Victory Disc

by Andrew Cartmel

  I emailed the sound files to Joan Honeyland and received her effusive thanks. Then we discussed a time of arrival for Albert to collect the originals. He turned up in full chauffeur regalia again, including this time a sinister pair of sunglasses. I gave him the 78s and he drove off with them, and I had a sudden pang when I realised I’d never see—or hear—these recordings by the Flare Path Orchestra again.

  I still had copies of them all in digital form, of course. But what the hell use was that to anyone?

  “Someone on the phone for you,” said Nevada, interrupting my gloomy speculations. “I think it’s the human palindrome, but he didn’t try to chat me up so I’m not sure.” She handed me the handset, which I took with some measure of trepidation.

  “Hello? Noel?”

  “Yes indeed. It is me. Listen, I’m ringing about Abner the cat.”

  I had a sudden sinking feeling. I’d half-expected this call. After all, we’d made the mistake of leaving a get-out for Leo when we’d given him the cat. We’d given him Abner on approval, so to speak.

  If he didn’t want to keep the zombie cat, I didn’t know who the hell we’d turn to. I saw an elaborate cluster of complications stretching out before me like a Borgesian labyrinth.

  I said, “So, how is Abner?” I might have sighed. Nevada certainly looked at me apprehensively.

  “He’s absolutely marvellous,” gushed Leo. “He’s such an affectionate little chap. Follows me everywhere and keeps me company while I’m sorting and cataloguing, purring constantly. And, absolutely the most important thing, he seems to have an innate and intrinsic respect for shellac and its uniquely fragile and vulnerable nature.”

  “That is the most important thing,” I agreed. “So it would be safe to say you and Abner are getting along, then?” Listening intently on the sofa beside me, Nevada made a gesture of wiping sweat from her brow and sank back in relief.

  “Absolutely. Absolutely. Very safe to say. Getting along famously. He’s here right now, sitting beside me. Aren’t you, little chap? Yes, you are. Yes, you are. You should hear him purring. Would you like to hear him purring?” Before I could say yes or no, the line went apparently dead.

  Now, if I held my breath and I listened very attentively I could just about detect a faint susurration, like a rhythmic version of the indistinct miniature roaring you hear in a seashell. I offered the phone to Nevada. “The purr of the zombie cat.”

  She listened for a moment and handed it back to me. “Impressive.”

  Leo came back on the line. “Very impressive,” I told him.

  “Isn’t it? He was a bit quiet when you first brought him here. He’d just spent a couple of hours in the back of a car in a cat carrier, of course. No wonder he was subdued. But he soon perked up and started nosing his way around, exploring the place. And he absolutely loves the garden. Spends half his time out there. Among the sheds.”

  “Among the sheds, of course.”

  “But he always comes in at night to sleep on the bed with Crystal and I.”

  My ears pricked up. “Crystal?”

  “Ah, yes. Of course. I haven’t told you about her. In point of fact, that’s why I’m ringing you up. To tell you about her. To thank you for bringing Abner into my life. Because he brought Crystal into mine.”

  He spent the next five minutes giving me the details, which, I must admit, had me riveted. When he’d finished I hung up and looked at Nevada, who’d evidently been trying to piece together the conversation from my end of it.

  “Leo’s got a girlfriend,” I said.

  “So I gather.”

  “Called Crystal.”

  “So I gather.”

  “He met her at the vets when he took Abner in for a check-up. She’s the secretary for the veterinary practice.”

  “Are they just dating or are they actually, you know, doing the thing?”

  “Judging by his extensive complaints about the cost of condoms these days, I’d have to say that they are doing it.”

  “My god. And all thanks to Abner. Wait until I tell Tinkler. If he’d taken the cat maybe he would have got laid.”

  She got her chance to tell him that evening when he came over for dinner. This was the price he’d demanded for lending the kit I’d needed for the digital transfer. A small enough price to pay, although he had also insisted on planning the menu for tonight himself from among the recipes he called my ‘greatest hits’.

  “And I want the homemade Cointreau ice cream,” he’d concluded.

  That night he devoured the three courses with considerable satisfaction.

  He wasn’t so pleased when he heard about Leo. “You see,” said Nevada, rubbing it in. “If you’d taken the cat, it could have been you who was shagging a gorgeous fit young veterinary secretary.” The adjectives ‘gorgeous’, ‘fit’ and ‘young’ had not featured at any point in Leo’s discussion of the woman from the vets. They were entirely Nevada’s own embroidery. “It could have been you who met her.”

  “Well maybe I still can,” said Tinkler. “When you go to see the vet about a cat, do you actually have to show them the cat?”

  That night in bed, Nevada and I tried to plan our next move. Although the recent excitement in Camberwell had felt like a conclusive victory at the time, we were in fact pretty much back where we’d started, with no clear way forward. We’d found a number of records for our client, true, and recorded some oral history about her father.

  But, apart from capturing Gerald Wuggins’s recollections—something we always seemed to forget to do—we’d pretty much run out of leads to pursue.

  I didn’t know if there were more records out there. Or, assuming there were, how to find them.

  Everything seemed to have come to a full stop.

  Then Danny Overland phoned.

  * * *

  We met Overland some distance from his usual smoking spot along the Embankment outside the Royal Festival Hall. He was watching teenage skateboarders practising their art amid the brutal concrete forms of the South Bank. He grinned when he saw us approaching.

  “Look at these kids. It’s amazing what they can do.” He smiled, squinting in the sun. It was a bright day, but an unforgiving, icy Baltic wind was blowing in across the Thames. Overland looked remarkably jaunty and full of beans for a man of his advanced years, and yet there was something incomplete about the picture. Then I realised what it was. He wasn’t smoking a cigarette.

  He seemed to read my mind because he instantly reached for his shirt pocket and pulled out a packet of Marlboros, took one out and lit it, inhaling with satisfaction.

  “How do you stand the cold?” said Nevada.

  “Come again?” He took his cigarette out of his mouth and squinted at her.

  “Your short-sleeved shirt. You’re always wearing them. And it’s always bloody freezing.” Nevada indicated his cigarette smoke, carrying briskly away on the icy wind.

  He smiled and shrugged. “It’s the war. I got so cold in those sodding Lancaster bombers, flying over Europe in the middle of winter at freezing altitudes, long night missions to Berlin; I just got so fucking freezing then that ever since nothing has ever really felt that cold.” He puffed on his cigarette. “Does that make sense, dear?”

  “It certainly does,” said Nevada. “I can’t imagine what it must have been like.”

  Neither could I.

  I said, “You wanted to talk to us about something?”

  Nevada shot me a look of annoyance. She obviously felt I was rushing ahead impatiently and being blunt just when we were building a nice rapport. But I was a little impatient, because I, sadly, could still feel the cold. I wanted to get inside somewhere warm and have a coffee, preferably a nice coffee.

  Nevada needn’t have worried. Overland smiled a crooked smile. “Straight to the point. I like that. Reminds me of home.” He took his cigarette out of his mouth and studied it as though trying to remember what it was. “I asked you here because I wanted to say thank you.”

  This w
rong-footed me. Sensitive expressions of appreciation were not on the list of things I was expecting from this man. “Thank you?”

  “Yeah, for those records. The ones you digitised for me.”

  I’d completely forgotten about this. When I’d sent the digital dubs to Joan Overland I’d also posted CDs I’d burned—onto write-protected discs, of course—to Gerald Wuggins and Danny Overland. Or rather, to Overland’s beleaguered PR person, Jenny.

  But I hadn’t expected any response. Certainly not this.

  Overland was sucking on his cigarette, its tip glowing a hot bright orange, and peering intensely at me. “I didn’t think I’d be interested in hearing them again, after all this time. Those old records.” He exhaled smoke, pale ribbons in the cold streaming wind. “But you know what?”

  “What?” said Nevada.

  He grinned at us. “They blew my mind. Hearing them again. After all these years. Brought it all back to me. Those days. Gave me the chills in fact. I still get them now, just thinking about it.” He indicated his bare arms. His deeply tanned, leathery old skin was puckered with goose bumps. They came and went, as if to decisively demonstrate they weren’t being caused by anything as mundane as a freezing afternoon by the river in London. I was impressed.

  “My god.” So was Nevada.

  Overland nodded. “Yeah. The music of those days. Coming out of the past. Something I was part of. It brought it all back to me. Stronger than I could ever have imagined.”

  There was a long silence. At last Nevada said, “So, you liked the records?”

  “Yes. You’re doing a great job digging them up, and preserving them. It’s good music—even with the fucking little idiotic vignettes that good old Lucky insisted on adding—even with those, it’s still good music. Great music, in fact. It should be preserved. It deserves to be. It’s important.” There followed a silence that made the previous one seem brief by comparison, during which he stared at us with an unrelenting, analytical gaze, as though trying to make up his mind about something. Finally he said, “Anyway, I just wanted to say thank you.”

  He turned away and stared out at the river.

  It seemed he had said his thank you and that was all we were getting. After a moment Nevada and I looked at each other, shrugged and started to walk away. I put my arms around her and she moved in close to me, sheltering from the wind. We walked back past the South Bank complex, then along the road and up the steps that led to the elevated walkway. “Well, that was weird,” I said.

  “It was certainly a bit of an abrupt dismissal.”

  I said, “I definitely got the feeling he was going to tell us something else.”

  “Exactly! And then he changed his mind.” She looked at me. “What could it have been?”

  I shrugged. “We may never know.” We strolled along the elevated walkway through the Shell building. Then out again to where walkway formed a concrete bridge over the busy road, towards Waterloo Station.

  As we strolled across the bridge, above York Road, I happened to turn to my left and saw a familiar vehicle navigating the roundabout by the IMAX cinema. A very familiar vehicle. It entered York Road and sped towards us. I gripped Nevada’s arm.

  “Look,” I said.

  It was the VW hippie van with the sun and the moon painted on it. There was no mistaking it. And in the clear afternoon light we got a very good look at its only occupant as it flashed by under the bridge where we stood.

  The driver was a young woman.

  A girl in fact.

  “It’s her!” exclaimed Nevada.

  “Who?”

  “That little harlot. The one who stole my Hermès scarf in Dover.”

  * * *

  That night Tinkler joined us for dinner. I had by now finished paying him back with meals for lending me the digital conversion kit, but he came over anyway. It seems he’d got wind of the fact that we were cooking ‘the thing with the artichoke hearts’. He arrived early so he could make sure and nag me about the correct use of fresh thyme. “You mustn’t get any of the stalky wooden bits in like you occasionally do.”

  “Is ‘stalky’ even a word?” said Nevada.

  “Don’t start.”

  I had finished adding the thyme, all carefully de-stalked, and was just about to serve dinner when the phone rang. It was Leo Noel. When I saw the number I wondered wearily if he could be having second thoughts about custody of the zombie cat at this late stage. But as soon as I heard his voice, I relaxed.

  He sounded jubilant, jazzed.

  Nevada watched me with curiosity, Tinkler with impatience while I talked to the human palindrome. Or rather, while I listened to him. He didn’t require much in the way of comment or response from me. The saga went something like this. Leo had discovered that Abner loved going in and out of the sheds and napping in them. Since he did no harm to the records, Leo was happy to encourage this practice. In fact, he was going out of his way to pamper the cat.

  So instead of putting a cat flap in the door of one of the sheds to allow Abner easy access, he installed cat flaps in all of the sheds.

  “All of them?” said Nevada, when I told her and Tinkler about it over dinner.

  “Every one.”

  “What’s the big deal?” said Tinkler, chasing an artichoke heart around his plate with a wedge of sourdough toast.

  “He has a lot of sheds,” said Nevada.

  “And now a cat flap in every one.”

  “That must have been a lot of work.”

  “Yes, but not for Leo. He put an ad in the window of his local newsagents asking for someone to do all the cat flap installing.”

  “An ad in the newsagent’s window?” said Tinkler. “Why doesn’t he just use the Internet?”

  “The Internet hasn’t made huge inroads on Leo’s world. Anyway he got a response from one Leokadia, a Polish handy man. At least, he thought she was a handy man. But then she turned out to be a handy woman.”

  “A handy woman?” said Nevada.

  “She sounds pretty handy, anyway.”

  “I trust she was at least Polish, this fraud,” said Tinkler.

  “She is Polish and she’s no kind of fraud. And she is very attractive.”

  “According to Leo,” scoffed Tinkler.

  “Very attractive, and did a great job with the cat flaps. Such a great job that Leo invited her in for a drink afterward.”

  “A refreshing Perrier, no doubt,” said Tinkler.

  “And they got along extremely well, laughing and talking together over drinks, and one thing led to another…”

  Nevada and Tinkler stared at me.

  “They didn’t,” said Nevada.

  “Please tell me they didn’t,” said Tinkler.

  “I’m afraid they did. The human palindrome is now having a scorching affair with his Polish handy woman.”

  Nevada’s eyes gleamed. “No.”

  “What about the vet?” said Tinkler. “I mean the vet’s secretary or receptionist or whatever she was. Crystal?”

  “Oh, he’s still seeing her.”

  “You mean he’s sneaking around behind her back?” said Nevada. “Or do I mean sneaking around behind Leokadia’s back? Sneaking around both their backs, I suppose.”

  “Oh no. He’s not sneaking around behind anybody’s back. They all know about each other.”

  Tinkler blanched. “They all know about each other? And they’re all okay with it?”

  “They certainly seem to be. And they all adore the cat. That’s something they have in common.”

  “That fucking cat,” said Tinkler. His face darkened. “Why didn’t you let me adopt him? I could be having sex right now.”

  Nevada smiled. She seemed particularly gratified at this turn of events. “I did everything in my power to convince you to adopt Abner. But you wouldn’t hear of it.”

  “Yes, I would hear of it. I would have heard of it. I would.”

  “No you wouldn’t. And in fact you made some disgusting remark about sardine fart
s.”

  Tinkler shook his head. “Well, you should have pointed out how shallow I was being. I mean, how could you let an opportunity like that pass me by? The cat’s obviously a chick magnet.”

  “He certainly is,” said Nevada smugly.

  “Actually I was going to say he was a minge magnet but I didn’t think you’d let me get away with saying ‘minge’.”

  “I definitely wouldn’t. So it’s a good job you didn’t.”

  Tinkler pursed his lips thoughtfully. “What is it with that cat?” he said.

  I said, “Maybe it’s some kind of pheromones he gives off.”

  “Maybe it’s the sardine farts,” said Tinkler.

  * * *

  The following morning I was drinking my coffee in the back garden, Fanny sheltering underneath my chair, as was her custom, using my shadow to protect her from the pallid rays of the English springtime sun. I was reading an article about pink label Island first pressings in an old issue of Record Collector when I heard a hesitant knocking sound.

  I looked up from the magazine and Fanny paused in washing herself under my chair.

  The sound came again. A tapping on wood like the delicate application of a hammer.

  I realised it was coming from the garden gate.

  I got up, Fanny making a small sound of complaint at suddenly being deprived of her sun screen, and walked to the gate. I slid the bolt and opened it. Standing there, in the lane between my garden and the Abbey, was Jenny, Danny Overland’s PR person.

  “I’m sorry to bother you,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind that we tracked down your home address.”

  I wondered about her use of the word ‘we’ but then a voice said, “Of course he doesn’t,” and Overland himself stepped into view and shouldered past Jenny, into my garden. I moved back a little to let him in and he gave me a nod. Then he turned to Jenny. “You wouldn’t mind leaving us alone for a few minutes, would you, dear?”