Bartholomew 02 - How to Marry a Ghost

by Hope McIntyre

  “You know, to get everyone’s attention when I make a comeback with my music”—he paused—“I’ll be doing concerts and they’ll want to hear this. So I thought I’d come down to the studio and give it a dusting off.”

  Suddenly I felt very depressed. How could I tell him that he looked like an old has-been, that nobody dressed like this now, that even I—who was pretty hopeless when it came to rock music—could tell that his moves were dated. And his upper body, while pretty impressive for a man of his age, was just not in good enough shape to display like this. And what had induced him to dig out his old gear? Hadn’t he been the one to condemn the pretensions of the old rockers he saw on TV? What had happened to his minimalist approach to clothing that rendered him so elegant?

  I didn’t really need to ask myself the question; I knew the answer. I could hear it in his voice, see it in his face. He had succumbed to insecurity. He was appealing to me. I’ve still got it, haven’t I? I can still do it, can’t I? They’ll still love me, won’t they?

  Was that the real reason he was doing a book? To hang his comeback on its success? I realized I was incredibly disappointed.

  I had thought Shotgun had drifted into middle age with a rare and impressive gracefulness, that he had resisted the temptation to imagine his golden years could continue unabated. Apparently not.

  And then, as he came closer to where I was standing by the

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  door, I realized he was drunk. He wasn’t lurching about the place and his words hadn’t really been slurred but there was a loony grin on his face that told me he was under the influence of something.

  “I’m sorry to drop by unannounced,” I said, “but I wanted to transcribe the tape I made of you last time. I was wondering if we could set up a system whereby I came by and went straight up to your office without disturbing you.”

  “You can disturb me any time you want,” he said, throwing an arm around my shoulders as we walked back down to the hall.

  “Is this what you used to wear onstage?” I asked him, thinking I ought to show some kind of polite interest in what I’d just witnessed.

  He paused and looked down at himself as if he’d only just noticed what he had on.

  “Well, it’s what everyone used to wear, innit?” Did he sound defensive or was it my imagination? “And before you say anything, it’s not what I’ll be wearing if I go out on the road again.”

  “No?” Maybe I had misjudged him.

  “Not at all. Do you want to know the real reason why I’m togged up in my old gear and singing my old songs? Well, I’ll tell you. I know I’ve got to give you the story of what happened that night with the groupie and the truth is I needed a little help to get me started down that particular memory lane.”

  “You don’t want to go there, as they say?” I thought I’d keep quiet about the fact that it was clear the most help he’d sought had come in the form of a bottle.

  “Got it in one. But I will!” He stepped ahead of me, turned and wagged a finger at me. He was an irritating cliché, a bad co-median’s portrayal of a drunk. “I’m going to give you the goods.

  I promise. The tape is in the machine right by my computer, by the way, all ready to roll.”

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  But when we got upstairs he seemed to forget about me and wandered off down the corridor to another part of the house. I walked around the landing and found the office where I booted up his computer, put on the headphones, pressed play and went to work.

  As I listened to his voice, I realized that today he had slipped once again into the phony Cockney of his rock star public appearances. I wondered to what extent he had been playing a role during his years as a performer and how much it had taken its toll on him.

  And then I gave myself up to the transcription of the tapes, letting my fingers dart about the keys and working up to a rhythm whereby it was almost seamless the way he narrated his story into my ears and it came out on the page. I was so caught up in it, mesmerized, yet again, by the story of his early years with Angie, that I didn’t hear him come in and stand behind me.

  When he touched my shoulder, I jumped and typed gibberish for several seconds.

  “I went and had a little rest,” he said, “and while I was lying there, I thought to myself, I’m going to do it now, while she’s here, while I’m all worked up to talk about it. So what do you think?”

  But he didn’t wait for me to answer.As I sat there with my fingers poised above the keyboard, he began to speak.

  “By the 1980s we weren’t touring nearly as much, maybe only every two or three years, and by 1990 , when the groupie died, we hadn’t been on the road in five years. So it was something of a comeback tour and the audiences were crazy in their anticipation. I’m not sure it happens anymore but if you were old enough to remember, the rock concerts of the sixties and seventies were sheer mayhem when it came to the fans.That was our heyday but even at the later shows it was still bedlam. Those little girls packed in shoulder to shoulder, crushed up against the stage

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  below me, it was thrilling and horrifying to me all at once. And what you have to remember is that at this London concert in 1990, I was forty-fucking-five! But the fans seemed younger than ever.

  “They kept fainting and my natural inclination was to jump off the stage and go to their rescue but I couldn’t do that, of course.

  It would have made matters fifty times worse. There was no way the ambulance people could get to them through the crowd so they had to be hoisted up and passed horizontally over the audience to safety. Half the time it looked as if they were dead.

  “At the end of each concert they rushed us out round the back and into waiting cars—or helicopters if we were playing a stadium—before the fans could get to us. But sometimes the security was rubbish and some of the more persistent girls would break through and come after us, jumping onto our car as it was moving away. Of course quite often the other members of the band looked down at them from the stage and cherry-picked a few to help them make it through the night.They’d send Freddy, our roadie, to bring them round the back. I never did that, you know? I really didn’t. If I was at a party or a club and I was so out of it, I didn’t know what I was doing, then yes, there were times when I succumbed to temptation. I mean what guy wouldn’t when it’s handed to him on a plate and he’s had a few? But I wasn’t proactive about it. I didn’t point them out to Freddy like the others did and say ‘Get me the redhead with the big knockers.’ ”

  He’d been standing by the door and now he slid down the wall and sat on the floor, his long legs stretched out in front of him, his back resting against the doorjamb. He’d changed out of his rock star gear and was wearing just a toweling robe, knotted firmly around the waist.The hairs on his legs were fine and blond and his toes were as long and tapered as his fingers.

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  “I first saw her at the De Montfort Hall in Leicester. She was pathetically small and I couldn’t stand the way she was being jostled by the crowd. She went down a few times but she was a game little creature, she was on her feet again in no time. And she was always smiling at me.

  “Then I began to notice her at every gig—Birmingham, Sheffield, Liverpool, as well as down south in places like Brighton and Reading—always in the front line. And then finally in London what I’d always dreaded, happened: She was pinned up against the stage and I suddenly noticed that she was flailing her arms around and she was trapped. She was pressed so hard against the stage she couldn’t breathe. She was literally getting crushed to death right in front of me.

  “So I had them lift her onto the stage and they took her round the back to revive her. Of course when she recovered, she took it as a sign that I’d asked for her and she was waiting for me in the car. I was quite surprised to find she was American.
She’d seen us on our last tour there and she’d followed us to England. Followed me, I should say. After what she’d been through, I didn’t like to have her thrown out so I let her ride back with us to the hotel.

  “And there I made my escape because what she didn’t know was that I wasn’t staying at the hotel with the rest of the band. I had an apartment off Queens Gate that I always went to when I’d finished a London concert. The home I shared with Angie always had a throng of fans outside and if I went there after a concert it was sheer bedlam all night and we never got a wink of sleep. And of course I was getting on a bit by now, I needed my sleep!

  “I was so dead beat that night that I went straight back to the apartment to get some kip. But she was more crafty than I’d bargained for. Apparently she worked on one of the band until he was drunk enough to tell her where I’d gone. Before I’d even taken my clothes off, there was a knock at the door.”

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  Even before he told me, I knew there was no way someone with Shotgun’s impeccable manners would shout at her— Fuck off out of here, you little slag! —which would have probably been the only way to get rid of her. Sure enough, he said, he invited her in and made her a cup of tea.

  “Nothing stronger. I really was concerned about her age. She said she was twenty-one but I didn’t believe it for a minute.Then of course I couldn’t get rid of her. We didn’t have cell phones in those days and I couldn’t reach Freddy to get him to come and cart her off. He was probably passed out in some club. So she followed me into my bedroom and she wouldn’t leave.

  “So I did. I must have been out of my mind to just walk out and leave her there but I swear, at the time, it struck me as the easiest thing to do. I waited until she was in the bathroom and then I ran down the stairs and out of the house. I ran into one of the people living in the apartment above mine on the way out. He was coming in and I could tell he was quite surprised to see me, probably hadn’t realized he had a celebrity neighbor. He acted pretty cool, just nodded to me as if he saw me all the time. I walked the few blocks down the road to our house. I thought if by some miracle there was no one outside I could spend the night there. But of course the usual hard core of fans had settled down for the night in their sleeping bags. I had taken care to keep to streets that weren’t too well lit. If anyone had realized Shotgun Marriott was walking around unattended, I’d have been mobbed.

  “Having got that far, I took a risk and sneaked round the back of our house to a gate that led into our garden. It was locked but I had a key. I actually had quite a nice time. It was the summer, it was a warm night, the moon was shining bright, la-di-da-di-da, and I stretched out on one of the sun loungers and had a snooze.

  Actually it was more than that, I was out for two or three hours and the girls round the front had no idea I was even there.There

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  were lights on upstairs and I could have woken Angie but if you really want to know I was quite enjoying the adventure of camp-ing in the garden.

  “The only problem was when it got a bit nippy and I did want to go inside, Angie wouldn’t answer the bleeding back door. She more or less used to barricade herself inside the house when I was doing a concert in London. I mean, I don’t blame her. It was four in the morning and she probably thought it was one of the fans.

  “So I had to walk back to the apartment. I got a bit lost and I asked a policeman walking his beat where I was. I thought I could rely on him not to mob me and as it turned out I wound up rely-ing on him for much more than that.

  “The girl was still there when I got back. I had assumed she would leave when she found I was gone but she had got into my bed and was fast asleep. And it wasn’t as if I could sleep on a couch or something. This was just a place for me to crash after concerts so the place was totally bare of furniture except for the bed. By this time I was too tired and exhausted to do more than climb in beside her and go to sleep myself. It was probably the most idiotic thing I’ve ever done in my life but at the time I just thought it was the easiest.We’d both get a few hours’ kip and by the morning I’d have the energy to deal with her. I think I even envisaged having some kind of wise-uncle chat with her in the morning about the error of her ways.

  “When I woke up in the morning and tried to rouse her, I discovered she was dead. And if you’ve done your homework and read all the press clippings, you’ll know what happened next.The police were all over me and the only reason I’m not doing twenty-five to life is because of that copper I spoke to. He’d recognized me, of course, and when they did a postmortem they put the time of death as being while I was gone. The neighbor who

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  had run into me on the way out couldn’t wait to tell anyone who’d listen that he’d seen me go out and the copper confirmed where I was three hours later. And while I had no one who could say I was in my own garden for most of the night, they had no one who could say I wasn’t.”

  I remembered the headlines now. pillow talk was the one they used the most.The girl had died of suffocation. Someone put a pillow over her head and held it there and they had found that there was one pillow missing from Shotgun’s bed.

  Suddenly I realized something. I hadn’t got a single word of this on tape. I started typing furiously, trying to remember word for word what he had said. I’d done it in the past when I’d been doing an interview and the tape recorder had gone on the blink and left me with nothing. If I allowed nothing to distract me, I had probably unconsciously retained enough to recapture the gist of what he had said. And then I’d get him to sign it—or read it into the tape recorder.

  It didn’t take me that long—it was only about four pages—

  but when I turned to hand it to him, of course he had gone. I was frustrated beyond belief. We always got so far and then he opted out. I needed to take it further, to ask him for more detail. Had he been the only suspect?

  But when I went looking for him, racing around the landing to where I’d seen him disappear before, I was stopped dead in my tracks by the wailing sound of a harmonica. Then it stopped and once again I marveled at Shotgun’s authentic rendering of the blues.

  “Got plenty muddy water, don’t need no water t’all All I need’s a sweet mama, to hear her daddy call.”

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  But I left before I could hear the sound of him breaking down into heartrending sobs. Once was quite enough. God knows how he would cope when he had to talk about Sean’s death for the book.

  This time I had a little trophy to take away with me. My right hand thrust into my pocket was clutching a disk onto which I had copied the transcriptions. Now I could get to work on the beginning of the book in the cabin. In the Jeep I laid it on the passenger seat beside me and then snatched it up into my pocket again as I looked through the windshield and saw a car parked at the end of the dirt road and leaning against it was Detective Morrison.

  Had he come to pursue his persecution of Shotgun? Ought I to rush back and warn him? I drove past him, ignoring his wave to me over the steering wheel. As I approached the flat terrain surrounding Cranberry Hole Road that I now found so threatening, I wondered if I should have reported my nighttime prowler to him. But then I remembered what he had been doing to Franny and I knew that he was the last person to whom I would feel comfortable entrusting my safety.

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  MIDWAY THROUGH THE MORNING OF YET ANOTHER

  glorious day, I realized with a certain amount of satisfaction that even though I had been at the cabin for less than a week I had already created a nest just like the one I had in London. I could come in, close the door, and dismiss the world outside. No one bothered me apart from a few squawking seagulls, but if I felt like company, I could pop over to the Old Stone Market and visit with Franny or pick up t
he phone and speak to Rufus.

  And there was another reason why I was suddenly so content in my surroundings, one that I had a little trouble coming to terms with. I was on my own again. To be translated: Tommy wasn’t around. It was a bit of a shock but I had to admit that while I thought about him quite a bit, I didn’t actually miss him as much as I had thought I would.

  Of course there was the trivial little detail that two grisly murders had been committed less than half a mile away and I had my very own personal nighttime prowler but you can’t have everything. And in the meantime I had a job to do.

  I spent the day setting up my “office” in the desk area of the cabin and making notes on how to structure Shotgun’s story. I drove to East Hampton and bought the reference books without which I could not work—a dictionary, a thesaurus, maps—at

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  BookHampton and I called Staples and ordered a printer, a supply of typing paper, and all the other stationery I needed. I was, as they say, all set.

  I had planned to spend the evening preparing a leisurely supper of clams (provided by Rufus) and a tomato salad made with local tomatoes from the farmers market and fresh basil, and then I was going to tackle Tommy’s letter.

  So when Martha appeared in the doorway brandishing a bottle of wine, I wasn’t happy.

  “I’m not disturbing you, am I?” Whenever people said that, you could bet on it that they knew perfectly well that they were.

  “It was so good to talk to you the other day, I kind of hoped I’d find you here. And of course I wondered if you’d had a chance to—”

  The look on her face was eager and pathetic and it infuriated me but I reminded myself that Martha had known Sean Marriott and I needed to keep her sweet.The one thing that could encourage me to be social was if it had something to do with my work.

  Yet why did she have to come and ruin my evening?

  “I was just about to give the place a good clean,” I said in an attempt to steer her away. A total lie. I was hopeless at cleaning.