Dead Girl Walking

by Christopher Brookmyre

  ‘All right,’ Scott said, ‘no, I don’t need it, but it was there, and—’

  ‘This is how it starts, Scott. Maybe you tell yourself you just want something to celebrate with after the show, or to keep the buzz going when you come off stage. Soon it becomes the thing you’re looking forward to and the show’s the thing between it and you. I’ve seen this before. We all have.’

  And with that, she walked away, stomping off outside leaving us all to stare at each other awkwardly for a few moments before Damien geed everybody up to get themselves back to work.

  So, basically, just another day on tour with Savage Earth Heart.

  You’d be amazed what you can learn about people when you’re around them every waking hour for the best part of a fortnight.

  Such as, bugger all.

  Don’t get me wrong, I found out a lot about their habits, moods, what they ate, sleeping patterns, grooming regimes and even OS preferences, but very little of any real substance. This was, of course, because they were mostly men. I try not to generalise, so I’ll acknowledge that statistically speaking, this was a very limited sample, but my data suggested that men can talk all day about music, movies, books, TV, sport, science, politics, religion and even clothes, but almost never about themselves: their families, their upbringing, their relationships, their ambitions.

  Heike put it more bluntly when she said that men talk about their feelings like they talk about their periods.

  As for who these people really were, I found out more in ten minutes on my laptop than from several days sharing a coach, a dressing room and several hotels. It felt a bit creepy, to be honest, looking up websites to investigate the people I was travelling with, as suggested by the fact that I only did it in my own room. Was that daft? I wouldn’t have felt at all conflicted about doing it if I had just been a fan of Savage Earth Heart, but now I knew these people, it seemed a bit stalkery. However, the whole issue was that I didn’t know these people.

  It was a jolt to see my name listed on the band’s Wikipedia page. Worse, the words hyperlinked to some Royal Scottish National Orchestra and National Youth Orchestra pages, where there lurked some truly embarrassing photos from my earlier years, just waiting to be discovered by the curious. Seriously, I’d have felt less squirmy knowing nude selfies had been hacked and posted (not, I should stress, that I have ever taken any nude selfies).

  Scott had been in the band from the start, and it turned out he was Heike’s cousin. She had taught him to play guitar when he came to stay with her on Islay one summer, according to one of the few articles that made much mention of anyone other than Ms Gunn. I was envious of the instant advantage this gave him: even of the fact that her big-cousin status meant she was constantly on his case.

  I found out that Damien was thirty-nine, which was at least twelve years older than I thought. I could still see why I had assumed that, though. He was naturally young, always positive and energetic, by far the least cynical person with regard to his outlook on music, which was even more surprising when I read that he had been around the block a few times. I knew Heike looked up to him due to his greater experience, and I wished I could be calm and impressive around her like he was.

  I learned that Rory was divorced, which was some going for a guy not long turned twenty-five. I was unsure how this made me feel, especially after all the remarks I had heard about being already engaged at twenty-two (even if we hadn’t set a date yet). ‘That’s awful young, is it not?’ people would ask, implying I was making a mistake, or at least hadn’t given myself time to consider all my options.

  Rory had worked as a secondary-school physics teacher until the sudden success of the second album meant he could concentrate full-time on the band. A bit embarrassingly, I also sussed that he had nothing specifically against fiddle players. It was at our Cardiff soundcheck, when the engineer asked me what I wanted in my monitor mix, that it dawned on me that this was what Rory had been talking about when he said he ‘didn’t want to hear any fucking fiddle’. It would have been nice to be able to say that I told him about this and we shared a laugh over my hilarious misunderstanding, but despite learning that he didn’t hate my guts, I felt even more awkward around him after whatever weird mojo had passed between us up on that drum riser.

  I still wasn’t particularly comfortable around any of my bandmates, to be honest. Heike was the one it was easiest to learn about, but it also felt the weirdest to be reading up on her online, when surely I could simply walk up and ask her about herself. But that was the problem, wasn’t it? I didn’t feel like I could simply walk up and ask her. It didn’t seem appropriate.

  I noticed that a lot of articles described Heike as a siren, usually preceded by ‘sultry’. It was one of those tabloid terms they applied to just about every female vocalist, interchangeable with ‘songstress’ or ‘diva’. Like with the law of the stopped clock, in Heike’s case the word ‘siren’ was more accurate than any of the newspapers truly realised.

  People were drawn to her, almost hypnotically. I’ve heard folk talk nonsense about star quality, claiming instantly forgettable wannabes have it and thereby diluting whatever meaning it might have. Maybe someday scientists will be able to pinpoint what it is about certain people that makes them shine a little brighter and dazzle the rest of us, but for now, I can only say that Heike had something about her that made you want to be in her presence, touched by her grace.

  She was aware of it too, but not in the way you might think. Maybe it was fairer to say she was wary of it: as though this siren feared that if you came too close, she might be the one drawn to her doom. Or maybe she was just scared of all the attention she got.

  That’s why asking direct questions about her life was right out, though it did mean that on the rare occasions when she shared something it felt all the more precious. That I alone had seen her tears on stage at Bristol that night felt like a secret treasure.

  I wondered whether she liked being in this male-dominated company because she could hide there, where nobody was likely to ask her anything truly personal. We all wanted to get nearer to her, wanted in different ways to please her, but the trick was for her not to notice you were doing it, for you not to be caught trying to please her. It was like that childhood game where you all sneak up on someone with her back turned, trying to see how close you could get before she spun round and chased you all away.

  Any time I felt we had made a connection, either she’d start avoiding me soon after or she’d find a way to make things awkward between us, like criticising my playing or changing the set to drop a number with a violin solo.

  Not all sailors were vulnerable to the siren song, it must be said: such as Dean. His less charitable take on her was that she was ‘another fucking spoiled diva who’s got used to people sucking up to her all the time and as a result she thinks she can treat everyone like shit’.

  I heard him mutter something about officers and enlisted men with regard to her attitude to the road crew, but from what I could see, nobody was given special consideration when Heike was on the warpath. In fact, if anybody got it worse than the rest, it was probably Damien, despite always being the soothing voice whenever tempers threatened to flare. Maybe it was actually because he was such a calming influence that she knew it was safe to take out her frustrations on him. Sometimes it was like she was goading him to finally lose it with her, and the less he bit, the angrier she became, which may well have been Damien’s way of winning the battle of wills.

  He was definitely spot-on with what he’d told me backstage after the opening night. No matter what had gone down before, all of it was forgotten when we took the stage.

  Forgiven, I’m not so sure.

  Not Spam

  As Parlabane saw it, NDA or no, the only way to proceed with this investigation was to act as though it was any other story. He didn’t know what kind of nonsense Mairi’s head was full of regarding phone hacking and other shady practices, but twenty-odd years of experience had taught him
that real journalism was all about good sources, even (and perhaps especially) when they might seem, to other eyes, unlikely ones.

  He wasn’t being polite when he told Mairi he liked Savage Earth Heart, and it was more than a matter of merely being one of the mainstream millions who had been bludgeoned into submission by the ubiquity of ‘Do It to Julia’ last year. He had followed their progress with the faintly proprietorial interest of one who had been aware of the band since the earliest days, but this wasn’t down to his visionary judgement or ear for future talent. Rather, it was that the band had been brought to his attention by a friend who had been the recording engineer on their first three-track release.

  Cameron Scott ran a recording studio just off Love Street in Paisley, a place that had initially made its money from cutting demos for aspiring new bands. It built a reputation for making even the most rough-and-ready outfits sound polished, and thus Scottsound Studios had become a well-trodden step on the ladder for a lot of Scottish artists.

  One of them had been Savage Earth Heart, whose debut EP, Salt Sting, was passed on to Parlabane with uncharacteristic insistence by the man who recorded it, backed up by the assurance that ‘this lassie’s a bit special’. It was the sort of evangelical recommendation that one might recall as involving a CD being thrust eagerly into one’s hands, except that the man passing it on could never be described as doing anything that sounded quite so energetic.

  Parlabane was looking for him right now in a busy café near Gilmour Street Station, though not looking that hard, as his guest was almost always late. Then he realised that the guy grinning at him from two tables away was the man he was searching for, if not quite the man he was expecting to find.

  His hair was neatly trimmed and he was wearing a shirt. Clearly, something had gone very wrong with the world. It was like Prince Charles turning up as a goth. No wonder he didn’t recognise him: Parlabane realised he had never seen quite so much of his face before.

  ‘Spammy. What the fuck?’

  He was giggling with disproportionate amusement at Parlabane’s surprise, almost like he had only done it to see the response it would get.

  ‘You like it? I’m thinking of robbing some places and maybe murdering a few folk. Seriously, it’s like I’m fuckin’ invisible.’

  Parlabane hadn’t seen him in more than a year, and given all that had happened in the intervening time, he felt an unexpected urge to hug the guy. He resisted, however, realising that it was simply an instinct to cling on to someone who represented the warmer certainties of the past.

  Plus, you just didn’t hug Spammy. Apart from the fact that he wasn’t a hugging kind of bloke, there was the physical consideration too. He was an assembly of the hardest, sharpest and boniest limbs Parlabane had ever had the misfortune to collide with. Even the slightest accidental contact with him could leave you feeling as though you had fallen against a metal structure wrapped in a sheet. Seriously, the guy was like Wolverine, if Wolverine had smoked weed fourteen hours straight every day for ten years.

  ‘What happened?’ Parlabane asked.

  Spammy grinned again, sheepish.

  ‘Met a lassie. Three months now. Seriously punching above my weight. Keep thinking the spell’s gaunny wear off and she’ll walk in one day and see this dozy plamf standing there, but until then I’m lapping up every moment.’

  ‘Wow,’ he responded, taking a much-needed seat.

  A girl. That certainly explained everything, though he couldn’t help but worry: was Spammy someone’s work in progress? What the hell, even if he was, the boy seemed deliriously happy. Parlabane tried not to hate him for it.

  ‘Plus it was beginning to come through grey in places. Checked the mirror one morning and realised I was starting to look like a badger.’

  A waitress came by and they placed their orders, their divergent choices reassuring Parlabane that his friend had not been completely transformed. Meals such as this had always given a different meaning to the compound ‘brunch’, in as much as it was lunchtime for Parlabane and breakfast for Spammy.

  ‘So, to what do I owe the honour?’ Spammy asked.

  ‘It’s to do with Savage Earth Heart. Launched on the path to global domination from Scottsound Studios.’

  Spammy responded with a near-conspiratorial grin.

  ‘Aye, tell’t you Heike Gunn was bound for glory. She just had a quality about her, what they used to call the x-factor, before that dye-job wank-hammock Cowell debased the term for ever.’

  ‘As I recall, you engineered their first single.’

  ‘Engineered it? I fuckin’ produced it. I know that’s not what it says on the sleeve, but it’s what happened.’

  ‘Who’s credited in the notes?’

  ‘It says “Produced by Alistair Maxwell”, the only document on Earth where you’re gaunny see that phrase, because he’s “produced” fuck-all else. He didnae know what he was doing, but Heike looked up to him at the time.’

  ‘Not a fan?’

  ‘He was a cunt. A talented cunt, grant you, but a cunt. Actually, maybe more of a fud than a cunt, if you know what I’m saying.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Parlabane, who really didn’t. This was just how Spammy spoke: not everything made sense, but it was wiser to let him maintain his flow than to ask for an explanation, as that only sucked you deeper into the vortex of Spammy-logic.

  ‘He’d played with a lot of people; I mean, gie him his due, he was well quoted, but in his own mind he was some kind of national fucking treasure. I think he had Heike convinced she was his “discovery”. He was never getting away with that for long, though: the lassie had too good a conceit of herself.’

  ‘Egotistical? Manipulative?’

  ‘You say that like it’s a bad thing. She was all right with me, but you need to be a bit of a selfish, pig-heided nightmare if you want to make music that sounds like you imagine it, and not some supermarket-ambience Mumford and Sons shite.’

  ‘And did her bandmates understand that?’

  ‘Fuck knows, mate. I couldnae care less as long as they did what they were tell’t and naebody cried all over my mixing desk.’

  ‘What did you make of them?’ Parlabane asked, intending to compare impressions.

  Spammy shrugged.

  ‘They were all right. Wee Scott, the bass player: he’s Heike’s cousin. Think he used to have bother from the local young team growing up; noo they all turn up cadging places on the guest list. Fair play to him. He was quite shy. Liked a toke, him and Angus, the guitar roadie. Angus dealt a wee bit. Always had a line on a supply. Good gear,’ Spammy remembered with a wistful smile, wiping up some egg yolk with a slice of fried bread.

  Parlabane recalled his astonishment when Spammy gave up weed, a pragmatic development of the smoking ban. It had proven to be a temporary aberration, but he wondered about how things stood now, given the new girlfriend, the shorn locks and the shirt that didn’t even look slept in.

  ‘Damien never touched it,’ Spammy reflected. ‘Wouldnae do anything if he thought it might affect how he played. Honestly, if the guy thought having too many hand-shandies detracted from his picking, he’d just have bought looser jeans for his swelling balls. All about the music, that boy.’

  ‘And what about the drummer?’

  Spammy responded with a baffled expression, like he didn’t understand the question.

  ‘He was a fuckin’ drummer,’ he said with a hint of exasperation. ‘What else do you need to know?’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  ‘I got on fine with all of them, to be honest,’ Spammy went on, lathering Tabasco sauce on to the mass of haggis and black pudding he had been patiently combining with the edge of his fork. ‘Apart from Maxi, that is. Things got a bit strained with him because he could kid on to everybody else that he knew what he was doing, but he was acutely aware that I knew he was busking it. Ungrateful bastard, given how much I saved him from himself. You should have heard some of the things he was considering to give the impression
he was full of bright ideas.’

  ‘Like what?’ Parlabane asked, intrigued.

  ‘He brought in a saw player at one point. A fuckin’ saw player. Daft fud had been listening to Mercury Rev or something. Maxi came out with some pish about wanting sounds that were elemental. I’m thinking, Away outside and record the fuckin’ wind, then. But no, he’s for a saw player. This fudnugget fronts up: a professional saw player. It says it on his card. Who the fuck is a professional saw player?’

  Spammy shook his head and scooped a forkful of the haggis/pudding/Tabasco abomination into his mouth. He looked like his professional sensibilities still remained affronted these five years later.

  ‘So I take it the saw-playing never made the final mix?’

  ‘Final mix? I never even pressed Record on the cunt. I’d have given him a fair shout if he hadnae taken himself so seriously. How can you take yourself so seriously when you wobble a fuckin’ saw and call yourself a musician? Anyway, it didnae end well. Bit of an atmo, you know?’

  Spammy’s grin told Parlabane that, however it had ended, it had been by his design and to his liking.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Saw Boy finished doing his piece and he asked if we wanted him to do anything else. I says, aye, could you take a centimetre aff the bottom of that door there that keeps sticking on the new carpet? Cunt went mental.’

  Parlabane did well not to spit his coffee all over his hamburger. He might have shorn his locks, but he wasn’t Samson unmanned. Spammy was still Spammy. Parlabane could have sat listening to him all day, a reassuring reminder of better times. He had a job to do, though, and there was something else he needed the gen on.

  ‘What can you tell me about Bad Candy?’

  Spammy fixed him with an evaluating gaze. He had known Parlabane long enough to be aware he usually had an agenda, and he had clearly arrived at it.

  ‘The tour promoters? Their star’s on the rise, I know that much. They’ve come a long way and they’re not really Bad Candy any more. Well, they are in some ways,’ he added.