Their eyes were all on Sam, as if he was already in on the secret. Did they, like Jeeves, think there was something he could do to help them? How could he? There was nothing he could do about any of those things.
“You’ve got a good voice, Sammy. Why not do something with it?” Benson offered, coming forward to stand beside Jeeves’ chair.
By nature, Sam was not an angry young man. Quite the opposite, in fact. Other boys had been cruel to animals, cruel to one another, vacant, unfeeling. Even so, Sam had always felt they were victims of their circumstances. They’d just been dealt the wrong set of cards.
And lately it seemed everyone he knew had been dealt losing hands. The ever-elusive “they” always found a way to take more. Every year taxes went up, food cost more, housing, power, water, gas, electricity, transportation, raw goods and processed goods and whiskey and wine and hairdos and health treatments, waxing-waning-slicing-dicing-pulling-pushing, eliminating hairs, dead skin cells, dust and debris, excess fat, dangerous molecules in the air, dangerous molecules in the water.
Eliminating everything but debt.
Jeeves asking Sam to be the poster boy for his cause seemed like fate finally smiling upon him. He wanted this to work, because what else was he going to do? He didn’t think he could endure becoming an avid watcher of programmes like Strictly Come Dancing, sitting at home on his couch and gaining five stone while pretending the world around him wasn’t unravelling.
Jeeves might be maniacal and eccentric, but at least he gave a shit and seemed clever. He was a professor, after all, and all these people were on board with his movement.
If the Arcana wanted bodies, if the Arcana wanted a war, then Sam wanted it, too.
Jeeves smiled knowingly at Sam, his eyes gleaming bright in the afternoon sun pouring in from the study’s lone window. “So, whaddya say, son? Join us, play a song or ten, remake the world?”
Sam watched the boys and girls in the room as they watched him. Blue hair, hemp jewelry, smart eyes, nervous energy, They joked around, conversing with earnest smiles and casual touches like they’d known each other for lifetimes. The type who ask you questions about yourself when you meet them, who don’t tell you what it is that they’re about until you ask.
He already was one of them.
A crooked grin spread across his face. “Okay. Why the hell not? Let’s sing so loud we put the Exchange out of business,” he said, raising his glass.
Jeeves clasped his hands together, springing from his perch. “Excellent! We start immediately. I’ve got musicians here, lots of ‘em, a few good ones even. You’ll be playing onstage at Wembley Stadium before you know it.”
Sam stood up, swaying slightly, the wine now having gone to his head. “Freedom,” he mused. “What does that even look like?”
“What kind of freedom do you want, Sam?”
“The free kind,” Sam said. Flashes of light shone in his eyes. “The free kind of freedom.”
“This one won’t cost you a cent,” Jeeves promised.
Chapter Five
I’M YOUR MAN
Montreal wasn’t a natural-born singer; he became one for the soapbox and the ride. Prior to rock superstardom he’d been a poet, a carpenter, a wax-worker, a demon, an MI-5 officer, and a faithful husband. Faithful in deed, that is. Montreal had wandered in his heart many times.
But he was not alone in his transgression. His wife, a ballet dancer, had up and left him one summer for a half-mad philosophy grad student named Janus Jeeves.
Montreal became a rock star on his thirty-seventh birthday. His body had felt already too old, but his eyes sparkled like someone twenty years his junior, and he had no choice but to follow where they led—into the spotlight. Despite the inability to sing beyond a range of five notes in his gravel-laden voice, he knew how to work with what he had. In the rock n’ roll game, it was more about attitude than raw talent.
He possessed a fine-tuned vibration that lived under his skin like a live wire, an indeterminable itch that couldn’t be scratched. It had provided him with what he’d needed in the business—attitude by the shitload. Back then, he’d gotten arrested so many times the local coppers named a cell after him. Now, new recruits who’d never met the namesake were instructed to “Throw ‘im in Monty’s block.”
After Montreal’s ex-wife became Jeeves ex-fiancée, they’d become tentative mates—trading barbs, insults, and bedroom stories. Jeeves saw Montreal as the powerful commodity he was, for both his experience in the music industry and his ties to the military.
Montreal put up with Jeeves because the old dog tickled him pink and told fantastic stories.
Sam met Montreal when the former rabble-rouser was almost dead—thirty years after fame and fortune had lifted him up and plummeted him back down.
Meeting one of the few young men in the city with fire still in his belly gave Montreal life again.
Jeeves sent Sam to Montreal to teach him everything he knew, from moving beyond basic chord progressions to slithering across the stage like an acid glitter monkey love snake. What Montreal lacked in vocal range he made up for in guitar technique, and Sam was a fast pupil, adding Montreal’s variations on twelve-bar blues and the easiest way to write a riff to his basic knowledge of open and power chords.
At Montreal’s request, Sam had stopped eating and started shaking. He was just trying it out—an experience to draw upon so that he could fake it later. Anything for the cause. Four days without food. He’d lain for hours on the roof of his building, staring up at the billowing clouds while hunger pangs and delirium brought new words to him, along with a frenetic, manic energy unlike anything he’d ever experienced.
He’d written ten new songs in those four days.
The sun was setting on a cold spring evening outside of Montreal’s two-story townhome, the few leaves on the neighbourhood trees yellowing and withered, dry and spotted from inconsistent watering. Sam and Montreal sat on the steps out front, taking a breather from rehearsing with the rest of the band who had taken up semi-permanent residence in Montreal’s garage.
“So, what have you been doing with yourself for the last thirty years?” Sam asked the older man as they sat out front, sipping cold beer and watching the sky darken.
“Not drinking, not smoking, and writing words no one will see,” Montreal said, a sad-sweet look shimmering in his pale blue eyes. “Now I’m drinking and smoking again. Still writing those words though.”
“Think Jeeves would have liked to teach me himself, but he don’t know a thing about playing music other than how to massacre Beethoven on the piano by ear alone. He’s a ruddy genius in his own right, but he’s never been a rock star.”
“Nah, Janus’s been through a lot of things, but he ain’t been through the business.” Montreal set his beer down on the step between his feet, folding his hands together and facing Sam. “So then, my dear boy, let’s see what we’ve learned today.” Montreal leaned forward, hands on his knees and a crooked smile on his lips. “What, pray tell me, is Rule Number One?”
“Rule Number One,” Sam stated, noting a bit of irony in the constant memorizing and repeating of rules associated with a freedom movement. “Rule Number One is…everyone who says they’re your friend is a liar.”
“I’ll bet it was nothing but A levels in school for you, my friend.”
“True. Not that it’s done me much good.” Sam stretched his arms out behind him, leaning back. “You see the obvious problem with Rule Number One though, don’t you?” he said, grinning. “That would make you a liar. And that would, in fact, make Rule Number One itself a lie.”
“Ah, but I never said I was your friend.” Montreal smiled so his eyes squinted, character-affirming laugh lines showing on his weathered face. With the darkest hair, the lightest eyes, and a lean physique, he could pass for a much younger man from a distance.
“But I also never said I wasn’t a liar,” Montreal cautioned.
Montreal’s a closed book with half the pages tor
n out, thought Sam. He was brilliant though, and terribly funny. Sam thought he ought to front Jeeves’ movement instead of himself. The job would probably be his if only he were forty years younger. “Fair enough. What’s Rule Number Two?” Sam asked, sipping his lager.
“Always wear a coat of arms.”
“Do you have one I can borrow?”
“I have one you can have.”
Everything in Montreal’s wardrobe was black and more than half of it was leather. The wardrobe sat on four wheels, one of them cracked. It leaned against a rust-coloured wall covered in tan stains. Like the rest of Montreal’s South London townhome, his bedroom was sparsely furnished and mismatched. An emerald green vase housing a nest of twisted bamboo reeds sat atop a scratched wooden nightstand. His bed was along the far wall, and reminded Sam of some kind of civil war hospital bed—sunken-in mattress, grey-white sheets, and a short, sterile-white bed frame.
“Most of these are too small for me now,” Montreal said, sorting through his various black jackets. “Here, think this one’ll fit you just about right.” He took out a short-cropped black leather coat with a high collar, pointless zippers and buttons decorating it from bottom to top in perfect asymmetry.
“Oi!” A lanky man with a plectrum between his teeth appeared in the doorway, leaning against the frame. Twenty-year-old Muzzy was Sam’s new bass player and synth master, the son of a black British banker and a South Asian schoolteacher.
“So, while you guys have been in here shopping, we finished rewiring the setup to feed through the V90. Everything’s good to go,” Muzzy said.
Muzzy looked the part of the quintessential dreadlocked bass player minus the dreadlocks. Tattoos, laser piercings, ill-fitting clothes, plus a short crop of bleached blonde hair that looked like it’d been cut by his mum. He stood a couple inches taller than Sam, but would seem smaller on stage a meter behind him, partially hidden behind his silver Rickenbacker.
“Let’s not keep the lads waiting,” Montreal said, as Sam slid on his old jacket.
It was a perfect fit.
They returned to the garage, and Sam picked up a sheet of paper on which Muzzy had scrawled the bare bones of one of their new songs.
“Can we try it in G?” Sam asked.
“You always want to do it in G,” Muzzy complained. “What’s wrong with D?”
“Yeah, well G’s my sweet spot.”
“Oh, you want me to hit yer G spot, do ya?” said Muzzy, raising an eyebrow.
“You’re such a juvenile,” said Sam.
A frantic drum fill with too much high-hat interrupted their ribbing. Montreal looked up from where he sat on a wide amp, studying some scribbles of songs Sam had asked him to look over.
“Hey kid, what’s your name?” he asked the drummer.
“Seth.” The slight, dark-haired boy grabbed the cymbals to mute them, twirling a drumstick in his other hand and dropping it. He could be sixteen, seventeen, spots still on his face and a beard just barely managing to make itself known; Sid Vicious if Sid had been an introvert and had parents who were software engineers.
“You can’t be just ‘Seth,’” said Montreal. “What are we going to call you?”
“No more animal names,” Sam said. “Jeeves is callin’ me Fox. Saint Fox. I tried to fight it at first, but I kinda like it now.”
“How bout ‘Bongo’?” suggested Muzzy.
“Piss off,” Sam smirked, tossing a cigarette butt at him.
“Zephyr,” Montreal said. “We’ll call him Zephyr.”
“That’s bloody awful,” Muzzy said.
“This coming from a man named after a fuzzy green cartoon character,” said Sam. “Anyway, Jeeves’ll love it.”
“The more ludicrous, the better, right? Ain’t that how it goes?” asked Muzzy.
“It is,” said Montreal. “It absolutely is.” Montreal squinted at Seth, giving him a thoughtful once over. “You’re awfully scrawny to be doing much damage on that thing for hours at a time—but then again, some of the best ones were.”
“He’s a bloody machine,” said Muzzy.
“No more dicking around guys.” Sam plucked the low E string, then modulated his whammy bar till everyone got annoyed and paid attention. “Let’s play some music. We’ve got a show in less than three days.”
Chapter Six
WORKING CLASS HERO
At home behind other broken dream memorabilia, Kit kept one black-and-white Telecaster and a practice amp. Staring at them now, deep pangs for her one and only true love reverberated, a love she’d abandoned for practicality and a habit of feeling comfortably uncomfortable in her own skin. Running her hand over the smooth, wooden neck, she gripped the Telecaster and brought it against her chest, cradling it like a child.
When Kit was seven, she began learning how to play the electric guitar—a glitter-red and half-sized Strat that her father, a blues musician, had custom-made for her. She was very good by age twelve, and by fourteen she was excellent. By sixteen she had a record deal, and by sixteen-and-a-half she had managers and producers telling her to lose weight, dye her hair, take her clothes off for photo shoots. Write catchier tunes about dark nightclubs, obsessive crushes, partying, and the naughty naughty things she dreamed of doing to men.
She’d tried to compromise in her own way. Wore quirky outfits that showed a little skin but nothing she’d be embarrassed for her mum to see her in, dyed her hair Japanese pop-star violet, wrote a couple tunes with simple, crunchy, three-chord progressions.
The songs weren’t catchy enough. Her top could be cropped shorter, breast implants were obviously necessary. She should be photographed out with Darin Flynn, a hot young singer-songwriter just like her, with black eyes and the impossibility of walking through a metal detector without incident—except unlike Kit, Darin barely contributed to his own songs, and strummed two or three power chords while his band did the rest. He was cute though, and management was insistent, and so she had agreed to dinner, during which he was nice enough, and after which he was not.
At eighteen, Kit gave up being a pop star, sold most of her equipment and applied to uni. Fell into computer tech so she could still play with wires and make electric equipment do what she wanted it to do.
It’d been years since she’d sung. Her voice was clear and luminous, but no one heard it anymore save for the pets and plants she occasionally looked after for neighbours. Kit’s sweet voice belied her chronically malcontented soul, so she had to get her aggression out through her guitar. The shredded-to-bits fuzz distortion and army of pedal effects she used created an alarming dissonance with her appearance—slight, unassuming, only wildly beautiful at a certain angle to those with an eye for unusual aesthetics—her eyes too large, her legs too thin, sticks and stones pasted together with craft glue at awkward angles. Men came to her in between relationships; they thought she was unique, some sort of mystery, different from their wives and girlfriends who played head games and asked for too much. But when they couldn’t crack the code, they left, returning to their familiar, mapped-out lives. An independent woman, a used toy, she kept a smile on her lips during the day and saved her melancholy for the night.
She tuned her guitar quickly, deftly; it was terribly out of tune from years of neglect and would need new strings. Within minutes she had plugged the amp into the wall, plugged the guitar into the amp. She struck chords at random, hitting the strings wildly with her thumb as off-key squeals rang out through the tiny flat, the distortion on the amp turned up too loud to allow any pleasant noise to come out.
She played one of her old songs, found her voice had a new quality, a maturity previously lacking. Just a touch of gravel, a mockingbird with an injured wing.
The tenants in the flat next door banged against the wall. She turned the amp up and played the opening riff to an old song of hers that once upon a time sat at the top of the charts. A long dead dream coalesced in her mind, the colours still faint, the image still fuzzy, not much more than a warm feeling in her thro
at and her gut. Still, it was there, and it wouldn’t be leaving anytime soon.
She had learned from her mistakes—she would do things her way, stay out of sight, out of the stranglehold of the lizards and pigs who’d once ran her like a business. She would sing again, and she would play whatever she wanted.
The cobblestone streets twisted wide and narrow, the smell of day-old bread and grease hanging loosely in the evening air. Kit’s worn, three-year-old suede boots made no sound on the stony ground. She never wore dresses and never heels—black pressed trousers and a white gossamer-thread top would do for tonight. It was not a fancy dress occasion anyway.
Kit had done her share of travelling, to big cities and smaller ones, in all sorts of countries and climates to play for all sorts of people, and they were all different and all the same. London was the same as any other city. It was large and vacant, cool and comfortable, judgmental and welcoming—you just had to know where to go and who to avoid.
Her mate Lindsey had rung up and invited her to a party, saying there would be some other musicians there tonight she might like to meet, and that it would be good for her to get out and socialise before she forgot how.
Having no better offer, she agreed.
She arrived early, and was immediately whisked away by a girl named Delia, one of those girls who plays at being your best friend the minute they meet you, usually for no apparent reason. The girl will make your life more interesting for the time being, but she will also steal part of it. Absorbing your identity into her own, she would grow more colourful as you grew more bland. Kit had met plenty of girls like her before and kept her guard up, and yet, Delia had good taste in music and laughed in what sounded like earnest at her jokes, so she couldn’t help but like her.
“See anyone you fancy here?” Delia asked her in a conspiring tone, the dyed ends of her red-blonde hair brushing against Kit’s shoulder.
The Rise of Saint Fox and The Independence Page 4
