Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite! (32 page)

'What if it happens, then the company folds, or the piece of work falls out of favour and is forgotten?'

He made a
phht!
noise.

'They just vanish?'

'Yep.'

'That's pretty sad.'

'That's life,' he said.

I sat back, took another drink of coffee. This really was the best cup of coffee I'd had in twenty years. Why couldn't I make coffee like this?

'How long has this been going on?' I asked.

He glanced up, made a small vague gesture with his hands, then looked back at the picture.

'You mean there are manifestations of Shakespeare plays? Books of the Bible? Pliny?'

'Sure,' he said. 'All of those. Except Pliny. Pliny was another dick.'

I stared at him for a while, but he wasn't looking at me. I glanced around the café. I wondered who the other customers were, which made me think of the Stand Alone, and I wondered who those other customers were too. There was a door out onto the street, but I didn't know what street it was. Was it just the other side of the block from Abbey Road? I almost doubted it. Walking through the red door and down the long corridor felt like taking a trip to Neverland.

I noticed the jug of water over by the counter.

'Glass of water?'

He shook his head. I got up, poured myself the water, and had drunk half of it by the time I sat down again.

'But the Starbucks guys, when I saw them, seemed to be working on something. New coffee-related drinks, I presumed. They were tasting. But you're doing jigsaws. What's that all about? Shouldn't you be writing songs?'

He shrugged.

'The Beatles split up, they don't care. And anyway, I'm my own man, I can do what I want.'

'But what makes you the Jigsaw Man?'

Now he looked up, slight annoyance showing on his face.

'You do,' he said.

'What d'you mean?'

'I don't call myself the Jigsaw Man, for crying out loud. It's not on my passport. No one else called me the Jigsaw Man, except you and your friends, until you wrote that script. Would you call anyone else doing jigsaws the Jigsaw Man? Would you call some guy who eats a bacon sandwich every day the Bacon Sandwich Man? I mean, don't get me wrong son, I don't mind. But you just have to acknowledge your own part in all of this.'

'But the agency people, whoever they are, they call you the Jigsaw Man and they referred to each of the other guys as the Jigsaw Man.'

He stared across the table. For the first time I saw in his eyes some of the darkness that I'd seen in the others. The incarcerated ones.

'You started it,' was all he said, and then he turned back to the picture. His eyes roved around the pieces that remained to be fitted, but I could tell he was distracted. I had a feeling of everything being my fault, but I'd been over that in my head so many times. And he'd just confirmed that the others had been taken into custody twelve years previously.

'What's going to happen to them?' I asked.

He glanced up and then turned back to the picture.

'If they find me, they bring me in, they ask me the same sorts of questions they've been asking them, then they leave us to rot forever, or they kill us all. They kill all four of us, we all die.'

'And if they don't find you?'

'They leave them to rot for all time.'

'Won't they kill them?'

He shook his head, although this time he wasn't looking up. I got the feeling he had far more invested in the conversation than he was letting on.

'Can't,' he said. 'Whatever it is that we are, we're not created the same way as everyone else, so we can't just be killed off. They kill one of those guys, he just appears back at home base, wherever that might be. In our case, over the road there. The only way to finish us off is get all of us at the same time.'

'How do they know that? How do you know they know that?'

'Learned their lesson with
Beggars Banquet
. Now those guys are still out there.'

'Wow. The Stones haven't done anything significant since
Beggars Banquet
?'

He took a deep breath, let it go slowly. Lifted the coffee cup, but placed it down again without taking a sip.

'So, if you stay out of incarceration, the others survive in misery. If they take you in, you all die?'

'Yep.'

'And if you all die, what happens to the record?'

'Hey man, it's the Beatles. It's not just going to vanish overnight. But soon, and in this day and age, I mean...' and he snapped his fingers, 'like that, you're going to get folks on Twitter and in blogs talking about how the album's been over-rated, and then it appears in books, and over time it comes to be dismissed. It becomes an afterthought in the Beatles catalogue. And then the Beatles become an afterthought.'

'That's kind of weird, and a bit sad, but it's not, you know, the worst thing that could happen to mankind.'

He took another quick look up, made a small movement of his shoulders.

'Never said it was,' he said.

'It's just, it's just not good for you four.'

'That's about the size of it.'

'Crap,' I muttered, although I wasn't entirely sure what I was referring to. The entire situation was crap after all.

'But it's reasonable that you want to see your wife and kid again,' said the Jigsaw Man, this time looking me in the eye.

I nodded.

He stared at me for a while. Very obviously sizing me up. I realised he had a suggestion to make and was considering whether or not I was the right person to make it to.

'Who are the other customers?' I asked.

'Just folk who can see the red door. Not that many can.'

'But the Stand Alone?' I said. 'That was just a regular café, right?'

It had never been busy either. Once again I thought of the other few customers, and how most of them appeared to be regulars.

'Of course it wasn't,' said the Jigsaw Man.

'But how...?'

'Jones,' he said. 'That's why it faded for you guys after she left. You'd been there enough that you could still find it, but gradually, without her, it just vanished.'

'Well, who's Jones then? Who
is
Jones? She represents something of human significance?'

'I never knew,' he said, sounding completely disinterested. 'Tom Jones?'

I gave him the required look. I didn't want to think about my Jones being some sort of representation of an ageing Welshman with sculpted facial hair.

'What d'you want me to say?' he said. 'Think about it, work it out. You know her a lot better than I do.'

Jones. It was just a name. I'd never thought about it before. Why would I?

Tom Jones. Indiana Jones. Terry Jones. James Earl Jones. Catherine Zeta-Jones. Tommy Lee Jones. Chuck Jones. Brian Jones. Davy Jones. Desmond and Molly Jones. Me and Mrs Jones. Dylan's Mr Jones. The Counting Crow's Mr Jones. Everybody else's Mr Jones. Agent Jones, Agent Crosskill's partner. All part of this bizarre Beatles narrative.

'Maybe that's it,' he said, his voice a little softer, as if he'd been running through the list in his head along with me. 'Maybe that's why she seems so capricious, that you can never pin her down, that you never know who she really is. Maybe she's all of them. All the Mr or Mrs Joneses that have ever existed or been created. She's a manifestation of this name that crops up all over the place. Who's that Mr or Mrs Jones that people sing about?'

We stared at each other for a while. I was probably supposed to be thinking about what he'd just said, but I was barely thinking anything at that point. It was a lot easier to imagine Jones as flighty and unreliable, rather than as the incarnation of an entire surname.

'Hey,' said the Jigsaw Man, 'maybe she's Jones the cat out the first Alien movie.' He shrugged. 'Anyway, never knew, never cared.'

I sat back, closed my eyes, dragged my hand across my face. Rubbed my eyes. My head wasn't hurting. No, my head
was
hurting. Yes, my head was beginning to hurt. This seemed so convoluted, never ending, yet when I thought about it, it seemed simple. Straightforward.

Why was I getting a headache then?

I opened my eyes. There was a thin file lying on the table in front of me, obscuring the top section of the jigsaw. I looked at it for a while and then glanced up at him.

'It ain't biting you,' he said.

I pulled it towards me. It was a faded cream-coloured file, embossed with the crest of the CIA and with the words TOP SECRET stamped top and bottom. I tapped my finger on it a few times, and then slowly opened it. The document inside was perhaps twenty pages thick. The top sheet bore the heading: REPORT INTO RUMOURS ABOUT THE DEATH OF BEATLES SONGWRITER PAUL MCCARTNEY. Again this page was stamped TOP SECRET, and there were a few other office stamps and a couple of signatures. The document was dated June 27
^th
1970.

He was watching me now. I didn't look up but I could feel his eyes on me. I turned to the second page, which had two short paragraphs, one headed Justification and the other Summary:

Justification:

This report has been commissioned to examine the rumor that Mr James Paul McCartney, one quarter of the popular beat band, The Beatles, was killed in a car accident in either 1966 or 1967, and replaced by a doppelgänger. The report will consider the likelihood of truth in the rumor, and the reasons for it. In either event of the story being judged to have been unfounded, or to have been based on fact, consideration will be given to the involvement of the Soviet Union and what attempts might have been made to subvert western society.

Summary:

While strong and arguably conclusive proof has been uncovered to determine that Mr James Paul McCartney died in a car accident in November 1966 to be subsequently replaced in the band and in private life, so far no link has been found to known Soviet operatives working in Great Britain and/or continental Europe at this time. Investigations continue.

I looked up at him again. He returned the slightest of raised eyebrows. I took another sip of coffee.

'This is great coffee,' I said.

'Thank you. You know, you probably don't need to read too much of it. The bulk of it's the usual rumour and innuendo. You'll know all that stuff. Hey, you wrote about it last year.'

'But... it's a joke, right? Everyone knows it's a joke. It's like, people don't actually believe Neil Armstrong never went to the moon. It's kind of fun to talk about, but really...?'

'The CIA believed it.'

'How did you even get this?'

He tossed a casual hand in the air. That wasn't a question he was about to answer, and I didn't want to know in any case.

'What do you want me to do with it, then?' I said.

He stared across the great divide of the Adoration of the Magi.

'Work it out, son,' he said. 'These people, this agency whoever they are, are searching for the manifestation of
Sgt. Pepper
, four people to represent the four Beatles. But what if there weren't four Beatles on that album? What if, starting with
Sgt. Pepper
, there were only three actual Beatles, plus this other guy pretending to be Paul, singing John's songs, and who ended up on his own writing
Mary Had A Little Lamb
and
Rupert And The Frog Chorus
.'

'But.... there are four of you...'

He nodded slowly.

'Yes,' he said, 'there are.'

I looked down at my coffee, and wondered what its secret was.

I left shortly afterwards, through the front door of the café. I glanced at the other customers as I went, wondering who they might be. Was there an
Unbearable Lightness of Being
, a
Nessun Dorma
, a
Monty Python & The Holy Grail
, a Boeing 747?

I stopped at the entrance of the café, knowing that I would never be back in one of the Jigsaw Man's establishments. I turned to look at him, but the waitress was back at his table, blocking my view. They were chatting and I couldn't see his face.

I looked down beneath his table. Past the head of a middle-aged woman with bouffant hair and through the crook in the arm of another customer, I could see the Jigsaw Man's bare feet on the floor, his left foot tapping along to whatever tune was playing in his head.

––––––––

I
knew I wouldn't see the Jigsaw Man again. Jones I wasn't so sure about, but this peculiar one-quarter of the essence of a Beatles album I'd been listening to for over thirty-five years was gone from my life.

I walked a couple of blocks, found myself outside Lord's cricket ground. The gates were open, and there was a sign up indicating a match taking place. Middlesex – Nottinghamshire, third day of four. I stood for a moment and then decided to go in.

I needed to sit in silence and consider what should happen next. A game of cricket, the third day of four, seemed perfect.

I paid my £16, walked into the ground and sat in the Edrich Stand, side on to the wicket, no other spectator within ten seats of me. Only twelve wickets had fallen so far in the game, and just after lunch on the third day of four it already had draw written all over it. Every now and again polite applause would break out, but other than that there was barely a murmur of conversation.

I had a pint of cider and a pie, which I was slowly working my way through. I‘d bought a packet of sea salt and malt vinegar crisps for dessert. It wasn't healthy, but I could make up for it later.

The CIA report was in my small backpack, which was on the ground between my feet. The Jigsaw Man had insisted that I take it and do with it as I saw fit.

I was trying to sort it all out, but it all seemed so far-fetched. There was a strange collective of people out and about in the world who had been created, seemingly spontaneously, through the artistic and hard-working efforts of others. These people seemed to exist in our world, even if things were not entirely as they seemed. And there was the peculiarity of the red door. Were there hundreds, thousands of red doors around the world?

I appeared to have become involved in this other world, partly because of my connection to Jones, and partly because of the fact that I'd managed to think myself off a plane; a bizarre and frankly unbelievable act, which belonged in a bizarre and unbelievable world.