Written in Dead Wax (15 page)

Maggie said, “Thank god I had my set of keys, and thank god I turned up when I did.”

“You just found him… at the bottom of the stairs?”

“Those fucking stairs,” I said. She flinched at the obscenity but she nodded.

“I don’t think he’d been lying there long. Thank god.”

“And he what, just fell down and landed on his head?”

Maggie nodded again. “As you saw, he’s now stable but in a coma.”

“When is he going to wake up?”

She gave me a long, serious look, making lots of eye contact in a way that somebody had probably trained her to do on a course once and said, “There’s something called the Glasgow coma scale. It’s scored from three variables. Eye function, motor function and verbal response from the patient.”

“It tells you how bad the coma is,” said Nevada. She was as impatient with this exegesis as I was.

Maggie nodded, but evidently wasn’t to be hurried. “The patient is given a cumulative score from three to fifteen. It used to be fourteen but now it’s fifteen.”

These details were driving me mad. “How bad is he?”

Maggie frowned and nodded again so we’d know how serious it was but be reassured that there were positive aspects to be weighed up, too. “Jordon is a seven.”

Nevada gave a big sigh of relief and said, “That’s great.” Maggie stared at her and she hastily added, “Isn’t it great?” Maggie shook her head. No, it wasn’t great.

“Eight or anything under is considered a severe brain injury.”

“Oh shit,” said Nevada contritely.

“But he may improve. We hope he will improve. We’ll pray that he improves.” There was a long silence during which we all stood in this candy-coloured corridor staring at each other.

Then Nevada said, “Because it went up from fourteen to fifteen, the scale, does that mean people are more conscious now than they used to be?”

Maggie looked at her for a moment and then said, “There really isn’t anything we can do here. They’ve got my number and will let me know as soon as anything changes.” She glanced at me. “I’m going to the hospital chapel. You’re welcome to join me there.”

“No thanks, Maggie. Thank you for everything, though. Thanks.”

“All right,” she said and turned and walked away.

Nevada and I were left standing there, staring at each other. She said, “I’m sorry I was such a bitch earlier. On the phone. I was just worried about you.” I looked down the corridor to the room where they had Tinkler wired up.

I said, “It turned out it wasn’t me you should have been worried about.”

* * *

Nevada had told Clean Head not to bother waiting for us, since we had no idea how long we’d be, so now we walked the short distance along the Fulham Palace Road and under the shadow of the flyover to the Broadway mall where we could try to gather our thoughts and have a coffee. My one lucid decision of the last three hours had been to avoid drinking anything that came out of a machine in the hospital pretending to be coffee.

But the coffee we bought at a franchise outlet in the mall was pretty dreadful, too. And we didn’t have much luck gathering any thoughts, either. Nevada looked at my cup, which I hadn’t touched after the first sip, and said, “Do you want something else?”

“No, it’s fine.”

“Listen, I’m really sorry to do this and it’s going to make me sound like a heartless, evil witch, but—”

“We have to keep looking.”

“That’s right.”

The show must go on
, I thought.

We left our coffees on the table and left the shopping mall. We walked up King Street until we came to the neighbourhood full of Polish shops that bordered on Chiswick, then we began to work our way back, hitting every charity shop.

We started with the Amnesty International bookstore, which usually has some records in the back. Today they had plenty, but nothing to interest us. It took about twenty minutes to eliminate them all, though, and without any garment rails to distract her, Nevada was getting pretty antsy by the time we left.

They had one crate of records at the next charity shop and as I crouched to look in it I was suddenly overcome with a wave of hopelessness and depression. What was the point of what I was doing? I was just a pathetic man on a ludicrous mission, squatting over a box of mouldering LPs. I couldn’t bring myself to begin flipping through them. Nevada must have read something in my face because she put a hand on my shoulder and said, “It’s what Tinkler would want.”

Hilariously enough, she was right. Assuming that the cruelly battered vegetable that was now Tinkler could have formulated an opinion and uttered it, he would have told me to keep looking. You never knew what was in the next crate.

I sighed and leaned over the records. There was a rail of coats hung inconveniently close above and they tickled my head as I worked. I found myself wondering if lice were jumping down onto my hair and realised that I’d been hanging out with Nevada too long.

I flipped carefully through the albums, inspecting every one. It turned out what was in the next crate in this instance was Hawaiian guitar and church organ music with a liberal sprinkling of rugby songs. Onwards.

At the next shop, though, I found a solid slab of jazz that must have come from the Helmer collection. The holy grail was not amongst them but I pulled out half a dozen for my personal use and went over and set them on the counter. There was a rotund middle-aged man and a small birdlike woman standing behind it. The man had Einstein-style wacky grey hair, a custard-coloured jumper, and reading glasses hanging around his neck on what looked like a really long black shoelace. I asked him if he had any more records and he said he had some in the back. Would I like to look at them?

The old excitement began to rise up in me. Nevada was busy flipping through the clothes rails with a sneer on her face, obviously gainfully employed, so I left her there and followed the man. There was a heavy brown curtain hanging over the doorway at the rear of the shop and we pushed through its dusty folds into the gloom of the back room. “I’m not really supposed to let customers through here. Health and safety regulations,” said the man dryly. “So try not to do a somersault and break your neck.” He began moving several cardboard boxes full of crockery, to expose some big square leatherette carrying cases, the kind specifically designed to hold records.

He flipped them open for me and the disappointment was instant and total. It was nothing but shellac. “I’m really sorry,” I said.

“Not your cup of tea?” said the man.

“I don’t have any means of playing 78s.” Just then there was a burst of angry speech from the front of the shop. The heavy curtain muffled it so that all I could discern was that it was Nevada, in what sounded like a spirited altercation with another woman.
Making friends again
, I thought. The man looked at me in amusement.

“Handbags at twenty paces,” he said. “Sounds like your missus is getting into it.” I hurried back through the curtain, warmed by his mistake, to find my “missus” standing there looking both triumphant and scandalised. She had the pile of records I’d left on the counter and was holding them to her chest protectively. The nervous little lady behind the counter was staring at her and I just glimpsed a third woman disappearing out the door of the shop.

“She tried to steal your records,” said Nevada.

“She was just looking through them,” said the little old lady.

“She was going to buy them,” said Nevada, “given half a chance. Her eyes lit up when she saw them.”

“A woman who likes jazz,” I said. “You didn’t happen to get her number?”

“I’m not your lonely hearts service,” said Nevada frostily, shoving the records at me. Over her shoulder I saw the man smiling. He made a small lashing gesture with his right hand—the international sign language for “pussy-whipped”. I paid for the records and we left.

There was nothing of interest at the other charity shops on King Street, until we hit the last one. It was brightly lit and modern, not like some of the establishments. The guy in charge was young and chubby with the sort of retro long hair that reminded me—with a painful tug—of Tinkler. I wondered if Maggie had heard anything yet? But she would have rung us.

They didn’t have any records on display so I asked the guy.

“Vinyls, you mean?” he said.

“We don’t say vinyls,” said Nevada. “We say albums or LPs or records.” I thought this was a bit snotty, even though I recognised where she’d got it. He didn’t seem to mind, though. Pretty women can get away with murder.

“We had some,” he said, “but it’s all gone.”

“All of it?” I said.

He nodded. “We had one of those big plastic boxes…”

“A crate.”

“Yeah, it was full of the stuff. Full of records.” He smiled and leaned across the counter as if letting us in on a confidence. “The manager wanted me to get rid of them. We had only put them out yesterday, but she said it was making the place look messy. Said it was old-fashioned. So she told me to throw them out.”

“You threw them out?” I said.

He shook his head, grinning broadly. “No. We sold it. The whole crate. For a hundred quid. A hundred pounds for some vinyls! We were going to throw them out. The manager, she had just ordered me to throw them in the rubbish, and then this woman comes in.”

“What, just now?” said Nevada.

“Yeah, just now, this woman comes in and offers us a hundred quid! She didn’t even look through them. Took the lot. And gave us a hundred pounds.”

I had a hollow feeling in my stomach. “Do you happen to know if there was any jazz?”

“Oh yeah, it was all jazz. Miles Davis. John Coltrane. That sort of thing.” He smiled happily at us. “I’m going to be the under-manager of the month,” he said. “A hundred quid!”

I didn’t tell him there might have been a record in there worth several thousand times that much.

“What did she look like, this woman?” said Nevada. “Was she a blonde?”

“Yes, that’s right, a blonde.”

We walked out of the shop. “It was the same bitch,” said Nevada.

* * *

I got home, emotionally drained and exhausted, and flopped on the sofa. Turk was nowhere to be seen, probably asleep on the bed, but Fanny was pacing restlessly in the kitchen and tapping her bowl with her paw to tell me she was hungry. I poured out some biscuits for her and Turk came pelting through. I poured some for her, too, and returned to the sofa.

Nevada and I had visited the hospital once again before calling it a day. But there had been no change. Not in Tinkler’s condition, nor in his sister’s. Maggie was still camped out in the chapel and quietly and patiently guilt-tripping us for not joining her. For one wild second I wondered if maybe I
should
be there with her. Maybe god would punish me and Tinkler would never regain consciousness because I was hunkering down in front of crates of records instead of the altar in the hospital chapel.

To put a stop to thoughts like that I got on the phone. I called Alan at Jazz House in Leicester and then, in desperation, Ken at Dusty Groove in Chicago. The record was supposed to be somewhere in southwest London, but you never knew.

But when they heard what I was looking for, they both laughed at me. It was good-natured laughter, and I deserved it. Alan said if he’d found an original copy of
Easy Come, Easy Go
he would be sitting on a beach in southern India instead of a drafty industrial estate in the Midlands. We chatted for a while about other things and then said our goodbyes.

I hung up the phone and stared at it blankly for a moment. I had no idea what to do next. Then the phone rang. I picked it up and said hello. A woman’s voice said, “Do you know who this is?”

It took me a moment, but then I got it. “Cement in the gutters.”

“You can’t beat it,” she said. “Listen, I’ve got some news for you.”

My heart was beating double time. “Oh really?”

“Yeah, I spoke to her, the ex-wife, and she said okay.”

“Okay?”

“If you want the rest of the records you can have them.”

“What?” I said.

She laughed. “Try not to fall out of your chair. She isn’t just going to
give
them to you. Or maybe she is. She didn’t exactly say. She just said you can come over tomorrow morning if you like, have a look through them, see if there’s anything you want.”

“Tomorrow,” I said. “In the morning? Tomorrow?”

The woman laughed again. “That’s right. This is how it must feel to be Santa Claus.”

“At the house in Richmond.”

She grew serious, all business. “No, at the flat in Turnham Green, I’ve got to give you the address. Have you got a pen?”

“Yes, no, yes, no, shit.” The cats were staring at me in wonderment as I frantically scrabbled through the piles of junk on my coffee table, looking for the pen I knew must be there, somewhere.

She chuckled. “It’s okay. Don’t panic.”

I found the pen and wrote down the address.

* * *

There was a gourmet chocolate shop that I knew on Turnham Green Terrace called Theobroma. They also served high-calibre coffee, so I arranged to meet Nevada there the next morning before we went to meet Mrs Helmer, whom I’d learned was called Aisling, pronounced Ash-ling.

I caught the bus to Hammersmith and then a District Line Tube, heading west. I’d talked Nevada into meeting me there. It was about halfway between us—I’d learned she was staying not at the Connaught or Castle Dracula but a flat in Maida Vale—so this made more sense than getting Clean Head to drive all the way down to me in the taxi and doubling back.

Plus, to be honest, I was enjoying using my travel card again.

I caught the Tube to the next stop beyond the address, so I could scout the location before meeting Nevada. I like to look as if I know where I’m going, especially when I’m with a companion as acerbic as her. I walked out of the Tube station into the sunlight and fresh morning air. I had the guarded feeling that this was going to be it. We would find the record today.

I had checked twice with Maggie about Tinkler since I’d woken up, but I still felt guilty because he wasn’t the only thing on my mind. I felt in my pocket for the map I’d printed off the Internet, paused to orientate myself, then set off.