December

by Phil Rickman

  almost musical tinkle of collapsing glass, before the night gets sheared into streamers of orange and white.

  Twenty yards away, the old blue Land Rover driven by Tom Storey has brought down a low, sleek Lotus Elan, like a lion with a gazelle. The Land Rover has torn into the Lotus and savaged it and its guts are out and still heaving, and Dave can see flames leaping into the vertical rain. A voice is talking crisply from the Land Rover's radio, but he can't hear what it's saying for Simon's wounded cry,

  'Oh, Jesus, look ...'

  On the fringe of the burning tableau, surreal in the remote rural night, a large, shadowy, lumbering, crumbling thing is half carrying, half dragging a lumpy, sagging bundle and babbling to it,

  'Debs, Debs, Debsie, Debs, s'gonna be OK, Debsie, s'OK …'

  guy's got no consideration ... Eight months gone ... Jesus, can she get into that thing, her condition ...?

  There's a blast of hard, golden heat from the wreckage; Tom is thrust forward as if he's been kicked in the small of the back and drops his awful, pitiful burden. Both sleeves of his jacket burst spectacularly into flames, shoulders to cuffs.

  As Dave runs towards the heat, a smut floats into his left eye, forcing him to close both of them. He feels like he's entering hell, hearing Tom bellowing, the hiss of flames and rain and then - like the voice of the Old Testament God from the burning bush - the Land Rover's radio voice, heavy with history.

  '… and to recap, if you've just joined us, it's now been confirmed that the former Beatle, John Lennon, has died after a shooting incident outside the Dakota apartment block in New York where he and his wife ...'

  Part One

  November 1994

  I

  Darkness at the Break of ...

  Maybe you read in the papers about what happened in Liverpool on the 13th of December 1993. Well, anyway, I was there. In the middle of it. Scared me a lot. Not so much at the time - it happened in full daylight. In fact it's taken me nearly a year to get a perspective on it, but it still ...

  Crap. Crap, crap, crap.

  Scrub it.

  Wasn't what he wanted to write, anyway. Really, he wanted to pour it all out about Jan and the tragic black bonnet business and what it had done to them. But where would that get him? And also ... it would be pathetic.

  Nearly as bad as his usual please contact me letters, which, getting no replies, had been followed up - weeks, months, years going by - with the please, please, please ... just get in touch, write, phone, carrier pigeon, anything ...

  Talk about pathetic ...

  Start again.

  Dear Moira,

  Liverpool. December 13, 1993. I know it was nearly a year ago, but bear with me. Even if you read about it in the papers, the significance would probably pass you by. For everybody here, it was like an act of God. Picture the scene. God's at a loose end one afternoon. Spots Liverpool out of the corner of an all-seeing eye and He thinks, Yeah, why not ...

  Or - what about this? - He notices one of His less successful creations strolling along Whitechapel towards the guitar shop and He thinks ... that's bloody Dave Reilly, let's see if he gets the message this time.

  And then He glances at His watch (one of those fancy ones tells you when its teatime in Paraguay), does a little countdown, points His finger and He says, out the corner of His mouth, 'OK ... LET THERE BE DARKNESS!'

  Too whimsical. You've probably lost her already, pal. If it even reaches her.

  This was the other problem. He could never be sure the letters and postcards and Christmas cards and birthday cards were even getting through.

  No replies. Could be she thought even communications by post could reawaken things better left comatose, but Dave was buggered if he could see it. Whenever he was locked out in the night, he wrote to Moira. This amounted to a lot of letters.

  He'd tried ringing this feller in Glasgow, Malcolm Kaufmann, the agent, but he was always 'in a meeting', according to his secretary.

  Could Mr Kaufmann perhaps call back?

  Aw, the secretary said, between you and me, you'll be waiting for ever for Mr Kaufmann to call back. My advice would be to write ...

  And write. And write.

  Maybe Moira had directed that all the envelopes addressed in Dave Reilly's handwriting should go directly into the bin. Dave had thought of this some while back and had one typed, but no reaction to that either; maybe she thought it was a bill.

  And yet, even though he'd never seen her since the morning of the 9th of December 1980, she was always there for him. Kind of. For instance, there was the time, after the humiliating failure of his solo album in 1987, when, facing the prospect of having to get a Proper Job and no qualifications, he'd sat down at the piano in Ma's front room, started plonking the keys, putting on his poshest McCartney voice.

  Moira My Dear,

  I am reaching out in desperation

  Please...

  And thought, out of the blue, You know, you could survive on this for a bit. If you can't be original, why not take the piss out of people who can? And while you might not be technically as good at it as some, there are ways you can make up for that. Like going into the quiet place, absorbing the essences ...

  Look, the only way I can handle this thing, he'd once said to Moira, is to try and channel it into creativity. To make something lasting and positive out of it. Isn't that what art is?

  Ah, the idealism of youth. Maturity tells you that if all that comes back in your face, if you can't make anything lasting and positive out of it, don't mess around ... put it into something negative and transient.

  Yes. Well. No wonder Moira had looked distinctly dubious.

  Anyway, I was in town that day, Monday, December 13, for a little gig (I'm not going to tell you where it was, I do have some pride).

  I'd gone to buy a few sets of strings at this little music shop which sells me them in bulk. The guy there was trying to flog me a secondhand acoustic guitar, a Takamine -Japanese, brilliant built-in pick-up with sound-balancing, everybody's using them, ultra- reliable -you know the way they go on.

  But I was in a relatively good mood. For the time of year. It's always a relief when the 8th of December goes past and nothing destroys me. So, anyway, I was giving it a go, this guitar, and for some reason I started playing 'Julia', the Lennon song off the White Album, the one introducing Yoko to his dead mother. The one I never could rewrite for laughs.

  Well, I must have been feeling wistful, you know how it is. I was doing the voice, which is John at his most ethereal. I always like the opening of that one - about half of what he says being meaningless, but he says it just to reach you, Julia ... It's so personal and spiritual, much more so than the self-indulgent primal scream stuff on the Plastic Ono Band album.

  Anyway, it was just after one o'clock, everybody buggering off for lunch, the pubs filling up, and I'm perching on an amplifier, droning out 'Julia', feeling unusually ... wistful (I can't get away from this bloody word 'wistful', but you know what I mean, kind of coasting on memory, but nothing more complicated than that ... or so I thought) and I remember looking down and seeing something glistening on the curve of the guitar, just above the pick-up, a blob of liquid, and then another one landed next to it.

  Plop.

  Well, of course, it was a bloody tear, wasn't it?

  I was really embarrassed. But at least it was Liverpool, where more tears have been shed into more pints over that bastard ...

  Anyway, the feller who runs the shop comes over - he'd been watching me, not saying a word. So when he sees I've finally noticed him, he wanders across, big grin. 'Got to buy it now, matey, you've christened the bugger. That'll be nine hundred and thirty five quid, including discount.'

  I'm thinking, You dickhead. Not him, me.

  Then the lights go out.

  Bang.

  You're never going to send this, pal. Might as well admit it. You're just tormenting yourself.

  Dave was writing it on the card table in his old bedroom at
Ma's bungalow in Hoylake, on the Wirral, where the seagulls cruised past the window and crapped on the glass.

  Always used to stay here when he was working clubs and pubs in Liverpool and the North West, even though it depressed the hell out of him. Now, with the Jan thing on the blink, he was killing time, gearing up for a final rescue bid.

  In a situation like this, he always wrote to Moira, which was as much use as writing to Santa Claus and sending it up the chimney, but must be therapeutic because he was unloading it, like - presumably - spilling it all to an analyst.

  On the wall, directly facing him, was a reproachful picture of the martyred John Lennon, going yellow now, like the adjacent poster from inside the Beatles' White Album, which, twenty years ago he'd - presciently, no doubt - had framed in black.

  In fact, apart from his own artwork for the first Philosopher's Stone album, the room was still the way it had been when he was a student, back when the world was innocent. 'When you're famous,' his ma used to say, 'I'll open it to the public at a fiver a time.'

  Even she must be realising the prospect of Dave becoming famous was about as likely now as the seagulls flying off to crap somewhere else.

  The old girl had a man friend these days and went off on regular 'dates' in this feller's ancient Morris Oxford, sometimes staying out all night. She was seventy.

  Before Jan, Dave had lived for brief periods with four women, all of whom had known about him or learned very quickly. (The sudden coldness of the bedroom sometimes in the early hours, the way owls would always find them, even in the city.) Initially they'd been excited by it. It was his bit of charisma'. (Moira used to talk, quite cynically, about her 'glamour'.) But it faded fast.

  If he was ever to trap some happiness, it could only be with a woman he couldn't frighten, and he'd only ever met one, and among her last words to him had been the endlessly echoing

  we're no gonny see each other again, ever.

  And she'd never replied to his letters.

  I mean all the lights went out. Everywhere.

  Remember Dylan's line about darkness at the break of noon. This one was just over an hour after noon, but I'll get to that.

  Well, obviously, we thought it was just the shop, at first. I said, 'You shouldn't keep waiting for the red bill, Percy, sometimes they forget.' Then we go out into the street and everybody's lights have gone, and I can hear this terrible screeching of brakes from the main rood around the corner - I mean, not just one screech but a whole chorus of screeches, and it's obvious what's happened - the bloody traffic lights have all gone out.

  Well, I couldn't have bought Percy's Takamine even if I'd had the money - the bloody till wouldn't work. So I walk out into the centre of town, and it's like the end of the world's been announced.

  Some people are really panicking -I mean, everybody's had a power cuts at home, maybe even the whole street's been off ... but an entire city? Customers and office workers trapped in lifts? Streets clogged with cars and buses and taxis? Trains frozen in coal-black underground stations?

  This is not natural.

  And it's dead eerie, somehow. Although far from quiet, what with the streets full of police trying to get the traffic flowing again, shops being locked in customers' faces because of the looting threat.

  I remember this feller banging on the door of a newsagent's shouting, Hey, come on, gissa packet a ciggies, will yer? Just one packet, yer bastards!

  And there's a woman rushing out of a hairdresser's with half a perm and her face all smudged clutching a towel and grabbing hold of people, screaming, You've gorra help me! He's taking me out tonight, it's me anniversary!

  Which might have been funny if she hadn't been wearing (oh God, oh Jesus Christ) the black bonnet.

  Half an hour later, the rumours are spreading. Some people are saying it's the IRA, and a woman at a burger stall with its own generator is doing fantastic business and telling one customer after another, 'It's not just Liverpool, you know, luv, it's the whole country that's been blacked out! You've had it for hot meals now. Gerrit while you can!'

  It wasn't, of course. It was just Liverpool, as if that wasn't bad enough and totally unprecedented - a hundred thousand electricity users cut off for the best part of two hours, shops and businesses losing millions of pounds.

  According to next day's Daily Post, a spokesman for the National Grid said it had been caused by 'an outside body'. It was finally traced to the valves on two transformers in the Lister

  Drive power station at Tuebrook. This is one of the places which passes on the juice from the National Grid to the local lecky company, MANWEB.

  In the DP the following day, a MANWEB official was quoted as saying it was 'extraordinary' two transformers going down at once. A 'million to one chance', an 'untimely coincidence'.

  And then another unnamed spokesman actually said, 'The fates came together on this one.'

  Interesting, isn't it, that when official bodies can't explain something, they still revert to expressions like 'the fates'.

  Was it ever actually love all those years ago? Or Just a subconscious plea for empathy?

  If it didn't come back to John Lennon, it always came back to Moira. In the spring of 1981, he'd decided he couldn't stand this any more and set out to find her.

  This meant Scotland. He'd rung all the people he knew up there - about five of them, mainly musicians. One guy said, yeah, she was certainly gigging, done some support for Clannad, he was sure she had. Another said, hang on a mo, there was a line or two in the local rag - Aberdeen University - the 20th, was it?

  So Dave had loaded up his van with all the clean clothes he could gather together, thrown an old mattress in the back in case he ran out of cash. And the Martin guitar, in case he had to sell it, perish the thought.

  Well, actually, the guitar was also there because of this little fantasy he had. A darkened folk club somewhere picturesque and atmospheric, and she'd be doing her act with everybody sitting around quietly, revering her. And then she'd get on, solo, to a song which really could have used a second guitar, a few harmonies. She'd be in a long black dress, and when she reached the chorus she'd sound so alone you could die.

  At which point...

  ... another guitar, the incomparable Martin, would join in from the back of the hall, getting louder as the figure from the past weaved between the bodies towards her, looking as handsome as ever but maybe a little weary; he'd travelled a long way, after all...

  Dave still cringed over this.

  Spring had been late that year. Especially in Scotland. Snowdrifts in March, the travelling bard, especially in a nine-year-old Ford Thames. And when he got to Aberdeen University, there was no concert on the 20th involving Moira Cairns.

  Moira who? She wasn't even that well known. She'd made one album of her own songs - including The Comb Song - and then gone back to the traditional folk stuff. She was not famous; she had a following. He didn't know about Malcolm Kaufmann in those days; maybe the agent hadn't yet come on the scene.

  It was hopeless. She didn't seem to work to any kind of pattern. Or she knew somehow that he was around.

  Example. He'd turn up at some pub in, say, a fishing village in Fife, having spent most of a week on the trail and just enough money left for a night's B and B, and he'd find it was last night, she'd already been on, fixture altered by request of the artist.

  This would keep happening, in different ways. Town halls, theatres, arts centres, students' unions ... always last night, or it had been postponed, or it was the wrong town, or it was the right town and the bloody van broke down and he arrived too late.

  All of this happening in a kind of haze, like in those infuriating dreams where you're trying your damnedest to do something dead simple, like make a phone call, and your fingers keep hitting the wrong numbers. Each day he'd set out with the certainty that this time ... And each night he'd wind up confused and knackered, getting pissed and weeping off the quay at Oban or somewhere.

  She was always ahe
ad of him, always the next town along the line, and an impenetrable mist between them.

  Some days he'd climb a hill and stand with his hands spread and his eyes closed. Where are you? Just give me a direction. Like the way he'd reach out for her mind on stage or during a session when a song took off on its own. We going into the chorus again,

  or wind it up?

  Nothing.

  And then he'd got ill, running a temperature. Couldn't even drive home. Lay sweating on the mattress in the back of the van until he must have passed out or something and the next thing he remembers he's in an ambulance and then a hospital and someone is saying, Nothing obvious, looks like plain old nervous exhaustion to me.

  Next thing, he's sitting up in a cold sweat, throwing off the blankets, screaming, the Martin!

  Who is this Martin, Mr Reilly? Is he a friend?

  The bloody Martin's still in the bloody van!

  It wasn't, naturally. Fifteen hundred quid's worth of customized, hand-tooled acoustic guitar. They hadn't taken the van; even thieves have standards.