Kill For Love (4 page)

He nodded.

"Right! I'll wait to hear
from you. You don't like Jesse Gadden, is that it?"

He shook his head. Then opening
the front door he stepped quickly out, and trotted away down the road.

Some people can be very precious
when it comes to their taste in music, she grumbled to herself as she closed
the door.

Then, pouring herself a large
glass of wine, she turned the volume of the CD player up. Jeroboam might not
like Jesse Gadden, the Motts next door probably didn't like Jesse Gadden, she
wasn't even sure that she liked Jesse Gadden, but if this interview with him was
ever to happen she was going to make sure she was thoroughly prepared.

She read right through the
evening, curled up on the cream sofa in her living room. While she'd been out reporting
during the week, Beverly,
the intern, had been scouring the websites and cuttings for biographical
information on Gadden, the result being a thick folder stuffed with print-outs
and photostats. The girl had been proud when she’d handed it over, but, as the
evening wore on, Kate became increasingly disappointed. There was so little
hard information.

Fetching a notepad she compiled
some basic facts. Born in l975 in Waterford
and christened Jesse Gadden Monaghan, a Wikipedia biography suggested his mother
might have been a traveller. Neither a father nor any other family members were
mentioned. The only certainty was that his mother had died when Gadden was
five. After that there’d been a series of orphanages and boys’ homes. Then
there were references to performing as a folk singer in Galway and Dublin in the nineties.
He'd also, it was rumoured, hustled a living in Paris
and Amsterdam
and busked on the London Underground, but there were no dates for this. As for
friends there were no details, other than the name of his first manager in Dublin, Kevin O'Brien.
Then at some point Petra Kerinova had appeared.

"KERINOVA,"
she jotted down.
"WHO IS SHE? WHAT FOR? LOVER?"

On this there were no hints.
Indeed for a rock star the amount of gossip about Gadden's sex life was paltry.
There were none of the usual groupie tabloid tell-tales, no paternity claims,
and no paparazzi photographs catching him backstage with cocaine stretched
models. Given the sparseness of facts, it wasn't surprising there'd been no proper
biography on him, the couple of Jesse Gadden paperbacks Beverly had come up
with being scarcely more than details of recordings, tour dates, song lyrics,
photographs, publicity hand-outs, a few quotes and names of charities
supported.

One thing about him, she thought
as she read through the list of charities, and noted the photographs of him
shaking hands with the good, the great and the powerful, he was certainly
generous.

But what of the missing eighteen
months before the farewell tour? What had he been doing then? Where had he
been? There were no clues. In a world groaning with information technology it was
amazing that Gadden had managed to keep so much of his life secret.

At around ten she gave up on the
brochure, and, going up to her study, typed
“Jesse
Gadden”
into Google. Almost immediately a figure came up.
“Approximately 19,500,000 entries match your
details.”
Approximately!

As Beverly had already sieved what journalists
had written, Kate turned to the fans' sites. “Crazy,” she murmured, as she saw
the devotion spelled out, from trite declarations of worship to lengthy interpretations
of song lyrics. To her the songs sounded like a succession of sumptuous images
piled one on top of the other, wordy metaphors laced together by a conceit of
significance. And she wondered at the ability of so many people to see in them what
she couldn't.

Quickly bored by the logjam of
whimsy, she returned to her living room, pushed a
Jesse Gadden
In Concert
DVD
into the player and watched as the singer’s pale face glowed luminously on the
screen.

What was it about this man that
caused such devotion? What was she missing?

Chapter
Six

September 18:

She drove up to Hampstead for a
family lunch the following day, feeling guilty because she didn’t really want
to go. If her father had still been alive there would have been stronger binds.
He’d been a history professor and she’d been half way through a thesis on “unAmericanism
in American cultural imperialism” when he’d died twelve years earlier. She’d
also been having an affair with a married lecturer in international relations
at London’s
King’s College. Her father hadn’t approved of either.

“You should get out and see the
world as it really is,” he’d always urged.

And in the weeks following his
funeral she’d abandoned both thesis and lover. Already an occasional broadcaster
on foreign affairs, she’d seen an opportunity for another kind of life when an
opening had presented itself as a radio correspondent with the BBC World
Service. Then there’d been Chechnya
and 9/11, and by the time of Shock and Awe she’d moved into television, making
her face famous with pieces from Afghanistan,
Somalia and West Africa. She was steely, personable, pretty and well
read, and she could improvise intelligently before the camera. The job consumed
her life.

 
When her mother had re-married she’d been
pleased for her, although puzzled, disappointed, actually, in her choice of new
husband, David, a widower and retired broker. Now Kate understood how parents
felt when a child married: no-one could ever be good enough. Her mother, who’d
been a teacher, saw things differently; her every gesture towards her new
husband being touched with intimacy. And while Kate’s twin brothers, now forty,
were embarrassed to see their mother making foolish
double entendres
, Kate was both fascinated and appalled. It was as
if their mother had reinvented herself in her new husband’s image, that she
would do anything to please.

But, where once there’d been a
centre to the family with shared memories, there was now an elderly couple who
took cruises on their pensions and played golf, and were, it seemed to Kate,
silly. Her father had never been silly. When he’d been alive she’d rarely felt
the need to go home. She wished she had, because now, without him, though her
mother and stepfather lived in the house in which she’d grown up, there was
nowhere to go home to.

Yet here she was on the first
sunny day in a week, parking her car, a functional little Citroën, under the
horsechestnut tree which stood outside her mother’s Victorian house off
Haverstock Hill.

As she switched off the engine a
disembodied voice spoke to her. “What was he like?”

She looked up through the sun
roof, open for this late, warm day. Catherine, her fourteen year old niece, was
standing on the garden wall staring in at her. “What was who like?”

“You know. Mum said you met him
in the lift at the hotel. Did you want to die?”

“Should I?”

“People say they do.”

“Crazy people.” And she closed
the sun roof.

“I don’t suppose you thought to
get his autograph, did you?” Catherine asked as they went up the garden path
together.

“No. But I gave him mine.”

 
It could have been worse. Lunch was the usual
Sunday joint, and the flowers she’d brought were honestly appreciated. Her
brothers had both gone into education, John as a lecturer in economics, Richard
as a head teacher. John and his wife, Helen, had one child, who was Catherine.
Richard and his wife, Nell, had two sensible sons, of thirteen and eleven.

As usual the conversation
revolved at first around the children’s schools, before going off into a
discussion about a fifteen year old Japanese girl who’d murdered three
room-mates in her dormitory while they’d been sleeping, before committing
suicide. For the past few days as the Japanese police had searched for a credible
motive, the world’s pundits had sniped smugly about the pressures put upon
Japanese students to perform. But in this house of teachers the mood was one of
puzzlement.

“Who knows what goes through the
mind of a fifteen year old?” Kate’s mother observed quietly.

“Yes, well…” new husband David
interrupted. “This is all a bit miserable, isn’t it. Anyone like any more
lamb?” And he picked up the carving knife as requests for seconds were made.

“So, come on, tell us, when you’re
close up, do you really see ‘your pain reflected in the mirror of his blue eyes’?”
asked Helen, John’s wife, smiling. She was a psychotherapist at the Tavistock
Institute, and was much amused by a recent cover story in the
Sunday Times Magazine
in which Jesse Gadden’s
eyes were shown in enlarged close-up.

Kate pulled a face. “I think the
mirror must have been a bit fogged when I met him.”

“They say he can ‘see into your
soul’,” came in John wryly with another quotation from the same article. He’d
always been a young fogey, scornful of anything that was fashionable.

“Some kind of metaphysical
keyhole surgery, probably,” Kate threw back.

“It sounds as though he’s got
X-ray eyes,” this was one of Robert’s sons.

His twin brother giggled. Knowing
what they were thinking Kate pulled an anguished face and looked down towards
her body, as though Jesse Gadden might have been able to see her breasts. This
further amused her nephews.

“He’s beautiful.” Nell, Richard’s
American wife, who’d been sitting at the end of the room said quietly.

 
Everyone looked towards her. She was a plump,
curly haired, motherly woman on the brink of forty whose life revolved entirely
around her sons and the school where she worked in administration.

“Well, yes, of course...” Helen
began.

“I mean it,” Nell insisted. “His
eyes do seem to invite you into them. And his voice is…” She couldn’t quite
finish the sentence.

“But the songs, do you understand
what they’re about?” Kate asked.

“Not really: not much, anyway. I
keep thinking I do, but then the meaning seems to slip away, like when someone
explains something very difficult. I mean, you get it when they’re telling you,
but then you can’t remember what you understood the moment they stop talking.
Jesse Gadden’s songs are like that.”

“Like you and Latin, eh, Charlie?”
came in her husband, Richard, ruffling the hair of the son sitting at his side.
“Can’t remember what you understood the minute you close the book.”

Kate watched. He’s covering for
her, she thought. Nell had been talking like a fan, so he’d purposely changed
the direction of the conversation. Head teachers weren’t supposed to be married
to rock fans.

Nell smiled. She didn’t care.

The family’s new step-father was miles
behind the conversation. “I always had trouble with Latin,” he said. “A dead
language. I didn’t see the point of it. Boring. I don’t know why you bother
making the poor boy learn it. No-one else does nowadays.”

Kate watched as her mother smiled
and put a friendly, speckled hand on his wrist. She felt sad for her. Her
mother was losing her independence of thought. As a younger woman she’d been a
Latin teacher.

“I like Jesse Gadden when he
sings
Scabbard’s Blade
,” Catherine came
in meaningfully as she bisected a sprout, then peered up from under the dark
triangular bob of hair which hung provocatively over one eye.

“That’s the one about sex, isn’t
it?” Helen, her mother, asked. She was a thin, attractive woman, more
intelligent looking than sophisticated.

“Is it?” Catherine asked with
mock innocence.

Kate watched them all. It was a
normal family affair, full of little eddies of tension and rivalry, of some
people growing up and others growing old. Quietly they sawed on through lunch,
her mother and step-father exchanging more smiles, her brother Richard and his
boys talking football news, and the sophisticates, John, Helen and Catherine
swopping only-just-disguised, long-suffering, grown-up looks. They were three
little units, she thought, three groups of people and she was on the outside of
all of them, the observer and unmarried daughter, the spinster sister, the
maiden aunt.

From the periphery of her
awareness she heard David congratulating her on her New
Forest ponies’ story, chiming loudly about the disgrace of it all.
He sounded more indignant than he ever had after her reports from Africa, and she watched sadly while her mother nodded and
said how proud she was of her daughter. Kate wished she felt proud of herself.

It wasn’t until the afternoon was
finishing, the goodbyes had been said and the families were making their ways
back to their separate lives that Helen mentioned Jesse Gadden again. “A most
unexpected thing about him came out in a programme some of my colleagues were
doing at the Tavistock,” she said, as she and Kate returned to their cars. “They
were trying to find out to what extent different sorts of music could be used
in different kinds of therapy, so a group of patients were played all kinds of
stuff…Bach, Gershwin, John Lee Hooker, Abba, Stockhausen… even Girls Aloud. And
the surprising thing was, it was Jesse Gadden who had the most interesting
effect.”

“You mean he put them all to
sleep or woke them up?” Kate asked as she found her car keys.

Helen laughed. “They weren’t
asleep. Some were extremely alert. But different people had entirely different
reactions. Most became quiet, listening carefully. Some were very happy but one
or two others were afraid, wanting him turned off, refusing to listen.”

“And what was deduced from that?”

Helen shrugged, and pulled a
face. “That music causes different reactions in different types of people, I
suppose! It wasn’t my project.” She kissed her goodbye. “Anyway, it’s been
great seeing you again. Good that you’re back to your old self.” And she
hurried to rejoin her husband and daughter.

Kate got into her car. Across the
road a man walking his dog indicated her to his wife. The woman peered into the
car and for a moment Kate wondered if she knew them. She didn’t. But they
thought they knew her.