Jeremy called round the next morning. I opened the door, red of eye, sallow of skin, and claggy of hair, and he looked at me as if he couldn’t decide whether I was coming down with flu or had just had the night of my life.
“Your friend Jack about, then, Ell?”
“Sod off,” I muttered, clutching my ratty terry-towelling dressing gown around me. I’d had to prise it out from under Mr. Tibbs while I buzzed my unexpected visitor in, and I really wasn’t in the mood. “C’min. Ignore mess.”
Jerry chuckled and edged around the pile of books by the door. I scanned the room for signs of abnormal habitation, offering up silent thanks that Day’s fag ash had been confined to the kitchen last night. A light breeze fluttered the curtains at the open bay window, and Mr. Tibbs leapt up onto the window seat, yowling softly. A chill touched the room, and I narrowed my eyes.
Don’t bugger about.
“Well, I’ve got to make it quick.” Jerry pulled a wad of papers folded into quarters from his pocket and smoothed out the creases. “But here you are. I did what I could with what you gave me. She was a bitch to find… but then I suppose anyone would be, in her situation. Did you know people used to go to the house, try and nick souvenirs? Tile from the bathroom her husband died in turned up on eBay last year, apparently.”
It took me a minute to catch up with him but, when I did, I thought too hard about it.
“Yuck.”
“Yeah…. Anyway, there it is. Um.”
He loitered, shifted his weight on the balls of his feet, obviously desperate to pump me for information but not quite sure how to start. Just a few weeks ago, I realised, I would have taken pity on poor Jerry and spilled the whole story… or at least some form of it that I could have shared without him thinking me completely insane. Now all I wanted to do was get him out of the door.
I peered at the papers he’d handed me, sucked my apparently furry teeth, and nodded. “Oh. She stayed in Gloucestershire… we thought she— Uh. Yeah. Thanks a lot, Jerry. I owe you on this one.”
He made no move to go.
“Are you…. I mean, you’re okay, are you?”
“Yes. Yes, I’m fine. Very fine. Thanks. Hunky dory, all that. Yeah.”
I virtually pushed him out into the hall. His mouth set into a hard line, biting back whatever reprimand he wanted to give me.
“I’ll leave you to it, then,” he said icily. “Got to go and talk to God on the big white telephone, have you?”
I managed a sick sort of smile, appropriate under what Jeremy assumed the circumstances to be, and closed the door. I heard him huff his way down the corridor, fading out to the sound of hurried, grumpy footsteps on the stairs. I’d hear all about this later, I just knew it, though it somehow failed to worry me. I looked down at the papers in my hand. Eileen Shawcross, she went by now. Middle name, apparently. I wondered if there had ever been a Mr. Shawcross. I assumed so; for all I knew, maybe more than one ex-husband stood between Inez and her past.
I called her that morning. Somehow, it seemed right to take a shower, put on some clothes, and fix my hair and make-up before I did… not that it was video-phone or anything. I’d seen neither hide nor hair of Day. To be perfectly honest, I preferred it that way; I had no desire to try wheedling an interview out of Inez with him standing over my shoulder gesticulating. Anyway, I wasn’t sure what I’d say to him, after last night.
I sat with the phone cradled to my ear, my knees drawn up against my chest, and the leather of the window seat pleasantly warm beneath me. The sun sparkled on the glass; a bright, seaside summer to come, maybe.
“Hello?”
I almost bit my tongue. “Oh… hello. Is that, uh, Mrs. Shawcross?”
“Mizz.”
“Ms. Shawcross… I’m sorry. I—”
“Who is this?”
“M-my name’s Ellis Ross. I was won—”
“I’m not interested in sales calls.”
The harshness of her voice made her sound older than I’d pictured her somehow. Silly, really, because she’d be at least fifty by now, surely. I didn’t know what I’d been expecting—the glamour puss from the photos, the tempestuous siren Leon Fielding had described…. What sort of woman ended up being Mrs. Damon Brent, anyway?
“I’m not selling anything. I wanted to ask you for an interview,” I blurted.
“What?”
That curt tone reminded me of my grandmother. Just as with her, I started to speak far too quickly, rushed to get the words out before her inevitable and irreversible judgement landed on me with a solid thump.
“Please. I’m writing a— I wanted to talk to you about your tennis career.” Who knew? Maybe the lie would work. “Just a few words; maybe I could make an appointment?”
The briefest of silences—Please don’t hang up. Please.—and I thought perhaps I’d appealed to her vanity. I was wrong.
“Oh, God… you’re one of them, aren’t you?”
She rang off and left me clutching nothing but a dial tone and a half-formed cuss.
“Bugger,” I said to the world at large.
“I coulda told you she’d be like that.”
I closed my eyes. I’d much rather not have had Damon witnessing my failures. He’d already seen into my darkest moments, watched my defences and my breakwaters crumble away. Connection.
Oh, I’d give him bloody connection….
A chill draught whispered to my right. I sniffed, opened my eyes, replaced the phone in its cradle, and turned, bright and cheery and unflappable. Damon stood with Mr. Tibbs in his arms, tickling the cat under the chin. I stared. Damn animal barely ever let me pick him up—every trip to the vet for boosters ended up in a military campaign and a battle of wills—but he seemed to nestle quite comfortable against Day’s shirt. Today’s comparatively conservative ensemble comprised just a moss green cotton v-neck, frayed at the cuffs and hem, untucked over a pair of pale blue velvet flares; it surprised me.
“She never liked press. Not after we got spliced. ’Cos it wasn’t about the tennis anymore. Nah, it wasn’t,” he added, making a kissy face at Mr. Tibbs and scritching him under one shaggy black cheek.
The sodding cat had started to purr.
Oh, you’re gloves. You are gloves.
“I think she got jealous, y’know? I mean, it’s one thing to buy into it all… but ’til you see it from the inside out, have to put up with all the shit that goes with it…. She hated that people weren’t interested in her game, just her outfit. Y’know?”
I nodded and recalled what Jeremy had said about bathroom tiles cropping up on the internet. Given the note of melancholy that crept into Day’s voice when he talked about Inez, it didn’t seem wise to mention it.
“Mm.” I gave a non-committal grunt and went to make some more coffee.
Anything but look him in the eye and say I’d screwed up. Truth be told, I hadn’t even expected to see him again so soon after what I supposed I should think of as our little heart-to-heart. I would have expected him to slope off somewhere, for there to be some dark, lingering mood over the place. It would have given me a chance to get back, however briefly, to my research and my thesis, dealing for the first time in a week with the latest batch of concerned emails from my supervisors—worried by the way I’d rushed through seminars and missed audit lectures—and perhaps even writing a little bit more.
Not that I would have been able to really engage with it, my mind caught in the brambles of what I now thought of as my ‘other book’. Oh, I’d write his biography. I knew that… although I hadn’t told Damon yet. It wasn’t as if I needed his approval, of course. It had been his idea in the first place.
I just felt that I owed him the courtesy of asking. Nothing more.
He’d followed me into the kitchen. I could tell without looking now, without needing to notice the chill or the change of the texture in the air.
“You don’t need to worry, babe. She’ll come around. Inez was always like that. Ask once, she says no. Ask twice, you get a maybe… third time’s a charm. You just, like, keep on, yeah? She’ll do it.”
I retrieved the sugar from the cupboard and slammed the door, but a not-quite-grumpy smirk tugged at my upper lip.
“That’s a patented seduction technique, is it?”
Day snorted. “Nah, I…. Well, maybe. Persistence is good, y’know? Big white limousine works too.”
Reaching for the milk, I noticed something stuck to the fridge door. A small blue leaflet, badly photocopied and with a scratchy block font, advertised the monthly Open Mic Night at The Crown. I frowned, because I didn’t remember picking it up, but there it was, tucked neatly under the magnet that reminded me No Coffee, No Workee.
I decided not to mention it. For now.
Instead, I sloshed milk into two mugs of tea and tried not to think about the nature of reality. It had been getting easier to do, which probably wasn’t good. It no longer seemed strange—he no longer seemed strange—and, I had to admit, I was glad he’d come back. He sat down at my kitchen table and addressed the easy crossword on the back of the morning paper. I stood for a moment, holding the tea, and watched Damon Brent frown, chewing thoughtfully at the end of a biro.
“Tea,” I said and set the mug down in front of him.
“Thanks, love.”
I took my drink into the other room, slouched back in front of my computer, and wondered where we were supposed to go from here. If Inez didn’t want to talk…. Well, the only thing I could do was to keep trying. Persistence, like Day said. Maybe try another angle. Write to her, call back on a different tack. Try not to get myself arrested for harassment.
I sipped the tea. Our list of suspects—though both of us seemed a little squeamish about that word—hadn’t really changed. Sure, a lot of people had been ruled out by reason of being dead or overseas. The list Damon had drawn up of everyone who’d had a finger in the pie of his daily life seemed virtually incomprehensible to me: roadies and small-time dealers known only by their nicknames, a number of lawyers and label people who’d dealt with the finances, plus the ephemera of hangers-on, facilitators, and disposable faces who flitted in and out of the band’s ken. ‘Not mainly people you’d call friends,’ he’d said dismissively. ‘Not for long. Y’know?’
I didn’t, not really, but I’d nodded and agreed. A lot of them had been at the party that night, and some of them might even have had motive. I privately suspected that sheer irritation value could have played a part in Day’s death, from the way he spoke about people—if it wasn’t ‘that chick who looked after the fan club stuff. Y’know. Brunette. Kinda stacked. Dunno her name…’, then it was ‘that weedy little twerp we had in for A&R after Vince left the label’.
Still, it kept coming back to the same faces, that same inner circle. The wife, and the band. Leon, I had my doubts about. Damon wouldn’t hear a thing against him. I knew that, so I held my concerns close to my chest, but I hadn’t quite found it in myself to trust him at Dulwich.
I was wondering just why that had been when the phone rang. It jerked me out of my reverie, and I snatched up the receiver, brain not quite switched on.
“Hello?”
“Miss Ross?”
The voice sounded young, female, well spoken. Totally unfamiliar. I reasoned it must be a sales call, except that she waited for me to respond rather than pitching straight into the manifold wonders of double glazing. I did a quick mental check of any bills that I might have forgotten to pay.
“Yes,” I said cautiously. “Who’s this?”
“Christy Brooks. I’m Mr. Napier’s assistant. Lovely to speak to you at last. Now, Mr. Napier sends his apologies; he said he would have been delighted to call himself, but we have a British White in breech with twins, so he’s waiting for the vet.”
I took a moment to process this, but it failed to hit any buttons.
“Ah-hah? Oh dear.”
“Anyway, he wanted me to make an appointment with you for the interview. He’s been very enthusiastic about it. Would you be able to make, say, Friday? I realise that’s rather short notice, but Mr. Napier will be off to Stockholm for a fortnight at the weekend, and he’s very keen to talk to you before he goes, if possible.”
I ruffled frantically through the paperwork on the desk in search of pen and notepad. Things cascaded to the floor. I bit back on a curse, aware of Damon’s appearance in the room. He mugged at me, looked confused when I pointed at the chaos and flapped my hand urgently, while smiling into the phone and saying:
“Oh, absolutely… I’d be delighted. I must say, I wasn’t expecting to hear back so soon.”
Ms. Brooks chuckled and remained irritatingly sunny as she fixed up my appointment and give me directions to Old Wallow Farm. I scribbled down things of import, like the nearest train station and the time I needed to be there, on the back of an overdue gas bill.
“Good, er, good luck with the twins,” I said vaguely, before hanging up.
The receiver clunked back into its cradle. I heaved a sigh and shook my head.
“Weird.”
“What?”
Damon wafted behind my chair; in a moment of strange, unconnected flickers of light, the papers I’d knocked to the floor reappeared beside my keyboard.
“He seems… keen. Joss Napier. I don’t know. Maybe it’s me.”
Day lolled against the edge of the desk and regarded me with his head to one side. He curled his lip dismissively. “Yeah? Well, he always thought he was Mr. Articulate… prob’ly got some project he wants you to write in.”
Catty. I raised an eyebrow. “You two didn’t get on, then?”
“Nah, I’m not sayin’ that.” Damon fidgeted, hand straying to the pocket that held lighter and fags. “He’s all right. It just, like, it wouldn’t surprise me. Y’know? If there was one person who knew his way around the media, it was Joss.”
I pursed my lips and said nothing. Just what I needed. A media-savvy former drummer with one arm up a cow.
* * *
May 24th 1976
Joss really wasn’t keen on TV appearances. Everyone always told him they got easier with time, but they didn’t. He hated the whole experience, from the way just having the cameras there screwed with the flow of the gig to the horrible invasion of having one stuck right in your face. He never knew what to do and ended up grimacing at the unseen viewers like an awkward cousin at a wedding. He brought his cigarette to his lips, took a pull, and leaned back against the dressing room door, watching the endless flow of people nipping to and from the studio.
He’d been in, taken a look at the set-up, seen Cris shading his eyes under one of the big, face-meltingly-hot spots and having some kind of argument with a skinny kid clutching a clipboard. He’d seen the host knocking around somewhere too. Short German bloke with a terrible hairpiece that looked like something he’d scraped off the autobahn and slapped on his head.
They’d be shooting partially in the round, down on floor level. Joss’ drum kit had been wedged in between the amp stack and two blocks of scenery, just plain white cubes, redolent of the clean, bright concrete that most of West Germany appeared to be built from. Leon had been whinging about it all the way from the airport. Why this, why that, how come it all looked the same? Joss had tried to explain about how they’d rebuilt after the war, how concrete was cheap and quick and gave off this air of optimistic modernism. However false, however shallow it was, it made people believe there could be something better. Something brighter. Just like the music did.
Bullshit, of course. He knew that.
Camera people, lighting people, sound people. They were the same in any language. So were the roadies. Joss noticed one guy he knew only as Rusty Jimmy—Damon’s main man for the few days they were over here—wander up from the corridor, twirling a spare cable in his hand.
They’d have to be out there before long. Joss took another drag on his cigarette. He wanted a drink. He—no, he needed a drink. If he’d be expected to do this thing, to keep smiling and looking like he enjoyed it when they stuck a lens right in his face… he needed a drink. It would have been better if there could have been some kind of respite. Some buffer between the studio work and all its grinding, incessantly depressing baggage—that whole oppressive thing Charlie and Day had going—and the nadir of all things horrible that loomed before them on the horizon. Another European tour. That’s what this stupid TV appearance was supposed to promo. Joss winced.
Not that he hated touring, not per se. Sure, he hated the buses with the windows that wouldn’t open and the heaters that wouldn’t work, and the inevitable arguments, and the ancient, endless hours of boredom. And he was sick and tired of pale, anonymous towns he couldn’t remember from the last time he’d visited and always believed he would never see again, full of pale, anonymous teenagers clinging to the ragged coattails of fashion. Sick and tired of being obligated. Sick and tired of being nice and being enthusiastic and, most of all, putting up with all of the shit and—right now—really, truly, sick of West Germany and all its forced, brittle, claustrophobic, clean-scrubbed false optimism.
Joss stubbed the cigarette out on the rim of the litterbin beside him and dropped it in. He flicked his hair off his shoulder and turned to push through the door, damn near colliding with Charlie, midway into a good long cuss.
“…completely and fucking utterly, man! What’d you do? Huh? I’m not doing— I mean, I’ve had a sodding basin of it so far this year, y’know? Bloody state of—”
“He can’t help it, all right? It’s just—”
Damon looked uncertain, which Joss wasn’t used to seeing. He raised an eyebrow.
“What’s going on? Did somebody find my traps case?”
Charlie waved dismissively at the door. “Roadie got it. Whatshisname. Jimmy. Left it on the bus. S’all right. Point is, man, he can’t go on like that,” he said and nodded to the beige vinyl couch at the other end of the room. “You can’t cover for him in front of the camera, y’know?”
Joss turned to the couch. Leon was sitting on it, knees pressed tightly together and his upper body hunched. He held his left hand curled up by his mouth, gnawing at the edge of one nail, while the fingers of his right hand worried at the cuff of his embroidered purple tunic, twisting the cotton into a thick coil. He was sweating heavily, and his hair stuck out at even wilder angles than usual. He glanced up at Charlie, eyes wide and slightly unfocused.
“I’m not going on! I can’t…. Like, nobody should, y’know man? It’s not… no. No.”
He shook his head, stuck the finger back in his mouth, and chewed with renewed vigour. Charlie swore under his breath. Damon sighed and looked to Joss for assistance. Joss fumbled for something to say, some excuse to get himself out of it, and failed. A smear of blood marked the bed of Leon’s nail. Damon noticed and batted the hand away.
“Hey. Don’t. Hands are worth money, man.”
Leon blinked owlishly. “I can’t,” he murmured, shaking his head from side to side in a kind of rhythmic judder. “I can’t go out there. I-if I go up there, man, it’s all gonna…. Nah, ’cos you don’t understand, right? S’all gonna blow up. Kccccchbbbbooooom!”
Leon’s hands clenched around an imaginary mushroom cloud somewhere in front of his pallid face. He stared at his curled fingers and began, very slowly, to rock back and forth.
“Can’t,” he said. “Boom.”
A studious silence fell. Joss reached out a hand, going to touch Leon companionably on the shoulder. Damon stopped him.
“I… I think this is, er, one of those things, man. Y’know?”
“He’s lost it.” Charlie crossed his arms. “I said. Didn’t I say? Fuckin’ acid casualty, that’s what he is. See?”
“He is not,” Damon retorted. He glanced at Leon, then at the door, and frowned. “Anyone else seen this?”
Joss shook his head. “I was standing out in the hall; I’d have seen if anyone else had come in.”
“Right.” Damon shot him a determined look. “Then he’s fine. Joss? Pass us that bottle of vodka. I think I’ve got…. Yeah, here we go.”
He fished in the pocket of his flares and pulled out a small square of foil, folded into four.
“Oh, you’re kidding!” Joss said, watching Day tip three small red pills into his palm. “You can’t give him anything else. Who even knows what he—”
“Just shut up, all right? Gimme the booze.”
Damon snatched the vodka bottle and hunkered down in front of Leon, who was still staring off into some hidden universe, quiet apart from the occasional whimper.
“Leon? Red time, baby. Come on.”
“Charlie, aren’t you gonna…? Isn’t anyone going to say anything?” Joss rocked back on one foot, hands on his hips. “I mean, I’m not just gonna stand here while you kill him.”
Charlie muttered something under his breath, scowled, and paced over to the door. Leon opened his mouth, and Damon slipped the pills in, one by one.
“You’ll feel better in no time. There. See? Who’s good to you, eh?”
“Mm-nn.”
Leon turned a little green around the gills as Day tipped the bottle up and helped him wash down the reds. Joss stepped back, just in case.
“Can’t trust the useless little berk to do anything right,” Charlie complained. “We’re all gonna look like complete nonces.”
“Yeah, like you need help making yourself look stupid,” Damon muttered.
Charlie angled for a reply, but was interrupted by the door opening. Cris poked his head into the room in a cloud of grape-flavoured smoke and worried anticipation.
“All right, boys? Two minute call, and we’re ready for checks. Okay?”
Joss glanced at Charlie, who seemed about to say something, but instead just shrugged and turned away. Joss could, he supposed, have spoken up, but what would have been the point? Why bother now, at the last minute? And it had felt like the last minute for a long while now; lots of last minutes, stretched out and piled on top of each other, until every breaking point just got crested like another dip in the road. Damon and Charlie kept bitching and scrapping in some kind of pretence at machismo, while Leon disintegrated slowly on the sidelines.
They hadn’t been in West Germany for eighteen months, but Joss remembered sharing a hotel room with Leon on the last tour. He’d listened to his stupid midnight roach-musings, his lame jokes… he’d never been this bad then. They’d snuck out of the hotel, gone to a Bier-Keller of Doom where all the red-cheeked, moustachioed locals stopped in their steins at the sight of two long-haired, denim-washed hippies entering the dim bar. It had been fun; he’d felt like a kid bunking off school, and he’d seen Leon in a new light. His own light, not Damon’s reflected glory.
Joss slapped a hand on his back, hating it when Leon flinched beneath his touch.
“You all right, man?”
Leon stared up at him with wide, hollow eyes. “Yeah,” he said, and his voice sounded breathy, like an echo. “I’m being daft, that’s all. It’s fine.”
He blinked a few times and flicked on a nervous grin.
Joss frowned.
“Well,” he said doubtfully, “if you’re sure.”
“Aw… yeah. Yeah.”
“Oi!” Damon stuck his head back through the door, impatient and tight-lipped, and whistled between his teeth. “You girls comin’ or not?”
Leon wobbled to his feet.
“I’m there, man. I’m… yeah.”
Joss rolled his eyes and followed on behind.
It wasn’t their first TV gig. Whispering Bob Harris, The Old Grey Whistle Test and of course Top of the Pops had seen to that, but most times the cameras had been incidental to the performance, not something they had to keep stopping for, readjustments and repeats and the constant tweaking of light and sound. Even the kids in the audience looked as though they couldn’t get into it; just as pale and anonymous as Joss remembered them.
He settled himself behind his drum kit, painfully aware of the camera gliding around them, its operator perched on the mount like some twiggy, pasty jockey, his eye glued to the sight. The lens flared under the lights; its glare made Joss wince. To his right, Charlie started to complain about being blocked by the stack.
“Yeah,” Damon put in. “That’s how you know God hates bassists, yeah? You have to stand next to the drummer.”
Joss pulled a face. Cheap shot and not even funny. The kind of jokes Damon made when he wasn’t thinking, when something had him rattled. Leon still didn’t look right. He kept glancing all around the place, at the petulant, bored teens and the gawky TV people, and his mouth moved on and off, as if he kept articulating something under his breath. Mantra? Prayer? Joss, not so lapsed from his childhood Catholicism as he might have been, wondered, but then he saw the glassy cast to Leon’s eyes and made out the word-shape ‘kaboom’.
The floor manager gave the count, the host did his bit of spiel, and Joss took a deep breath. He didn’t have to think about this part. He knew the song like the back of his hand, and his bandmates were easier to read than The Beano. Two-four on the hi hat, double stroke roll and into the eight beat rhythm on the snare with a ghost strike on the third count… and in went a wailing lick from Day’s Strat. Joss glanced at him over the cymbals, pouting for the camera, showing off. The kids loved it, of course. Loved him.
Them. Joss tried to prod himself with that thought because, even now, it didn’t quite seem real. It had once—before the make-up got thicker and the fights grew more regular and they seemed to spend eight weeks out of twelve carping at each other like old women—but not now. And he would have thought other people would’ve noticed.
He went for a big cymbal roll, the tongue of the music slinking up beneath them, lifting everything from the floor up in one great shapeless swirl that smoothed the creases out of everything—
What the fuck?
—and, with a huge electrical glurp and a fairly impressive shower of sparks, the entire house grid went out.
Lights, sound, everything; all dismissed in a shattered dimness and the ear-itching, sucking pop of shorting fuses. Assorted screams erupted from the audience, Teutonic curses from the TV people and, in the middle of it, Joss saw Leon’s dim silhouette. He backed away from the microphone, shaking his head.
“I told you!” he yelled, virtually unheard in the chaos. “I said! You didn’t listen…. Nobody ever listens, man! I said it would! I said!” He wrapped his arms around his Les Paul and clutched it to his chest like a security blanket. “I said, and now look! Oh, God….’”
Charlie had abandoned his bass and got into an arm-waving, language-barrier-laden argument with the gaffer, while the German host flounced offset to his canvas chair. Joss glanced across the floor at Day.
“I tried to tell ya! I said it would! This is what happens, man… this is how it goes, all right? I told you…. I’m not doing this anymore! I won’t! I’m gettin’ shpilkes over here, man! I mean it! I can’t—”
Damon nodded and set his guitar down. Joss stood and, wordlessly, they grabbed Leon under the elbows. He was still yelling when they marched him back into the dressing room.