by Phil Rickman
'Well if you're all gonna get unfucked before the week's out ...' Prof looked pointedly at his watch. 'You better make a start. Mind if I leave the circle? Too much coffee.'
Lee Gibson arrived then, so all of them left the circle. 'We a band again?' Simon asked.
'Better find out.' Tom picked up the Telecaster, played, unplugged, what sounded like the opening riff from 'Hooked', a heavy rock number about a dockland pub-fight from his solo flop, Second Storey. He winced. 'Load of bollocks.'
'How are we this morning, Tom?' Lee said cheerfully.
'Shagged out,' said Tom. 'Plug me in, Prof.'
It was Simon who'd swung it. Prof was sure of this.
Simon, the willowy ex-public-school boy who'd confessed to being every kind of psychological misfit, had emerged as the leader. Simon had gathered energy and inspiration from somewhere and he was spreading it around like it was in danger of evaporating. Simon the bass player laying down the rhythm track and then re-emerging as Simon, the Classical One, viola solos that gave you the shivers, especially on a sonorous instrumental number, 'The Valley', which Prof had never heard before.
Also, Simon seemed to have a way with Tom - big mulish guy, you thought, but there was a formidable intellect in there which the big man kept tamped down under this thick layer of bluff cockney.
He was a bloody natural, was Tom, the most instinctive musician Prof had ever seen work. Made you realise how many of the other so-called guitar heroes were just brilliant technicians, without depth. Artisans.
What it was with Tom, he had no ego, no urge to be centre stage; he just wanted to fold himself into the backcloth. This was why his solo album hadn't worked, couldn't work: Tom simply had no desire to project. He'd pick up his Telecaster - any Telecaster would do, no modification necessary - and stand around waiting for something to do.
'Help me out here, Tom,' Simon would say, and Tom would build the musical equivalents of a suspension bridge or a skyscraper or a complex railway system.
At one point, they all gathered around Tom's booth and Tom was shaking his head a lot and Simon talked to him a while and then Tom said, 'Yeah, all right.' And he hit the riff to 'Hooked', only slower.
'We do this one live?' Simon said to Prof, who by now was recognising that all he was here for was to organize whatever they wanted and get the levels right. Live takes, everybody playing together, seemed to suit their peculiar chemistry.
'Whatever,' Prof said.
Half an hour later, they were ready. By this time he'd realised that 'Hooked' on the Second Storey album had just been a speeded-up desensitised reworking of the Black Album track called 'The Man With Two Mouths'. This was a return to the original, even slower. Prof didn't know what the song was about, except some kind of underworld violence in London, but Tom's downbeat croak was oddly moving and afterwards the big guitarist stayed in his booth, back turned as if he was embarrassed. And the lights dimmed strangely.
Moira didn't play on this one; she sat with Prof behind the glass and smoked a cigarette. 'Wonderful, huh?' she said. 'I wouldn't waste time on another take. Prof, you'll no' get it like that again.'
Prof nodded, didn't question it. Questioned nothing, all afternoon, all night.
They did Dave's 'Dakota Blues'. For the first time, Dave sounded comfortable in his own voice, and Tom produced a spontaneous solo of such aching, bittersweet simplicity that Prof could've wept. Later, Moira introduced a little song she said she'd composed in the car on the way here about a New Age traveller who joins a band of gypsies. Just Moira on guitar and Simon on violin. Prof recorded a rhythm track but figured he'd probably dump it. Simplicity was best, if you had the quality.
Between midday and midnight they laid down four very serviceable tracks, which was amazing, especially when you considered the state of these people only last night.
They were a band again, all right. They were - astonishingly - like a band which had been together on a nightly gigging basis for about ten years. They communicated without words. And they pulled Lee Gibson along with them. Lee, making a bomb in the States with his best-avoided heavy-metal crap, had been a little cocky at first, until Tom Storey put him into perspective. He was a good drummer, actually, and enough of a real musician to recognise when he was in the Presence.
So Prof was getting stuff which would be a joy to mix at a future date ... well away from the Abbey.
It was a good studio, though, he couldn't deny that. The low, vaulted ceiling, the stone walls. There was an ambience here you could use, or not.
And Simon decided he wanted to use it.
At ten minutes past midnight on the morning of Thursday 8 December, Simon announced he had a number which, he said, he'd intended for the Black Album in 1980, but it didn't work out, wouldn't come right.
'You don't wanna call it a night?' Prof said. 'Rather than go for something you aren't sure of.'
'No,' said Simon.
'Only, in my experience, if you go out while you're winning, it gives you a bit of encouragement. You come in fresh tomorrow, ready to hit it. Yeah?"
'If it's OK with everyone else, I'd like to go for it now,' Simon said 'It's important to me. Something I want to say to somebody.' There were nods and shrugs.
'And we can try a live take,' Simon said. 'Except I'll put the bass on later.'
'Yeah, yeah.'
This one was going to be a mainly instrumental, impressionistic piece called 'Holy Light', partly improvised, wordless vocals from Moira with elements of Gregorian chant.
Simon told Prof it was his attempt to convey what it must have been like for the founder of the Abbey, a monk called Richard Walden, weighed down by old sin and shame - so a heavy intro with cello and bass, both laid down by Simon, and then Tom would gradually introduce colours and Moira would do the white light.
'You remember this one?' Simon said to Moira.
'I remember how I blew it. It was supposed to be light and joyful and kind of inspirational, and it just made me depressed. I remember going out and wandering round in the dark and smoking several cigarettes, coming back, trying again ... just couldn't sustain the mood. You really want to try this one again, Simon?'
'Yes,' said Simon solidly, like he was making a solemn vow in front of witnesses. 'And don't worry about sustaining the mood. The mood's changed. Lee, if you want to call it a night, we can do the bass and drums tomorrow. I'd like to work over that with you, but I'm not sure how it's going to go.'
'Yeah,' Lee said. 'I could do with a good coffee.'
Dave looked up. 'Won't she be asleep?'
Lee stood up and stretched. 'Only for the first couple of minutes.'
He left by the back door. Bitter cold air came through in a rush and made the cymbals hiss.
Dave said, 'What's this about, Si?'
Simon was bringing his cello out of its case. 'It's about correcting history.'
Moira had been standing under two mikes, and when she fell to her knees and then rolled over on the grey carpet, both hands over her face, Prof started to get seriously alarmed.
OK, he'd engineered some pretty wild sessions in his time, hadn't everybody? Whole bands on acid. Occupational hazard.
But this was the Abbey. Simon had said to him that if there was one lesson to learn at the Abbey it was never to allow yourself to relax.
Prof tore off his cans. He couldn't bear to hear this any more.
whatdoldo, whatdoldo?
He turned his back on the glass panel between the control room and the studio floor and watched the metal spools turning, getting it all down for posterity, for some poor bastard in a listening-studio to hear and dream and wake up screaming, We can't release this!
And the spools went on turning, the tape slithering past the heads.
gottastopit, gottastopit, gottastopit
He didn't need cans to hear it. The panel was only glass. He was surprised it hadn't shattered.
They'd all come out of their booths. Simon wanting the studio ambience. Wanting to fill
the entire space until the music was absorbed by the stones in the walls and the vaulted ceiling which supported the tower's mass, so that it would be like the whole structure was held up by the music.
Simon's bid to establish control.
And Prof was frightened as he watched ...
... Simon, stripped to the waist, droplets of sweat actually flying from his body as his bow slashed at the cello's strings and his face stretched in agony like something painted by Goya, the bow in ribbons, strands of it flying free.
Tom Storey, steady, legs apart, pacing him with long, loping, measured chords, potent as the strokes of a cut-throat razor.
While Dave had put down his golden-hued Martin guitar and rushed to where Moira lay, cradling her head in his lap, tears from both of them on Moira's cheeks.
Prof watched Moira's breast heaving. The sounds coming out of her before she fell had been the sick, soured Gregorian chant of his recurring dream.
Which had not been audible on the Black Album tape, he'd swear it, and yet ... ... had been introduced into his subconscious mind by the tape.
He knew that Moira, in her mind, had been running in terror along the ruined nave, under the Abbey's gaunt, black ribcage guarding its diseased lungs, the ground quaking as the Abbey breathed.
Alive. They were inside an ancient, living, sentient organism. He could see a fire burning in the deepest woodland, yellow and pink, below an ancient, lumpen tree with twisted, swollen branches and chattering twigs, the tree reaching out its branch-arms like a deformed man. Rough nails projected from the tree's tendrils, thick and glistening reddened strings looped around them and the rich, succulent smell of roasting meat.
Someone must have opened the door and let in the night mist, swirling now around the silent drums and cymbals.
The mist formed against the glass screen, full of stricken Goya faces
(as Simon sweated over the cello, sawing savagely at the quivering strings)
and then collected out on the studio floor, above where Moira lay weeping with her head in Dave's lap, Dave crying, too, and maybe it was the mingling, evaporating tears which turned the mist into a little cloud of throbbing blackness which settled around her face like a soft helmet.
And, oh, God, God, God, God, how he wanted a drink ...
Prof scuttling around the control room, hands over his ears, the Abbey alive all around him, walls expanding and contracting, the sick, stone organism pulsing with soured, curdled energy, Prof's brain swollen inside his skull, the bones straining and cracking.
StopitstopitstopitstopitstopitSTOPITSTOPITSTOPITSTOPITSTOP
'It's over, Prof.'
'Go away. I never want to see any of you bastards again.'
'You can take the tape. You can take it out on the bloody hill and burn it now. I'm not Russell, I'm not gonna con you. See, there it is, still turning. Rip it off, take it away, soak it in petrol...'
Their faces above him, with lights, like a surgical team over an operating table.
'It was necessary. Prof,' Moira said.
Prof sat up. 'How can anything like that ever be necessary? What happened to you, why'd you pass out, why was the black ...?'
'I was seeing, Prof. Simon was showing us. Making a point.'
She shook herself. 'Whole thing was very exhausting.'
Simon was kneeling by Profs chair. 'That piece wouldn't work the first time, because I was trying to make it into the kind of vision which it wasn't. This abbey was never dedicated to the Light. It used to be in the middle of a forest, now it just gathers mist.'
'A black abbey?' Prof croaked.
'A black abbot, and he's still around, the essence of him. That was to let him know that we knew. That I knew. Me particularly, because he had me. Nearly.'
Simon stood up, his back to the tape deck. The needles on several of the twenty four illuminated level-meters were still moving as if the tape was recording the ambient sounds from the studio floor.
Simon said loudly, 'If you're listening, Richard, I just want to say it's nearly over. You're fucked, man.'
Prof, feeling like a very old producer, sat up in his chair and swallowed bile as the black needles on more than half the level-meters whipped over to the red area and stopped there for all of three seconds, as though they were recording a spasm of rage.
XI
Bart Simpson
THURSDAY, 8 DECEMBER
The first of the screams pierced the skin of Moira's sleep like a syringe.
Sometimes this happened. Like being a radio, picking up distress signals you couldn't do a thing about, maybe ships out there in the Atlantic. Best to shut them out, roll over, bury your head in the pillow, pull the bedclothes over.
Metaphorically speaking. Because burrowing in the bed would only seal you off from the sounds in the room - a ticking clock, gargling water-pipes, birdsong. The distress calls, coming from some inner space would, in fact, be that much louder.
But still you did it, instinctively, sometimes - like now - bending the pillow around your head. 'Go 'way, huh, lemme get some sleep, didny get to bed till gone four.'
And this time - the pillow around her head, the sheets and blankets over the pillow, the eiderdown on top of everything - it worked, thank God, the screams dwindling to feeble twitters.
'Fine, I can handle that, just let me have a few more ...'
'… minutes.'
Moira struggled frantically through the jungle of bedclothes, breaking surface with a gasp.
The scream was real.
It had stopped, but its memory hung around like a kick in the stomach.
This had been a long, tremulous scream, beginning in mere pain and rising to an agony of high-pitched terror.
Moira sat up for a moment, pulling hair out of her eyes. The scream did not recur. A dark mauveness hazed from the high, uncurtained window. She groped on the floor for her watch. It was 7.30 a.m.
She slid her legs to the floor, calf-muscles aching. She was wearing the Bart Simpson nightshirt. It was up around her waist, revealing that one of the blisters on her thighs had burst in the night. She pulled a tissue from the box on the floor and dabbed away the yellowy matter, then sat on the edge of the bed, gathering her emotions, not ready yet to take on the scream. How did she feel about this - the climax of last night's session, Simon's shout of defiance?
Simon.
The scream.
The scream, a real scream, had come from above. There was only one room between hers and the roof.
Moira was up and running for the door.
Eddie fumbled his way to the phone with shaving foam over half his face.
'I'll see you in the church in twenty minutes,' she snapped before he could even remember his own exchange and number ...
'Heaven's sake, Isabel, you know what time it is?'
'You want to hear this or not?'
'What about my breakfast?'
Isabel hung up, the bossy bitch.
Vanessa was missing, her single bed empty.
Meryl panicked at once ...
Flinging on her dressing-gown, she raced downstairs. The only open door was the one to the living-room, but the room was empty.
'Vanessa!'
She ran to the front door to find it still locked and barred. She dashed through to the kitchen; it too was empty, the back door firmly fastened. Meryl hugged her breasts, convinced the child had disappeared as mysteriously as she had arrived.
She was not natural. She was like a spirit, a fairy, a changeling.
Oh, don't be so stupid, Meryl! Stop. Think.
She went back into the hall and opened the front door, stepping out into the bitter air, clutching her dressing-gown to her throat.
Nothing. No one.
She hurried back into the living-room. Through the picture-window, sheep grazed contentedly on the damp and misted hills. She was furious with them: did they have no aspirations beyond the food chain?
Trembling with anxiety and cold, she made herself sit down next to th
e fireplace, where the cinders of last night's coal fire lay brown and dead. It was a mean little grate, far removed from the deep inglenooks at Martin's place. Meryl felt horribly lonely remembering the roaring fires of Hall Farm, the long, velvet curtains, the unseen, perfumed essence of the Lady Bluefoot.
Oh my lady, if only you were here with me.
But she wasn't. She was the house ghost of Hall Farm. Nice ghosts were like good wine and didn't travel.
Meryl stood up. She needed help. Quickly.
The village?
Although naturally, she believed, gregarious, she hadn't made herself known to any of the villagers here. This was on Simon's advice. He'd thought it best for her to keep a low profile. As, indeed, he told her, did most of the locals. Except, that was, for a man called Eddie Edwards. If this man ever showed his face at the vicarage, she should clam up at once, Simon had decreed. She should have nothing whatsoever to do with Mr Eddie Edwards ... or, even more important, with a certain Superintendent Gwyn Arthur Jones. If he were ever to turn up, she could say she was the vicar's aunt (aunt indeed, how old did he think she was?), looking after the place while the vicar took a short holiday with friends in Oxford or somewhere.
What a tangled web. After her years with Martin, Meryl was tired of tangled webs.
Martin! She'd telephone Martin, at once, before he left for work. It was the fair and honest thing to do, having promised Vanessa only that she would not involve Shelley.
Now. Phone. Office.
This was the room across the hall from which she'd borrowed books. And there, on a plain mahogany desk, sat the phone, and also ...
'Vanessa!'
Wearing the pretty cotton nightdress Meryl had bought her in Abergavenny, the child was sitting calmly on a leather-frame blotter, gazing out of the window, across the street towards the disappointing village church. She didn't even turn around at Meryl's cry.
