Authors: Phil Rickman
Twice, he glared defiantly down between his legs, revelling in
the awesome terror.
The main part of the
church roof was between his knees, about a hundred feet below. When he arrived here
he'd been glad the church had no tower; vertigo would grab him in belfries,
like having a coat thrown over his head his arms seized and his body spun round
and round.
Simon started to laugh aloud with the perverse joy of fear.
This was what it had come to: if it wasn't perverse, it was without pleasure.
His intention had been to climb up until he could see the Holy
Mountain, the Skirrid. To hold out his hands to it, draw in the emanations like
a truth drug.
He'd have come directly up here first thing this morning if
well-meaning Eddie Edwards hadn't turned up at eight-thirty, determined to haul
him off to Abergavenny. Eddie was a force of nature. And, besides,
that
might have been divine
intervention, he might have experienced a moment of revelation in the ruins of
Abergavenny Castle, where Aelwyn had witnessed the unspeakable.
Aelwyn Breuddwydiwr. The
dreamer. And not the only one, if Simon was expecting divine intervention.
He climbed on, carelessly. A piece of rock was torn off by his
left boot, and the boot took a savage, lunging step down towards the distant
church slates, dragging his left hand from the rock, his right hand grabbing instinctively,
just in time, at the outsprung root of a stunted rowan tree, while his mind was
screaming for his body to be free of all this.
It left him hanging gloriously in space, intoxicated with the
knowledge that certain death was simply a matter of relaxing his fingers.
I'm going to fucking do it, he decided. I'm really going to let
go.
Far below him, a van crawled like a beetle up the village lane,
and the church roof began to see-saw.
A blast of wind took him in the stomach. The tree root began
to split. He saw his broken body supine amid broken slates across the spine of
the roof.
His arm began to ache. He looked up. The rowan tree was
growing out of the middle of the great cleft, clinging like him to the rock.
But the tree had to go on clinging until some gale uprooted it, and he'd simply
made the decision to let go, the mind committing the body to the air.
'Last chance!' He felt his face contort, his teeth bared like
a wolf's. 'Tell me.
Is it the Abbey or is
it me? Tell me, damn you!'
The root snapped.
VI
Like
a Dog Turd
Tom Storey started to
laugh.
He was sprawled on the double bed,
hands behind his head. Meryl sat upright on a padded stool alongside the fitted
dressing-table unit, her hands in her lap. She didn't much like the laughter, but
it was an improvement on his belligerence outside.
Tom said, 'When I was wiv Sile Copesake's band - sixty-nine,
seventy, this'd be - the motel was still quite a new fing in this country, not
many around, you know? But Sile, he knew where to find 'em.'
Tom sank his chin into his chest. He'd taken off his jacket
and his shirt to expose a grey vest with holes in it and a small, forlorn
tattoo just below his right shoulder:
DEBS
,
in a blue heart.
'See, in those days, hotels was still a bit prudish. Band
shows up after a gig, one lady apiece, fine - they could be your wives or your
regulars. Two ladies, difficult.
Free
...
well ...'
Meryl smiled. She was almost touched to think that this man thought
he could shock her.
'Now Sile,' Tom said. 'Some nights, he'd want four.'
'Greedy,' Meryl said calmly.
'Yeah. Suppose it was, really. But you got to remember this
was his heyday. He'd done his time, twenty years of it, seen kids he d taught
to play turning into superstars while he's still slogging round the clubs. Here
he is, 1970, forty years old, blues is back, Sile's at the centre. He knows it
ain't gonna last - he wants his share.'
'Sad, really.' Meryl was trying to remember who Sile Copesake
had been.
'Yeah, it was. Sad. But the point I was making wiv motels is
you got your own access from the car-park, no reception desk to pass, no
stairs. The roadies could ferry the ladies in and out, nobody the wiser. Yeah.'
Tom expelled a philosophical sigh. 'One fing you could say about Sile, he knew
where to find the motels. Otherwise, he was a tit.'
Meryl said, 'And you? Did you use to have your four girls, Tom?'
'Me?' Tom smiled self-consciously. 'Nah. I used to like to
talk a bit as well, those days. Maybe I was lonely. And when you talked to 'em ...
well, tell the truth, they wasn't all slags. Nah, one girl a night was enough.
Wiv one girl, you could pretend.'
He looked strangely vulnerable. She tried to imagine him as a
young man. Long, blond hair in the Viking warrior style and matching moustache.
Meryl had never been a great follower of rock and roll. She realised she must
be about the same age as Tom Storey, but you probably had to be a generation
younger to have idolized him.
She supposed Viking was right, the rock musicians descending
on some country town, raging through their concert. And then the orgying among
the local girls.
But Tom Storey had only taken one girl into his chalet. He
liked to pretend. Pretend she was his girlfriend? Pretend they were married?
Pretend he had emotional security?
Meryl said gently, 'Pretend?'
'Piss off,' Tom said abruptly. He grinned cruelly. 'Look at me
now, eh? Look at what's waiting outside me chalet nowadays. How far can you
fall, eh?'
Meryl felt her face tighten and burn. The bastard. She felt a
deep, savage need to hurt him back, emotionally and physically, but, other than
the stool she was sitting on, there was nothing to throw at him. She sat very
still, bit her lower lip. A heavy lorry rumbled past.
Tom had his legs apart; there was a small hole in the crotch
of his trousers. Hardly what you'd call erotic. Poor Shelley, Meryl thought.
And then she said, without thinking, 'Who's the man with the
hole in his face?'
She hadn't meant to say it. There was a raging silence. Then
the light, functional, modern furniture in the room seemed to grow darker and
heavier and more cumbersome, the atmosphere suddenly musty, the air stained
brown. For long, long moments, it was an older room, from an older, poorer
time.
And now Meryl finally
was
shocked. Tom Storey stared at her for shattered seconds, and then he began to
weep.
All the way back to London,
mainly motorway, Prof Levin kept on at Dave, wouldn't let him think, roaring
over the grinding of big trucks, the hiss of air-brakes in the damp gloom of
late November. 'What's your problem, David? You're the Angel of fucking Death.
Get in there, man, go back, work it all out.'
Dave wouldn't think about it. He just drove, racing the
retreating daylight to the end of the motorway. Resisting questioning Prof
about the two words which had so rapidly relieved them of Russell Hornby's
company: Soup Kitchen.
Prof, well pissed - several more drinks before Dave could
prise him from the Crown - was still euphoric about getting the dirt out of
Russell Hornby. Drink and euphoria, dangerous combination: it meant Prof was
seeing the funny side.
'Maybe you need it, son, eh? Work with Storey again? Think
that's possible? Think Case's gonna lure Storey out of his bunker? And Moira?
Like that, wouldn't you? No, really? Think she's still got it, David, that
special something?'
'I don't know what she's got,' Dave said soberly. He was
thinking of the dark, smoky cowl, the hideous bonnet.
'And what about the other guy?'
'Do us a favour. Shut your gob, Prof.'
'And Soup Kitchen, and Barney
Gwilliam. I'm getting old, David, I'm allowed to ramble. Hey, you know how they
identified Graham Bond after the tube train got him? Thumb print. That was
years ago; that don't matter. What's now is Soup Kitchen. And Barney Gwilliam,
a little pool of blood in studio ninety-seven.'
'For God's sake. Prof, what are you on ...? Shit!'
The lorry driver had started blasting on his horn. Dave
couldn't do anything about the situation; he was blocked on each side, the fast
lane all Porsches and Jags and BMWs, an endless tin river. One small tug of his
right hand would toss them into oblivion, a swift, blurred death, couple of
burnt-out nobodies in a ten-year-old Fiat. The lorry was screaming, Do it! Do
it!
'Barney Gwilliam, David. You ever hear about Barney Gwilliam?'
'I don't even know who he is.'
'What a short, selective memory you have, son. Barney Gwilliam
was your engineer at the Abbey in December 1980.
'Oh. Barney. I never knew his last name. Very quiet guy, got
on with the job, didn't have a lot to say.'
'That was the boy. Brilliant. Drove a studio like a DC10.
You're right. Didn't have a lot to say. But the manner of his passing, David,
was truly ... truly eloquent.'
Passing?
The big truck was screaming for space. In his mirror Dave saw
that the figures 666 were part of its registration. The lorry bombarding him
with bile from behind, Prof into a death trip in the passenger seat. And in the
flat fields either side of the motorway, his mind constructed buildings: a
fortress, massive, forbidding, many-windowed, all of them black; above it
soared archways and buttresses of wind-worn, pink-grey stone; through the archways
a woman walking, a woman with her head wrapped in black.
A blue sign said SERVICES 1M.
But he hadn't really seen her, had he? Not
really
. This was only his own
projection, from a ten-year-old photo. A mind game. Contaminated by Prof's
rambling about some death song on the album, a song that hadn't existed.
'Simon, yeah? Simon St John? Played cello and flute and that.
And bass. The only member of the band could read music, am I right?'
Sometimes, anyway, when you played mind games, they came back
on you in a negative way, as if to teach you a lesson - don't mess with this
stuff unless you're serious.
'Where's this Simon now, then, David?'
But he
had
been
serious, desperately serious. Oh God. Oh Jesus. Not Moira.
'David, I'm tryin' a talk to you.'
'Last I heard he'd become a Christian,' Dave said. 'Like Cliff
Richard.'
'He never! Dylan did that once. Never made a really good album
since. They don't, do they, when they find God? Proves the old saying, don' it,
'bout the devil having all the best tunes?'
'That's all bollocks. It's only fanaticism makes bad music.
The rule is, believe what you want but don't preach, it just sounds naff.'
'Used to call the blues
the
devil's music.
Robert Johnson selling his soul at the crossroads at
midnight, getting himself murdered. Graham Bond, remember him? The Aleister
Crowley fixation? Poor bloody Bondy, flattened by a tube train. Late sixties,
was that? Feels like yesterday. This is a sick, sick industry, David. Ambition
fuelled by dope and sex and they all get cored, too young. Reach the point the
only thing they got left to sell is their immortal fucking souls.'
A great black truck, transcontinental job, was coming up hard
behind them in the middle lane, wanting to get past, too heavy to move into the
fast lane.
'And the roll of the dead. Hendrix and Morrison and Brian Jones
and Bolan and Joplin and Lennon and Kurt Cobain ...'
Dave loosened his hands on the wheel. The wheel was wet.
'I'm getting off, Prof.'