December (33 page)

      
'Say what?'

      
'
Deathoak
. Maybe you
didn't say that at all. Sometimes I just kind of hear it, you know.'
      
'What's it mean, anyway?'

      
'Bugger all. Well ... it's an anagram of The Dakota. With a T
to spare. Maybe I made it up myself subconsciously and got it slightly wrong.
You get a signal about something, your mind converts it into a currency you can
deal in. That make any sense? No, shit, it doesn't. Sorry.'

      
It did make sense, in a way Prof didn't care to fathom. He
started to sing, in a tuneless wheeze,
'Seven
long years since I heard the news
... '

      
'I'm
still wakin' in the night with the Dakota Blues
. Still true, Prof.' Dave
screwed up his face, drained his glass. An old couple looked over from a nearby
table and the woman smiled; middle-aged drunks obviously didn't worry her.

      
Dave said, 'Only it's nearly fourteen long years now.'

      
Prof said, 'We all felt upset about Lennon. We didn't all get
obsessed.'

      
Dave said, 'You didn't all feel responsible.'
      
'I need a drink,' Prof said. 'Let's
find somewhere.'
      
'I'm not drinking with you, Prof.'

      
Sanctimonious little shit. What d'you mean, responsible?'
      
Dave's eyes clouded. 'Maybe I
killed him.' His face made the tablecloth look grey in comparison. 'Maybe I
killed John Lennon.'

Weasel said, 'How'd you
know this geezer's looking out for your old man?'

      
Vanessa didn't reply. She was curled into a giant armchair.
She'd made herself some hot chocolate in a mug with the Manhattan skyline
silhouetted around it.

      
On the TV, Eddie Murphy said, 'Hey, man, what the fuck is
goin' down here?'

      
You might well ask. Weasel thought.

      
'You ain't going like him, Princess?' he whispered, more to
himself than her. Tell me you ain't going like him.'

      
Could they? If their brains was tuned into less circuits than -
got to say it -
normal
people, you
wouldn't think they'd run to an extra circuit, would you?

      
'Princess. Do you know who he is?'

      
Vanessa took a sip of her chocolate. 'Who?' She didn't seem very
interested any more.

      
'The geezer wiv ... wiv two mouths.'

      
'He's my grandad,' Vanessa said to Eddie Murphy. 'My daddy's
daddy.'

      
'Your daddy tell you that?'

      
Vanessa shrugged.

      
'He tell you about him at all?'

      
'He's dead,' Vanessa said. 'Let's watch the film, Weasel.'
      
She knows, Weasel thought. Whether
Tom told her or not, she knows.

      
Weasel remembered. It wasn't a memory he liked. It had coloured
his childhood. Coloured it red.

      
Weasel leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes. What the fuck
was
goin' down here?

'Listen . . Prof Levin had
gone red in the face. It made his white beard look pink. 'Don't you start
telling me what's impossible, Reilly, I know what I bloody heard.'

      
Dave said, 'Here, have some more coffee.' Catching the eye of
the guy behind the counter. 'Get's another pot, would you, pal?'

      
Thinking how much he liked Prof, a straight guy, one of the
few. But the old man had to have been misled. Hadn't been too hard to convince
himself that, when he thought he'd heard Prof screaming
deathoak
in the club, it had been no such thing ... just like the owls
in the night, the train whistles, the screech of brakes, the crackle of twigs
underfoot ...

      
And now Prof was talking tapes: music from a dark place, music
to pollute your dreams, bring on the night-sweats. And sliding from his stool
mumbling about knowing a better place than this.

      
'I'm sure you do, but we're staying here.' Dave's mind full of
names. A dismal winter morning, sickly fire and a stench of paraffin. His memory
had it all mixed up with the other fire, the Lotus and the Land Rover. Looking
back, it was as if they'd been cremating Debbie ... and the baby, because
nobody who'd been there could have imagined a live baby coming out of the
scorched mess that was Tom's wife.

      
Keeping it casual, he asked Prof where these tapes had come
from. Prof talked of a man called Stephen Case, and a box under a bed. 'Thing
is, David, he knew where to look. Steve Case. He knew exactly where to look. This
made me suspicious straight off.'

      
Dave's stomach had turned to frozen meat.
Fourteen years since I heard the news/Still wakin' in the night with
the Dakota Blues.
Fourteen years in a half-light of doubt and guilt.

      
'How many tracks, Prof?'

      
'Five or six. I only played half of it. That was enough,
believe me.
Nobody understands
"Aelwyn the Dreamer"
. What was that about?'

      
'Prof, I ...' The stifling heat in the coffee bar was not
enough. His lips felt cool and raw and cracked as he tried to speak. 'Don't
remember too much of what we did, only what we planned to do, which might not
be the same thing.'

      
'Why, what were you on?'

      
'Not that simple. Well, yeh, it was. For me.' Dave looked down
into his empty apple-juice. 'A woman. I was high on a woman.'

      
'Yeah,' said Prof. 'I saw her once. Very gorgeous, Moira Cairns.
Where's she now?'
'I don't know.'

      
'I mean, she's ... alive and everything?'
      
'What's that mean?'

      
Prof came over anguished. 'I dunno, mate. Some stuff on this
album ... these tapes. Distressing.'

      
Dave, shivering, pulled his white scarf tight. 'Did you hear a
number called "On a Bad Day"?'

      
Prof shook his head. 'A woman,' he said. 'A woman dying.'
      
'I don't know what you're on
about.'

      
'The woman
dying
. On
the tape. She's fading - the voice, the whole
quality
of the voice getting sort of brittle. And then - yeah -
she's saying, very feebly,
Help me, help
me.'

      
Dave said, 'I don't remember it.'

      
'Come
on
, son, you
were there.'

      
'Prof, I don't remember it, I swear to God.'

      
'And then ... She's on the very point of death ... don't ask
me how I know this, it's in the music ... when ...'

      
'This didn't happen ...'

      
'… when Tom Storey's inimitable guitar comes roaring in, very
offensive.
Savage
... Come on,
David!' Prof thumped a fist on the counter, his white beard harsh, like a nylon
hairbrush. 'Talk to me. I've heard the music. It's living in my dreams. Tell me
all the things you think I won't believe!'

      
'Shut up, you'll get us thrown out.'
      
'And tell me ... ' Prof shouted, '...
tell me what it is about you and Lennon.'

There was obsession here.
Obsession of a kind Prof Levin had never encountered before. Obsession so
intense and vivid you couldn't help but get pulled in. Like in the club, Muthah
Mirth.
      
Like in the nightmares. And the
music. Especially that.

      
Years ago, Prof had been on this one-day seminar for record
producers and engineers, conducted by some university professor whose theory
was that certain music could open up your subconscious. The guy said that
babies in the womb, used to the same old sounds - the mother's breathing, the
mother's heartbeat - could be kind of traumatized by some sudden vibrating
sound from outside, like a door slamming.

      
So here we are, Prof had been thinking, safe in our material world
full of traffic and horn-sections, pneumatic drills and drums machines, and
then we're exposed to sounds from ... from
somewhere
else
... And we say, so glibly,
this
music is really haunting.

      
Dave kept moving his glass around on the counter, like a glass
on a séance table.
   
The walls of the
coffee bar dissolved for Prof, projecting his own visions from Muthah Mirth as
Dave talked of a soaring building, like a castle, at night, pinnacles and cupolas.
Blenheim Palace or somewhere, only taller, and obviously in a city.

      
A vision seen on the eighth of December 1980 during a
recording session at the Abbey studio. People singing and wailing; somebody
dying, somebody dead.

      
And the same building photographed for a thousand newspapers,
filmed for a thousand TV reports, beamed across the world on the ninth of
December, 1980.

      
The Dakota building near Central Park in New York, where John Lennon
had lived and died. The Dakota building, the most forbidding edifice in New York,
with gargoyle and a metal fountain like a big, black flower.

      
Prof said, 'You're telling me you saw all this? You saw him
... ?'

      
Dave nodding and then shaking his head. Not telling him the
whole truth, obviously. Maybe not knowing what the truth was. The only constant
was this monstrous building, the core of the obsession, so much a part of Dave
that he'd been throwing it out like smoke as he sang, and Prof had choked on
the smoke.

      
Prof was off his stool. 'David, I'm not a psychic, I'm a
bloody technician. I mix sounds. I'm a simple man who just wants a night's
sleep and maybe a drink or two.'

      
He waved an arm at the guy behind the counter. 'OK, OK, I'm
making an exhibition, I'll behave myself.'

      
Climbing back on his stool, mumbling at Dave. 'All right, so
you have this vision. You're outside the Dakota and bang, bang ... only three
Beatles left.'

      
'Five bangs,' Dave said. 'I think there were five. Were there five?'

      
'How the hell should I know? You were there. Go on. Five shots.
You see him go down?'

      
'No, you're not getting this.
I
went down. I couldn't see what was happening. Glasses had gone. I
didn't realize his eyes were that bad.'

      
'Oh Jesus,' Prof said. 'This is not what I want to hear. This is
frightening, David. Also tasteless, very tasteless.'

      
'They put me in a car. I was in the back of a car. 'This guy is
dying." Somebody said that.'

      
'I know somebody said that. It's a very famous line. It was in
all the papers, which is where I prefer to think you got it from.'

      
'Sure.' Dave shrugged. 'You prefer to think that, it's fine. Really.'

      
'Finish it,' Prof said. 'What's the punchline? There's always
a punchline. What was it like being shot? Did you suffer much? Did you die in
the car or on the operating table, I forget?'

      
This was not what he'd been expecting. He was
not
going to take it seriously. He'd been
fucked up enough. This was where it ended. This was where he came out.

      
'I chickened out.' Dave had gone pale again. 'I didn't stay
with it. It was ugly, incredibly distressing. And also ... shit, it was
irrelevant to what we were doing at the Abbey. I wanted nothing to do with it.
That's the crunch - if I'd stayed with it, all the clues were there. I could've
heard his voice, and it's not a voice you'd mistake. If I'd had the nerve. If
I'd been interested enough. If I hadn't made the Godlike judgement that this
was irrelevant. Moira sensed it was important, tried to make sense of it, but I
lost it. I wasn't trying hard enough.'

      
'You're saying you saw this thing, you were a part of this scene,
but you didn't know who it was?' Prof felt a touch of impatience. He welcomed
it. He wanted to walk out of this in anger, not make a timid retreat. 'What
difference would that have made? You'd been shot -
he'd
been shot by then. All over. End of story. How does that make
you responsible? Jesus, you're so full of shit sometimes, Dave ...'