Gimme More

by Liza Cody

  It wasn’t something he could plan for or avert. The groundwork was perfect but, with girls, groundwork counted for nothing. They either went for you or they didn’t.

  But she did. Her face relaxed, her eyes widened and her soft lips parted.

  ‘Hi, Cela Five,’ she said, and held out her hand.

  Game on!

  It was suddenly as if there had never been a doubt in his mind – like watching the ball sail into the back of the goal: ball, goal, destiny. What was intended happened.

  He wasn’t even surprised to find Birdie at Grace’s house. Him, Birdie, destiny. The stars themselves were playing into his hands. The goal was huge, the ball needed no persuasion. Alec was on a roll.

  What did surprise him though was Birdie herself. He was expecting a towering figure. It wasn’t that he’d imagined her to be unchanged from how she looked in the pictures he’d seen in Archives. It was more that he expected her to be … well, bigger – more imposing. When he saw Grace dancing with her, his first reaction was that Grace was the aunt and Birdie was the niece. No aunt he’d ever known danced like that.

  He watched her, listened to her conversation with Grace and couldn’t believe she was of the same generation as his own mother. The talk was quick and spicy, peppered with laughter.

  The mother was more what he expected: slower, vaguer, more out of it. He had to work at remembering she was in the room and including her. Grace had described her as a bit of an old hippie and she hadn’t misled him. He felt he could safely leave the mother out of the equation.

  ‘What d’you think?’ Grace said, breezing into his room, her brother’s room.

  ‘We-ell,’ he began hesitantly, ‘kind of amazing for her age.’

  ‘Age?’ Grace laughed indignantly. ‘Typical ageist orientation.’

  ‘OK, she’s just amazing,’ he said. ‘And so are you. It’s an amazing family.’

  ‘Amazing Grace,’ she said, striking a pose. ‘And don’t you forget it.’

  Alec envied Grace her status with her aunt and her mother. If they never spoke of Jack, it was the only subject which wasn’t acceptable in free-range conversation.

  He liked Jimmy’s room with its posters and the anarchy-coloured quilt. Lying on his single bed, either alone or with Grace tucked into his armpit, he’d stare at the posters as if they were his private portrait gallery. All were emblematic figures and Jimmy had arranged them like a football team. Wittgenstein was in goal behind a defensive line-up of Stephen Hawking, Puff Daddy, Karl Popper and Orson Welles. He wasn’t afraid to put Mother Teresa in the midfield or to be childish and have Batman on the left wing.

  Alec pictured himself among the strikers. Any team with him in attack would score. No argument. He had the juice.

  Almost as proof, Jimmy had gone to Italy without coming home for the summer. I’ve never met the guy but he’s doing me favours, Alec thought. Now he could settle in and take his time. Only the mother missed Jimmy, turning quiet and sombre.

  Meanwhile he spent his time gaining points with Grace and covertly studying Birdie.

  She came and went without explanation. He followed her once while Grace was washing her hair, leaving early and, unbelievably, catching a bus. Alec noted the number but didn’t get on. It was odd to see her, mythic traumatised bitch goddess, in a bus queue. He searched her room, opened her laptop, found notes for lyrics, chords and arrangements filed under song titles, not in alphabetical order. He found accounts which seemed to make no sense at all. He couldn’t find private letters – her filing system seemed random. Her clothes too ranged from massively expensive designer gear to scruffy jeans, all maintained with equal carelessness. She smoked sometimes, even in the kitchen, but at other times she didn’t smoke at all. There seemed to be no pattern.

  Alec didn’t feel baulked or thwarted. Submerged somewhere at the base of his spine was an absolute confidence that all he had to do was be there. She would come to him. Like Grace, like Mr Freel, she would spin into his field of gravity.

  She liked him. He would walk into the sitting room while she was playing the piano, and she’d turn and smile. She would play a few lines especially for him and sing in a lilting tone, ‘Don’t worry, be happy, every little thing gonna be all right.’ She thought, as Grace did, that he was anxious about finding a job. They thought he was looking for a job and a place to live so that he could stay in London and not go back to his home town. Cleverly, he’d consigned his family to Hull – far enough away to be no threat.

  He would drag a chair close to the piano and say, ‘Go on, play something else. It’s amazing – no one in my family has any talent at all.’

  It wasn’t flattery, he didn’t have to fake an admiration he didn’t feel. Truthfully, he felt that his own family would look lumpen beside Grace’s.

  ‘What d’you think?’ she said. ‘Bass going, da di da dum-dum da-dum; drums going, pa-tum tum ti-tum; melody like this; harmony here; and a little descant line up here? What d’you think, Alec?’

  ‘Sounds great,’ he said, in total ignorance, loving it.

  ‘You must come to the club and see this band,’ she said. ‘You and Grace. I’d like to hear your opinion. You’re the right age.’

  ‘Honestly,’ he said, ‘I don’t know anything about music.’

  ‘Gut reaction – that’s what I’m after – intelligent, sensitive first impressions. I know you can do that.’

  Yes! he thought. She likes me. ‘I’d love to,’ he said. And was rewarded by the smile. The intimate smile, brilliant blue eyes crinkling, the deep corners of her mouth stretching. He couldn’t help smiling back. The laugh was even better. It was throaty and husky. It seemed to bubble up like soda in a bottle neck.

  He could make her laugh, that was the wonder. He might come across her alone, sitting in the kitchen late at night, maybe with a glass of wine in her hand. She’d have that dreamy-sad expression she wore when she was solitary. He found she enjoyed it if he said something a little cheeky like, ‘My dad always told me to beware of secret drinkers.’

  She wouldn’t reply with something boring like: ‘What’re you doing up at this hour?’ She’d offer him the bottle and say, ‘Insomniacs of the world unite. Where do they keep the sleep in this house? I’ve searched everywhere.’

  And he said, ‘It’s always on the top shelf, out of reach,’ surprising himself and making him glad to have his own imaginative riposte secretly recorded. Bit by bit he was assembling a journal of her thoughts and memories, her comings and goings. Eventually it would be sent to Mr Freel, and he didn’t want his own part in the dialogue to sound lumpen. He wanted his part to be as light and kaleidoscopic as hers. He wanted to sound like the right man for the job. He wanted Mr Freel to hear how Birdie was beginning to trust him.

  ‘Don’t let her seduce you,’ Mr Freel had said. ‘She can charm the snakes out from under stones.’

  Well, listen and learn, Mr Freel, Alec thought, and then tell me who’s seducing whom.

  II

  Excerpts from the Antigua Movie

  If you succumb to heat and magnetism and fuck someone you’ve only just met, sometimes you can find yourself irretrievably attached without sufficient information. You commit the grossest intimacies with a total stranger and then the wind changes, and you’re stuck with it. No one with even a modicum of sense would buy a house or a car on such a basis. A puppy? Yes. Exactly the same lack of logic controls your choice of pet – especially if you’re the soft-hearted type who chooses from an animal shelter. Unless luck is as blind as love you’ll find yourself devoted to a creature, riddled with ringworm, tape worm and ear mites, who snaps your thumb off when you offer the healing hand.

  Jack stirs the heavy air with an alien finger. He says, ‘Ripples.’ After a pause he says, ‘I wonder how long before these ripples reach London.’ A longer pause, ‘I hope, by then, they’ll be a cyclone. They’ll blow the roofs off houses and tear the arms and legs off the spidermen.’

  The blonde chick sharing his hamm
ock says, ‘Assassination by cyclamen air.’

  From this great distance, in time as well as space, the ripple touches my cheek like a snowflake. This time, however, I can’t actually see the disc-shaped whirlpool of rainbow molecules. I’m not stoned. But the picture is pretty: there is turquoise sea, cerulean sky, ochre sand, indigo shadows. There are two fallen angels tangled in a single hammock.

  I stop the Steenbeck and say, ‘Can you lift a still photograph of this image?’

  The technician says, ‘OK,’ and makes a note.

  We go on, plodding frame by frame, into the past, illuminated by the dim light of an editing desk.

  Some of the elements – ‘tearing the legs off the spidermen’, the ‘cyclamen air’, and the ‘cyclone’ – found their way into ‘Walks Like a Spider’, one of the cruellest songs Jack and I ever wrote – and, by the way, one of his most unlikely, melodic tunes. It took people a long time to recognise what a nasty song it was.

  From this distance his instability and his paranoia are obvious. But so is his beauty. From this distance I say, ‘Don’t touch him. Call an ambulance.’ I say, ‘Could you really see only the beauty? Did you really think you could heal this lost creature?’

  But, when he found me, how was he lost? He wasn’t lost. He was found. And so was I. Foundlings, both of us, and delirious with joy at the discovery.

  Wouldn’t it be ironic if I left this tedious editing room believing in arranged marriages? The belief tucked into the same envelope as half a dozen still photographs of pretty young lovers in an idyllic setting. The photographs will be strategically placed where another young lover can find them. Will the belief touch him too? He’ll know what to do with the stills. But common sense in the matter of his personal affairs … ? Oh no, that’s still years and miles away.

  Jack borrowed a small estate called South Winds. The house came complete with staff and groundsmen. But we never stayed in the house. We took first one, then two of the guest bungalows on the beach. Friends, hangers-on, the band, when they arrived, stayed in the house. It became crowded and the usual sniping and jealousy broke out.

  To begin with, of course, we were alone. A sudden, mysterious departure caught everyone by surprise and we were gone before anyone could ask where we were going. We were gone, in fact, before we could ask ourselves what we thought we were doing.

  ‘Got to get away,’ Jack said. Get away from what exactly? From the attention? Yes. But we’d courted that. We’d expended time and ingenuity on making Jack famous. He wanted success with every cell in his body and he couldn’t be successful without being famous. He was a performer, for Christ’s sake.

  When a performer rejects attention, he rejects a large part of himself. The greedy, look-at-me shadow of the man goes hungry. Then the shadow wages war against the man and tears him up, searching for food.

  ‘Got to get away,’ Jack said. ‘Gotta chill. We can talk and play. It’ll be like it was: maybe we can write, y’know, like we used to when we were alone.’

  After only ten days, however, his hungry shadow found a bunch of American film students bumming around on the beach and employed them to watch us be alone.

  Does it sound contrary? It sounded deeply contrary to me. But in those days I believed all the hype about simplicity and integrity. I hadn’t accepted that nearly all men, women and children are at war with themselves to some degree or another.

  It wasn’t that Jack’s hungry shadow won the war. That would be too simple. But the fight became more personal and way more bitter.

  Here is a nice little piece of film: here is Jack at table. It’s dark, he’s lit by a couple of fat candles, surrounded by plates, bottles, wine glasses. A roach smoulders in the ashtray. His eyes are empty and sleepy. Hippie heaven. The simple life. The simple man with his simple wife.

  ‘Yeah,’ he says, ‘tomorrow …’ But he doesn’t go on. He looks up, directly into the lens. From here, from this distance, his slow candle-lit blink looks surprised. ‘Are you still here?’ his bemused half-smile seems to say. ‘Gimme a break.’

  He dips his finger in the wine and begins to write on the table top. The drifty blonde wraith at his side reads what’s written in wine. She gets up slowly and wafts away.

  The next shot is from outside. It shows the silhouette of palm fronds blowing in front of the lit window. In the shot after that it is indeed tomorrow. And in between? The camera, this footage, implies that there was sleepy stoned love between the two shots, between the simple man and his drifty blonde. The appearance of two people, hand in hand, stepping off the porch into the warm sand in the morning confirms it. What you see is what you get.

  What you don’t get is what was written on the table top.

  Jack wrote, ‘I am the eye. The eye is watching me. The camera is eating my eyes.’

  When the beaded blonde wraith read that, she got up, alarmed, and asked the Americans to stop shooting. Jack stayed where he was. He was literally paralysed with fear.

  Look at the drifty little wraith, so sweet, so young, and from this distance so ridiculous in muslin and feathers. Someone substantial, a down-to-earth woman, would have packed up then and there. She would’ve checked Jack into a private clinic and let the experts help him.

  What in God’s name did the wraith think was going on?

  I can’t remember. I know I was alarmed. And I know I thought in my simple-wife way that what Jack wrote was a metaphor. I thought he meant that the camera was destroying his ability to see himself as he really was, and he’d chosen a macabre way of saying so. I suppose I agreed vaguely with what he wrote, so I saw it as a sign of sanity. His fear was what frightened me.

  In spite of what you see in those ninety seconds of film, stoned love was the last thing on Jack’s mind that night. It took four and a half hours and five tabs of Mandrax to persuade him even to lie down. He was rigid and gibbering with terror.

  What did the wraith think? That it was an echo trip, or something? An incomplete metabolite of the previous day’s acid? Oh yes, all that underground pharmacology – I remember that. We drank gallons of freshly squeezed orange juice next morning. How very effective.

  But the sound-track to this excerpt is interesting. A single acoustic guitar is playing the twelve-bar blues riff which was eventually elaborated and became the underlying theme for ‘Black Blonde’ on the Hard Candy album.

  I stop the film and turn to the technician. I say, ‘I want to change the sound-track.’

  ‘OK,’ he says, making a note. ‘Give me what you want in and I’ll see what I can do.’

  I hand him some old-fashioned reel-to-reel audio tape. He threads it on to the machine, and now the wraith is Jack’s voice because this time there are vocals. This time the single guitar picks out a sixteen-bar pattern. Half hummed, half sung, Jack’s voice rasps, ‘In the morning she holds me, she folds me, she opens the drawer by her bed. She breaks me, she makes me, the widow mistakes me for the man she keeps wrapped in her head …’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Fade up there … fade out here. Yeah, that’ll do.’

  The technician glances at me, puzzled. After all, ‘Black Blonde’ was perfect for the job. Why would I want to cut it out?

  ‘Both versions,’ I say. ‘I’d like a copy of both versions. On film. But I’d like the original version transferred to video.’

  III

  Losing the Juice

  It began to go wrong at the InnerVersions gig when Birdie led Grace to Dog Records’ table to introduce her to Mr Freel. Alec couldn’t duck out because he was with Grace. He was sweating from the dance floor and not feeling at all like bright young executive material. Mr Freel greeted him with a forbidding glare. Alec handled it rather well, he thought, by backing out and going to the bar to buy Grace a lager and lime. From then on, he avoided the record company table.

  Avoidance meant dancing rather more often than he’d intended – which pleased Grace inordinately. Her pleasure was irritating, and worrying in case Mr Freel thought he was a lightwei
ght who couldn’t keep his mind on the job. But he didn’t have a choice.

  Birdie, unnaturally it seemed to Alec, was keeping company with Mr Freel and the bunch of guys who were clearly his subordinates. They were all easily distinguishable from the club crowd and, obviously, that was the way they wanted it. They were not there to have a good time. This was work.

  Alec couldn’t think of a way to signal to Mr Freel that he was working too. The best he could do was to be unobtrusive. It was annoying. He wanted to be closer to the action. How could he shine and be unobtrusive at the same time? Not by dancing with Grace, that was for sure. Dancing with Grace defeated both objects. He tried to look cool, but her bounce and zest called for some sort of response, and he began to feel disconnected.

  What kept him going was Birdie’s amused encouraging smile which he caught every now and then when he felt he was flagging. ‘Keep at it,’ her smile said, ‘you’re doing fine.’ The problem was, he was forced to admit, that as she didn’t know what he was doing she couldn’t know whether he was doing it fine or not. All the same, he felt he had her approval.

  She could, it seemed, move with ease between her family, the band and the company men. With Mr Freel she appeared to be polite but distant. She doesn’t know he hates her, Alec thought once, standing on the edge of the crush at the bar, waiting to be served. The thought surprised him because, of course, Mr Freel didn’t hate her. He only wanted something she was unwilling to hand over. Mr Stears was the one who hated her.

  The music pounded into him like a jack-hammer, making him light-headed and glad he’d decided early on to go easy on the booze. He wished he could hear what Mr Freel was saying to the guy who’d pushed his way through the crowd to deliver a note. Mr Freel read the note, folded it and slipped it into his inside pocket. He leaned towards Birdie. Birdie nodded slowly.

  ‘Isn’t this great?’ Grace said, taking a drink from his glass. ‘Let’s dance.’