'Yep.'
'And if you all die, what happens to the record?'
'Hey man, it's the Beatles. It's not just going to vanish overnight. But soon, and in this day and age, I mean...' and he snapped his fingers, 'like that, you're going to get folks on Twitter and in blogs talking about how the album's been over-rated, and then it appears in books, and over time it comes to be dismissed. It becomes an afterthought in the Beatles catalogue. And then the Beatles become an afterthought.'
'That's kind of weird, and a bit sad, but it's not, you know, the worst thing that could happen to mankind.'
He took another quick look up, made a small movement of his shoulders.
'Never said it was,' he said.
'It's just, it's just not good for you four.'
'That's about the size of it.'
'Crap,' I muttered, although I wasn't entirely sure what I was referring to. The entire situation was crap after all.
'But it's reasonable that you want to see your wife and kid again,' said the Jigsaw Man, this time looking me in the eye.
I nodded.
He stared at me for a while. Very obviously sizing me up. I realised he had a suggestion to make and was considering whether or not I was the right person to make it to.
'Who are the other customers?' I asked.
'Just folk who can see the red door. Not that many can.'
'But the Stand Alone?' I said. 'That was just a regular café, right?'
It had never been busy either. Once again I thought of the other few customers, and how most of them appeared to be regulars.
'Of course it wasn't,' said the Jigsaw Man.
'But how...?'
'Jones,' he said. 'That's why it faded for you guys after she left. You'd been there enough that you could still find it, but gradually, without her, it just vanished.'
'Well, who's Jones then? Who is Jones? She represents something of human significance?'
'I never knew,' he said, sounding completely disinterested. 'Tom Jones?'
I gave him the required look. I didn't want to think about my Jones being some sort of representation of an ageing Welshman with sculpted facial hair.
'What d'you want me to say?' he said. 'Think about it, work it out. You know her a lot better than I do.'
Jones. It was just a name. I'd never thought about it before. Why would I?
Tom Jones. Indiana Jones. Terry Jones. James Earl Jones. Catherine Zeta-Jones. Tommy Lee Jones. Chuck Jones. Brian Jones. Davy Jones. Desmond and Molly Jones. Me and Mrs Jones. Dylan's Mr Jones. The Counting Crow's Mr Jones. Everybody else's Mr Jones. Agent Jones, Agent Crosskill's partner. All part of this bizarre Beatles narrative.
'Maybe that's it,' he said, his voice a little softer, as if he'd been running through the list in his head along with me. 'Maybe that's why she seems so capricious, that you can never pin her down, that you never know who she really is. Maybe she's all of them. All the Mr or Mrs Joneses that have ever existed or been created. She's a manifestation of this name that crops up all over the place. Who's that Mr or Mrs Jones that people sing about?'
We stared at each other for a while. I was probably supposed to be thinking about what he'd just said, but I was barely thinking anything at that point. It was a lot easier to imagine Jones as flighty and unreliable, rather than as the incarnation of an entire surname.
'Hey,' said the Jigsaw Man, 'maybe she's Jones the cat out the first Alien movie.' He shrugged. 'Anyway, never knew, never cared.'
I sat back, closed my eyes, dragged my hand across my face. Rubbed my eyes. My head wasn't hurting. No, my head was hurting. Yes, my head was beginning to hurt. This seemed so convoluted, never ending, yet when I thought about it, it seemed simple. Straightforward.
Why was I getting a headache then?
I opened my eyes. There was a thin file lying on the table in front of me, obscuring the top section of the jigsaw. I looked at it for a while and then glanced up at him.
'It ain't biting you,' he said.
I pulled it towards me. It was a faded cream-coloured file, embossed with the crest of the CIA and with the words TOP SECRET stamped top and bottom. I tapped my finger on it a few times, and then slowly opened it. The document inside was perhaps twenty pages thick. The top sheet bore the heading: REPORT INTO RUMOURS ABOUT THE DEATH OF BEATLES SONGWRITER PAUL MCCARTNEY. Again this page was stamped TOP SECRET, and there were a few other office stamps and a couple of signatures. The document was dated June 27th 1970.
He was watching me now. I didn't look up but I could feel his eyes on me. I turned to the second page, which had two short paragraphs, one headed Justification and the other Summary:
Justification:
This report has been commissioned to examine the rumor that Mr James Paul McCartney, one quarter of the popular beat band, The Beatles, was killed in a car accident in either 1966 or 1967, and replaced by a doppelgänger. The report will consider the likelihood of truth in the rumor, and the reasons for it. In either event of the story being judged to have been unfounded, or to have been based on fact, consideration will be given to the involvement of the Soviet Union and what attempts might have been made to subvert western society.
Summary:
While strong and arguably conclusive proof has been uncovered to determine that Mr James Paul McCartney died in a car accident in November 1966 to be subsequently replaced in the band and in private life, so far no link has been found to known Soviet operatives working in Great Britain and/or continental Europe at this time. Investigations continue.
I looked up at him again. He returned the slightest of raised eyebrows. I took another sip of coffee.
'This is great coffee,' I said.
'Thank you. You know, you probably don't need to read too much of it. The bulk of it's the usual rumour and innuendo. You'll know all that stuff. Hey, you wrote about it last year.'
'But... it's a joke, right? Everyone knows it's a joke. It's like, people don't actually believe Neil Armstrong never went to the moon. It's kind of fun to talk about, but really...?'
'The CIA believed it.'
'How did you even get this?'
He tossed a casual hand in the air. That wasn't a question he was about to answer, and I didn't want to know in any case.
'What do you want me to do with it, then?' I said.
He stared across the great divide of the Adoration of the Magi.
'Work it out, son,' he said. 'These people, this agency whoever they are, are searching for the manifestation of Sgt. Pepper, four people to represent the four Beatles. But what if there weren't four Beatles on that album? What if, starting with Sgt. Pepper, there were only three actual Beatles, plus this other guy pretending to be Paul, singing John's songs, and who ended up on his own writing Mary Had A Little Lamb and Rupert And The Frog Chorus.'
'But.... there are four of you...'
He nodded slowly.
'Yes,' he said, 'there are.'
I looked down at my coffee, and wondered what its secret was.
I left shortly afterwards, through the front door of the café. I glanced at the other customers as I went, wondering who they might be. Was there an Unbearable Lightness of Being, a Nessun Dorma, a Monty Python & The Holy Grail, a Boeing 747?
I stopped at the entrance of the café, knowing that I would never be back in one of the Jigsaw Man's establishments. I turned to look at him, but the waitress was back at his table, blocking my view. They were chatting and I couldn't see his face.
I looked down beneath his table. Past the head of a middle-aged woman with bouffant hair and through the crook in the arm of another customer, I could see the Jigsaw Man's bare feet on the floor, his left foot tapping along to whatever tune was playing in his head.
40
I knew I wouldn't see the Jigsaw Man again. Jones I wasn't so sure about, but this peculiar one-quarter of the essence of a Beatles album I'd been listening to for over thirty-five years was gone from my life.
I walked a couple of blocks,
found myself outside Lord's cricket ground. The gates were open, and there was a sign up indicating a match taking place. Middlesex – Nottinghamshire, third day of four. I stood for a moment and then decided to go in.
I needed to sit in silence and consider what should happen next. A game of cricket, the third day of four, seemed perfect.
I paid my £16, walked into the ground and sat in the Edrich Stand, side on to the wicket, no other spectator within ten seats of me. Only twelve wickets had fallen so far in the game, and just after lunch on the third day of four it already had draw written all over it. Every now and again polite applause would break out, but other than that there was barely a murmur of conversation.
I had a pint of cider and a pie, which I was slowly working my way through. I‘d bought a packet of sea salt and malt vinegar crisps for dessert. It wasn't healthy, but I could make up for it later.
The CIA report was in my small backpack, which was on the ground between my feet. The Jigsaw Man had insisted that I take it and do with it as I saw fit.
I was trying to sort it all out, but it all seemed so far-fetched. There was a strange collective of people out and about in the world who had been created, seemingly spontaneously, through the artistic and hard-working efforts of others. These people seemed to exist in our world, even if things were not entirely as they seemed. And there was the peculiarity of the red door. Were there hundreds, thousands of red doors around the world?
I appeared to have become involved in this other world, partly because of my connection to Jones, and partly because of the fact that I'd managed to think myself off a plane; a bizarre and frankly unbelievable act, which belonged in a bizarre and unbelievable world.
The agency that had imprisoned me and kept me from my family, had only released me on the basis that I handed over the Jigsaw Man. No Jigsaw Man, no wife and child. However, I didn't want to hand him over. Do that and I'd be consigning four people to their deaths. And how did I know I could trust the agency in any case? If they locked the Sgt. Pepper guys up because they didn't understand them, why would they let me walk free when they had no good explanation for my aircraft evacuation?
'This is like baseball on a Valium overdose,' said a voice, as someone sat in the seat to the right of me. At the same time, the seat on my left was occupied. Agent Crosskill had spoken, Agent No Name had joined him in flanking me. 'And baseball's shit to begin with,' he concluded.
'You disappeared again,' she said. 'You're going to have to stop doing that, or we're just going to have to lock you up. Feed the key to the crocodiles.'
I took a drink of cider. Didn't want to rush it, but didn't want to take too long over it so that it became lukewarm. The pie was finished, I thought I'd wait for Harold Lloyd and his friend to vanish before I opened the crisps.
'I've got something for you,' I said. I laid down the glass, reached into the bag and gave Crosskill the CIA folder. They both glanced over their shoulders and looked around for cameras when they noticed the markings on the outside.
Crosskill flicked quickly through the report, but this was a trained guy. He was reading every word. He grunted a few times, then eventually he leaned across me and handed it to his pal. She made the same quick read through but without the grunting. I sat in between them and drank. Had already decided that one cider was enough. I'd probably leave it a while then have a coffee.
'Where d'you get this?' she asked.
As she spoke, she folded the file in half and slipped it inside her jacket. I wondered what kinds of pockets she had, but when I glanced at her there really was no sign of the file.
'A friend gave it to me,' I said.
'What friend?'
I had already prepared the answer, as I'd been waiting for their arrival since the moment I'd left the Jigsaw Man's café.
'A Polish film star. His name’s Piotr.'
'When did he give it to you?'
'In Seattle.'
'Why didn't you show it to us in Seattle?'
'I needed to think about it. Sure I know some stuff about the Beatles, but I'd never been to Abbey Road before so I thought I'd come and compare the descriptions in there with what I saw around me.'
'The person who wrote the report could have done that. Doesn't mean it wasn't a joke.'
'I know. I just wanted time to think.'
'And what have you thought so far?' asked Crosskill, as usual arriving late to the interrogation.
'I thought that if Paul McCartney wasn't part of the Beatles when they recorded Sgt. Pepper, then perhaps you're not looking for four Jigsaw Men after all. Perhaps you're only looking for three. Perhaps the guy I used to see back in Glasgow is one of the three you've got in custody already. Which was what I thought at the time.'
'Well, wouldn't that be convenient for you?' said Crosskill.
'I don't even know what I want, so I have no conception of convenience or not. I've been living the dream the last few days. Travelling the world first class, expensive suites in expensive hotels. Living the dream. I just don't know that I want to do this for the rest of my life if I'm searching for someone who doesn't exist. I might start to feel guilty about all the money I'm spending.'
'It's nice that you think we're not going to get it back off you,' said Crosskill glibly. I ignored him. It wasn't as though I didn't understand that they held total dominion over me.
'Where did you go once you left the Abbey Road studio?' asked the woman.
She wasn't looking at me, her eyes on the cricket. Since sitting down I'd seen numerous examples of the immaculate forward defensive. 315-4 had become 326-4. Time was passing.
'Went into a café,' I said. 'Had a flat white. Great coffee. Maximum taste, perfect blend of bitter and sweet. Went to the bathroom. Came out on the street the other side of Abbey Road, don't know its name, started walking. Didn't really intend coming here, but I was passing and...'
'Which café? We didn't see you go into a café.'
'Didn't catch the name.'
'You're a very unreliable witness.'
'That's as may be. However, what you have in your pocket there is proof, from your own CIA, that Paul McCartney died just before they started recording Sgt. Pepper, in the year before its release. There were only three Beatles on that album, so there are only three Jigsaw Men, and you have them all. You can do with them what you will.'
Agent Crosskill grunted. His friend surprised me by applauding as the batsmen laced a lovely cover drive through the infield for four.
'Love cricket,' she said. 'Absolute metaphor for life.'
41
We drove down the M4. At least, I was pretty sure it was the M4. The windows in the car, while not being blacked out, were at least very, very dark, so I could barely see anything. But I got the vague impression we were on the M4. Heading to the south-west. Heading back to Bristol.
It was a large comfortable car. I was sitting next to Crosskill, his buddy across from us, her back to the driver. She was reading through a file. Crosskill was sitting completely still, eyes open, staring straight ahead.
'What's the date?' I asked at some point.
Neither of them answered, as if they couldn't be bothered speaking and were hoping the other one would get it.
'What's the date?' I asked again, having given them about half a minute.
'May tenth,' said Crosskill.
I shook my head, held the expletive that came to mind. I hadn't even noticed the date the last few days, it had been so unimportant, not even when I'd had a boarding card in my hand. The tenth of May. I had originally been picked up to go to the airport on the seventeenth of December. Brin and Baggins hadn't seen me for close on five months; with my extra six months in the Highlands, I hadn't seen them in nearly eleven.
Suddenly I was going home, and all those things I hadn't thought about since they'd lured me into the car outside the coffee shop suddenly came flooding back. But it was different now. Back in December, I was going home not having seen my family for a while, but with them h
aving said goodbye that morning. Now, however, I wondered if they might have become used to life without me.
'You're taking me home?' I asked.
The female agent looked up from her file and nodded. Her face almost had a look of curiosity about it, as though she was surprised I felt the need to ask.
'Don't they think I'm dead?' I said.
She shook her head. Crosskill grunted.
'You're still there,' she said.
'What d'you mean?'
She finally closed her file and looked at me. A long, unyielding gaze. The kind of gaze I would have wilted beneath a while ago, but no more. Maybe I was turning into Bruce Willis at last.
'What d'you mean?' I repeated.
She glanced at Crosskill, and then did something else with the file. Like she was closing it again, just for the sake of it. The way that people cock their gun in a movie, even though it doesn't need to be cocked, or they would have had it cocked minutes earlier in real life.
'You've been there the entire time,' she said. 'They won't have missed you.'
I shook my head. 'That can't be.'
'Why?'
'The other me, the one that was at home all the time I was up in Scotland. He got on the plane. He would have died in the crash. I saw the list of everyone who died. I was on the list.'
She shook her head. I could hear Agent Crosskill making vague disparaging noises to my right, but I wasn't looking at him. Not that Agent No Name was wilting under my steady gaze.
'We fixed that,' she said.
'What?'
'We were monitoring your moves. We saw what you were checking for online. We amended the page you were looking at to show that you were on the plane.'
'Why?'
She shrugged, looked slightly nonplussed, as though she hadn't thought about it before.
'I don't know,' she said. 'Guess we didn't want you freaking out about there being two of you. Didn't want you to suddenly think you had to go running off home to fight this other guy who was nailing your wife.
About a hundred things come rushing into my head at the same time, but all that came out was, 'Why didn't I, the other me, why didn't I die in the crash this time?'
Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite! Page 25
