Written in Dead Wax (21 page)

I said, “It’s unplayable. At the moment. But don’t worry.”

“What do you mean don’t worry? My boss is definitely going to want to play it and he’ll be expecting a high fidelity audiophile experience.” She looked at me. “And what do you mean, at the moment?”

I said, “There’s two kinds of damage to records. There’s the kind that’s permanent and irreversible—wear and abuse and scratches. And then there’s the kind that’s just due to neglect and lack of care. Like leaving a record lying around and allowing it to collect dust. I think that’s what we have here.”

She was getting what I was saying, but she was also getting impatient. So I cut the explanation short. “Irreversible damage usually happens to a record that’s been played hundreds of times.”

“But that’s not the case here, correct? This is not irreversible damage. Correct? Please, sweetie, this is like riding a fucking rollercoaster.”

“I’m sorry. I’m just saying that this…” I held up the record. “This looks like exactly the opposite problem.” I tilted the record to the light and inspected the thick grey layer of dust that had accumulated on the playing surface. “I suspect that the record has hardly been played. Perhaps it was played once, or never. After that, I think someone left it lying around, perhaps on a turntable, for months or maybe even years.” I turned it over. This side was a lot cleaner, which supported my turntable hypothesis.

I looked at Nevada. “But I think, under the dirt, it may well be perfect.”

She was watching me intently, as if her future hung in the balance. “And the dirt can be removed, correct?”

I nodded. “By cleaning with a proper record cleaner.”

She relaxed. “Well, you’ve got one, haven’t you?”

“No.”

She shook her head. “Yes you have. I remember, the first time I was here.”

“Shit,” I said. “The omelette.” I hurried back into the kitchen and caught it just in time. I turned off the heat under the pan. Nevada had followed me into the kitchen.

She said, “I remember it with great vividness. You were banging on about coffee filters in the record cleaner box, or some such lunacy. But the point at the centre of this lunacy was you had one, a record cleaner.”

I took the plates out of the oven, where they’d been keeping warm. “I do. But it’s just a primitive wet bath system.”

“I think I’m still with you so far, but I’m suppressing an urge to scream.” I cut the omelette in two and transferred it onto the plates. “Here, let me take those.” Nevada took the plates out and put them on the table, and set cutlery around them with a clatter while I buttered the toast and stacked it on the breadboard. When all the food was on the table I showed her the record again.

“For this you need a proper record cleaning machine, one with a vacuum cleaner built into it to suck the gunge off the surface of the record as it cleans it.”

“Suck the gunge, right, that’s audiophile terminology is it? I must say it isn’t very appetising.” But she didn’t display any lack of appetite as she tucked into the omelette. It was cooked to perfection, despite all the to-ing and fro-ing.

“They’re really noisy too,” I said, between devouring forkfuls of omelette. The cheddar was just right. “That’s another reason I never got one. The vacuum cleaner is unshielded you see, and they make such a racket that you have to wear ear pads when you’re using one. To avoid damaging your hearing.” I grinned at her.

“Yes, I get the irony. Losing your hearing in pursuit of audio perfection.”

“Plus the cats would hate it.”

Nevada reached down and patted Fanny, who had become excited by the sound of us happily eating and was now inward bound for her food bowl. “And we wouldn’t want to hurt your little ears, would we, would we, would we? Little ears, little ears.”

“Plus I could never afford to buy one.”

She looked at me across the table and smiled. “You’ll be able to afford to buy one now.” She helped me carry the plates back into the kitchen and dump them in the sink. “So where do we get one of these machines?” she said.

“It’s not that simple.”

She followed me back into the living room. “No, of course it isn’t.”

“If we rushed out and bought a very expensive record cleaning machine, and someone happened to have us under observation, don’t you think they might find it a tiny bit suspicious?”

She looked at me, the realisation surfacing in her eyes. “Of course. Why would you want a special record cleaner? Perhaps to clean a special record.”

I nodded. “We wouldn’t want the Aryan Twins to put two and two together.” I looked at her. “And get an Aryan four.”

She snorted with amusement. I sat down again and reached for another piece of toast, the last survivor lying lonely on the breadboard.

“So we don’t buy one of these cleaners. Instead we find someone who already owns one, for business or personal use. Someone we can trust.”

“I was going to have that piece of toast,” said Nevada. “And do you know such a person?”

I divided the piece of toast with her. “I do, but he lives in Wales.”

“I don’t want to sound as if I don’t immediately love the idea of driving to Wales, but is that the only option?”

“We could send the record to him in the post.”

“Right,” she said. “Wales it is.”

* * *

Once she was sold on the idea of driving to Hughie’s to clean the record, Nevada wanted to set off right away. “So let’s go,” she said.

“Not now. First we want to spend the day combing the charity shops.”

“What? Why?”

“We don’t want to give any indication we’ve found the record.”

“Of course not. So we don’t want to change our usual pattern of behaviour.”

“That’s right. We have to behave in a way calculated to pull the wool over their little Aryan eyes.”

“And if they think we’re still looking for it, if they see us doing that, they won’t guess that we found it.” She grinned at me. “You’re so sneaky. I can’t believe it. You have a natural talent for this.”

So we devoted the day to making the rounds of the charity shops, this time in Chelsea. The poshest neighbourhoods of London tend not to have charity shops. Too downmarket. Which is a pity. The King’s Road, though, was an interesting exception and the shops here were always worth a look. Today we hit all of them. It was fun. I didn’t find anything, but that didn’t matter. I was sated, content, like a fisherman who had already landed his limit.

Landed a whale, in fact.

That night in bed I said, “By the way, do you ride a bicycle?”

Nevada rolled over and looked at me. “Do I look like I’ve ridden a bicycle since I was twelve years old?”

“That’s kind of exactly my point.”

For someone who allegedly hadn’t been on a bike since she was twelve, she did surprisingly well the following day. We slipped through the Abbey grounds, ghostly in the early morning mist.

It was Sunday and we generally didn’t go record hunting on Sundays, because so many charity shops were closed for the day. “So if we can just prevent them from discovering that we’ve slipped off…”

“Assuming they’re watching us at all. For all we know, they take Sundays off, too.”

I had borrowed the bikes from the two nice women, Ginnie and Sue, who lived next door. Because their bungalow was adjacent to mine, we could step out of my back gate and in through theirs virtually unseen. The two bikes had been left out for us, equipped with rather impressive heavy-duty steel locks. We unlocked them using the keys Ginnie had slipped through my letterbox the previous night and walked the bikes out, ticking and whirring, into the dark and quiet of the foggy street.

We closed the gate behind us and stood in the small access road that paralleled the rear wall of the Abbey. There was an opening in the wall about a hundred metres down on our left, which allowed pedestrian access into one small section of the Abbey complex, a public thoroughfare for centuries. We threaded our bicycles along the footpaths here, guided by the low amber footlights that marked the path, both of us gaining in confidence as we got used to the machines. “It’s just like riding a bike.” My voice seemed to be muffled in the fog. No one else was around, so I spoke a little louder. “You never forget how.”

“So, who did we borrow these from?” said Nevada.

“Lovable local lesbians.”

She shifted around on her seat. “Do you think I’ll catch being a lesbian from sitting on this bicycle saddle?”

“We can but hope.”

Having taken our meandering, roundabout route through the Abbey grounds, we now came out onto the main road about half a mile from the exit of my estate. We would proceed to ride back past that exit, as though approaching from another direction entirely, and hopefully only recognisable as a couple of anonymous dawn cyclists.

We whizzed down Abbey Avenue, towards the Upper Richmond Road. The avenue was silent and empty, wreathed in fog. The amber streetlights were discreet glowing clouds flowing above us. I could sense Nevada relaxing beside me as she got used to the bike. She looked over and flashed me a grin. She was beginning to enjoy the ride. So was I.

The air was damp and cold and clean. You could smell the promise of snow.

Up ahead glowed two soft red circles, ill-defined and floating in mid-air. The traffic lights. We slowed to a halt and waited, balanced on our bikes. The eerie green glow of the traffic lights shone through the fog. We took off and turned right.

There were no cars in either direction. The only sound was the drone of a passenger jet descending towards Heathrow, high above us in the immensity of the morning sky. We pedalled towards the next set of lights. As we slowed, there was a wet whispering sound behind us.

The sound of bicycle tyres.

A cyclist appeared out of the mist and fell in beside us. An indeterminate lean shape with helmet and goggles, dressed all in black with a yellow stripe down the side, he or she stopped and waited poised on his or her bike for the traffic light to change. Through the fog the soft red light shone down on us all.

Just then there was the sound of a second bicycle. It whispered to a stop on the other side of us. This rider was also dressed in an entirely black outfit with a yellow stripe. This rider was bigger, undoubtedly a man. My heart began to beat raggedly in my chest. The light changed.

We all surged forward together. The two riders in black were tight on either side of us. I could see Nevada was pushing as hard as I was, but we weren’t making any headway. Our escort kept pace effortlessly.

We moved down the empty streets in perfect formation. I was going full out now, sweating profusely. My rucksack felt hot where it was strapped against my back.

Inside the rucksack was a box. Inside the box was the record.

I looked at Nevada helplessly. The riders to our right and left kept pace with us like automatons. There was no one else in sight. We were alone in the street. I began to realise just what a miscalculation I’d made.

Then there was the sound of a third bike.

Then a fourth and fifth. They came out of the mist. All wearing the same black outfit as our escort, black with a yellow stripe. They fell in all around us, all identically dressed. More and more until it was finally a dozen cyclists, all with the same team colours.

They were all around us, like a school of fish surrounding two of a different species. They were riding with us, and then suddenly they were gone, pouring on the speed and contemptuously pulling away from us—the two Sunday-morning amateurs—as they disappeared into the mist. Quite possibly on their way to the Olympics.

Nevada and I looked at each other and slowed down.

My heart was pounding, and not just with the exertion of cycling.

* * *

At the car rental place in Putney we loaded the bikes into the back of the Volvo we’d hired and set off towards Hammersmith and the M4.

I was driving, Nevada beside me with a large book of maps, prepared to supplement the in-car navigation system if necessary, and a rather more useful bag of oranges that she was all set to peel on demand, then neatly segment and pass across a piece at a time to refresh the driver.

“Are they seedless?”

“Now you’re starting to sound like Tinkler.”

Speaking of Tinkler, we had to drive along the Fulham Palace Road and right past the Charing Cross Hospital. But we didn’t stop. “They might have it staked out. They might be watching for us.”

“Do you really think so?”

“No,” I said. “But we can’t take the chance.” She nodded and started peeling an orange, releasing its lovely scent.

So we agreed we wouldn’t stop in to see Tinkler.

It was something I’d live to regret.

* * *

The sun was coming up and burning off the mist as we drove west out of Hammersmith and onto the motorway. Nevada napped for a while and then woke up and resumed our conversation as though it had never stopped.

“So tell me about your friend.”

“Hughie Mackinaw,” I said. “The Scottish Welshman.”

“That’s what Tinkler calls him.”

“That’s what everybody calls him. Good old Hughie. What can you say about a white man with an afro? At least it’s not ginger.”

“There is that,” she said.

“He has a wife called Albina and a boy called Mickey and a little girl called Boo.”

“Is that short for something? Boo?”

“I don’t know. But she’s nice.”

“It’s a nice name.”

“I like her a lot better than the boy.”

“Why?”

I considered. “Hughie is one of those macho guys who has spoiled his son completely rotten. So the kid is this sulky, tantrum-throwing, petulant little pudding.”

“You paint an attractive picture.”

“So, anyway, what I’m driving at is that the son’s the antithesis of the guy himself.”

“I get it. In what way is Hughie a macho guy?”

“He used to run with a motorcycle gang in Scotland. He was their mechanic. Great precision mechanic—could build spares from scratch. He could make anything. But then he discovered it was safer and more profitable to build turntables.”

“Strange career U-turn.”

“Not really. He always loved music. Had a good ear. That’s the connection.”