Gimme More (24 page)

Now look what we're left with! Tonight, Grace comes into my room just as I'm turning out the light. She's weeping and she can hardly breathe for snot and tears.

‘Oh Auntie Lin,' she says.

I hold the duvet back so that she can slide into bed beside me the way she used to when she was smaller than me.

‘What's he done?' I say. Because no woman cries this way except for love. But Grace just cries and snuffles on my shoulder like an infant while I wait, getting wet and bored.

I wonder if Robin brought her kids up right. With our mother and father, howling achieved nothing but a slap and a period of isolation in our room. But Robin tried to make her kids' childhood a time of excitement and pleasure; above all, a guilt-free zone. She said she was crippled by the feeling that she was, in every way, unsatisfactory. Which, I suppose, was the burden a whole generation of English kids had to bear. So she gave her own children applause and encouragement and the sense that they were as important and valuable as the adults. It wasn't exactly that they could do no wrong, but wrong, once done, could easily be admitted to and just as easily forgiven. Which, as it turns out, is almost the same thing, because here is Grace who clearly feels it is OK to come howling to my room after midnight. Not only is it OK, but she's confident that she will be welcomed and comforted. Even if the wrong she's done is to me.

‘Don't make him leave,' she gasps at last.

‘Alec?' I say. ‘Why?' Because, for the time being, I don't want her to know what I know; at least, not until I know what she knows.

‘Well, I knew he liked the music,' she says, ‘and I knew he wanted to meet you. But I thought it was
me
. I thought he came here for
me
.'

See what a sense of self-worth does? It's so much more of a bummer when you find out you aren't as important as you thought you were. Poor little Grace. I break out the tissues and pass a handful to her.

‘Tell me about it,' I say – comforting, neutral Auntie Lin.

‘You'll never forgive me,' she wails. She's never been unforgiven in her life – she's simply giving me notice that I must forgive her.

‘He left his laptop in my room,' she says eventually. ‘He was writing a letter but he wouldn't let me see it. I thought it might be to an old girlfriend. He swore there was no one else – but, Lin, he's so special. Other women must want him too, mustn't they?'

‘Sure,' I say. That's another subject I have first-class honours in. ‘So you read his letter, did you?'

‘He was different tonight,' she tells me. ‘Not cold, but like he was thinking about something else. So when he went back to Jimmy's room I started thinking, what if it's some
one
else? But it wasn't. It was you. He was writing a report about you.'

‘Oh.' Extraordinary – at last the little sod has been careless with his security, but the wrong woman booted up the information.

‘He's been following you,' Grace says. ‘He's been recording your conversations. And I thought he loved
me
.'

‘He isn't following me because he loves me,' I assure her.

‘No-o,' she says. ‘But he's fascinated with you.'

‘No he isn't. He's doing a job.'

‘Oh Lin,' she cries, ‘I thought you'd be furious with me.'

‘Why, sweetie? Because someone made a patsy of you?'

‘Because I was indiscreet. I knew he wanted to meet you. I thought he was doing his doctorate on music journalism of the late sixties. That's why he was so interested in you and Jack. I should have told you, but I just wanted to help him. But I've let you down,' she says, weeping more comfortably. ‘Can you ever forgive me?'

‘I don't know,' I say.

She looks at me, shocked. I was supposed to tell her she was my little Grace and everything she does is peachy and not her fault.

‘How much damage is done?' I ask instead.

She pulls herself away from my comforting-auntie arm, and for a moment I think she's going to say, ‘I've apologised, what else do you want?'

But she's better than that. She says, ‘How much damage can he do?'

‘Who was he writing to?'

‘Mr Sasson Freel,' she says, ‘with a copy to a Mr B. Stears.'

‘Ah.' I sigh. ‘He can do quite a lot of damage.'

She sags. ‘You're going to send him away, I know you are.'

‘Well, what would you do, Grace?'

‘I ought to kick him out. I ought to wake him up right now and throw him out. But I can't. I love him, Auntie Lin. I really do. And I don't want him to know I messed around with his laptop.'

So yet another generation of my family betrays itself for Jack's bright youth.

‘He's drunk, he tastes like candy, he's so beautiful.

He's so deep, like dirty water. God, he's awful.'

Courtney Love

Alec Parry wasn't a bad man – he liked dogs and he tolerated children – but he loved the stories of young men who started out in the mail room and went on to own the company. Which was a good thing because a post-graduate course in Media Studies opened the world of mail rooms to him.

He knew that the film and music business was a world where thousands of over-qualified young people applied for every menial job. The lucky ones were then brutally exploited by a system of internships where you worked like a dog for less than a living wage in the hope that, if you distinguished yourself, you'd be taken on as permanent staff.

Memo Movies was an independent music film company. It dealt in archive footage and classic videos, and every two or three years it made a film of its own based on the history of jazz, blues, rock or the development of trip-hop. These productions depended heavily on Memo Movies' archive catalogue because, when tracing the roots of any new movement in music, it's illuminating to show the influences on it with film clips of music history. Memo Movies' archive went back as far as an old film of Bessie Smith, made in 1927. It was a diamond mine for anyone interested in that sort of thing.

Before joining Memo Movies Alec had never heard of Bessie Smith or Son House or Bill Broonzy or Howlin' Wolf or any of those legends who went back before the 60s. But he did like the music of the 60s and 70s – a fact he leant on in his interview. After joining, he made it his business to become as knowledgeable as he
could about the seminal bands of that era. And he was surprised how far back into history his research took him. He hadn't realised that even revolutionaries have a spiritual lineage, that they, too, inherit a tradition.

To do him credit, Alec made an honest stab at filling in the gaps in his knowledge. His motto might have been, ‘Blag your way in, become indispensable and then stick like glue.'

The problem was in sticking like glue. If history was anything to go by, when his six-month internship was up, Memo Movies would decide he was too expensive to take on full wages. They'd let him go and employ instead another monkey to whom they could pay the usual mixture of peanuts and promises. They would do this without appreciating Alec's potential. He was hard-working, ambitious, smart, well-educated and resourceful, but he couldn't prove it in a menial job. If he wanted to be recognised, he first needed to be noticed.

So Alec became the helpful young guy who made himself useful to anyone who had a permanent staff job. If a consignment of videos went missing, he'd stay on the phone and track it down. If the coffee machine or the copier broke down he was the one who badgered the repairman to have it fixed before the end of the day. If Production wanted to view material from Archives he took it personally to the editing suite and made sure he stayed long enough to try to find out what the project was about.

A month into his internship, after he'd found out how jealous and close-mouthed all the people on the production side were, he discovered that Memo Movies' current project was Jack. So Jack became Alec's project too. He bought the CDs, he read the books, he watched all the film and video he could lay his hands on, and he trawled the Internet for references which the dinosaurs in Production mightn't have come across.

Then he had a stroke of luck: in a Jack chat-room he met g.ace. To begin with, he only monitored conversations, not wishing to join in. Then one day he came in on an exchange which ended:

metalman: to say hardcandy is not nosecandy, naïve.

g.ace: to say what u say, banal.

metalman: what, then?

g.ace: sex with minors – h-c ref to taking candy from babies. metalman: b***ox.

At this point Alec, who had himself been struck by the intimations of dirty sex in ‘Hard Candy' which, as Metalman clearly thought, ought to have been a song about drugs, interjected.

cela5 to g.ace: yes. thought so too – but ambiguous.

g.ace to cela5: all jax birdie songs ambiguous.

After a while Alec concluded that g.ace was something of an expert and gave out his e-mail number. The conversation continued in private over the next week. He liked g.ace's style. There was wit and intelligence, and what looked to Alec like an inside track.

One day he delivered a folder of video cover designs to the Managing Director's secretary and found the great man himself leaning over her desk. He'd never met the MD before and he couldn't let the opportunity go by.

He took a deep breath and said, ‘Good morning, Mr Stears. I'm Alec Parry, an intern here. Sir, as I'll probably never get to meet you again, please may I ask you one question?'

Mr Stears straightened, looking at first irritated and then indulgent.

Alec said, ‘Sir, they say downstairs that you and Jack were actually friends, so I wondered if you knew: is it true that Jack was a football fan, that he followed Tottenham Hotspur and he had a cockerel tat on the inside of his left knee?'

Mr Stears's indulgent smile left his face. He said, quite sharply, ‘Where did you hear that?'

‘Well, sir, I've been looking on the Internet for stuff about Jack which might enrich the current project.'

‘Who told you to do that?'

‘No one, sir. I've been doing it for my own interest, in my own time.'

‘Then I must ask you to stop,' Mr Stears said. ‘Everything we do here is confidential. You must
not
discuss ongoing projects outside this building. Don't you know anything?'

‘I'd never discuss a project,' Alec said indignantly. ‘I was getting information, not giving it.'

‘Idle gossip could give rival documentary makers a head start.'

‘I don't gossip,' Alec said. ‘I was simply encouraging someone else to. And I thought you might be the only one around I could check a
recherché
fact with.'

Mr Stears pushed his spectacles up his nose and gave Alec a hard stare.
‘Recherché,
huh?' he said, ‘I think you'd better come through to my office and tell me what you've been up to.'

Alec admired Mr Stears's office. He admired the stripped maple floor, the Sheraton desk, the gothic windows and the river view. But he promised himself that if – no, when – he ever made an office like this his own, he wouldn't spoil the effect by letting himself go to seed and getting overweight like Mr Stears. He'd keep the Wurlitzer jukebox though. That looked like a fun toy.

‘OK,' said Mr Stears from behind the Sheraton desk. ‘Who gave you your
recherché
fact?'

Alec explained why he didn't know who his informant was, and he went on briefly to recount the conversation. He was encouraged by Mr Stears's interest. If he wanted to be noticed, he thought, he'd lucked into exactly the way to do it.

‘Let me tell you something,' Mr Stears said, after listening attentively for several minutes. ‘This correspondence could be dangerous. Do you want to know why?'

‘Why?'

‘Because the
recherch
é fact in question is probably known only to a very few people. Intimates. Family.'

‘I didn't think Jack had a family.'

‘He didn't. I'm talking about Birdie Walker and
her
family. You must have formed an opinion about Birdie if you've been doing your research properly.'

In truth, Alec had been keeping his eyes so firmly on Jack that, so far, Birdie was only the glorious appendage anyone would expect to see in the company of a rock god.

‘Mmm,' he said, in what he hoped was a judicious tone of voice, ‘tricky one, that.'

‘Tricky isn't the half of it,' Mr Stears said. ‘My concern is that if she gains even an inkling of what we're up to here, she'll block it any way she can.'

‘Why would she do that, sir?'

‘Jealousy,' Mr Stears said. ‘Jealousy was always her problem. Jealous about Jack, jealous of Jack. Do you know, she even claims to have collaborated on some of the classic songs?'

‘I didn't know that.'

‘Well, I suggest you find out about her before you resume your cosy little correspondence. You might be writing to a snake in the grass.'

‘I'll terminate the connection,' Alec said. ‘I wouldn't want to compromise your production – that was the last thing on my mind. I had no idea it was so sensitive.'

‘Now you know,' Mr Stears said dismissively. ‘If you want to get on in this business you have to learn that although networking is a tool of our trade, blabbing foolishly to anyone who seems to share your interest is one of the easiest methods of having your ideas stolen or blocked.'

‘I'm really sorry, sir,' Alec said, thinking, maybe coming to the attention of the MD wasn't such a great idea after all. ‘But I promise you, I never said who I was or who I worked for or why I was interested. I was only coming off as a fan.'

‘I hope you're right,' Mr Stears said and turned away towards the river view.