Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite! (10 page)

She shook her head. 'You seem to be pretty alive to me.' And then she surprised me by stating exactly what had just gone through my head. 'So what are you going to do? If you go along to the authorities then they're going to wonder why you weren't on the plane. In fact, they're going to assume that you never got on the plane in the first place, even though you were supposed to be, and... and they might well surmise that you had something to do with the plane crashing.'

Just as I'd been thinking, sitting here looking out the window at the sea and the sky.

'Yes,' I said. 'But it's more complicated than that.'

'Ooh,' she said, 'that's kinda interesting. Go on.'

'The plane doesn't crash for another six months.'

She stared across the table. Weirdly, this seemed more of a shock to her than the fact that I'd thought myself off the plane in the first place.

'Wow,' she said eventually.

'Yes,' I said.

'That is a whole different kettle of potatoes. Thrown back in time. Neat. So you know what's going to happen in the next six months?'

I hadn't thought about that. I'd just been thinking about myself.

'I suppose so,' I said.

'You can change events,' she said.

'I'm not changing anything,' I said. 'I can't mess with... you know... space-time.'

''Scuse me there, pet,' said a voice, and we both looked over to see that there was now someone sitting at another table. Six people in fact.

'Sorry,' she said, 'Gotta go. Let's talk after work. I get off at five.'

*

P
erhaps it wasn't so weird that I'd recognised the voice and not the face. The eyes were vacant, the face much thinner than previously. I think, however, that the principal thing it points to was that the voice was all-important. His appearance had never mattered; his looks had always had that ambiguous quality, as if you could never pin down exactly who he was or what he looked liked. What had mattered was what he said.

The Jigsaw Man.

I sat down in one of the two chairs opposite. Straight back, my hands clasped in my lap. I looked across the table into those dark eyes, and tried to imagine myself twenty years previously, in a bright café in Glasgow, the day pouring in through large windows, the river flowing by outside.

Of course, I very rarely looked into those eyes. How often did we look at each other across the table? On the occasions when I sat with him, he would invariably have his head down sorting out jigsaw pieces. As would I. From this position did he impart such wisdom as came to him on any given day.

There was the day of the four wives of course. (If there ever were four wives.) We'd looked at each other that day. Was it these dark eyes that had stared back over the puzzle at me? I honestly couldn't remember. The eyes meant nothing to me. Nevertheless, I knew. This was the Jigsaw Man.

Had my Jigsaw Man had a moustache? I tried to picture him. I couldn't remember.

'It was you who came into the café,' I said. 'The day the plane crashed. You spoke to me without speaking.'

He didn't reply.

'I don't understand,' I said.

'What don't you understand?' asked the Jigsaw Man.

WHO WAS THE COOLEST BEATLE?

––––––––

W
ho was the coolest Beatle? I'll cut right to the end and save you the trouble reading, in case that's how you'd like it. It was George. By a mile. Now, I'm not arguing that George was the most creative Beatle or the best songwriter. Yes, if you were to name the top ten best Beatles songs, you'd quite possibly have three of George's. But then, name the top thirty best Beatle songs, and you've still only got three of George's. His biggest hit as a solo artist saw him successfully sued for plagiarism, and his second biggest hit was written by someone else.

Nevertheless, George was the coolest Beatle, and not just in a way that you could say that so-and-so was the tallest hobbit or that Shanghai is the least polluted city in China. George was cool by any standard.

As for the others, we can dismiss Paul and Ringo straight away from the cool stakes. It could be argued that they do, without doubt, suffer in comparison with John and George by still being alive. But there are plenty of old rockers who manage to retain some element of cool about them, in the way that those two haven't.

The trouble is that they might have been cool at one time, by the definition of the day. It used to be a different thing to be cool. Thirty and forty years ago you were cool by drawing attention to yourself, by letting everyone see how cool you were. Consider the Fonz, the embodiment of '50s cool in a '70s TV show.

The Fonz owned the room. He walked in and everyone knew he'd arrived. He was the centre of attention. He sucked in the last vestige of cool from those around him and added it to his own well-stocked supply. He was from a time when you were cool because you let everyone know it.

Of all the major characters of popular 20
^th
century entertainment, the Fonz rivals only Harpo Marx's early movies, sleazy, bottom-grabbing, child-like pervert character for being out-dated. Now the coolest guy in the room is cool because of what he doesn't do, rather than for what he does. He doesn't try to be cool, he just is cool. He might not say anything at all, and if he does speak, it's only to the person standing next to him.

He's cool because he is. That's all.

Paul and Ringo are still trying desperately to be cool. They haven't realised that the world has moved on. There was a time when some might have argued that Dylan was cooler than McCartney, and some could have argued the opposite. Now, regardless of whether you care for Bob's atrociously shot voice creaking and scraping its way through a fourteen minute song about the movie Titanic, Bob remains himself, while Paul is still trying to be someone that he thinks people want him to be, and therefore there's no contest in the cool stakes.

This is why people consider Paul to be disingenuous. They don't know who he is. Even if they don't think about it, they implicitly know that they’re looking at a guy who isn't being himself, and consequently, can you really believe anything he says? He's the rock star equivalent of a politician.

As for Ringo, making the peace sign hasn't passed for cool in over thirty years.

John is an interesting case, of course. There's an argument to be made that he is such an important figure in 20
^th
Century popular culture that he rises above any notion of cool or otherwise.

When he was alive, he was the epitome of modern-day cool in that he clearly didn't give a shit what people thought of him. What Lennon fan amongst us, having craved a comeback album in the late '70s, did not weep upon finding all his new songs alternated with those of his wife? Nowadays, comfortably listening to Double Fantasy requires but a minute or so of track arrangement on your iPod. In 1980 it required lifting the needle on your record player every three-and-a-half minutes, a much more tiresome business. Yet, John clearly didn't give a shit what we thought about it and, more than likely, wasn't just doing it to please Yoko either. He was doing it because he wanted to do it that way.

Likewise, recording a Beatles album with your wife draped across the piano: not cool. Being able to write Come Together despite the fact that your wife is draped across your piano: damn cool.

The jury might have been out, but then the manner of his death – gunned down in the world's coolest city – pretty much sealed his place in the cool column. History has been kind to him, however, and now it is quite possible that Lennon belongs in an entirely different column, a column that transcends the cool discussion.

John didn't give a shit what you thought and wanted you to know just how much he didn't give a shit what you thought. George, on the other hand, out-cooled this by some way. He didn't give a shit what you thought, and he also didn't give a shit whether or not you knew or cared whether he gave a shit. George brought out an album in 1982 and more or less didn't tell anyone about it. He didn't care. No one bought it. He didn't care about that either.

I remember reading an interview with him in the mid-'80s in which he said that he could have a hit album if he wanted, that he could make the record and do the promotion rounds and sell it. At the time I thought he was living on past glories and that that ship had definitely sailed. Then, in 1987, he recorded a commercial album, did the rounds of the talk shows, made a few videos and had a hit record, just like he said he would. Then he chose not to do it again.

He had an eccentric rock star's mansion. He organised the concert for Bangladesh. He saved Monty Python's Life of Brian, then was OK about it when some of them wanted to go off and make their next movie for more money with a big American company. He held the Pythons in awe, and didn't realise that they held him in awe. He did his only solo concert in the UK to raise funds for the Natural Law Party at the 1992 General Election.

All right, that last one wasn't cool, but he didn't give a shit that it wasn't.

Cool is something you either are or you're not. There's little you can do about it. The more you try to achieve it, the farther away from it you become. George was cool. Paul and Ringo, because of, rather than despite, their desperation, are not. And John... well John just belongs in an entirely different article.

*

T
hat was my piece. When it was posted online, the Beatles fans of the world rallied round and read it. It caught on amongst them. Someone somewhere must have linked to it from their Facebook page or something, and it took off. The last time I looked it had attracted over five thousand comments. I'd say they were split 5-95 between those who agreed with me and those who thought I was the stupidest moron that had ever listened to a Beatles album, if, in fact, that was something I'd ever done. And that's not to mention the legion of Harpo Marx fans who chipped in on the subject of my astonishing ludicrousness and slander.

The internet is an unforgiving place. I was brutalised. Humbled. My opinions brought to their knees. Of course this is what the internet is like, it is the fury of all hell let loose, but it hadn't occurred to me that it would happen over something like this, a trivial article, largely tongue in cheek, presenting a trivial, largely tongue in cheek point of view.

I was wrong. Of course I was wrong. If it wasn't for the fact that I was cast adrift for six months, a complete non-person, while another man – even if it was me – slept with my wife and helped my daughter with algebra, I might have been upset by it. Yet the fury of the internet seemed small potatoes next to the complete and utterly curious meltdown of a life.

Nevertheless, I was glad my picture wasn't on it, and that I'd written it under the obvious pseudonym, Billy Shears. I could go about my business unhindered, and not need to worry that all those who'd posted death threats because I'd had the hubris to imply that Sir Paul wasn't cool anymore – and indeed never had been – were actually going to be able to try to carry out the threat.

Soon enough I stopped reading the comments. Indeed, I expected much worse for my article on the work of the replacement Paul, the article that took for granted as absolute fact that McCartney had died in a car accident. However, no one read that one. That's how the internet works. Or not.

––––––––

H
er name was Amber. She apologised for being called Amber. I wondered if she was used to apologising in the States for the name, or whether it was just since she'd arrived in the UK.

'Why are you apologising?' I said. 'It's a nice name.'

'Over thirty per cent of women with the name Amber work in the porn industry,' she said.

'That's not true.'

'On average, in the US, just over 0.001 percent of women work in the porn industry. Yet if you're called Amber, bingo, you've got just a two in three chance to avoid it.'

I smiled, although I got the sense that this was all part of her routine when she told people her name.

'That why you came to Nairn?' I asked. 'There hasn't been a porn industry here in twenty years.'

She laughed. She smiled a lot, but there was a sincerity in the smile. I liked her, and not just because she believed I'd been on a plane to LA a few hours earlier.

We were sitting at the back of a small pub at the bottom of the High Street. A quiet afternoon inside, but then the sun was still shining and there was a warmth about the day that would linger late into the evening.

'What are you going to do?' she asked.

I'd been thinking, and had sorted out my short term plans. Longer term, I wasn't so sure. All I could think about was somehow muddling through the next six months without doing anything stupid; what to do about the actual plane crash, however, I had no idea.

How could I stop the plane flying into the storm? How could I prevent it taking off? Maybe I could delay it, but then what was that going to achieve? There must be another me, right at that minute, the me of six months earlier, living with Brin. If the plane didn't crash, then that me wouldn't die. What then? Would that version of me disappear at the time the plane should have crashed, or would he go on living? In that case, there would be two of me, there would be another me living my life. The next six months was long enough. I needed that other me to be on the plane. Except, I knew he wouldn't be on it when it crashed.

Was I being selfish? Letting the plane take off, knowing that all those people were going to perish, just so my life would get back to normal? And how did I do that? If the other me got on the plane, it crashed, and then I turned up back at home, how was that going to look? What were the authorities going to think? If I arrived at home straight away, before the plane had left, then I could tell Brin I'd decided not to get on the plane. I'd have her as my alibi. Yet, I would still be on a CCTV camera – probably hundreds of times – walking through the airport and getting on the plane.

I had six months to think about it. The immediate problem was what I was going to do for six months, so that was what I had addressed.