by Liza Cody
Ten minutes later Fay came in with two cups of peppermint tea. She settled beside him on the sofa and asked him the question he’d been asking himself. ‘Dear,’ she said, ‘why are you being so defensive about this? It’s most unlike you.’
‘I don’t know,’ he said with a sigh. ‘I think it’s because both you and Tina seem to be implying that I’m emotionally involved.’
‘What’s so bad about that? After all, Linnet has made your working life bearable – if not a pleasure – so it’s understandable that you wouldn’t want her threatened.’
‘Exactly,’ he said with relief. He sank back into the cushions, prepared to let the matter rest. But Fay was still waiting.
‘What?’ he said.
‘Maybe,’ she said gently, ‘Tina and I are wondering about the woman who gave you some rather iffy references and yet can still make you act out of character.’
‘I’m not acting out of character,’ George said, annoyed. ‘Do you know, Tina accused me of being star-struck.’
‘No!’ Fay said. ‘How very insulting!’
‘This isn’t a joke.’ He got up and stamped away to bed leaving his peppermint tea untouched.
III
Sex and Suicide
‘The lady’s a spring chicken,’ Jack sings. ‘No meat on her bones, slim pickings. Sleeping on my dirty floor, she says to me, she says, “no more” …’
I look at Marielle’s dusty carpet. I couldn’t bear to sleep in her bed so I laid a mattress on the floor.
In the beginning Jack and I slept on a dirty floor next to the kitchen with its creeping detritus and dripping taps. The others had to step over us to get to the cornflakes. We didn’t give a toss. But we wanted to be alone so we rented a flat a couple of blocks away and we bought a bed. No chairs, no tables, just a big second-hand bed. We didn’t care who’d been born, who’d died, who’d lain sleepless in it. Quite soon we bought the Camden Hill house.
Jack’s graph was on the rise. Slowly at first and then steeply, up, up, and with it we rose through the lower strata of property – a sort of rake’s or rock’s progress – until we reached the big house in the home counties with its protective wall and gate. If the graph had continued in the same trajectory the next step would’ve been to the big house in a tax haven – France, Switzerland or the Caribbean, and apartments in all the cool cities. But it didn’t. The trajectory ended in tragedy and here I am back on a dirty floor. Oh yes – the yo-yo motion of real estate in rockbiz – nine times out of ten you’ll find yourself at the end of your string.
Blackwood Park was the house that Jack burned down. The protective wall and gate prevented the fire brigade from getting straight to it. Precious minutes were lost while panicking groundsmen searched for the spare key. The housekeeper and her husband ran around in their night-wear like headless hens trying to save their own valuables. Outside the gate, with the fire brigade stalled, the little group of fans who had set up a semi-permanent campsite on the verge cried and wailed and tried to scramble over the wall. To do what? To save Jack? Or to ask him for his autograph?
I don’t know. I wasn’t there so I only saw the pictures like everyone else. And everyone else saw pictures of me a day later gazing, stunned, at the wreckage. ‘Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home’, jeered the caption. ‘Your house is on fire and your meal ticket’s gone.’ There’s nothing so cuddly and comforting as the British press.
At the inquest, the housekeeper inaccurately said Jack had been drinking. She told the coroner that she’d served supper at ten-thirty but that Jack had eaten very little. She said he’d been ‘down in the dumps’. She prepared a tray of sandwiches and snacks with a thermos of hot coffee which she left in the sitting room. She went to bed at eleven-thirty and heard nothing till the smoke alarm woke her and her husband at four in the morning.
Her husband said that after supper Jack went down to his studio in the basement. Jack was working, he said, and seemed vague, ‘not quite himself’.
The chief officer of the fire service said that the blaze had been started in the basement with some sort of accelerant like lighter fluid or kerosene. He said that the beams and joists burned away and that by the time his crew got to the scene the ground floor and an upper storey had collapsed into the basement. It took them several hours to control the fire and a further two days to recover the body.
Jack’s doctor said that three weeks previously he’d prescribed Valium for Jack because he appeared to be suffering from depression and stress following an arduous tour of the United States. As far as he knew Jack seemed to be a sensible sort of chap who could be trusted with prescription drugs. Laughter from the press gallery was quickly silenced by the coroner.
Jack’s shrink said that Jack was experiencing paranoid delusions and that he had prescribed Mandrax because of stress and fatigue. He had been seeing Jack for six months on a regular basis – when he was in the country and when he remembered to turn up for his appointments.
No one asked for my unqualified opinion about the state of Jack’s mind. All they wanted to know was why I’d left him alone, why I hadn’t burned to death too – keeping him company like a good wifey. It was, by that time, already well known that I’d been at a party on board a launch on the Thames. There were pictures of me dancing with a couple of minor aristos, James Coburn and Björn Borg. Ho-ho.
I said that we’d both been invited, we’d both planned to go, but Jack pulled out at the last moment. I went because it would have been impolite for us both to bail. I didn’t hear about the fire until the boat docked and we disembarked for breakfast.
The crowd outside the court booed and threw flour, eggs and vegetables when I came and went, telling me clearly that the wrong one died. It was a bad mistake to shack up with the man everyone else loves, and it was worse than a mistake not to throw myself on his funeral pyre.
A journalist once asked me what it was like to be hated by just about everyone, and I didn’t answer. What could I say? It’s a way of life? It’s a cherished facet of my complex identity? Or should I have asked in return: what should I do to make everyone love me? Dump Jack? Mutilate my face? Go on a chocolate binge? Have two-thirds of my brain surgically removed? Die?
Actually, the question is more interesting than it appears to be, especially in the UK where brains and beauty are commodities you’re supposed to conceal and apologise for. You can get away with beauty if you turn yourself into a joke blonde with big boobs and a generous heart. And you can get away with brains if you can dilute them with large helpings of the common touch and humility. But if for any reason you lead a public life and you don’t butcher your natural attributes you’ll face tremendous hostility. Simply by being who you are, you’ll antagonise the majority of the general public.
People need to feel sorry for you or superior to you or they won’t accept you as one of their own. If they don’t accept you and you commit further crimes, like shacking up with the sexiest man in the country and being seen to live a glamorous life, you will be treated like a thief. You are seen to be stealing something which rightfully belongs, not to you, but to them.
So Jack died horribly in a fire and left his arrogant blonde piece alone without protection – tally-ho, open season.
Unfortunately, the people who came to help Jack’s arrogant blonde piece were the people who understood and had themselves suffered from the boom and bust cycles of media attention – those who were themselves very rich, very famous or very both. Thus the blonde piece was seen to be profiting from Jack’s horrible death – double scoop of tally-ho, open season.
I wonder, if they saw me now, on a little camp bed, with my nose six inches from a dirty floor in a dark and wretched flat, would they forgive me? Nah, probably not. They’d say I was getting my come-uppance. And who knows – they might be right. Distinction deserves punishment. We all strive for equality.
Why couldn’t they wait? Age and Alzheimer’s, after all, do the same job pretty completely. We all end up in a similar place.
Where will the dangerous distinction be then?
So much for my problems, such as they were. What of Jack’s? Did he have any? He was beautiful, talented, rich and famous – obviously no problems there. On top of that, he was loved. No one hated him. He had the most efficient lightning conductor money could buy to divert hatred. He had me. I protected him from being struck by jealousy and hatred. He was safe while he walked under my umbrella.
Lucky Jack – all those gifts, all that unconditional love and approval. That’s what everyone wants. Well, maybe, but it destroyed Lucky Jack.
After all Lucky Jack started out as a rebel rocker. His hair, his clothes, his demeanour were, at that time, an outsider’s slap in the face for the establishment. His songs had some hard things to say about the narrow constraints of England, about po-faced, joyless morality, about the land of hope and glory with its impotent militarism and xenophobia. His very existence was predicated on opposition.
He didn’t see himself as speaking for a generation. He was speaking for himself, and then he was adopted by a generation.
When that happened he found himself in a position of leadership, bearing the weight of millions of hopes and fears. He couldn’t speak for himself any more. He was representing his generation. And he found he didn’t have the freedom any more to fuck up.
He was loved, and it’s a lot harder to dismiss love than hatred. I at least had the freedom to despise and fight against the people who hated me. He was not allowed to show the slightest contempt for the people who loved him. Slowly but surely he was suffocated by love and approval.
The night he blew it all away we were both supposed to be on the launch chugging around Marlowe, Cliveden and other significant landmarks on old father Thames. We were supposed to make merry with the hereditary hoorays and their henriettas, with safely selected elements of show-biz and sport. I could go. I could take what they had to offer in a spirit of detachment like a thief at their table, well aware of their contempt.
He couldn’t. They were offering him a place at their table without irony or contempt. We love you, Jack, you’re one of us.
He wasn’t one of them. But they loved him so they were adopting him too. Lucky Jack.
I went to the party and he went out of his mind.
He thought they were stealing his soul. Along with the trinkets, the clothes, records, ideas, photographs, time, which everyone was already pinching with impunity, now they were stealing his beliefs and appropriating his rebellion.
Even now they’re still at it: the tele-cine lab I was secretly working at was broken into, and a reel of film – images of Jack, sounds of Jack – was stolen. Someone believes that what belongs to Jack, Jack himself, is their own property. He’s loved and desired, even now. So many years later he must still give himself freely. Lucky Jack.
The last thing he said to me before I left for the party was, ‘You smell of sex and suicide.’
And I said nothing because I was pissed off with him.
Sex and suicide are not concepts you talk about in a coroner’s court unless you want them aired and analysed in public for weeks afterwards. I kept Jack’s last words to myself.
The coroner asked, but I told him that Jack simply said, ‘Goodbye, have a ball.’
I tried to imagine what would’ve happened had I told him the truth: ‘He said, “You smell of sex and suicide,” but that was normal. Jack was always coming out with stuff like that. That’s the way drug-crazed rock stars talk.’
And yet I could’ve said that. Sex and suicide are two good swords. They sound well together. Who knows, maybe Jack was trying out a line – they have an end-of-chorus ring to them. I wouldn’t have been surprised to come home to find Jack asleep with a partially completed song called ‘Sex and Suicide’ crumpled next to his elbow. Waiting for me to finish it for him. Certainly I’d have been less surprised to find a song than to find the smoking wreckage of his mansion on the hill.
Speaking of mansions on the hill, I’ve given that soul-snatching spiderman enough time. I’ll ring him from a public call box in the West End tonight after work.
‘Nash,’ I say. ‘I might have something for you.’
‘Have you, Birdie?’ he says. ‘Why am I not surprised? What’ve you found?’
‘What have you arranged?’
‘Ah, Birdie, Birdie, why won’t you trust me? Haven’t I already sent you ample proof of my good will?’
‘Not ample, no,’ I say. ‘Sufficient but not ample.’
‘Sufficient is ample,’ Nash says fussily.
‘Trust is expensive.’
‘No, Birdie – trust is free. You are expensive.’
I laugh and wait.
Nash says, ‘I want to see what you’ve got.’
‘A sample,’ I say. ‘I could arrange to show you a sample – pay per view. Maybe.’
‘I’ve been giving your problems a lot of thought,’ he says. ‘I’d like to be able to clear up one small matter for you.’
‘How kind,’ I say. ‘Which small matter is that?’
‘Tax,’ he says. ‘A representative of mine has been talking to the Inland Revenue. He says that they’d be willing to do a deal. You could start again from scratch for seventy-five per cent of the total bill if it were paid in a lump sum.’
‘That’s sweet of you, Nash. But I couldn’t pay it if it were seven per cent.’
‘Well, of course not. That’s why you’re in such a mess. It’s so sad, Birdie. I wish you’d come to me before. I can sort this out for you with a single phonecall. Think about it – you could come back to the UK to live, you wouldn’t have to wander like a gypsy and work for gangsters.’
‘Are you calling Sasson a gangster?’
‘I’m talking about a Malaysian gentleman who owns a chain of night clubs. I understand you were reduced to booking acts for him.’
‘He wasn’t a gangster as far as I was concerned,’ I say. ‘He paid me well and he kept all his promises. How do you know about him anyway?’
‘I’m interested in you, Birdie. I wish you’d believe that. I want to help you. And to prove it, the minute you show me whatever it is you’ve found, I’ll make that call to the Inland Revenue. There should be no more secrets between us.’
‘You’re going too fast for me, Nash,’ I say. ‘It’s unnerving.’ It’s true, I am unnerved. He’s been talking about my affairs to some bastard in the tax office. He’s been checking up on my contacts. I can feel him crawling all over my life.
‘Let me think about it,’ I say. ‘It’s true that the tax bill has been an impossible burden, but it doesn’t solve the problem of future earnings and …’
‘Come here,’ Nash says impatiently. ‘Bring your sample or whatever you call it. Show it to me and I’ll make the call.’
‘No,’ I say. ‘Wait. I’ll make the arrangements.’ I will not go back to his house unprotected and I’ll be damned if I’ll show him so much as a nail clipping on the mere promise of a phonecall. I hang up.
IV
Show Time
‘Who’s paying for this hotel room?’ Tina asked.
‘Linnet,’ George said. ‘She gave me cash.’
‘This is weird. She should be here.’ Tina twitched the curtains and looked down over London rooftops and half-hidden streets. ‘Cash payments,’ she said, ‘fingers on phone buttons. It’s like buying back kidnapped children, or extortion or something.’
‘Well,’ George said, ‘I advised her not to be here, and you wanted someone in the office.’ He turned the TV round so that it faced one of the easy chairs while Tina tested the video.
‘A poncey hotel room!’ she said. ‘We could’ve done this in the office.’
‘Not if Linnet wants to keep her place of work confidential.’
‘It won’t be confidential for long,’ Tina said. ‘This bloke’s going to check us out quick as a fox.’
‘But not before this meeting.’
‘And we’ll be a bleeding sight easier to check out than he is,
’ Tina continued, looking at her watch. ‘He’s big-time.’
‘Exactly,’ George said. ‘This makes sense. Don’t tell him the venue till the last minute and don’t tell him the room number till he arrives.’
‘It makes sense,’ Tina agreed, ‘but only if you’re totally paranoid about him bugging the room and re-routing phone calls. Bloody hell, George. I feel silly. It’s only a bloody video.’
George sighed. He’d made up his mind not to defend Linnet or any of the decisions they’d made jointly but already he was acting like her advocate. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘we all agreed. So let’s just stick to the plan and get it over with.’
‘Amen,’ said Tina, and the phone rang. She picked up the receiver, listened and said, ‘Thanks. Would you send them up.’
‘Them?’
‘Visitors,’ Tina said. ‘Didn’t say how many. Come on, George, don’t look so anxious. It’s show time.’
A few minutes later there was a tap on the door. Tina opened it and admitted a short, stocky man in a pale raincoat.
He said, ‘Good afternoon. I’m Mr Zalisky’s assistant. Would you mind if I look round? It’s only a formality – just a routine we go through whenever he goes anywhere.’
‘Be our guest,’ Tina said, standing aside and glancing at George.
George watched. The stocky man was practised and thorough. Bugs, bombs or bandits would’ve stood no chance.
‘Amazing,’ Tina muttered. ‘Looks like we’ve got paranoia on both sides.’
It was real, George thought. Up till now, a secret part of his brain had thought he might be indulging Linnet.
He was pleased to see Tina follow their unexpected guest to the bathroom. They both watched while he closed the window and the curtains, cutting all the daylight out of the room.
‘OK,’ the stocky man said. ‘Thank you.’ He punched a button on his walkie-talkie and said, ‘Everything’s fine.’ Then he stood in the middle of the room. ‘Terrible summer we’re having,’ he remarked pleasantly. ‘I like to play a round of golf myself but I’ve hardly had the chance. Oh, by the way, by all means send down for coffee for yourselves – Mr Zalisky always brings his own.’
