Back Up

by Paul Colize

  Then he launched into a long speech touching on politics, nonconformism and revolution. He maintained that we didn’t have to let ourselves be downtrodden by the greats of this world, we should refuse to accept our lot. War was not inevitable.

  He said that young people had something to say and would seize power one day to create a new order under which the world would live in peace. It was just a matter of time.

  I didn’t understand all the terms he used, and some of his concepts seemed confused or idealistic. As far as I was concerned, you had to be an adult to exist properly in this world. But I was fascinated by his self-assurance, and the conviction behind his words.

  He spoke with poise, choosing his words carefully. His assertions were backed up with examples from current affairs. I watched him, and listened. He had an aura. I was hypnotised.

  The other two guys joined us. We drank more beers. Alex kept talking and we listened without interrupting him.

  Later, Marianne came over. She was tall, slim and very beautiful. She moved with supple grace. Her feet hardly seemed to touch the ground. Silently, she moved between us, placing her hands on our shoulders and kissing each of us on the mouth. Her kiss was more than a friendly greeting.

  She made a thick, aromatic soup. At the end of the evening, Alex rolled a kind of cigarette and held it out for me to take.

  He smiled. It was red Lebanese. The joint was passed from hand to hand, in a kind of ritual. I should have been surprised, or suspicious, but I saw it as a form of sacrament, a fraternal act that reminded me of Holy Communion.

  The others inhaled, drew the smoke down into their lungs several times and held it there. Second time around, I did the same.

  Little by little, I was overcome by a feeling of total happiness. I felt great. My thoughts were clear. My brain, heart and body were in perfect harmony. We talked, smoked and drank until late in the night.

  Late in the night, Marianne took me by the hand. We lay down and I fell asleep in her arms.

  24: AS A SMALL BOY

  Paul McDonald didn’t believe that bad things happen in series, nor in extraordinary coincidences.

  On the morning of Tuesday, March the twenty-first, 1967, while trying to contact Jim Ruskin by telephone, he learned from the shop-keeper on the ground floor of their building that his three flatmates had all lost their lives in the preceding forty-eight hours, in different places and from different causes.

  The shop-keeper added that several people had been trying to get hold of him since the deaths, and that he should contact the Berlin police immediately, or the local authorities.

  Paul McDonald had no doubt the deaths were connected, and that natural causes had played no part whatsoever. He concluded, naturally enough, that he was next on the list.

  After fighting down his rising sense of panic, he tried to identify a motive for the three murders, and to assess the potential threat to his own life.

  Several leads presented themselves for his consideration. Larry and Steve were sarcastic and provocative, and had made plenty of enemies in Berlin. Night club owners, dealers, pimps, not forgetting the endless ranks of G.I.s they had insulted whenever they were on stage. All would have liked to see them come to a sticky end, and Paul himself was no exception.

  Nicknamed the Mammoth by his close friends – and proud of it – Paul was well over six feet tall and weighed about twenty stone. Unlike Larry and Steve, he never settled scores with insults or murderous sarcasm. When he decided the limits of his patience had been reached, he would twist his goatee beard, slope over to whoever was contradicting him and smash his nose with a headbutt or his notorious right hook.

  Born in Dublin in April 1940, Paul McDonald was the oldest member of Pearl Harbor.

  At six years of age, he had organised a collection in his neighbourhood, to get hold of as many Mackintosh’s sweet tins as possible. Next, he arranged them on his attic floor in order of size and began hammering at them with rudimentary sticks, in an effort to recreate the style of his heroes, Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich.

  His mother bought him a drum for his tenth birthday. He carried it with him everywhere for two whole weeks, only putting it down when he went to bed. He got his first drum kit at fifteen, for his birthday – a second-hand Premier that his father had bought from an unscrupulous dealer, and which quickly succumbed to rust.

  After leaving school, Paul worked with his father in the building trade. He learned bricklaying, but also the shot-put, and boxing. He joined a few local bands, as drummer.

  In 1958 he married Margreth, a childhood sweetheart who delivered a baby boy one year later, baptised Jason. Their marriage quickly floundered, and they were divorced two years later.

  Towards the end of 1963, as the tide of Beatlemania swept across Europe, and British groups were increasingly talked about, Paul left Ireland and headed for London, to try his hand as a professional.

  He experienced a few setbacks before finding a job as a bouncer at Ronnie Scott’s Soho jazz club, and a position as a part-time drummer with a group known as Black Spirit.

  One thing led to another. He heard that Pearl Harbor were looking for a drummer, and joined the group in May 1964.

  Paul McDonald stayed up late and rose early. On average, he never slept more than four hours a night. Despite this, and the phenomenal qualities of alcohol he consumed, he always seemed in Olympic form. Asked what his secret was, he would say ‘sobriety – avoid it like the plague.’

  One evening, before beginning their set, Larry Finch had showed up with a tube of horse sedatives and bet him twenty quid he wouldn’t make it to the end of the show if he took half a tablet. Paul doubled the stakes by swallowing an entire pill, with a glass of cognac. Half an hour later, he collapsed over his drum kit. An ambulance was called. He spent the next three days in a wheelchair, brushing off the jibes of the other three.

  His drumming was powerful and impressive. He used the longest, heaviest sticks (‘my trees’ as he called them). He drummed so hard he sometimes broke the skins on his kit. He was possessed of Herculean strength, and used two twenty-six-inch bass drums to further enhance the effect. Not content with that, he had taken out the batter skin on his bass drums, so that he could hit them harder, and produce a drier sound.

  Once he had recovered some semblance of calm, Paul tried to reason things out.

  No one knew he had been in London. He had told the others he was going to see his son and visit his family in Dublin. In fact, he had been for an audition. Stuart, one of his closest friends, had told him that a promising new group called Fairport Convention were looking for a drummer.

  He had arrived in London on the Saturday, settled into a hotel and headed out into town. The audition was arranged for the following Wednesday and he had planned to make the most of his return by treating himself to a good time.

  He decided it was unwise to contact the German police. Two weeks earlier, he had smashed up a bar in Berlin. The owner reckoned he had had too much to drink and was bothering the other customers. Wrecking the bar had gone hand-in-hand with a thorough beating, and the bar owner had ended up in hospital.

  Furthermore, it seemed to Paul that carrying out three murders in a such short space of time, in three different places, took qualified personnel and skilled organisation. He couldn’t exclude the possibility that the police or some other German organisation was behind it all.

  He could have dialled 999 and confided his fears to the London police, but during his stay in London he had got into a row with a young motorist who had almost run him over on a pedestrian crossing. He had pulled the kid out of his car and taught him a lesson he wouldn’t forget, in front of a number of eyewitnesses, all of whom were reluctant to intervene. He had left the reckless driver half-conscious on the pavement and attacked his car, with his fists, elbows and feet. Then he had disappeared into the crowd, just as a police car arrived on the scene, its siren wailing.

  Best to disappear without trace, lie low for a few days, and see how
things turned out. The British press were sure to seize on the affair and set their hounds on the trail.

  He called Stuart and told him he was leaving London. That same evening, he took the night train to Glasgow. Next day, as soon as the banks were open, he entered a branch of Barclays on Buchanan Street and emptied his account. Then he took the train back to London.

  Covering his tracks still further, he booked into a different hotel, the Samarkand in Notting Hill, where he registered under his mother’s maiden name.

  He spent the next five days holed up in his fifth-floor room, only going out to buy newspapers, eat in a local restaurant, or for more booze.

  On Tuesday, March the twenty-eighth, at around 6:00a.m., the driver of a butcher’s delivery van making his way up Lansdowne Crescent saw a man fall from the fifth floor of the Samarkand and crash to the ground.

  The emergency services arrived quickly and pronounced the man dead at the scene.

  The police soon identified the victim, and parallels were established between the latest accident and the deaths of the other three members of Pearl Harbor.

  The investigation revealed that Paul McDonald had bolted his door, thereby excluding the possibility that anyone else could have entered the room.

  Blood tests revealed that in addition to 2.5 grams of alcohol per litre of blood, the victim had swallowed ten Vesparax, a powerful barbiturate. The police also found numerous pools of vomit on the carpet.

  They concluded that Paul McDonald had lapsed into an alcoholic coma. He had vomited in his sleep, which had woken him up. He had gone to the window to get some fresh air, and had lost his balance.

  Despite protests from McDonald’s family, they recorded a verdict of accidental death by defenestration.

  Paul McDonald’s funeral took place one week later, at the church of St Lawrence O’Toole in Dublin, on what would have been his twenty-seventh birthday.

  At the funeral, Paul’s son Jason, aged eight, beat time to the funeral march on the drum his father had been given as a small boy.

  25: DOWN THE DRAIN

  I found my military service papers on the table in the dining room. I had been waiting so long, I’d forgotten all about them. But there they were, mocking me, folded in four in a brown envelope with no stamp.

  I had just finished a day of stocktaking, a particularly exhausting ordeal. Once a year, we checked the difference between the book inventory balance and the counted stock. The operation took place over two weeks after the store had closed for the summer, and before reopening again in September.

  The stock-boys were each given a series of cards. They would make their way down each aisle, checking that the quantity of items recorded corresponded to the actual number in stock. They would check for discrepancies due to coding errors, loss or theft. For this reason, the operation was carried out in twos, one partner checking the other’s work.

  The head warehouse-man had teamed me up with Jacques, a hardboiled man of thirty with a thick moustache and brilliantined black hair. He was sour-tempered and always ready to pick a fight. One evening, I saw him settle a personal score with his fists, at the back of the store.

  One thing was clear: we were not the head warehouse-man’s personal favourites. He disliked Jacques’s aggressive nature and my apathy in equal measure, and exacted his revenge by assigning us to Small Nuts and Bolts, the most thankless task of all.

  It was our job to count the nuts, bolts and myriad minuscule washers kept loose in big, metal drawers. In most cases, the card indicated several hundred items, and it fell to us to confirm the accuracy of the information.

  We worked in complete silence at first, our exchanges limited to the comparison of the two figures. Jacques would call out the number of items recorded on the card and I would count the contents of the drawer by hand. In some cases, it took me fifteen or twenty minutes. Once I had finished, I gave him the result.

  While I tackled the washers, Jacques would smoke a cigarette or fire cutting remarks at the other stock-boys passing within earshot. We had several hundred reference numbers to check. The way things were going, we stood no chance of meeting the deadline.

  From time to time, something would happen to break the monotony. One day, a group of mechanics took Snow White by surprise and shut him in a huge cardboard box, which they sealed with duck-tape.

  From inside, Snow White roared with laughter. Rather than try to escape, he puffed cigarette smoke through a series of small holes he had drilled with a screwdriver. The show attracted all the stock-boys, and some of the mechanics. We all laughed out loud, until the workshop foreman arrived on the scene.

  Loudspeakers played music at low volume over our heads. One morning, they played ‘Lucille’, by Little Richard. Jacques shook his hips, muttering that the idiot ought never to have given up singing. I told him the story about how Little Richard had seen a fireball in the sky and taken it as a command from God to quit devil-music and devote himself to gospel instead.

  Jacques stared at me, transfixed. He asked me how I knew about that, too. We discovered our shared passion for rock music.

  In the space of a few hours, Jacques was transformed and stocktaking became fun. We talked, and argued, and hummed the occasional number while we got on with the job. Time flew by.

  Like me, Jacques loved Chuck Berry’s guitar playing, and Jerry Lee Lewis’s wild beat. I knew Lewis had married a thirteen-year-old girl, but Jacques told me more: this was Lewis’s second marriage, the first having been contracted when he was just fourteen. Jerry Lee Lewis said you had to be either hot or cold because if you were lukewarm, ‘the Lord would spew you forth from His mouth’. Jacques told me, too, that Chuck Berry was the meanest man who ever lived. When he gave a concert abroad, he would keep an eye on the dollar rate, adjust his fee if it went up and only play if the money had cleared in advance. He told me that Chuck had overdubbed on one of his tracks, to avoid having to pay a second guitarist.

  More than anyone, Jacques adored Eddie Cochran, who he reckoned embodied the essence of pure rock. In just a few songs, he had captured the atmosphere of an era, and the attitudes of a generation. What was more, like James Dean, he had passed into legend by dying at the right time. Jacques reckoned that in the year 2000, our children’s children would still be listening to ‘Summertime Blues’.

  He was blown away by what the Beatles were doing. Their first album had been released that spring. Ten tracks recorded in half a day for the pathetic sum of four hundred pounds. Ten small masterpieces packed with chiming guitar work and catchy tunes. ‘Twist and Shout’ was my favourite. The track was a cover of a song by Medley and Russell, recorded at the end of the session when an exhausted John Lennon had barely any voice left.

  By the end of the week, we had made good progress, but we still had half the cards to check and the boss was getting impatient. Jacques suggested we switch roles.

  We changed our working method. I called out the reference number and he would march over to the drawer in question. I would read out the quantities given on the card: 613, 223 or 458. He would pull out the drawer, weigh it in one hand with an expression of intense concentration, and declare that the amount tallied, or we were three washers short. I would note the result. The whole operation took about fifteen seconds at most. We doubled over laughing. Having ignored me for almost a year, he had adopted me in the space of three days.

  At the end of September, I reported to the Petit-Chateau barracks for my statutory three-day induction.

  The site was near Avenue de la Couronne, where I had spent my childhood years. Everyone talked about the ‘three days at Petit-Chateau’, but in fact there were only two.

  I had decided to try a plea of ‘insanity’. My expert sources told me I should play my ‘concussion’ card, and convince them that the accident had done irreversible damage. I was further advised to talk gibberish and grind my teeth during the electro-encephalogram. Best of all, I should try to pick a fight or refuse to cooperate with the guys in charge.
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br />   That morning, I stood in the middle of the parade-ground, surrounded by a hundred other guys. Most were older than me and had finished their studies. Like me, they were clutching suitcases and looking lost.

  Like me, they were deeply unenthusiastic at the prospect of spending fifteen months enlisted under the flag. Many had taken part in the unrest that accompanied the general strike of 1960. Listening to them talk amongst themselves, I knew the era of nicely brought-up, meek young people, conforming to strict parental and school rules, was coming to an end. Their talk made me think of Alex.

  I began by answering a lengthy questionnaire. The soldiers asked me if I had a preferred weapon? Did I want be a non-commissioned officer? I refused any suggestion of officer status and opted for the air force, which was reputedly more open-minded than the land army.

  At the end of the morning, I was given a metal identification tag on a chain. I was to wear it around my neck at all times, under my clothes. It bore my matriculation number, my name, my initials, my date of birth and the words Armée Belge. An officer came to explain that if we were found dead, the badge would be broken in half along the marked line, and sent to the ad hoc unit.

  Next, we went for our medical check-up. We all stood naked in a row. We had to urinate into a flask and bend forward for the doctor to examine our arse-holes.

  My file noted that I had suffered concussion, and I was sent for an electro-encephalogram. I looked dazed and rolled my eyes back as if I were half-mad. As soon as the examination was underway, I ground my teeth as instructed. The doctor called me to order and told me to stop taking him for a fool.

  In the afternoon, we watched a film about war, the uses of morphine and the dangers of syphilis, backed up by a truly terrifying collection of photographs. We ended the day with a series of psycho-technical tests full of squares and circles and cogs. In the evening, I watched François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, one more time. It was the only film they possessed.