by Paul Colize
Next up was the name game.
‘So, we’re still on the letter A, is that it? André? Your name’s André?’
He waited for a reaction.
‘Not André? Albin, like in La Cage aux Folles? Antoine, like the singer?’
The treatment began with a gentle massage of the ankles, toes and knees, combined with passive mobilisation. Little by little, the massage became firmer and more insistent. Dominique knew from experience that LIS patients often felt ‘chopped up’ into parts. Vigorous massage could help them feel whole again.
Throughout the treatment, he kept up a stream of talk, hoping to incite a reaction.
‘Albert, like our beloved monarch? Don’t say you’re called Albert? Really? That’s so funny!’
Next came work on X Midi’s joint mobility, as a preventive treatment for spasticity.
‘Tomorrow, we’re off to the pool, Albert. Swimming with Dominique: the best thing!’
Sometimes, he would lower his voice and speak into X Midi’s ear.
‘I really would like to know your name, my friend. If it begins with an A, blink once, OK?’
On Monday, the second of August, during the weekly team meeting, Marie-Anne Perard asked everyone present to summarise X Midi’s case from their particular perspective.
The accountant spoke first, delivering a statement of X Midi’s care costs. The man’s identity remained unknown, hence there was no supplementary healthcare plan. His treatment was wholly at the expense of Belgium’s Public Centre for Social Welfare, who were slow to reimburse the outlays and were issuing more and more requests for justification. She supposed that a portion of the costs would be charged to the clinic’s own profit-and-loss account, squeezing an already tight budget.
The roundtable was almost complete, and Dominique took his turn to speak. Unlike his colleagues, he did not go into detail regarding X Midi’s medication and treatments, or their likely outcome. But his words struck home.
‘This man has lived through something quite extraordinary.’
33: THE CENTRE OF THE WORLD
My only memory of the Channel crossing is the ceramic toilet bowl, pressing against my heart like a life belt. Kneeling on the floor, I heaved and heaved again, hoping to rid myself of the sick feeling that left me gasping for breath.
I had sobered up, but my temples were caught in a vice, from the after-effects of the dross. I could no longer feel the ground beneath my feet. Each step was a dive into a bottomless pit. Jimbo’s words circled round and around. Something had gone badly wrong. My girlfriend had thrown herself out of the window. The words hammered against my eardrums, and each time they resounded, the rush of adrenaline flooded my chest and limbs, even to the tips of my fingers.
What had gone wrong?
Why had Floriane jumped?
Elaborate, improbable scenarios presented themselves. At best, I was an indirect witness, at worst, an accessory to murder.
I thought constantly of my mother. I thought of the pain she would feel if she knew what I had become. I wanted to hold her in my arms and confess everything, to tell her what had happened, tell her I hadn’t understood it was a plea for help.
Arriving in Dover, I was so dazed that I failed to realise the police were asking for my papers. Fortunately, they thought I’d been suffering from seasickness. They glanced briefly at my passport, shared a joke and let me through.
I had to get new papers. I knew they could be bought in London.
Stepping down from the train, at Victoria Station, the effects of the drug began to wear off. In better spirits, I set off to discover the most amazing city on the planet.
Clapton is God. My first memory of London. The words were written on the wall of an Underground station. I had no idea who Clapton was. Nor that I would soon be meeting the greatest guitarist of all time.
In less than an hour, I could see why the English guys had been eager to get home.
In the summer of ’65, London was an unprecedented cocktail of revolutionary stirrings and extreme, entrenched conformism. The traffic was denser even than Paris, but no one sounded their horn. There was no attempt to squeeze past the other vehicles; everyone drove in a disciplined manner, determined to keep things flowing by a kind of mutual consent. On the Underground escalators, people stood to one side so that passengers in a hurry could walk up next to them.
No one seemed shocked by my appearance, as they had up to now. I hadn’t cut my hair since leaving Belgium, and wore a ponytail, with the beginnings of a beard. My clothes were crumpled, and pocked with holes. But still I passed unnoticed. There were none of the disapproving looks and mockery that had been a fact of everyday life in Paris.
On the pavements, gentlemen in black suits and bowler hats rubbed shoulders with Buddhist monks in orange robes, turbaned Sikhs, Kenyans in brightly patterned kaftans, Chinese in strange, skimpy suits and ladies seemingly from a different century. As if all the nations of the world had decided to live together in harmony.
But the streets were thronged with young people, too. Their wild looks exuded freedom. I was in London. I was alive.
I felt that young people would seize the reins of power, and that I had found the centre of the world.
34: THE SURFACE OF HIS MIND
Michael Stern, the journalist from the Belfast Telegraph, stayed in Berlin from the eighteenth to the twenty-third of September.
He had assumed everyone in West Berlin spoke English, but was forced to find an interpreter at the last minute, which lost him an entire day.
The statements he eventually collected confirmed his belief that the deaths of the four musicians were no coincidence.
First, he spoke to the Turkish shop-keeper on the ground floor of the building where the group had shared their three-roomed, furnished flat. He was disappointed not to see the flat itself – it had been emptied and let to new tenants.
According to the shop-keeper, the flat had contained few personal belongings. After the events, the owner had deposited what was left out on the pavement, and it had all been taken away with the refuse.
The shop-keeper said that if the flat had been his, he’d have done the same. He would probably have thrown the hotheads out long ago, anyway. They were noisy, foul-mouthed and totally lacking in respect. They would come back in the middle of the night, blind drunk or drugged and hollering in the stairwell. Each band member would come home at a different time, waking everyone in the building several times a night.
Once, one of the other tenants had come out of his apartment in a rage to call them to order. He was lucky to have escaped being lynched.
They bought nothing in the shop, but treated it like a public call-box, having given the telephone number to all their contacts.
When the man had vented his outrage, Stern asked about the musicians’ comings and goings during their last days in Berlin.
The shop-keeper remembered that in the space of twenty-four hours, three of them had left the city for unknown destinations, and that only the one he called Ringman, the politest of the four, had stayed behind. He remembered Larry Finch coming into his grocery shop on the Saturday morning, wearing a leather jacket and dark glasses. He wanted to use the phone to call a taxi.
After cutting the call, he had shocked the other customers by declaring in bad German, with gestures to match, that he was off to dance flamenco and have a good time with the ladies of Majorca.
Unusually for him, he had left a five-mark note on the counter.
The shop-keeper didn’t think there had been more calls than usual for the group, in the days before they left. No one had visited the band members, he said. As a rule, he never saw anyone else – male or female – going up to the flat. Apart from the telephone calls, and the postman, no one had ever asked for them.
He hadn’t noticed anything strange in their behaviour, though they may have seemed a little more excitable than usual. Ringman hadn’t seemed anxious or disturbed after his friends left, at last not until he learned
of the death of one of them, and threw himself under the U-Bahn.
Stern questioned one or two of the building’s other residents, who corroborated the shop-keeper’s story, but added nothing new.
An elderly woman on the sixth floor, directly underneath Pearl Harbor’s apartment, said that she knew their days were numbered, well before the series of accidents. They all smoked, took drugs and drank like hobos. She had heard one of them vomiting for a whole evening.
Stern managed to contact the apartment’s owner by telephone. He complained that the four hellraisers had paid no rent since the beginning of the year. He had nothing further to add, except that he wanted to hear nothing more about them, ever again.
Next, Stern visited the bistro where the group had played, in the English sector, on a street adjacent to the Kurfürstendamm, West Berlin’s liveliest thoroughfare.
Known as the Yoyo bar, the place was a curious mix of pizzeria, concert hall and night club.
The club’s owner was surprised to see a journalist devoting time to a series of unremarkable accidents. Though he admitted, with a knowing wink, that the conspiracy theory was likely to shift copies. He agreed to answer some questions.
The musicians would arrive around 7:00p.m. They would eat, do a few try-outs and begin their set around 8:00p.m. They were scheduled to finish at midnight, but would play on until two or three depending on the crowd, and the mood, making a total of seven hours on stage, with a ten-minute break every two hours. They were paid by the hour, so there were no complaints.
The place was frequented by a handful of students and hordes of servicemen, mostly American G.I.s, who came to listen to good old rock standards from back home. Pearl Harbor had carved a niche, covering standards from the American songbook, with a twist all their own.
The bar owner told Stern the musicians were an unmanageable crew who had caused their share of mayhem. But he had kept them on because they could warm up a room and fuel an atmosphere like no other group.
More than once, he had had to intervene to calm things down. They would holler at one another, hurl bottles into the audience, insult them or provoke fights.
They played seven days a week, but had asked for an exceptional day off on March the fourteenth, giving no precise reason. They had given just two days’ notice, which left him in a spot.
He had granted their day’s leave with bad grace, sensing that to refuse would only spark another fight. He had found a replacement band at the last minute, and the evening had been a fiasco. The audience had booed the stand-ins and demanded Pearl Harbor’s return.
Next day, Larry Speed, the bass player and leader of Pearl Harbor, had called to say that all four were taking two weeks’ holiday. The furious bar owner had threatened them all with dismissal if they didn’t show up for work that evening. Larry had replied that that was how things stood, and if he didn’t like it, he could ‘go fuck himself’. Finch’s response had troubled him, not for the language, he was used to that from them, but because the band had always been desperate for cash and clung to their residency, until now. The bar owner confided to Stern that most of their earnings went on illicit substances.
On the morning of his last day in Berlin, Michael Stern met Birgit, the woman Jim Ruskin had fallen in love with shortly before his death.
She gave him some information that whetted his appetite.
On Monday, March the thirteenth, Jim Ruskin had announced he wouldn’t be playing at the Yoyo bar next day. The group had accepted another engagement, adding enigmatically that they were going to get their big break.
Birgit had wanted to know more, but Jim wasn’t telling. He was determined the gig would take place and didn’t want to jinx it by saying anything about it beforehand.
On Wednesday, March the fifteenth, Jim told her the group had taken part in a recording session the day before, and that a record by Pearl Harbor would soon be in the shops.
Larry Finch, Steve Parker and Paul McDonald had used the resulting cash to take a few days’ holiday. Jim Ruskin, on the other hand, had chosen to stay in Berlin to spend more time with Birgit. He always looked on the bright side, she said. He was full of enthusiasm and knew his own mind. She couldn’t believe he had chosen to end his life in what she could only assume had been a fleeting moment of depression.
Stern tried to find out more about the recording session Birgit had mentioned, but drew a blank. That afternoon, he toured a few record shops, but none had ever heard of a disc by a group called Pearl Harbor.
Before catching his flight back to Belfast, he learned that Berlin had no less than thirty-one commercial recording studios, from the top-flight Hansa Tonstudio to poorly-equipped amateur operations that could be hired by the day, the hour, even the minute.
Back in Belfast, he called each one, but none had organised a recording session on March the fourteenth with a group by the name of Pearl Harbor. Only two recording sessions had taken place in the city that day, one by a gospel choir, the other a duo of flautists.
He offered his editor-in-chief an initial article about the disturbing series of deaths, but was turned down. At this stage in the investigation, there was nothing to suggest any kind of plot. The editor advised him to keep digging, but not to waste too much time on the story.
He would review his position if anything new came to light.
Three days later, Birgit called to say she had remembered a detail, though it was perhaps of no importance. Jim had telephoned someone from her flat on the day before the supposed recording session, which was unusual.
The two had exchanged a few words in German, and Jim had mentioned the titles of a few rock songs. The man down the line was called Karl, she remembered. Jim had spoken his name several times, and addressed him respectfully.
At the end of the week, Stern reviewed progress. Several questions still needed answers.
What had happened on the evening of March the fourteenth?
What had they recorded at the session, and where had it taken place?
If a record was made, why was it never released?
And who was Karl?
Stern ran through his notes, with a vague sense that he held vital information right there, under his nose. He read everything through several times, but could find no clue.
It was a phenomenon he had encountered before. He knew that in time, the information would float to the surface of his mind.
35: A GREAT ROCK CONCERT
A succession of black guys parade across the screen, all wearing dark glasses and piles of jewellery. They move back and forth in front of the camera, gesticulating with their hands. In the background, half-naked women writhe about on the hoods of huge, gleaming American cars.
The beat is mind-numbing, the melody non-existent, the words meaningless.
Whatever happened to music?
Chess, an English guy I knew from Chez Popov, had left me an address before heading back to London. We hadn’t talked much in Paris. His French was poor and I knew only a few words of English.
Whenever the occasion presented itself, he would dig in his satchel for a portable chess set and try to find an adversary. If he failed, which was often, he would play alone. It didn’t seem to bother him, quite the opposite, in fact – he said he was sure to win that way. From time to time, I would answer the call of duty and sit down opposite him. He liked playing against me. Victory was even easier.
The address was a Soho pub, the Bricklayers Arms, on the street people called Strip Alley. Chess spent his afternoons there, playing his eponymous game.
I set out to find the bar, though I was painfully aware of the difficulties that lay ahead. I was a deserter, and a fugitive wanted by the police. I was alone in an overcrowded city and spoke only a few words of English, mostly what I had learned from listening to rock music.
By chance, Chess was there. He seemed pleased to see me again. I told him I had left for London sooner than expected due to unforeseen circumstances. He asked no questions. For a good while,
we struggled to find words. Eventually, he confided he was ‘onto a good thing’ and that he would try to include me, too.
The good thing was Brian, a rich kid whose father had died of cancer a year earlier. Brian had inherited the family home in Hampstead, a collection of artworks and a hefty sum of money. He shunned his bourgeois origins and dreamed of living like us. Being a man of few scruples, he had dispatched his mother to a home and taken possession of the house.
Now, he lodged about fifteen people like us, two or three to a room. He figured this act of generosity gave sufficient credit to his claim to be one of our kind.
Chess and I went to Brian’s place. The house was magnificent. Like the set of Mary Poppins. Chess went in and talked to Brian. He came out again, wearing a broad grin. Brian had accepted me, I could move in, there was a place in a room on the third floor.
Inside, the house was less smart. The air smelled of tobacco and beer. The walls were covered with writing and obscene drawings. A low cacophony of music merged from different corners of the building. Brian shook my hand and showed me to my room.
We had few words in common, but I quickly got the measure of him.
Brian was tall and thin, spotty and awkward, on a permanent quest for acceptance and approval. His hands were slender and manicured. He wore his hair long, like us, but in an obviously expensive cut. He had made holes in his jeans and traded his Shetland wool sweaters for khaki jackets from an American army surplus store. He had daubed the letters N and D on the back – Nuclear Disarmament – and added a phrase along the lines of ‘Beatniks against the Bomb’.
None of us thought of ourselves as beatniks. The term had been coined by our detractors – a combination of Kerouac and Ginsberg’s ‘Beat’ and the Russian ‘nik’, as in Sputnik. We denounced American imperialism, but that didn’t make us fervent admirers of Brezhnev. It was a shorthand term that marginalised us by labelling us as left-wing extremists. We were accused of propagating subversive ideas.
