December (6 page)

                     
Another one of those
untimely coincidences the electricity company was on about.

                     
It spooked me, kid. I couldn't
keep a limb still when I read that. I don't like December, how could I? What
about you? Do things happen to you in December? Do you start to get nervous
when the nights are growing longer?

                     
It's November now, coming
up w a year since the big Liverpool blackout. Worried? Me?

                     
Bloody right I am.

                     
Here's another untimely
coincidence that never made the papers - they probably thought it was too
bloody stupid to mention.

                     
Nineteen ninety-three.
Thirteen years since December 1980, when people were crying in the streets of
Liverpool, everybody gathering in Mathew Street, where the Cavern used to be.
Do you remember that woman on the radio? 'He was still one of ours, was John.
He'd never really left. It's a death in the family.'

                     
The lights went out in Liverpool
in the thirteenth minute of the thirteenth hour of the thirteenth day of the
month in the thirteenth year since the murder of the city's most famous son.
                     
And that happened on
a Monday too.
                     
Moira, what can I
do?
                     
I'm heading for the
loony bin.

Which was still better - or
was it? - than being dead.
      
Maybe not.

      
'I'm the same age as you now, pal,' Dave told the picture of John
Lennon. It was the one from the front of the
Imagine
album, Lennon hazy in the sky. Lennon the seer, Lennon the sage.

      
Mark Chapman, the killer, in his spurious role as crusading Holden
Caulfield from Salinger's
The Catcher in
the Rye
, had claimed Lennon was the ultimate phoney. Self-justifying shit.

      
'In a year's time,' Dave told the picture, 'I'm gonna be older
than you were. That can't be right.'

      
John observed him sardonically through glasses like the bottoms
of school milk bottles.

      
yeah, well, you shoulda
thought of that at the time.

      
A white cloud blossomed like ectoplasm from the centre of John's
forehead.

      
'I was scared, pal, I keep explaining.'

      
that's
nothing to do with it, Dave, if you don't mind me saying so. we all get fuckin'
scared, when you're scared, that's the time to act, man
.

      
'Look ... I didn't know. I didn't know it was gonna be you,
did I? I've explained that. Loads of times.'

      
so what you're saying
-let me get this right - is that it'd've been OK if it was some other poor
fuck. You wouldn't be agonizing ...

      
'No, that's not ...'

      
you're sooooooo full of
shit, Dave, you hated me, man.

      
John's thin lips were slightly parted; a small puff of white
smoke drifted from his mouth into the clouds.

      
Dave lowered his face into his hands.

      
If you die tonight, who
has the last laugh?

      
Far above the bungalow, a seagull keened.

      
He often had the idea that wherever Moira was, there were also
seagulls, maybe the same ones flying back and forth.

      
He gathered up the letter. It was almost unreadable. He
wondered if his ma still had her little Olivetti. One way or other he'd have to
get this one typed.

      
Meanwhile, Jan. He couldn't put this off. It was just over an
hour and a half's drive to Jan's place. He would make it before nightfall.
There was no point in considering what he was going to say to her. It all
depended on how far she'd been able to come to terms with what he was. And on
what the doctors had said about Sara.

      
Out of his hands. It was always out of his hands.

      
Bloody Lennon was sneering benignly from behind his cloud.

      
fuckin' useless, Dave,
you know that?

      
'Now listen, you smug bastard,' said Dave, rallying. 'You were
becoming a sanctimonious sod, and just because you're bloody dead doesn't give
you the right…'

      
There was a small thump on the window. He turned in time to
watch coffee-coloured seagull shit sliding slowly down the glass.

II

The Next Big Thing

'That guy, what was his
name - found Tutankhamen's tomb ...' Prof Levin was fumbling with a penknife.
      
'Howard somebody ...'

      
The elegant, if frayed, Stephen Case, greying hair in a
ponytail, was keeping his distance, not wanting dust on his clothes. Plonker.

      
'Anyway,' Prof grunted, putting down the knife to wipe condensation
off his rimless glasses. 'I feel like him.'

      
Somebody apparently had said to Steve Case that he ought to
take a close look at the junk in Epidemic's attic. As a result of which -
what
a surprise - they'd discovered this
box, like a long, wooden cashbox, under Goff's bed.

      
'He was cursed, though', wasn't he, this bloke?' Prof replaced
his specs, slid a blade under the lock. 'Didn't they
all
get cursed? Didn't they all die horribly?'

      
'Yes, well, we're not archaeologists, and this isn't a tomb.' Stephen
Case smiled thinly. 'It just feels like one.'

      
They'd clambered up the linoleum stairs by torchlight, their
echoing footsteps making it sound like there was at least fifteen of them, and
the beam had been suddenly flashed back by the darkly glittering eyes of Jim Morrison,
of the Doors, twenty-odd years dead.

      
Jim was stripped to the waist, a floor-to-ceiling,
black-framed photo blow-up, full of scorching menace.
1943-1971. Singer, poet, shaman
- this on a tarnished brass plate.

      
Prof had remembered how Morrison had had a major drink
problem. He knew everybody famous who'd ever had a major drink problem. Not
that his own problem had ever been
major ...

      
They'd moved up two more flights of stairs and found similar
figures looming over the landings: Jimi Hendrix and then John Lennon, both in
black frames the size of coffins, leaning out at you over the stairs. A
memorial gallery of dead rock stars; was this natural?

      
Tell you one thing,' Prof said, feeling the lock of the wooden
box begin to loosen. 'If there's tapes in here, they ... see that?'

      
'Mould? Can't have got inside though, can it?'
      
'Want to bet, son?'

      
Prof was still suspicious, because Steve had known exactly
where to look: not in the actual attic, if there was one, but in mad Max Goff's
private apartment, this once-luxurious penthouse, now stripped of everything
but the giant bed and these godawful, black and purple funeral-parlour drapes
framing the 'rural' side of Luton.

      
The building used to be a shoe factory before it was the headquarters
of Epidemic Independent Records, with the founder sometimes living over the
shop. Now the founder was dead and Epidemic, leaderless and crunched by the
recession, belonged to TMM, Steve's faceless, multinational employer.

      
Place had been closed only two or three months, but already
these top windows were the only ones not boarded against vandals. There were
security men and dogs in the grounds, and Steve'd had to produce verifiable ID
before they'd been let in.

      
'What's A and R mean?' The chief security guy had demanded,
studying Steve's card.

      
Arrogant and ruthless, Prof Levin had thought, having known
Stephen Case since before he'd sold his soul to TMM, back when he was just
another hustler, and having no basic reason to think he'd changed.

      
Steve had sighed in annoyance, his shoulders thrusting under
the imitation Armani jacket he wore with creamish, stonewashed jeans. 'Artists
and Repertoire. Means I get to decide who we're going to record. My colleague
here is one of the people who push the buttons. That's what "recording
engineer" means.'

      
The security man's face had read,
I'll remember you, pal
, but, for now, he'd just nodded. 'OK, you
can go in, but we have to keep a record of anything you may remove from the
premises.'

      
'Jesus, we own the place now,' Steve had moaned, then had thrown
up his hands wearily. 'All right, all right.'

Finally, they levered up
the lid of the box, the edge of it splitting.

      
'Careful now, Prof, we don't want to ... Is that an envelope on
top?'

      
'Yep.' A thick A4-size one, made of heavy parchmenty stuff,
adding to the feeling of phoney antiquity coming off the black-painted wood of the
box with its greenish brass shoulders - built for doubloons, Prof thought, rather
than sensitive recording tape. This was going to be messy.

      
Steve was snapping his fingers impatiently. Prof handed him
the envelope over his shoulder, thinking, Why me? Why not one of the smart-arsed,
hi-tech boy wonders always hanging around his office,
please, please, Mr Case, Sieve, just gimme a break
...? What's he want
with a sixty-four-year-old alcoholic with a long-established attitude problem?

      
Except, of course, that the boy wonders maybe wouldn't know
where to start with the kind of tape that might have been stored for years in a
wooden box under the late Max Goff's well-used kingsize bed. Whereas Ken Levin
was known as Prof not only because of his glasses, his pointed beard and his
encyclopaedic knowledge of the British music scene since 1955, but on account
of an expertise with recording tape which some distinguished producers
considered was verging on the extrasensory.

      
Also, another point - Steve Case had obtained work for Prof at
a time when his drinking was causing some consternation (this in an industry
fuelled by dope!) and therefore was aware that Prof owed him one.

      
There was a certain type of bloke, especially in this
business, who was never quite as good as his reputation. Who only survived at
the top by doing people carefully-judged favours at the right time and
recouping later.
      
'What you were expecting, Steve?'

      
Steve looked at Prof furtively, down his nose - not many people
could do this.

      
Prof said, 'You'll let me know then, will you? One day?'
      
The box had actually been in a
cupboard set into the panelling in the base of the bed, this enormous four-poster
- repro of course but starkly impressive all the same, even though stripped of
its curtains, sheets and pillowcases.

      
Which would all have been black, of course. Best not to even
imagine what the founder of Epidemic Records had got up to here with various
girls and boys. And sheep and donkeys and Alsatian dogs, probably.

      
Max Goff must have been dead a couple of years now, knifed by
some little glue-sniffing teenager deluded into thinking the great man was
going to turn him into a rock star, allegedly driven into a homicidal frenzy
when he found out the truth. Well, obviously, there was more to
that,
wasn't there always?

      
It hadn't happened here, of course. But this was still a murdered
man's bed, wasn't it?

      
Aw, leave off... Prof shook himself.
      
Didn't seem to bother
him
- straw-haired, fortyish Steve
standing in the shadow of the four-poster, prising away at the parchment; you
could almost see his long, bony nose twitching. Stephen Case: twenty years in the
business, cynical, manipulative .. . but still prepared to be romanced, if not
fully seduced, by the Next Big Thing.

      
He was going to be disappointed, however - Prof extracting the
first tape-carton from the box, blowing off the mould - when he saw this lot.

      
Grimacing, Prof slid the tape back and counted up. A dozen cartons
of two-inch tape in ten-and-a-half-inch reels. Masters, obviously.