December (76 page)

      
'Strong wrists, you must have, girl.'

      
'We compensate, us cripples. Yes, I did the sums. Multiples of
seven. Interesting. So very interesting I've arranged to go with Mother tonight
to the W.I. cheese and wine. A few faces will no doubt change colour when I
roll over the threshold, but it might be worth the
 
aggro if I can jog some memories.'

      
'Yes indeed,' Eddie said. 'I never thought of that. But it
won't be easy, getting them to open up.'

      
Isabel smiled grimly. 'You'd probably find this quite
difficult to believe, but I can be a terrible bully.'

      
'I would find it almost impossible to believe,' said Eddie, remembering
her ramming him up against a pew end with her wheelchair. 'But my poor shins
might just accept it.'

Moira passed the paper to
Prof who read it, raised his eyebrows, and passed it to Simon. Blue Basildon
Bond on which was inscribed:

BREADWINNER

and

DEATHOAK

      
Simon looked up. 'Could she have got this from you?'
      
'It's possible,' Moira said.
'Anything's possible. But even if she did ... Look at the timing. How would you
feel if it was your mother and all she left you when she died was a wee note with
two words on it you never wanted to hear again and not even a goodbye on the
end?'

      
'Point taken,' Simon said. 'I'm sorry, Moira.'
      
'And then there's the other thing,
since we're all being so upfront. If I'm walking funny, it's due to getting my
thighs badly blistered by boiling water.'

      
She passed Dave a meaningful glance and a rueful little smile.
Prof noticed Dave looked shattered.

      
'What happened, I pulled a hotel kettle off the dresser after
seeing something I didn't want to see. In the steam.'

      
'Your mother?' Dave guessed. 'The Duchess? Why the hell didn't
you tell me?'

      
'You can all believe what you like,' Moira said. 'But
something was seeping through, like damp through a wall. And you all were
getting it, and
she
was absorbing my
share. And I'm ashamed of that. I just didn't think. I thought all we had to do
was stay away from each other and it would all gradually fade into history. And
the Duchess would say to me. You have some damage to repair. And here she is,
dead, and still saying it.'

      
Tom said, 'Who was that poet, wrote about how your mum and dad
fuck you up?'
      
'Larkin,' Simon said.

      
'They fuck you up even more when they're dead,' Tom said sagely.

      
'Yeah, but Tom,' Moira said, 'I just don't see the Duchess
wanting to put me in hospital with burns."

      
Simon folded the blue paper, passed it back to Moira. think
there was something else seeping through?'

      
'What I think is, you guys have been getting lots of bad stuff
over the years. Simon, you and the objects and the ... I don't want to go into the
sexual stuff ... Tom and the spooks from his record collection and all kinds of
paranoia - not to mention Debbie and the wee girl having Down's Syndrome. And
Davey seeing black auras everywhere and John Lennon at his shoulder. But me ...'

      
Moira shook her head as if, Prof thought, she couldn't believe
she'd been so blind.

      
'... Me, I had the Duchess to protect me ... and the Duchess
didn't say a word about it, except
You
have damage to repair.
Until it ... filled her up ... blew out her brain ...
Jesus, I don't know what I'm saying, this might be the purest nonsense.'

      
Yeah, Prof thought. It might all be. But it ain't. Too much of
it. And nothing explainable in physical human terms,
nothing.

      
'Pardon me,' he said. 'But might all this have begun in earnest
when certain old tapes went into the ovens at Audico and ended a beautiful
friendship between Maurice Rubens and myself?'

      
Simon opened his hands. Who knew?

      
'This is implying human intercession,' Dave said.

      
'The Abbey uses people,' Simon said. 'Sometimes they submit to
it, invite it even, and sometimes they don't know. We walked into it with our
eyes wide open and still couldn't see it. When Sile Copesake brought me down
here last week, he said it was this place that had fucked me up and I'd come
back to get unfucked.'

      
'Well if you're all gonna get unfucked before the week's out ...'
Prof looked pointedly at his watch. 'You better make a start. Mind if I leave
the circle? Too much coffee.'

      
Lee Gibson arrived then, so all of them left the circle. 'We a
band again?' Simon asked.

      
'Better find out.' Tom picked up the Telecaster, played,
unplugged, what sounded like the opening riff from 'Hooked', a heavy rock
number about a dockland pub-fight from his solo flop,
Second Storey
. He winced. 'Load of bollocks.'

      
'How are we this morning, Tom?' Lee said cheerfully.

      
'Shagged out,' said Tom. 'Plug me in, Prof.'

It
 
was Simon who'd swung it. Prof was sure of
this.

      
Simon, the willowy ex-public-school boy who'd confessed to
being every kind of psychological misfit, had emerged as the leader. Simon had
gathered energy and inspiration from somewhere and he was spreading it around
like it was in danger of evaporating. Simon the bass player laying down the
rhythm track and then re-emerging as Simon, the Classical One, viola solos that
gave you the shivers, especially on a sonorous instrumental number, 'The Valley',
which Prof had never heard before.

      
Also, Simon seemed to have a way with Tom - big mulish guy,
you thought, but there was a formidable intellect in there which the big man
kept tamped down under this thick layer of bluff cockney.

      
He was a bloody natural, was Tom, the most instinctive
musician Prof had ever seen work. Made you realise how many of the other so-called
guitar heroes were just brilliant technicians, without depth. Artisans.

      
What it was with Tom, he had no ego, no urge to be centre stage;
he just wanted to fold himself into the backcloth. This was why his solo album
hadn't worked,
couldn't
work: Tom simply
had no desire to project. He'd pick up his Telecaster - any Telecaster would do,
no modification necessary - and stand around waiting for something to do.

      
'Help me out here, Tom,' Simon would say, and Tom would build
the musical equivalents of a suspension bridge or a skyscraper or a complex railway
system.

      
 
At one point, they all
gathered around Tom's booth and Tom was shaking his head a lot and Simon talked
to him a while and then Tom said, 'Yeah, all right.' And he hit the riff to 'Hooked',
only slower.

      
'We do this one live?' Simon said to Prof, who by now was recognising
that all he was here for was to organize whatever they wanted and get the
levels right. Live takes, everybody playing together, seemed to suit their
peculiar chemistry.

      
'Whatever,' Prof said.

      
Half an hour later, they were ready. By this time he'd realised
that 'Hooked' on the
Second Storey
album had just been a speeded-up desensitised reworking of the Black Album
track called 'The Man With Two Mouths'. This was a return to the original, even
slower. Prof didn't know what the song was about, except some kind of
underworld violence in London, but Tom's downbeat croak was oddly moving and
afterwards the big guitarist stayed in his booth, back turned as if he was embarrassed.
And the lights dimmed strangely.

      
Moira didn't play on this one; she sat with Prof behind the
glass and smoked a cigarette. 'Wonderful, huh?' she said. 'I wouldn't waste time
on another take. Prof, you'll no' get it like that again.'

      
Prof nodded, didn't question it. Questioned nothing, all
afternoon, all night.

      
They did Dave's 'Dakota Blues'. For the first time, Dave
sounded comfortable in his own voice, and Tom produced a spontaneous solo of
such aching, bittersweet simplicity that Prof could've wept. Later, Moira
introduced a little song she said she'd composed in the car on the way here
about a New Age traveller who joins a band of gypsies. Just Moira on guitar and
Simon on violin. Prof recorded a rhythm track but figured he'd probably dump
it. Simplicity was best, if you had the quality.

      
Between midday and midnight they laid down four very
serviceable tracks, which was amazing, especially when you considered the state
of these people only last night.

      
They were a band again, all right. They were - astonishingly -
like a band which had been together on a nightly gigging basis for about ten years.
They communicated without words. And they pulled Lee Gibson along with them.
Lee, making a bomb in the
 
States with
his best-avoided heavy-metal crap, had been a little cocky at first, until Tom
Storey put him into perspective. He was a good drummer, actually, and enough of
a real musician to recognise when he was in the Presence.

      
So Prof was getting stuff which would be a joy to mix at a future
date ... well away from the Abbey.

      
It
was
a good
studio, though, he couldn't deny that. The low, vaulted ceiling, the stone
walls. There was an ambience here you could use, or not.

      
And Simon decided he wanted to use it.

      
At ten minutes past midnight on the morning of Thursday 8
December, Simon announced he had a number which, he said, he'd intended for the
Black Album in 1980, but it didn't work out, wouldn't come right.

      
'You don't wanna call it a night?' Prof said. 'Rather than go
for something you aren't sure of.'

      
'No,' said Simon.

      
'Only, in my experience, if you go out while you're winning,
it gives you a bit of encouragement. You come in fresh tomorrow, ready to hit
it. Yeah?"

      
'If it's OK with everyone else, I'd like to go for it now,'
Simon said 'It's important to me. Something I want to say to somebody.' There
were
 
nods and shrugs.

      
'And we can try a live take,' Simon said. 'Except I'll put the
bass on later.'

      
'Yeah, yeah.'

      
This one was going to be a mainly instrumental,
impressionistic piece called 'Holy Light', partly improvised, wordless vocals
from Moira with elements of Gregorian chant.

      
Simon told Prof it was his attempt to convey what it must have
been like for the founder of the Abbey, a monk called Richard Walden, weighed
down by old sin and shame - so a heavy intro with cello and bass, both laid
down by Simon, and then Tom would gradually introduce colours and Moira would do
the white light.

      
'You remember this one?' Simon said to Moira.
      
'I remember how I blew it. It was
supposed to be light and joyful and kind of inspirational, and it just made me
depressed. I remember going out and wandering round in the dark and smoking
several cigarettes, coming back, trying again ... just couldn't sustain the
mood. You really want to try this one again, Simon?'

      
'Yes,' said Simon solidly, like he was making a solemn vow in
front of witnesses. 'And don't worry about sustaining the mood. The mood's changed.
Lee, if you want to call it a night, we can do the bass and drums tomorrow. I'd
like to work over that with you, but I'm not sure how it's going to go.'
      
'Yeah,' Lee said. 'I could do with
a good coffee.'
      
Dave looked up. 'Won't she be
asleep?'
      
Lee stood up and stretched. 'Only
for the first couple of minutes.'

      
He left by the back door. Bitter cold air came through in a
rush and made the cymbals hiss.

      
Dave said, 'What's this about, Si?'

      
Simon was bringing his cello out of its case. 'It's about correcting
history.'

Moira had been standing
under two mikes, and when she fell to her knees and then rolled over on the
grey carpet, both hands over her face, Prof started to get seriously alarmed.