Gimme More (41 page)

‘But that's as far as I can go,' Guido said. ‘I can't sit here and watch the house ‘cos that's what the Sheriff's Department here don't like. You hang out here for a spell and just see if they don't slide on through to check out where you're at. People here dial 911 if they see a bicycle in a no-parking zone.'

‘It's that kinda place,' Alicia confirmed. ‘Exclusive.'

‘Way I see it,' Guido went on, ‘only thing you can do is walk on up to the door and talk to the guy straight up.'

‘Oh dear,' Barry said.

Talking to people straight up was not one of Barry's strengths, Robin thought. She'd had twenty-four hours of his hints and sly rummagings for information.

‘Only problem with that', Guido said, ‘is the dogs. Guy got a coupla mean suckers in there. I saw ‘em night before last. Pit bulls or something. Came out after racoons, I guess.'

‘Pit bulls?' Barry said.

‘What do you want to do?' Guido asked inexorably. ‘'Cos I suggest you don't wait till after dark. If the dogs don't get you the bugs will. This guy doesn't spray – he got mosquitos here big as dinner plates.'

Guido's getting a kick out of this, Robin decided. He's treating us like greenhorns in the wild west. She looked at Barry dithering, playing with his Sprite can, rolling the cold surface over his pink cheeks and between his plump palms.

She said, ‘Well, Barry? This was your idea. What're you going to do?'

Barry's buttocks writhed against the car seat. He said, ‘Robin, look, I mean, Jack was virtually your brother-in-law.'

‘Yes. And I've been listening to twenty-four hours of you saying he was your best friend.'

‘But if he's scarred, Robin? If he's mad …'

‘If he's scarred and mad, he's still Jack.' Robin opened the car door and waves of wet heat rolled in. She said, ‘Come on. We've got to find out, one way or the other.'

The picture of the bright angel on her wall, the one who greeted her every morning, beckoned. And summoned, Robin walked forward into the gloomy tangled jungle.

When I think of all those stories of people looking where they've been told not to look – Orpheus in the underworld, Pandora and her forbidden box, the foolish bride in Bluebeard's Castle – I see initiative poorly rewarded. Loss and death follow the curious. Don't look, they say. Don't be too clever. Don't ask too many questions. Death stalks the detective. But the human condition is to ignore warnings, to go where you're not welcome. That's how new worlds get populated. The naked ape isn't satisfied with the tree he was born under. ‘Gimme more,' he says as soon as he learns to speak. Greedy little bastard.

Good. The globe is crawling with greedy little bastards. I know, because I proudly count myself as one of them. My gimme-more gene is highly developed, so in that respect I understand Nash, Sasson and Barry perfectly.

It should be simple: They want what I've got; I want what they've got. That's the basis of a great relationship. But nothing is simple in a relationship between art and commerce. For one thing, these days, the art is of secondary importance to the artist. Sometimes I think they don't want the art at all – they only want a marketable artist. And increasingly, of course, that is just what they're getting – kids so greedy for attention that they sell their pretty young images to front a product so banal that no one listens to it.

Which makes it tough when what you want to sell are songs to the greedy bastards who only want the singer.

And that is why, when Nash was staring at me from across the boardroom table with his little saurian eyes magnified by thick plastic lenses, even before he opened his greedy mouth to drop his bombshell, I wrote on my copy of the contract, ‘Up your bum, Nash Zalisky.' Childish, undignified? Yes. Satisfying? Oh, absolutely.

‘I always wanted Jack,' he told me once, not mentioning music at all. Well, I'm not selling Jack. I'm not loaning him, leasing him,
or giving him away either. I have ten good songs and that was all I ever intended to sell. The rest? Well, call it my advertising campaign, if you like. It was never up for grabs.

The Antigua Movie? What was that but beautiful visual images packaged for a music industry which is willing to spend more on making a video than on cutting an album. It was beautiful visual images which got my back taxes paid, brought me to the bargaining table and gave me a bank account with money in it.

Nash will want it all back, of course. But he can't have it. He'll have to let it go – the way I've had to let go of all those past royalties, the way Jack had to let go of a little dance number that went platinum in Brazil.

Obviously Nash will say I scammed him. But he'll never be quite sure. Nor will Sasson, and nor will any of the other legal and financial advisors sitting at that table. After all, it was Nash who pulled out of the deal, Nash who said he didn't want to sign with me. Everyone at the table heard him. He said he'd prefer to sign with Jack. I was the innocent party in the rainbow dress who fainted from the shock.

He spent quite a lot of money on nothing. But even so, the price was small compared with what the industry owes Jack and me. He'll never pay that back. What he paid was the price for being a greedy little bastard who looked where he wasn't supposed to look – or rather, being Nash, sending his minions to look. It's the price he pays for looking when he should be listening, for listening when he has no right to listen, for stealing images I didn't want to show him, for corrupting kids like Alec who are primed from birth to want, want, want. But most of all, it's the price he pays for corrupting, with hope, innocent dreamers like my sister.

Her weakness was to love a man who didn't even see her. And Nash exploited her love. He said, ‘You can have him, but only if you betray him.' You pay for that, Nash. I only wish I could've made you pay more.

Later, what Robin remembered most vividly of the horrible, frightening incident was teeth: the gleaming white teeth of snarling
dogs and the yellow ochre teeth of a heavy smoker who mouthed the words ‘Fuck off' at her through mosquito netting.

The frenzied dogs clawed at the screen, rattling it, threatening to hurl their lean muscular bodies through it. She did not back off or run away. She stood her ground and called through the din, ‘Anyone at home?'

And then the face appeared at a window curtained only by mosquito netting. It was a nightmare face, bearded with wiry salt and pepper hair. Leathery skin hung in corrugations from sharp cheekbones. One eye was missing and the eyelid sank into an empty socket like a withered petal.

‘Jack?' she said uncertainly. ‘Is it you?' She tried in vain to make out the colour of the surviving eye – willing it, like a prayer, to be gloriously blue. But the surviving eye was so narrow, so screwed up with enmity and spite, that she couldn't identify a trace of colour in the hate-filled slit.

‘Jack?' she said again, provoking the dogs to more insane rage. But the single slitty eye just poured cold contempt on her quaking heart. The ragged hair around the mouth parted, showing chipped yellow teeth, and the lips formed the words ‘Fuck off but not a sound could be heard above the barking and snarling of the dogs. Then the face disappeared, leaving the black square of window bare.

She stood in front of his porch for fully ten minutes, waiting. She stood with tears pouring down her face, waiting for a stranger to come out and tell her that he wasn't Jack, that however long she waited he never would be Jack. Jack was gone. But the disfigured stranger didn't even return to the window. He left her standing in front of his porch while his dogs screamed and roared.

After a while she wiped her eyes on the hem of her pretty summer dress and walked slowly back to the car.

‘Well?' Barry asked, his cheeks wobbling with anticipation. ‘Well?'

‘It wasn't him,' Robin said, her throat sore from gulping tears.

‘Wasn't? Wasn't?' Barry said. ‘Then why are you crying?'

‘Because it might have been,' she said, utterly defeated. ‘It might have been but it wasn't.'

‘Are you sure?'

‘Absolutely sure.'

‘Did you see his face? How can you be so certain? I don't know that I trust either of the Walker sisters.'

‘Go and look for yourself.' Robin climbed wearily into the car. With silent sympathy, Alicia handed her a fistful of tissues and she buried her face in them, unable to prevent another wave of grief from shaking her drooping middle-aged body.

With the car door open they could all hear the hysterical barking of the dogs. Barry got out and took a couple of steps towards the dark secret house. Then he turned and got back in again.

‘If you're absolutely sure,' he said.

To believe anything else, Robin would have had to accept that her bright angel had become an ugly monster. She would have accepted his ugliness. After all, she had kept the ugly blackened lump that had once been his gold ring. But she could not accept that the man who gave her barmy mother a house when he didn't have one himself could stare at her with such contempt and hatred. She couldn't believe the beautiful youth whose voice made her heart soar could set his dogs on her and stand there staring while she wept in front of his house. An ugly face and body she could accept as Jack's but not an ugly soul.

Therefore it was not Jack's face she saw at the window. Robin's bright angel was a charmed thing etched into eternity. She knew she might not recognise his face, but she could never be mistaken about his soul.

‘You left your mark on me, it's permanent, a tattoo.'

Lucinda Williams

On a grey, drizzly hillside in north Oxfordshire the Hebbingdon Free Festival was in the middle of its noisy, gaudy first day. The damp grass was covered with groundsheets and polythene, and the groundsheets were covered by a sea of stoned kids, rocked into mindless paralysis by stacks of giant speakers from three stages.

Sheltering under the apron at the back of Stage Two were the five members of InnerVersions, Dram, Sapper, Corky, Karen and their new drummer, Patsi Noble. It was their first festival – their first time playing on an outdoor stage, and they were nervous as hell.

‘So many people,' Sapper said. ‘There must be thousands.'

There
were
thousands – the hillside was carpeted with kids. They weren't all waiting for InnerVersions though. They were simply hanging and waiting for whatever happened next.

‘The sound's horrible,' Karen muttered. It
was
horrible – muddled and muddy. The only thing to be said for it was that it was loud. But no louder than the sounds from the other two stages which could be heard clearly from where the band shivered under the backstage. Every now and then the wind blew across the faces of the open mikes causing a thunderous roar.

InnerVersions was slotted in between The Rolling Clones and a club act called Doreen Doreen with only fifteen minutes for the stage crew to set up. There would be no time for a proper soundcheck.

They'd never played to such a large audience and to do so without a proper soundcheck reminded Karen of all those dreams
of incompetence and unreadiness. Thousands and thousands of people, only a forty-minute set to make an impression on them, and no bleeding soundcheck.

Worse, the Clones were doing very well. They had the front of the crowd jumping and singing along to ‘Brown Sugar'.

‘If they like that,' Dram said gloomily, ‘they'll fuckin' hate us. No one knows us. They want a singalong, fuck it, and no one knows our material.'

‘They will after today,' Ozzy Ireland said. He was getting used to InnerVersions' pernicious habit of bringing each other down. ‘Enjoy yourselves for once. Go up there and just belt it out.'

‘Easy for you to say,' Corky said with a sly look at Patsi. ‘This isn't your first outing with a new drummer.' He emphasised the word ‘outing'. He still couldn't quite believe that Flambo had been replaced by a woman, a muscular woman who, it seemed, could count.

‘Shut up and listen to this,' Ozzy said. He folded back the flapping pages of
Mojo
magazine and began to read aloud. ‘“In the studio this month: Birdie, self-styled widow of the more famous Jack, is overseeing production and remastering of the eagerly awaited ten lost tracks. The Hyde Voodoo studio in New Orleans was picked for its proximity to ex-Jack producer, Junior Moline. ‘We're going for a raw, live sound,' says Moline, ‘something as close to the spirit of
Hard Candy
and
Hard Time
as we can get without too much overdubbing. We're calling the album
Hard On
at the moment but I expect the label will have something to say about it.

‘ “Surprisingly, the label is not Jack's old company, Dog Records, as was expected and indeed publicised. The prize, which is expected to go gold in its first week of release, has gone to Atlantic. After the aborted signing a spokesman for Dog was tight-lipped about the loss. ‘We are releasing a Jack-In-The-Box set of our own in time for Christmas,' was his only comment. But a little Birdie tells us that the rift was caused when conglomerate boss, Nash Zalisky, flipped his lid and started to believe in Jack sightings from as far afield as Acapulco, Miami and Bali. ‘The ghosts of dead rock stars are always haunting us,' she said with her familiar sexy laugh,
‘but you don't expect multi-media moguls to want to sign contracts with them.' So, no
Hard On
for Dog this Christmas.”'

‘Well that explains why we haven't seen her,' Corky said, digging his elbow into Sapper's ribs. ‘Nothing personal, old fruit – she was just feathering her own nest.'

It is finished and I'm holding in my hand the slim plastic box with a cover-picture of sunlit, windblown Jack. His face emerges like a spectre's from a stormy sea. Or is it receding into the waves? Coming or going? Who knows – it's all down to individual interpretation, like everything else in rock music.