December (63 page)

      
'What do you want me to do?'

      
'Just listen to what I've got in mind. If you think that's OK,
I'll go back down and lay it on them.'

      
'OK,' Moira said. 'Lay it on me first. Like, the way I see it,
we play by our rules this time or we're taking our ball home.'

The feeling of pushing
Copesake and Case around, putting them on the spot, this was almost as good as
a drink.

      
Well, somebody had to help these people. If they'd got in some
shit last time, being produced by Russell Hornby couldn't have helped. It was
all a question of which side you were on.
      
Russell was a management man and
therefore rich enough to own a Roller, whereas Prof was a musician's man and
lucky to be allowed to produce his very first album at the age of sixty-four.

      
Copesake and Case. Pair of wankers. Stuff 'em.

      
And this was what Simon was doing.

      
Prof was starting to like this vicar. He was kind of suave.

      
Also he had the authority now that was invested in you by
virtue of having God and the Skirrid on your side.

      
Simon had returned to his seat by the fire. It was getting
towards last-orders time, although the way the local punters were not
clustering around the bar suggested this was academic at the Castle Inn on a
Saturday night.

      
'Here's the deal,' Simon said. 'It's not open to negotiation.'
      
Steve Case looked immediately
hostile. Sile Copesake leaned back and sipped his pint of mild.

      
'We go in on Monday,' Simon said quietly. 'We go in for a
week. At the end of that period we give you the new tapes, you give us the old
tapes, the 1980 recordings, and you sign away all rights to them. Our management
will be in touch about contracts, including Prof's, early next week.'

      
Management? Prof thought, what management?
      
'Hang on,' Steve Case said. 'How do
we know ...?'
      
'You don't,' Simon said. 'You trust
us. We go in alone. We aren't disturbed. Nobody comes near. When it's over, we
come out.'

      
'That's irregular,' Steve said, it's our premises.'
      
'That's the deal,' Simon said.
      
Sile Copesake unhurriedly finished
his pint, set his tankard down on the table, wiped froth from his lips with the
back of a hand.

      
'Fair enough,' he said.

      
For Prof - maybe for all of them - it was a strangely
dispiriting moment of anti climax. A dead moment.

IV

Whatever
Gets You
Through the Night

Well?' Moira asked
playfully. 'Can you still respect me?'

      
She and Dave had slept together.
      
Dave said, 'You made me the second
happiest man in world.'

      
They were in Moira's car, the muddy old BMW, skirting Abergavenny
under an ice-white sky.

      
'OK, I'll buy it,' she said after a while. 'Who's actually the
happiest?'

      
'Whoever it was you were fantasizing about,' Dave said.

      
It was a cheap, throwaway line. He remembered using it once
with Jan, who'd then presented him with a list including Harrison Ford, Michael
Douglas and Richard Gere. At least, he said, you didn't say Rowan Atkinson. Oh,
and Rowan Atkinson Jan had said, but only when I opened my eyes.

      
All this was academic, anyway, because Dave and Moira slept
together only in the literal sense, entwined on Dave's bed fully clothed.
Innocent as children. A Martin guitar at their feet like a dog.

      
Now, away from there, it wasn't easy to believe this had
happened. Or, rather, that nothing had happened.

      
Moira was driving; he was aching for her.

      
He studied her. Her black hair was almost down on her
shoulders. It had been much longer before and tangly. There was a single vein
of grey, which looked exotic. She wore no make-up. She'd changed her sweatshirt
for an off-white jumper with a textured black sheep on the front.

      
Last night, everything about last night, had been hermetically
sealed against reality. The dream-medium had been congealing around him as the
day wore on, from crossing the Severn Bridge.

      
A state of mind never remotely real enough for sex.
      
Moira said, 'You really want to
know who I was thinking about. Who I dreamed about?'

      
They were on a dual-carriageway, hills either side alive with
sheep and cows and horses, farms and cottages with smoking chimneys. No sign of
the Skirrid.
      
They'd awoken early, cold. Moira
had said. Let's get out of here before Tom's about. Things to discuss, not for
Tom's ears. By half-past nine they'd driven fifty miles in a big circle and
eaten greasily in a transport cafe.
      
It was there that Dave, scalding his
hand pouring tea from a chromium pot with a loose lid, had asked her why.
Fourteen years. All those letters, all those cards. The fruitless pilgrimage.
Fo
urteen years. Fourteen
years.
      
Why?

      
'There's no easy answer, Davey. If there was an easy answer I'd
give it you.'

      
'It might have been presumptuous,' Dave said, 'it might have
been wishful-thinking, it might have been the arrogance of youth, but I kind of
had hopes for us.'

      
'Wouldn't have worked. Would've been disastrous.'
      
'That's what you said on the night
- that night. I didn't understand it then, I don't understand it now.'
      
'We were carrying too much baggage,
Davey.'
      
'I accept that. But you can
jettison excess baggage, can't you? We just needed a breathing space.'
      
'Did you manage to jettison your
excess baggage, Davey?'
      
'That's not fair.'
      
'Did you?'

      
'No. It gets heavier and bulkier all the time. But I do think
we could have helped one another.'
      
'Or killed one another.'
      
'You don't mean that.'

      
Moira had said, 'Something killed my mother.' But declined to
explain.

'Tom Storey,' Weasel said.
'Yeah, that Tom Storey.'

      
Sunday morning, and he was getting impatient. Gone through his
list of mates; most of the people he was calling now could barely remember him,
who he was, whose amps he used to carry out of the van into major gigs - the
Albert Hall, once.

      
It was all so long ago. Reminders was called for. Luckily Tom
Storey was
still a magic name to most
of them.

      
Vanessa was with him in Shelley's office, back of the house. It
was the effect on the Princess that was getting to him most, always such a
happy
kid, would skip around singing to
herself, saying hello to miserable gits like the late Sir Wilf. Even when Vanessa
looked solemn, you knew she was happy inside.
      
Today, Vanessa was not happy inside
or outside.
      
'Nah, see I'll be straight wiv you.'
Weasel said down the blower. 'My instinct says somefink's going down at TMM,
and this Meryl's - nah, it don't matter who she is, some tart - this Meryl's
been set up to, like, lure Tom into ... Nah ... he ain't. He's, like, dead innocent.
A big innocent.'

      
Funny thing. Since Tom had disappeared, Weasel was seeing much
more of the big guy in Vanessa. This had never been obvious before, whose
daughter she was - well, like, obviously, the ways their faces was arranged,
these kids. But Tom, the times he was at peace with the world, had a kind face,
too.

      
'He's stubborn, don't get me wrong. Like a big mule. But, like,
if you know how to handle him, he'll follow you around. Listen, Steve Case, there's
a guy called Steve Case. Where's he at now ...? Yeah ... Gotta be. Too much
coincidence.'

      
Weasel had on the phone a geezer worked in maintenance at the
TMM building. See, the thing about most of these people is what you might think
of as humble positions with record companies was that they was generally all
into the music. So you mentioned the name Tom Storey to, say, a caretaker of a
certain age and you had his full attention. Like telling a pensioner you'd
 
been to bed with Vera Lynn. It was a magic name,
on account of Tom's playing had given a lot of people a lot of pleasure and he
was like an icon, and even on a Sunday morning …

      
'Sorry, wossa name again?' Weasel scrabbled on Shelley's desk for
paper. 'Yeah, right, gimme that again ...'

      
What he had now was the home number of a secretarial assistant
in admin at TMM who used to work - this was especially good - at Epidemic. In
the old days, Tom - Weasel too - used to spend a lot of time around the
Epidemic offices, chatting up the ladies and that. How the big guy'd met
Shelley, in fact. Tom had actually known Shelley a year or two before Debs, and
afterwards, Shelley was the obvious shoulder - well, breast - to cry on while
he was fixing up to make his miserable solo album,
Second Storey
, the one everybody tried to forget about ...

      
'Hello? Yeah, that Barbara Walker? Oh. Yeah, if you could,
Beasley. Eric Beasley. Nah, she prob'ly don't know me ...'
      
He smiled at Vanessa, who was
sitting in the window hugging a cushion. 'I'll find him, Princess, 'fit's the
last ... Hello, Barbara Walker? My name's Eric B ... Well, ah ... yeah, it is.
Weasel, yeah! It's not ... Ginger? Nah! Ginger Hodge! Fuck me! I never even
knew your name was Barbara. That was your daughter, was it? Blimey, little
Ginger Hodge.'

      
Now this - this was a stroke of luck. Ginger Hodge'd been the
junior at Epidemic, all starry-eyed. Ginger Hodge was the kid Weasel had once
driven - and her mate, nothing like that - up the Ml to Brum to catch Tom Petty
and the Heartbreakers … '77 was that, or was it later? Time went by so fast. Little
Ginger Hodge with a teenage daughter.

      
Weasel was on the phone with Ginger Hodge best part of an
hour. Vanessa came and went twice and was back again by the time Weasel hung
up, head full of enough info to keep him going all day, thinking and reasoning.

      
'How's it going. Weasel?' Shelley asked tiredly, head around
the door, hair uncombed. This was a first; never seen her before without the
full gloss. Shelley had been
natural
gloss - what she was about, health foods, vitamins.

      
The shit people took from Tom. Bastard. No excuse this time.

      
Weasel did some rapid thinking. Anything he told her she was
going to pass on to this Broadbank, who might be OK, but might not, living with
Morticia, ducking and diving in the business world, the local council ...

      
'Hard going, Shel,' Weasel said heavily.

      
Shelley said, 'I just don't subscribe to your theory that
Meryl has to be somehow in this with Case. I think she's just fallen for Tom.'

      
Her face looking pinched, quite middle-aged, you had admit it.
Weasel felt desperately sorry.

      
'I mean, not in the way that women used to, Weasel, and that
was never a major problem. But it's clear from what Martin says that she's hungry
for some, I don't know, other worldly experience. Women think they've got
problems if somebody's after their husband's body, but when it's his … I don't
even know what to call it. "Mind" doesn't even close.'

      
He wanted to tell her what he'd learned: how, just lately Sile
Copesake had been spending hours locked in an office with Steve Case. Sile Copesake,
whose band Tom had joined in a screwed-up state on the rebound from the Brain
Police after a prediction about Carlos their manager's accident what put the slave-driving
bastard in Stoke Mandeville. Sile Copesake, who would know all about Tom's
extra-sensory wotsit, who was now a big cheese on the TMM board of directors.

      
He wanted to tell her this and a lot more he'd got from little
Ginger Hodge, sweet kid, delighted to help, promising to find out more and call
him back Monday.

      
But, in the end, Weasel kept shtumm. He told himself that this
was to spare Shelley unnecessary grief.