December

by Phil Rickman

  Which made the Weasel suspicious and legitimately so: part of his job was to look out for Tom and Shelley and the kid, Vanessa, and anybody that might give them hassle.

  He watched the two geezers for a minute or so and then turned back to the house and saw a figure, very still, in the kitchen window, heavy blonde hair on the shoulders.

  Shelley. Standing there, looking out, but not in his direction. There was a mug of coffee steaming in her hand. She had no expression on her face. Only tears.

  The Weasel thought: That bastard. Don't he realise what he's doing to her?

  Not the time.

  The Weasel wasn't stupid, knew when to back off. He's away before Shelley could turn and spot him and went round the side of the house to spy on the two geezers.

  She was a really wonderful woman, was Shelley. The Weasel had long ago given up wondering what hidden qualities Tom possessed that he could've pulled a chick of this quality and more amazing still - kept her for so many years. 'Cause it wasn't the money; if it wasn't for Shelley, Tom wouldn't have no money.

  But how much more of this - of Tom - was she going to be able to take?

  See, Tom was getting worse, not better - all too obvious to a mate who'd known him since they was kids in Bermondsey, back before Tom's old man died.

  OK, it was true, right from the old days, that Tom was the first to blow his stack. Temperamental, like any great artist. But not like he was now. Not like some hunted bear, and if you went too close, he'd have your throat. Not so hung-up he couldn't even confide in the faithful little guy who'd carried his amps out of the Transit van and into the halls, hunting for power points, changing plugs by torchlight, procuring dodgy substances or clean chicks or whatever else was required at any particular time to satisfy whatever needed satisfying.

  The Weasel stood on the edge of the circular drive and looked down, across the lawns. The two geezers, old Sir Wilf and the younger, taller one, had pushed off.

  He thought: Time I done a bit more nosing around. Go down the pub tonight, clobber the yokels at pool, find out what the score is with this Sir Wilf.

  But first things first.

  Making his meal, before work, the Weasel had come to a decision. 'Go down the house,' he'd told his half-pounder. 'Soon's as I get finished. Get some answers, find out what's going down. And no bullshit off the big guy. Not this time.' In the frying pan, the big burger had sizzled its approval.

  Wouldn't normally chance his arm like this, prejudice his position in the Love-Storey set-up. Next to being a temporary roadie for the Brain Police this was actually the best job he'd ever had, which still surprised him; he hadn't expected to be able to stick it more than a few weeks, all this fresh air shit. He might look like a shrivelled hippie - little round shades and grey hair half-way down his back (despite there not being much on top these days) - but he'd never been able to grasp the attraction of living in the sticks, communing with nature, getting your balls frozen off.

  But here in his caravan, all connected to the juice, with an electric heater, a good little sound system with a stack of vintage vinyl, plus a microwave and a hotplate so's you could make yourself a couple of greasy half-pounders after a day out delivering healthy shit to wholefood shops and vegetarian restaurants, well, this was OK, this wasn't half bad, to be quite honest, feet up in your van, good old stuff on the deck, Cream, Doors, Hendrix.

  In fact, it was the late Jimi Hendrix, Weasel's all-time fave axeman, that had started him thinking.

  Weasel stood at the edge of the lawn, lit a fag.

  How it happened was like this.

  Week or two ago he'd noticed that his fourth copy of Hendrix's Electric Ladyland LP (the one with all the naked chicks on the sleeve) was beginning to show serious signs of becoming unplayable. So Weasel, still resisting CD - crackles is life, man - had wandered down the big house to ask Tom if he could borrow his copy to transfer to cassette, which would mean he could also play it in the van as he drove around delivering his consignments of soya sausages and wholenut goulash.

  Now, when it came down to sounds, Tom was generosity itself, recognizing that to a guy like Weasel, sounds was lifeblood, right? As a rule Tom said; Yeah, sure, man, words to that effect.

  But this day, on this question of Electric Lady land, Tom come over distinctly weird, gone all confused, said nah, nah, he hadn't got that one no more, you take this one instead, palming Weasel off with this crappy old Jefferson Airplane LP. But not before Weasel had seen what'd happened to Tom's once-magnificent collection of rock albums, stretching over three whole walls of the big guy's ballroom-size den.

  Had seen that there was not one single Hendrix disc on the shelves.

  Along with other notable absences.

  A week later, just to test this theory of his, he'd presented himself at the back door with a view to borrowing the Rolling Stones' Beggar's Banquet, and Tom had come over all weird again and told him he'd lent it to someone and never had it back, what a drag. And sent Weasel off instead with Goat's Head Soup, a particularly creepy-looking Stones album from the seventies with references to the devil and stuff that Weasel figured Tom, considering his past, would want nothing to do |with.

  For some reason. Goat's Head Soup was all right but Beggar's Banquet was not.

  Weasel had dithered around a bit to get another quick scan of the rows of album spines on the shelves and, sure enough, he'd spotted a few more significant gaps: the Doors, Joplin.

  Which proved his theory, no question.

  He dropped his fag on the grass, stamped on it. Too late now. They didn't like - Tom didn't like - to be disturbed after dark. He'd give it another day or two. Then he'd definitely go back, face up the big guy.

  Making sure, however, before he said a word, that he was the one closest to the door.

  'You were quite right,' Martin Broadbank said into the phone. It's most peculiar.'

  'You seen him, then?'

  'You're joking. Even his nearest neighbour hasn't seen him. He's heard him ... playing his instrument.'

  'More than I have, Martin. He won't even come to the bastard phone.'

  'What about the wife?' Broadbank asked.

  'She quizzes you. If you're anything to do with the music business, it's "I'm sorry, Tom isn't working at the moment." Naturally, I didn't tell her what it was about, I want to spring it on him, I want to hear his reaction.'

  Martin Broadbank sighed in mild annoyance. He didn't know why he was getting involved in this, except perhaps out of boredom - you inherited your father's business, expanded it during the acquisitive eighties into areas the old man didn't even know existed; that didn't mean you had to find it interesting or regard it, God forbid, as your life's work. Boredom: he was spending an increasing amount of time fending it off.

  'It's all pointless, though, isn't it, Steve, if the tapes aren't worth it?'

  'The tapes will be ...' Stephen Case sounded a little nervous '... fine. That's my feeling.'

  'God save us from feelings.' Martin Broadbank's own feelings had told him to have nothing to do with it when his old university chum had called a couple of nights ago to ask if he knew he was residing not ten miles away from a living legend. But he'd been bored and slightly intrigued, and remembered the environmental health officer telling him about Sir Wilfrid Tulley getting ratty over some insane pop star at the bottom his garden.

  'Anyway, it seems your friend Storey's taken to playing his guitar, none too tunefully, in the early hours of the morning. His neighbour wants it stopped.'

  Stephen Case said urgently, 'How can I get to see him, Martin?'

  'Buy yourself a powerful pair of binoculars is all I can advise. Man's a total recluse, as you say.'

  'No, come on - you could help me. You've got contacts.'

  'Steve, you know how much I hate to say "What's in it for me?", but ...'

  'I was your best man!'

  'Were you really? I must have forgotten that particular marriage.'

  'And you're a TMM sharehold
er. A substantial one '

  'Lord, haven't I got rid of those yet? Must be losing my financial acumen. Look, OK, you want to meet Storey … give me a day or two.'

  Why was he doing this? Possibly for the same reason he'd got himself elected to the tedious bloody council. Because he just had to be at the centre. Because he saw life - and business - as a huge railway system. A matter of being at the right terminus at the right time. Sometimes you could even switch the points, and when two trains collided, capitalise on the salvage.

  'I might have a chat with the wife,' he said. 'I tend to like wives.'

  'As long as they aren't yours,' said Stephen Case, 'presumably.'

  Quite,' said Broadbank.

  II

  Baking

  Unearthly in the dusk, wreathed in white silk, the head glided silently past the vicarage window.

  The vicar looked up from his desk, disoriented.

  His study was at the side of the house facing the village, across the steep lane from the church under its protective rock of ages.

  The vicar, in jeans and sweater, moved to the window, leaving open on his desk an ugly old book, a Victorian account, with engravings, of the ecclesiastical buildings of Gwent.

  Isabel Pugh was in one of those electric wheelchairs - quite sophisticated, but not designed for Ystrad Ddu, struggling a little now, gliding less evenly, as it moved up the hill. A couple of feet behind it walked Mrs May Pugh, the vicar's part-time housekeeper, hands out ready to grab the chair if it stalled and slipped back.

  The vicar saw Isabel turn her head violently, tearing off the silk scarf. Behind his double-glazing, he lip-read, 'For God's sake. Mother!'

  Mrs Pugh's arms dropped to her sides and then folded in exasperation across her quilted chest as the wheelchair laboured away up me hill in the failing light.

  'What a bloody life,' the vicar mumbled, returning to his desk. If she'd been a post-pubescent schoolgirl when she fell from the Abbey, Isabel Pugh must be in her mid-thirties by now. How could she go on living here, half a mile up the valley from where she'd spent a night of agony, lying under rubble, next to the corpse of her young lover?

  People were unbelievably stoical in Ystrad Ddu, it's foundations perhaps, like the Abbey's, cemented in blood.

  The vicar sat down and switched on his green-shaded desk lamp. The battered book before him was opened to an engraving showing a bearded man in a torn and ragged monk's habit, on his knees, hands together in prayer. On the opposite page, the text read:

  And so Richard built for himself a rude wooden hut by the stream and lived there, and from that day onwards, others came to the place in search of sanctuary and the message was carried far and wide. Indeed, such was the reputation of the community at Ystrad Ddu for piety and humility that gifts were bestowed upon Richard Walden by lords and barons anxious to atone for their own misdeeds, and he was soon able to fulfil what had been foretold in the Revelation, the raising of a great Abbey to the glory of the Lord, from whose towers could be glimpsed the Holy Mountain Ysgyryd Fawr, the Skirrid ...

  The vicar thought of poor Isabel Pugh, angrily urging her electric wheelchair up the hill. How could Richard Walden's earthly paradise have shrivelled into that grim, mean, stunted place which bestowed only misery and death?

  He looked out of the window, lights corning on in the cottages which seemed to hang from the hillside.

  No use putting it off, mate, the vicar told himself. This is what the job's about. This is the sharp end.

  I can't.

  Oh, yes, you bloody can. Can't expect to be able to cast out other people's demons until you confront your own.

  Maurice, of Audico. said, 'OK, we'll bake them for you. We'll bake them at fifty-five centigrade for three days. No guarantees, of course; they may come out like crusty French bread, who knows?'

  'Don't worry about it,' Prof Levin said. 'I won't.'

  Because he took things as they came these days, didn't he? Stayed cool, avoided aggro, drank only coffee and Pepsi. Sure.

  He lifted the wooden box on to Maurice's desk.

  'My,' Maurice said. 'Some container.'

  'Yeah.' He was glad to leave the box at the factory tonight. Every time he looked at the thing, he found his body crying out for a proper drink - this being his regular barometer these days, how badly any particular situation made him long for a drink.

  With this box, the barometer read: Stormy. Stay in. Close windows, lock all doors.

  Of course, he'd known all along there was a fair chance of rescuing the tape, but with Steve Case it was always better t play your cards close to your chest. And in this case he was rather hoping that in three days' time Maurice would throw up his hands and say: Sorry, mate, it's just too far gone.

  This private enterprise bit: worrying. Prof was planning to semi-retire in a couple of years, pick and choose his jobs. If he had a choice of committing what was left of his future and his reputation to either Stephen Case or the entire TMM organisation, well, not much of a contest, was it?

  'Look,' Steve had said, the little vein under his nose twitching, 'do what you can. If it costs, it costs.'

  Well, it wouldn't actually cost that much, considering. Not when you had a mate in the recording-tape manufacturing industry and this mate owed you a favour or two for recommending his product to people who mattered. This was a business cemented by favours.

  'So here's the situation,' Maurice said. 'The baking should harden the binder, glue it all together again. But you know that without repeat bakings it won't last? What I'm saying, you need dub off a copy, PDQ.'

  'Yeah, yeah. Can you ring me the minute it's out of the oven?' They actually had special ovens at Audico for this; a lot of duff tape was produced in the seventies.

  'You want me to have a listen afterwards, see how it's come out, put you out of your misery?'

  'Don't bother. I'll collect. PDQ.'

  He knew there'd be no unauthorised copies run off, not with Maurice handling this personally. He was simply covering himself. He didn't know where this was going.

  It was near closing time, almost dark outside, no other customers in the store. An assistant was wiping the counters with a damp cloth.

  He took to the main cash register a bilious-looking item clingfilmed into a foil pastry case.

  What exactly is this?'

  She was a largish blonde in a blue and white butcher's apron, which, in a vegetarian foodstore, was probably something of a gesture.

  'It's a savoury flan, sir,' she said crisply. 'With onions and chives and a rather interesting soya-based cheese-substitute.'

  Martin Broadbank, Cotswold councillor, owner of supermarkets, said, 'Interesting, how?'

  He put her age at about the same as his, mid-forties. Earth-mother type, he supposed, but very attractive with the wide mouth and the heavy blonde hair like a big brass bell. And, of course, those wonderfully generous breasts. She looked slightly harrassed but very capable.

  He remembered Sir Wilfrid ... I mean she seems normal enough, the woman. Runs some sort of health food business in Stroud.'

  'We think it's probably the closest anyone's yet come to developing something which actually tastes like cheese rather than sour yoghurt,' said Mrs Shelley Storey.

  'I see,' Martin said. 'But surely at least twice as expensive what we traditionalists like to think of as real cheese.'

  She said, 'If you're talking about bulk Cheddar, produced, that's one thing ...'

  Martin Broadbank felt the lever controlling life's rail points begin to tremble significantly under his hand. A reliable number of interesting trains were now converging on this part of Gloucestershire.

  '… but if you look at specialist cheeses,' Mrs Storey said, 'you'll find this is actually not incomparable in price to some locally produced goat and sheep cheese, and when you consider …'

  Who was he doing this for? For Stephen Case, who'd been his emergency best man when they were at university together (studying law, which neither of them had turned int
o a career)? Or for Sir Wilfrid, who was set on a collision course with the reclusive Tom Storey, to whom Martin Broadbank wished no harm at all, and why should he?

  No reason at all, except that Sir Wilfrid was clearly a vindictive man and, what was worse, a vindictive man with some residual influence at the Department of the Environment which had sometimes been less than enthusiastic about plans for large supermarkets like Martin Broadbank's on the fringes of country towns.

  Well, I'm doing it for me, of course, Martin Broadbank acknowledged, accepting a sample of cheese substitute. And for the general good of mankind, which has to be more or less the same thing.

  'Interesting aftertaste,' he said. 'Good seller, is it?'

  The business was called Love-Storey (rather cute, the woman's maiden name had been Love), with specialist retail outlets in Cheltenham, Stroud and Cirencester and a wholesale warehouse supplying a range of home-made vegetarian gourmet delights of the nut-and-beanburger variety to sundry village stores.

  A couple of swift telephone calls had revealed Love-Storey to be in some financial difficulty stemming, apparently, from over-expansion in the late eighties. Most opportune.

  'I mean, how many of these, er, flans do you manage to offload in a week?'

  Never before had Martin Broadbank attempted to ingest anything in the soya-substitute line and he was not terribly impressed, to be honest. But vegetarianism was no passing fad; supermarkets back-shelved it at their peril.

  She was looking at him curiously. He met her eyes.

  'How many would you say?'

  Mrs Storey bridled. 'I ...' Then she closed her luscious lips, smiled wryly and called to an assistant. 'Jan, the savoury - what would you say? Fifteen, this week?'

  'Fifteen?' said Martin Broadbank with no hint of a sneer. 'Suppose you had an order for, say, five hundred? What would your price be then?'

  'All right,' Mrs Shelley Storey said, hands on hips, glorious chest out. 'Who are you?'