December (38 page)

      
You
mean Aelwyn?

      
Dave had fled the studio that night just as the song had
descended to the death of Aelwyn ...
his
death. Maybe this was an earlier take.

      
Which was impossible; there hadn't been any earlier takes. Rehearsals,
yes; recordings, no.

      
He felt starved, pulled the ancient, two-bar electric fire
closer to the chair. The point was to record it live, the whole band playing, a
fusion of minds and spirits. The aim: to let in the echoes from the stone. Russell
Hornby, who really didn't believe in any of this shit, had said, 'This is the
climax, guys, you need to build up to it, it shouldn't become blasé.' So they'd
rehearsed, many times, the build-up: Aelwyn's flight from Abergavenney Castle,
the pursuit across the frozen hills, six verses ... and, even in rehearsal,
kept coming out of the song before the seventh verse because Russell Hornby,
efficient, shaven-headed Russell, advised it. And Russell ...

      
... did not basically believe this shit.

      
Looking back, there were so many more things which didn't add
up.

      
The candles, the dark brown candles - they never had solved
the mystery of the candles. Too much had happened too quickly afterwards. And
now it emerged that somebody - Russell - had conned them over the tapes. Well,
with hindsight, this was understandable; no producer would like to watch his
week's work going up in smoke. Inexcusable, but understandable.

      
And 'On a Bad Day', the worst thing Dave had ever done - was
this abomination among the tapes which somebody called Stephen Case had so thoughtfully
recovered?

      
A toxic cocktail
,
Moira had called the band. Moira, who didn't even know about 'On a Bad Day',
the most toxic song ever recorded.

      
But Russell knew.

      
Dave's head sank into his hands. This was all too much to
take.

      
I mean ... she's alive
and everything?

      
Prof talking about a woman ... a woman dying ... on the tape ...

      
There was no woman dying.
Aelwyn
died. Nobody else. Tom's Debbie and John Lennon, but nobody else ... nobody on
the
tape.

      
Got to do it.

      
Dave sprang to his feet, switched off the TV, pulled his
canvas suitcase from under the bed. There was a zip compartment underneath for
stuff you wanted to keep flat. Inside the compartment was an LP record, made
maybe ten years ago and long deleted. His only copy; he'd carried it around,
wherever he went, for ...

      
He didn't know why the
hell
he'd carried it around.

      
Yes he did. It was for a purpose such as this. For an emergency.

      
Davey,
love, we're no' safe together, we're too much.
      
And it would bloody well have to be
an emergency because the only time he'd tried this before, there'd been a very
frosty reception and two days of severe headaches
. I told you, we can't even see each other again.

      
Dave took the album back to the armchair and the stuttering
electric fire. How ironic that the picture on the front should so mirror his
old fantasies (although it would be stretching credibility to think she might
actually have done this for
him
).

      
He looked at the photograph for a long time, memorizing the
details, the colours of the sky, the formation of the clouds, the corrugated
patterns in the sand where it met the sea, the shape of the rocks in the
distance. And then gradually ...

      
... gradually, he let his gaze drift away from the picture to
a point in space, in the middle distance. Regulating his breathing, allowing his
eyelids to fall, but not quite all the way, so that here was a hazy, unfocused image
of the blank TV screen on the chest of drawers and the white wall behind.

      
And then concentrating on the noise of the sporadic night
traffic, a distant radio, merging these separate sounds, letting them come into
the room and join the fractured metallic chatter of the electric fire until all
of it dissipated into a kind of aural fog, fading into the fuzzed images of the
furniture, everything coming part of the same sensory mush and then there was

      
a long beach, a deep blue-grey sky

      
and a woman side-on to the camera and to the sea, but her head
turned away so you couldn't see her face because of the black hair almost to
her waist. She had on jeans and a skimpy T-shirt. Bare feet. Hands behind her
back loosely clasped round the neck of an acoustic guitar trailing along behind
her.

      
He made the woman walk, silently tracking her along the and as
if through a movie camera on a dolly.

      
In her wake, a word was elegantly scrawled in the sand, as if
it had been spelled out by the trailing guitar. He didn't look at the word,
lest his attention be diverted and the woman walk out of his vision.

      
He heard the slumberous sighing of the sea, the skimming of a
late-summer breeze, the keening of seagulls overhead. And he altered their
voices until the sounds of the gulls and the sea were mixed into the rhythm of
her bare feet padding and slithering along the beach and the soft bump, bump,
bump of the acoustic guitar over the firm, corrugated ridges in the warm sand.

      
And he sent a word to the spirits of the air, a simple,
spherical sound, sent rolling like a small ball along the beach.
      
Moirrrrrraaaaaaaaa

      
Calling her gently, whispering to her to turn around. Sending
her all his love, sweeping in on the tide.

      
Knowing, not caring, that he was in tears.

      
Moirrrrrraaaaaaaaa

      
But she wouldn't turn.

      
She just kept on walking, and him staggering behind, losing the
rhythm of her even pace, the breeze awakening, turning against him and the
bored, restless sea slapping petulantly at the sand.

      
please.

      
Moira,
please
...

      
She was moving away from the shore, into the softer sand, and
the breeze lifted it, made it swirl around her ankles, and the guitar was clinking
on the pebbles, its strings quivering, discordant protests coming out of the
soundbox, and no message any more except the remains of the word deeply
inscribed into the harder sand, close to the shore, and the word was,

      
And as he read it, she stopped and turned slowly, but he
couldn't see her face, only the cowl of smog around her head, the black,
hideous bonnet.

An acrid smell of burning
as Dave's eyes sprang open through a screen of tears to find the cardboard
record sleeve had slid between his fingers, down behind the protective wire in front
of the electric fire.

      
... the woman dying ...
she's fading ... the voice, the whole quality of the voice getting sort of
brittle ...

      
There was a sizzling; a peeling, laminated corner had caught fire.

      
And then - yeah - she's
saying, very feebly,
help me, help me.

      
As Dave tore the album from the fire, threw it to the carpet,
stamped on it, he had a sudden image of fourteen years ago: thirteen candles in
a circle, Tom Storey deliberately tumbling one into a pile of lyrics sheets,
Simon St John languidly stamping out the names.

      
Dave bent over the singed and smoking album cover.
      
Of course, the writing in the sand
read,

Martin Broadbank, his face
all furrows of concern, said, 'Who knows? I might be able to help. Or ... or
Meryl might be able to help.'

      
All the lights were on in the drawing-room at Hall Farm: four
table lamps and a small chandelier. The watchful Meryl perhaps aware of a need
to drive away the dark.

      
Stephen Case had gone, leaving his card for Shelley, in case
he
could help. Suddenly everybody wanted
to help.

      
Shelley went to the window, parted a curtain to look out. There
was an aura of light on the drive from the lantern over the door.

      
'Why doesn't he ring?'
      
'Your transport manager?'

      
Shelley smiled palely. 'He's just an old friend of Tom's, from
way back. If anybody can handle Tom at a time like this, it's ... him.'

      
Meryl said, 'This is the little ... ?'

      
'The little hippie.' Shelley let the curtain fall. "With
the earring and the bandana. Eric Beasley. Known as Weasel. He was Tom's
regular roadie.'

      
Why doesn't he ring?
Twenty minutes. He said five.

      
'Tell me about this band.' Martin Broadbank threw a small log
on the fire, jabbed hard with a poker to produce more flames, more light. 'I
rather think Steve has been exercising an undue economy with the truth. I'm
sorry I was a party to it.'

      
'Wasn't your fault,' Shelley said. 'Really.'

      
Broadbank straightened up. He'd taken off his jacket, looked solid
and ordinary, just another rich businessman in his Cotswold retreat, no special
qualities. Oh, the freedom of living with someone like that ...

      
'Shelley, why don't I drive you home?'

      
'I should wait for Weasel. I need to know what I'm going into.
And also ..."

      
Ring, Weasel, for God's
sake, ring ...

      
'... and also, I think, the fewer cars on the road between
here and Larkfield the better.'

      
Shelley thought of the baby she'd taught Tom to love. Vanessa.
It had taken a long time, Tom looking down fearfully at his Nemesis in the cot,
the impossible baby, the baby who should have died in flames, the baby with no
great future, who served only as a reminder.

      
Vanessa the wonder baby. It had taken a long time to convince
Tom that Vanessa was a wonderful thing.

      
Weasel had said he was going to put her into the van and bring
her over here. Weasel knowing instinctively that Vanessa should not be there
tonight when Tom arrived home.

      
Nor on the road between here and Larkfield.