close.

      
And I don't mind
admitting I still can't make any bloody sense out of the metaphysics,
particularly the concept of heaven and hell. Even though I've seen the dead
walk, I still don't know where they go.
      
The phone rang.

      
Simon lifted the Bible from his knees, placed it on the chair
arm, went over to take the call at his desk.
      
'Simon?
      
'Yes?'

      
'It's me, Isabel.'

      
'Oh. Hello.'

      
'You sound different.'

      
'Do I?'

      
'Look, Mother's going to a choral concert in Abergavenny. Why
don't you come round?'

      
She sounded excited. A tone of voice he recognised from other
places, other parishes.
      
'Simon? Are you still there?'

      
'Yes.'

      
'So, what time?'
      
'I'm sorry,' he said. 'I can't. I'm
sorry.'
      
His mind had broken the connection
long before his hand put the phone down.
      
'Sorry,' he said.