December (29 page)

      
Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Mama Cass Eliot, Brian Jones ...

      
'And Jim Morrison. I been in Paris, wiv Jim Morrison. Dead in
the bath, all bloated.'

      
Weasel had got the hell out. Couldn't stand it no more. Run
back to his caravan and blasted his brains out with ZZ Top.

      
He wiped his face on a piece of kitchen towel and blinked.

      
The kid was back. Weasel breathed out a throatful of tension.

      
She was standing in the doorway, big hoop earrings still swinging
from running down the stairs. Her arms were full of this huge brown book.

      
'Sorry it took me so long, Weasel.' Dumping the giant tome on
the kitchen table, 'I had to go to the attic for it.'

      
'Bleedin' hell. Princess, in the dark? Whyn't you get me to go
up for yer?'

      
Vanessa looked sly, which was a rarity. 'Because it was hidden.'
A cobweb snapping as she opened up the book. 'Daddy chucked it out for the dustman
'cause it wouldn't fit in the stove. I brought it back and hid it.'

      
Weasel moved over to the table, interested. Was there gonna be
more albums in here?

      
'Look,' Vanessa said, peering down through her thick lenses.
      
'Oh,' Weasel said, disappointed. It
was just photos, ancient pix, mostly black and white - people at weddings,
people with babies, studio portraits of kids with their hair combed straight.
      
'Er ... yeah,' Weasel said. 'Very
nice.'
      
Vanessa, very solemn, started
turning pages over slowly, creasing each one flat.
      
'There,' she said.

      
It was a faded photo of a couple either side of a small boy.
The bloke was very tall and gangly, wearing an open shirt that looked kind of
ex-army, and you could see his string vest underneath. He was grinning down at
the small boy, had a big hand on the kid's shoulder.
      
'There you are,' Vanessa said.

      
'Yeah.' He hadn't seen the picture before but he recognised the
people all right.
    
'That's an old one,
innit, Princess?'

      
'That's him:

      
'Yeah, it's ...'

      
'The Man with Two
Mouths.'

      
'What?'

      
Weasel started to feel a little queasy. He said hesitantly, 'He's
... he's only got the one, Princess.'

      
'Not now.' Vanessa shook her head. 'He's got one here.' Putting
a finger on the bloke's lips. 'And another one ...' Moving the finger just slightly
'... here.'

      
'Oh jeez.' Weasel felt almost faint.

      
'Only bigger,' Vanessa said.

XI

Bloody Glasses

When the lights went down,
there was just the piano - a grand piano, but not
that
grand, even by nightclub standards: battered, legs chipped,
rainbow grease marks on the lid.

      
The piano sat just left of centre stage, only half in
spotlight, so that Prof never saw the figure emerge from the shadows and slide
on to the stool, only noticing that people around him in the club had gone
quieter.

      
Not that there were people exactly a
round
him ...
around
him
was a conspicuous circle of vacated chairs; he'd knocked a couple of drinks
over earlier on, other people's, a little clumsy tonight. Not pissed, you
understand, if only because he couldn't seem to get pissed any more, not in the
old sense of enjoying it. And
needing
it, well, that was a sad situation, when it came down to needing it. Which he
didn't; this was a conscious decision or, at worst, a temporary abrasion ...
aberration.

      
He didn't realise he'd spoken aloud until this big, bearded
git in a creased tuxedo leaned over and whispered, if you'd like to pop
outside, sir, I'd be happy to assist.'

      
The bloke had hard eyes. Prof held up his glass of scotch.
'Diet Pepsi,' he said, and he chuckled.

      
The man took the glass out of his hand and set it down on the
table. 'You're spilling it, sir.'

      
'Why don't you just piss off, eh, son?' Prof turned his chair away.

      
And then the piano began, those famous, sublime opening chords,
and he didn't see the bouncer any more.

      
Light came down on the pianist. It was like a heavenly light.
like you saw illuminating angels in those naff, sentimental Victorian pictures
in your granny's sitting-room. But Prof stared with this fuddled kind of awe, the
same way he'd stared at those pictures as a kid.

      
The pianist was white and luminous in some kind of loose shirt
which somehow made his body hazy, seem to shimmer in the air with those
beautiful chords, da da da da-da ...

      
The pianist turned his head. He looked directly at Prof, and
Profs hand tightened in the dark around his slippery glass.

      
For the man's eyes were white and waxen circles, like two
communion wafers. When his head bent over the keys, the light glimmered from
small, round, wire-rimmed glasses.

      
Everyone was very quiet. The playing softened. The pianist
looked up, almost drowsily drawing breath, and began to sing into his
microphone, this calm, human, painfully familiar, flat-vowelled nasal drone.

      
Imagine...

      
A shivery glow lit Prof up inside, like old malt whisky used to,
once.

      
... Imagine there's no audience
...

      
The singer looked up, peered over his little round glasses
into the sparseness, continued in sardonic Liverpudlian.

      
...
that's not so fuckin' hard ...

      
Everybody laughed. Except for Prof. All around him, outside
the toxic circle, all the other people laughing, the stupid crass bastards, as
he threw down the rest of his whisky and tried to blank out the heresy - that
the guy should come down to this - by amplifying the white noise in his head
into a black roaring, screwing up his face to close his ears.

      
He closed his eyes too, but he could still see the man at the
scuffed and battered grand piano, his cold, white eyes, his blank, pale face and
small mouth spewing its cheap parody.

      
'Scumbag,' he muttered. Then saw the bearded man starting to
advance, and shut up.

There probably hadn't been
as tense a meal as this, Shelley thought, since the Last Supper.

      
Seven of them at the long dining-table in the panelled hall.
Sometimes she thought there were eight and counted them again: herself and Tom,
their neighbours Sir Wilfrid and Lady Tulley (call me Angela, my dear), the
thin man with the ponytail, Stephen Case - Tom's fan, allegedly - and Broadbank
and the startling Meryl.

      
And although only she and Tom appeared on edge, that was
enough tension to go round, twice.

      
Meryl, in black, part waitress, part hostess, was in motion
much of the time; perhaps this was why she kept thinking an extra person was
present. This and the empty chair.

      
Shelley was having difficulty finding sufficient saliva to savour
the meal. 'Wonderful,' she remarked periodically, smiling stiffly at Meryl.

      
The dinner was meatless. A melon and cherry starter, followed
by vegetable soup. Then an expertly conceived risotto-type thing with a marinated
meat substitute. It clearly fooled Lady Tulley, who twice commented on the
succulence of the pork.

      
Actually, Shelley - in whose honour the dish had obviously
been prepared by Meryl - would, for Tom's sake, have far preferred it to be real
meat. Something to weigh him down, make him tired and lugubrious.

      
Instead, his jaw remained rigid and his face shone with sweat
in the light from half a dozen silver candlesticks, arranged in a straight line
down the old oak table. He hated candles.

      
In fact, Shelley would have preferred them to be dining from a
table with a vinyl top and metal legs inside some fluorescent-lit chromium conservatory
with glass walls - preferably assembled in a factory less than six months ago.
      
'More wine, Shelley?"
Broadbank offered.

      
'Not for the moment.' She covered her glass.
      
'More, er, orange juice, Tom?'
      
'Cheers,' said Tom, without
enthusiasm.
      
He was at the top of the table, his
back to the reconstituted Jacobean panelling. He was looking isolated and his
expression was frozen. Shelley, next to him, kept squeezing his cold and rigid
hand and getting no response, because Tom was very angry with her for deceiving
him about this place and how old it was. Stephen Case, on his other side, opposite
Shelley, kept trying to engage him in conversation, to which overtures Tom replied
monosyllabically without even glancing at the guy.
      
Case was 'a record company
executive'. Well, he would be, wouldn't he. Hmmm, Shelley thought. Bloody hmmm.
      
Next to her was Martin Broadbank
himself, opposite the dramatic Meryl in her black dress and her diamante
choker. Sir Wilfrid and Lady Tulley (Angela) were down at the bottom end, furthest
from Tom, which perhaps was as well. The seat opposite Tom, at the bottom of
the table, was the one that was empty.

      
'You know, TMM,' Case was murmuring to Tom, 'is not the philistine,
profit-oriented monolith you might imagine. Our directors are all
enthusiasts
, and if I mention the name
Silas Copesake ...'

      
Tom turned and observed his neighbour for the first time. 'Sile
Copesake?'

      
'The man they call the Godfather of British Blues,' Case said
proudly, spelling it out for everyone to whom the name would mean nothing - i.e.
everyone here except for the Storeys - 'has been a non-executive director of
TMM for some years. It's about musical integrity, Tom. Recognising our roots.
You were in his band once, of course.'

      
'Yeah. When I was a kid,' Tom said and turned back to his meal.

      
And Shelley knew for certain now that this dinner was about Tom
rather than her. Tom and Stephen Case. Seated together at the top of the table,
with Broadbank himself centrally placed to deflect conversation away from them
if necessary.

      
I've been bloody well set up, Shelley thought, outraged.

      
'Tried your cheese-substitute,' Broadbank said, as if he'd
picked up on this. 'Been right through the range. Preferred the smoked,
actually, is that terribly naff of me? Angela, what about you, have you and Sir
Wilfrid been carried along at all by the healthfood revolution?'

      
'Well, you know,' said Angela, Lady Tulley, 'I do have to say
that when in Stroud now one does find oneself drawn
increasingly
towards Love-Storey. Such an
appealing
little shop in itself.'

      
Shelley had seen her in the shop twice, buying fruit mostly. certainly
nothing that might be construed as cranky. She was solid, square and red-cheeked.
A walker - or rather, a strider, and clearly more at home in the Cotswolds than
Sir Wilfrid, who was looking rather shrivelled tonight.

      
'Indeed,' he kept saying, in a non-committal kind of way.
'Indeed.' Perhaps he always looked shrivelled. Previously, Shelley had only
seen him from a distance, pottering aimlessly in his acre of cottage garden, on
one occasion prodding about with a dangerously new-looking shotgun. He was
supposed to have been an environmentalist - although she supposed being a Senior
Something at the Department of the Environment was not quite the same thing.

      
'If you'd like to meet Sile again,' Case was saying to Tom, 'we
could arrange something, no problem ...'

      
Not the way, Case, Shelley thought, hostile now. She'd known
too many record company execs to trust any, particularly specimens like Stephen
Case with his Armani suit and his greying pony-tail. Anybody who'd survived to
grow grey hairs in this business had to have his poisonous side.