December (4 page)

      
Tail-lights wobble as the Land Rover hits the dirt track.
      
Moira says softly, 'Lee, this is
no' your problem, OK? You'll have the full fee, whatever happens.'

      
'I don't believe this.' Lee turns away in disgust. 'You
bastards need putting away.'

      
Simon waits until the studio door has slammed behind Lee.
'Right. We're obviously not going on with this. I don't think we need a vote on
it, do we?'

      
'I think we can safely speak for Tom.' Dave picks up Lee's
torch. 'He won't be back. He's had it with invoking ghosts.'

      
'We all have, Dave. But if we walk away, we have to accept
that's it for the band. Irreconcilable musical difference is, I think, the
usual term. We'll have to say that.'

      
'Hang on,' Dave said, 'I don't think I understand.'
      
'It's simple. If we're still
together as a band. Max Goff will sue us for breach of contract. He'll nail us
to the wall. He'll know we can't afford the action - except for Tom, maybe, so
he'll try and force us to come back.'
      
'Sod that,' says Dave.

      
'But if we've split up, he'll know there's no prospect of
that. He may decide to write us off. What I thought ... I'll ... I'll go and
see him myself. Come to an understanding.'

      
Simon's face, half-lit, is entirely without expression. Moira
knows how much he hates Goff. She also knows that Goff does
not
hate genteel, willowy Simon. 'We'll
all go,' she says carefully.

      
'No.' Simon's smile is sad, rueful. 'That wouldn't be appropriate.
I'll do it.'

      
Moira watches the Land Rover's red tail-lights fading into
the night mist. She looks up at the Abbey. As usual, it seems to be gazing down
on her with an ancient knowledge and a frightening edge of derision. The part
housing the studio has a single sawn-off tower, with windows where once,
presumably, there were only slits. She looks to Dave, who shakes his head.

      
'Too small, too old. This was in a city, I think. Doesn't matter
now, though, does it?'

      
Moira shakes her head too, knowing that neither of them
believes it doesn't matter, and then she says what she ought to have said hours
ago.

Dave, who just a minute ago
thought he couldn't get any colder, cries out, 'No!'

      
'Listen.' Moira's is a lonely voice, but calm, all
too
calm. 'This has to be the real end. I
mean, we're no' gonny work together again, are we?'

      
Adding, as if she can feel him reaching out for her, 'Davey, love,
we're no'
safe
together. We're too
much.'

      
'We need each other,' he protests hopelessly. Knowing she's shaking
her head. He needs her; she doesn't need him. Or she wouldn't be saying this.

      
'You could've ... come to some harm tonight, Davey. We've
become unlucky. Simon knows that, don't you, Si?'

      
Simon doesn't reply. Moira says, more harshly, 'We're the band
that should never've been, a bloody toxic cocktail. We
daren't
see each other again.'

      
Dave turns away, clenching his fists. Wanting to sob. He
doesn't, it would be despicable. How can he possibly walk away, and just forget
about her? He's thinking, wish I'd died, like ... like
who?

      
He's looking towards the east, where there's no suggestion of
a dawn. Around them, there's an unnatural silence, as if all three know what's
coming next. As if they're all waiting for the sound which will prove how right
Moira is and will snap the spine of the night.

In the long, heartsick days
to come, Dave Reilly, approaching his twenty-seventh birthday, is going to
drive himself half-crazy playing it all back. Always ending in tears. And
flames.

      
It's as if time's mechanisms have gone haywire, all the
shattering moments of the night occurring simultaneously in one endlessly distressing
present-moment. The dark fortress and the broken glasses and a prolonged
rending and mangling of metal. And Moira breathing, 'Jesus ... no?' - an appeal
for divine intercession in the split second
before
it happens.

      
Before they turn as one and run out of the entrance onto the
slippery track leading into an oblivion of hills and forestry and starless sky,
and it begins to rain.

      
Maybe two hundred yards along the dirt track, they see a lone,
steamy headlight beam, pointing vaguely into the sky like a dying prayer and
then dissipating into mist. A single, faraway scream is cruelly amplified by the
valley, beneath it the distant,
almost musical tinkle of collapsing glass, before the night gets sheared into
streamers of orange and white.

      
Twenty yards away, the old blue Land Rover driven by Tom
Storey has brought down a low, sleek Lotus Elan, like a lion with a gazelle. The
Land Rover has torn into the Lotus and savaged it and its guts are out and
still heaving, and Dave can see flames leaping into the vertical rain. A voice
is talking crisply from the Land Rover's radio, but he can't hear what it's
saying for Simon's wounded cry,
      
'Oh, Jesus, look ...'

      
On the fringe of the burning tableau, surreal in the remote rural
night, a large, shadowy, lumbering, crumbling thing is half carrying, half
dragging a lumpy, sagging bundle and babbling to it,

      
'Debs, Debs, Debsie, Debs, s'gonna be OK, Debsie, s'OK …'

      
guy's got no
consideration ... Eight months gone ... Jesus, can she get into that thing, her
condition ...?

      
There's a blast of hard, golden heat from the wreckage; Tom is
thrust forward as if he's been kicked in the small of the back and drops his
awful, pitiful burden. Both sleeves of his jacket burst spectacularly into
flames, shoulders to cuffs.

      
As Dave runs towards the heat, a smut floats into his left eye,
forcing him to close both of them. He feels like he's entering hell, hearing
Tom bellowing, the hiss of flames and rain and then - like the voice of the Old
Testament God from the burning bush - the Land Rover's radio voice, heavy with history.

      
'… and to recap, if
you've just joined us, it's now been confirmed that the former Beatle, John
Lennon, has died after a shooting incident outside the Dakota apartment block
in New York where he and his wife ...'

November 1994

I

Darkness
at the Break of ...

Maybe
you read in the papers about what happened in Liverpool on the 13th of December
1993. Well, anyway, I was there. In the middle of it. Scared me a lot. Not so
much at the time - it happened in full daylight. In fact it's taken me nearly a
year to get a perspective on it, but it still ...

Crap. Crap, crap, crap.
      
Scrub it.
      
Wasn't what he wanted to write,
anyway. Really, he wanted to pour it all out about Jan and the tragic black
bonnet business and what it had done to them. But where would that get him? And
also ... it would be
pathetic.

      
Nearly as bad as his usual
please
contact me
letters, which, getting no replies, had been followed up -
weeks, months, years going by - with the
please,
please, please ... just get in touch, write, phone, carrier pigeon, anything ...
      
Talk about pathetic ...
      
Start again.

Dear
Moira,

                     
Liverpool. December 13,
1993. I know it was nearly a year ago, but bear with me. Even if you read about
it in the papers, the significance would probably pass you by. For everybody
here, it was like an act of God. Picture the scene. God's at a loose end one afternoon.
Spots Liverpool out of the corner of an all-seeing eye and He thinks, Yeah, why
not ...

                     
Or - what about this? - He
notices one of His less successful creations strolling along Whitechapel
towards the guitar shop and He thinks ... that's bloody Dave Reilly, let's see if
he gets the message this time.

And
then He glances at His watch (one of those fancy ones tells you when its teatime
in Paraguay), does a little countdown, points His finger and He says, out the
corner of His mouth, 'OK ... LET THERE BE DARKNESS!'

Too whimsical. You've probably
lost her already, pal. If it even reaches her.

      
This was the other problem. He could never be sure the letters
and postcards and Christmas cards and birthday cards were even getting through.

      
No replies. Could be she thought even communications by post
could reawaken things better left comatose, but Dave was buggered if
he
could see it. Whenever he was locked
out in the night, he wrote to Moira. This amounted to a lot of letters.

      
He'd tried ringing this feller in Glasgow, Malcolm Kaufmann, the
agent, but he was always 'in a meeting', according to his secretary.

      
Could Mr Kaufmann perhaps call back?

      
Aw, the secretary said, between you and me, you'll be waiting
for ever for Mr Kaufmann to call back. My advice would be to write ...

      
And write. And write.

      
Maybe Moira had directed that all the envelopes addressed in
Dave Reilly's handwriting should go directly into the bin. Dave had thought of
this some while back and had one typed, but no reaction to that either; maybe
she thought it was a bill.

      
And yet, even though he'd never seen her since the morning of
the 9th of December 1980, she was always there for him. Kind of. For instance,
there was the time, after the humiliating failure of his solo album in 1987,
when, facing the prospect of having to get a Proper Job and no qualifications,
he'd sat down at the piano in Ma's front room, started plonking the keys, putting
on his poshest McCartney voice.

Moira
My Dear,

I am
reaching out in desperation

Please...

      
And thought, out of the blue, You know, you could survive on
this for a bit. If you can't be original, why not take the piss out of people
who can? And while you might not be
technically
as good at it as some, there are ways you can make up for that. Like going into
the quiet place, absorbing the essences ...

      
Look, the only way I can handle this thing, he'd once said to
Moira, is to try and channel it into creativity. To make something lasting and
positive out of it. Isn't that what art is?

      
Ah, the idealism of youth. Maturity tells you that if all that
comes back in your face, if you can't make anything lasting and positive out of
it, don't mess around ... put it into something negative and transient.

      
Yes. Well. No wonder Moira had looked distinctly dubious.

Anyway,
I was in town that day, Monday, December 13, for a little gig (I'm not going to
tell you where it was, I do have
some
pride).

                     
I'd gone to buy a few sets
of strings at this little music shop which sells me them in bulk. The guy there
was trying to flog me a secondhand acoustic guitar, a Takamine -Japanese,
brilliant built-in pick-up with sound-balancing, everybody's using them, ultra-
reliable -you know the way they go on.

                     
But I was in a relatively
good mood. For the time of year. It's always a relief when the 8th of December
goes past and nothing destroys me. So, anyway, I was giving it a go, this
guitar, and for some reason I started playing 'Julia', the Lennon song off the
White Album, the one introducing Yoko to his dead mother. The one I never could
rewrite for laughs.

                     
Well, I must have been feeling
wistful, you know how it is. I was doing the voice, which is John at his most
ethereal. I always like the opening of that one - about half of what he says
being meaningless, but he says it just to reach you, Julia ... It's so personal
and spiritual, much more so than the self-indulgent primal scream stuff on the
Plastic Ono Band album.