Blame It on the Bossa Nova

by James Brodie

  He was looking at me blankly. He was a dummy. I had a formerly held belief reinforced into certain knowledge that with an Eton education lack of personal ability need not be a bar to ambition. One could still rise to high enough public office to cause major and irrevocable fuck ups. “.... I had a little chat with Pascale in the cottage; very educational. But perhaps I’d better not say any more. I don’t know how deep you’ve been let in on the secret.... Oh, by the way I admire your taste. Sandie is very good... very good indeed. You know what I mean.”

  If he had come there to give me anything or reward me in any way he changed his mind. He stubbed his cigarette out with the heel of his shoe and looked at me with undisguised hatred for about twenty seconds. I sensed that my little speech had cost me real and ready money.... Then he left without saying another word.

  A guy I’d never seen before came in and told me to clean up in a washroom down a corridor. When I came out he was waiting. He gave me the wallet they’d taken from me in Kings Lynn and told me I was free to go. I often wonder if the kid ever got his van back.

  April 1963

  Easter fell in Mid April. I spent the weeks leading up to it working in a room above a shop in Clapham at a job I’d got out of the South London Press. I was painting red coats, pink faces and white beards onto plaster of Paris Father Christmas figurines, five inches high. It was seasonal work, in the weeks leading up to Christmas they painted chocolate covered Easter bunnies. I was on a winner; you got four pence for each Father Christmas but only three pence for each bunny - less complicated. I didn’t anticipate being around to rue the change eight months later. I didn’t need the money anyway. I’d picked up enough one way or another over the past autumn and winter. I was paying rent now; a sister of a friend had a room spare for a few months, just off the Fulham Road. For a long while all I did in the evenings was lie on the bed looking at the ceiling, practicing getting my pulse rate down to that of a hibernating rodent.

  One night she was at a loose end. She came into my room and sat on the chair next to the bed and chatted, breaking up the force field I had created by concentration alone between my eyes and the light bulb. She was obviously not going to shift so I suggested we went out for a coffee. We took the District Line to Charing Cross and walked up Villiers Street to the coffee bar that used to be halfway up on the right. I was off the drink now, for a bit, so I was using coffee bars more. This one, although not in Soho, was typical of one of the generic models which then flourished there. It was of the superior kind that did not attempt to provide entertainment, and this I appreciated. We got our coffees from the bar at the end and grabbed two free places that had just appeared. The place was crowded. The atmosphere was good and I was beginning to relax in a way that I’d almost forgotten was possible when my eyes, momentarily departing from her face, alighted on a figure standing in the corner of the room with her back to me. I knew immediately that there was only one person who stood in that defiant, arrogantly casual manner, which, when you had the keys, told you everything about where she stood in her ongoing dialogue with the world. She half turned as I watched. She was dragging on a fag as usual.

  “Excuse me a second,” I think I said to my companion as I stood up and started to make my way towards her. I don’t know what I was feeling as I was pushing my way past the backs of chairs and brushing people aside. As I drew near I saw she was with a young guy, possibly younger than me. He looked like a student too. I tapped her on the shoulder.

  “Hello Pascale,” I said. That simple act had a more dramatic effect on her than anything I had ever previously managed. Her whole body seemed to freeze for a second as she took in my face and my identity was registered.

  “Fuck it,” she shouted and in that same moment tore herself away and ran for the exit blindly pushing people aside and knocking over a guy with two cups of coffee in his hands. The whole place stopped to watch her, except the guy she was with, who turned to look at me, the catalyst. A few of those who had been barged aside shouted insults at her as she disappeared up the stairs but the reaction was mainly a buzz of conversational amazement that was maintained by me following her in the same reckless manner. My progress was easier as the shock of Pascale’s leaving had left those in my path mentally prepared for instant evasive action. As I bounded up the stairs to the exit in Villiers Street the insulated subterranean world receded and I was aware of cars and other surface life. It had started raining since we had descended to the cellar and the pavements and road were shiny, cars and taxis moved with a hissing sound and pedestrians grew introverted in their mackintoshes. I looked up the street, then down. I couldn’t see her anywhere. I had to get her now, I knew it - or I would never get her. I ran up towards the Strand but when I got to the top she wasn’t there. I looked into the forecourt of Charing Cross Railway Station. Taxis waiting for custom obscured my vision. Looking the other way I could see nothing so I ran into the forecourt past the taxis - still nothing. I continued running into the station, aware now of the pumping of my heart, unaccustomed to such exercise. On to the platform concourse, my spirits sinking with every step, I continued to the stairs at the side that led back down to Villiers Street, reached the bottom and the rain again flecked my forehead and face as I ran down towards Charing Cross Underground. I ran across the road narrowly missing a car that was swinging round from Northumberland Avenue. In the station there was nothing. I went up to the ticket office.

  “You haven’t seen a girl - about thirty, dark hair ..... have you?”

  The guy looked at me blankly and shook his head. I wandered out on to the Embankment and looked along towards Waterloo Bridge and then the other way up to Westminster - Nothing. I stopped. I was beaten. That was it; I was never going to find her now. I reached in my pocket to get a fag and glancing up saw the pedestrian footpath along the side of the railway viaduct of Hungerford Bridge. A dark figure was running along it, slightly built. It could be a woman. By the time I got to the top of the steps my heart was pounding again, warning me to take it easy. The bridge was deserted except for a figure in the distance, halfway across. I could see her running towards the darkened shell of the Festival Hall, in the middle of renovation, on the other side. I walked for a few seconds knowing that I had plenty of time to catch her before she made it to the steps and could disappear into the hostile wasteland, the remnants of the Festival Gardens, reassured all the time she was in my vision. Then I began to run, slowly, easily, watching the distance between us shorten. She was tired too and could no longer maintain any speed. As I grew closer I decided that the bridge would be a good place to get hold of her and talk. I broke into a sprint and, as I drew level, grabbed her and pushed her against the wire, which separated the path from the railway track.

  “..... And where the fuck are you going?” I snarled, my face and eyes, I know even though I couldn’t see them, full of hatred.

  “For God’s sake leave me alone.... You’re mad.” Her French accent was breaking through stronger than I’d remembered it in the months since I’d last seen her so that I was again struck by the incongruity of her mastery of the idiom.

  “Why the fuck should I leave you alone?” I pushed her back on the wire. We were standing there, our faces full of hate, glaring at each other. The rain had been given a good chance to work on us by this time and we were both on the point of getting really soaked. Our hair was already plastered down over our faces. We were both scruffily dressed, in our normal fashion, wearing similar donkey jackets and corduroys. A train went by behind us, its rhythmic passing over the joints in the track serving to soothe us as we independently recorded its beat. The diagonal shadows and light shed by the passing windows on to the path and on to our faces brought me back to a recognition of our location.

  “Where are you living anyway?”

  She shook her head to signify she wouldn’t tell me.

  “They’ve got Chris,” I said. “... And Frank.”

  She nodded.

  “Still, that was the idea, was
n’t it? To put away Chris - Dangerman as we in the Force call him.” We were interrupted by the approach of two young blokes and two girls, out on a double date by the look of it, scurrying across the bridge in the rain. I put one hand on the wire next to Pascale’s head to stop her slipping away with them. We froze as they passed and they gave us a look as if they thought we were a couple having a lover’s tiff. When they’d gone on a bit I said.

  “Why did you have to fuck off that night in Norfolk?”

  She ignored my question and we just stood there feeling the rain penetrating through our outer clothing. Another train went past. I saw people looking out but I knew they couldn’t see us. Soon they would be in Sevenoaks or Rochester, or somewhere.

  “They’re after me, Alex.... They’re trying to kill me.” I looked at her. She was changed, she had a humility I’d never seen before. “.... I thought you were with them. I can’t be sure you’re not... You’re not with them are you Alex? You’re not going to kill me are you?”

  I looked closely at her to try to work out if this was all on the level. I could see fear in her face. That was also new.

  “Why should I want to kill you?”

  “Someone’s trying... They’re trying.”

  “Who?........ Ronnie?......... MI6?”

  “I don’t know..... Perhaps Toby. They’re going to get me. I know it.” She was shaking, almost collapsing. I grabbed hold of her to keep her standing. I couldn’t inject warmth into the grasp; she’d buried that too deeply inside me for such instant recall.

  “Why should they want to kill you, Pascale? You’re on their side. You were part of the operation. You told me yourself, you were all in it together - out to get him.” I was trying to calm her down for self-interested motives. If she got much more hysterical outsiders might feel impelled to step in.

  “That’s all finished - That’s not the reason ..... Don’t you see? I know. I know about Frank..... So do you. You were there that night at Battersea Park..... I know they’re going to kill him.”

  “Kill who, Pascale?”

  “Kennedy........ Kill Kennedy.”

  I took her back to my place in the Fulham Road. Although it was raining we walked through it. We were soaked through anyway and no taxi would have taken us. And I was in no mood to invoke the relevant clauses of the Hackney Carriage Act to a stroppy cabby. When we got back I could see the girl I’d set out with was in her room. The light was on. I didn’t bother to disturb her. She probably wouldn’t have spoken to me. I shepherded Pascale up the stairs to my room and made her strip off and then showed her where the communal bathroom was, on the half landing below. There wasn’t enough hot water for a bath but she could clean up a bit using the wash-hand basin. I got changed and left all our soaking clothes in the bath to be attended to the next day. When she got back to my room I gave her one of my T-shirts and an old pair of rugby shorts that normally only saw action during the rare summer heat waves. After she’d had a fag she began to calm down although she never, ever, got anywhere near the old Pascale who didn’t give a shit. We were still sitting there, her in the only chair and me on the side of the bed, when the dawn came up. By that time she was flaked out, ready for sleep, and so was I. I gently laid her on the bed and in seconds she was sleeping. I lay beside her watching the pattern slowly develop on the curtains as the light grew and thought about what she had told me. How the lunatic Frank had spilled the beans to her, how back in the States his family’s money had set him up for life, first with a sports scholarship to an Ivy League university, then into the Navy, and now how it was being used to help finance a movement that was focusing all opposition to the Kennedys into an organization with specific and drastic aims. At first I had shown scepticism. I had pointed out that Frank was just about to become flavour of the month for the scandalmongers and that he was scarcely the secure base from which to plot the murder of a President.

  “You idiot, Alex. You can’t see, that’s why they want him out of the way. He’s a liability. He was only ever on the fringe, but even then he couldn’t resist talking. I got everything he knew out of him.... Alex, no one can stop it.”

  “Kill Kennedy...” I had repeated, trying to treat the proposition with the seriousness Pascale was convinced it deserved. “... But who?”

  “Who?” She gave me that famous Gallic snort of contempt and dragged on her fag.

  “Who d’you think. The CIA, Cuban exiles, the Southern Whites... The Mafia... The CP for all I know.”

  “What did Frank tell you?”

  “He didn’t know much. All he knew was that there’s a network across the States, the same network that set up the Bay of Pigs. They hate the Kennedys, Bobby particularly.... Johnson they can deal with....”

  It was all very much on the macro scale - lots of broad canvas, most of it applied in the sort of areas of colour that professional decorators put on with twelve inch wide rollers - very little technical detail. It overwhelmed me. I don’t know whether I believed it or not. My brain told me it was rubbish, the intensity of Pascale’s fear I could not discount. It said more to me than her words. I had seen all this before, from Chris. And they had got him. Perhaps it was an occupational risk. Danger and death had seemed so far away back at the Chelsea Arts Club and the previous September.

  “..... And now you think they’re out to get you.”

  “They are, Alex. They’re going to kill me. They’ve tried already.”

  She had grabbed hold of me in terror as she had said it. I looked across at her as she lay peaceful in her sleep. What if it were true and that all our activities of the previous winter assumed the perspective of the group huddled round the ice cream lady at the foot of the screen, while up above the main drama is playing played out in Technicolor? What if we’d accidentally got in the way of the projector and our shadow was being cast on the moving image? The two of us, keepers of the biggest secret in the world - The only ones who knew. And what could we do about it? Who were we? Two shitty little nobodies in a bed-sit in the Fulham Road.

  I phoned up the Father Christmas factory and told them I wouldn’t be in for a few days. Pascale couldn’t be left alone in the state she was in. We steamed the clothes dry in front of the gas fire, taking in great draughts of what felt like bottled pneumonia. She didn’t want to go out anywhere, but I made her. First of all to the corner pub where we sat in the private bar and went over and over again with miniscule variation the conversation we had gone through the previous night.

  “Who was that guy you were with?”

  “Just a kid... a Party Member. He doesn’t know anything about it. He was keen on me, that’s all. I’m glad I’ve got rid of him, he might have got hurt.”

  I suppose it was some kind of strange compliment from her that I was now considered sufficiently durable to risk exposure in her company in these revised circumstances. Before we left the pub I had to humour her by going to the door to check if there were any suspicious characters hanging about outside. I couldn’t see any.

  For the next couple of days we kept to unlikely pubs and workers’ cafes, always on the move at Pascale’s insistence. She was wearing me down. Since I had seen her in the coffee bar, anger had turned first to compassion and then to irritation. Try as I might I couldn’t buy the image of ruthless killers pursuing her relentlessly around the capital. We walked and walked, returning to the flat in the early hours of the morning. Even there she couldn’t relax. She still felt they could get her. I was beginning to wonder how it was going to end, if this hysterical rhythm could ever be broken. But on the third night she began to relax. She still thought every shadow was out to get her, still jumped at every unexpected sound. But she was beginning to get some objectivity on it. She could understand how some folk couldn’t see it that way. They were misguided and mistaken, she knew that for sure, but she could understand how they had been deceived into their wrong thinking.

  We were sitting in a pub just off the Commercial Road in Stepney. We’d taken a taxi there. I knew it
- a haunt of dockers, a place where all the goods they had nicked, or were thinking of nicking were exchanged or sold - a sort of commodities futures market. It was a pub where no one would ever think of looking for a girl in Pascale’s predicament. The bell was rung for closing time and, although the landlord wasn’t heavy about such matters, we rose and prepared to leave. She had been expounding on different aspects of her involvement in politics over the past five or so years in a way that I had never heard from her before, reflectively - non-partisan. Almost as if it was all in the past. Outside the pub we stopped on the pavement to do up our coats. It was still pissing down with rain.

  “You see, Alex...,” she said, continuing her mood of mellow imparter of wisdom, ‘the question is... is man’s ability to believe in the myth intrinsic evidence of the validity of myth?... because, as that’s the point all philosophy eventually boils down to... if you don’t particularly care what the answer is, it’s all a bit of a waste of time.”

  I could see it. She was finished. Through all my ups and downs with Pascale I had never doubted her potential to get herself as deeply hurt as she ever managed to hurt others, whether intentionally or co-incidentally. And now, as they had frequently over the previous months, my thoughts returned not to the Pascale I had known but to my image of the Pascale I had never met - the young girl growing up in the village with an embittered father and an intelligence that would drive her mad unless she got out. Why couldn’t the world find a place for the likes of Pascale? Why was it they had to keep going until they’d fucked themselves up completely, and only then be allowed the rest they would never know as long as their senses could pump messages to their brains. I had never known what I felt for Pascale, but whatever it was, it had found its way into every crevice and corner of my body.

  We finished buttoning our coats and I stopped for a second to make a choker of my scarf. She was halfway across the road when I heard the van. It came screaming out of a side street behind us and headed straight for her. It had hit her before I’d even registered what it was. Its momentum seemed to lift her and carry her pinned on its front before it buried itself into the brick wall of the docks opposite, a long blank wall, about fifty feet high, without door or windows, that stretched into the distance in either direction. It made a muffled sound of crumpling metal and something else. I’m not sure if I heard Pascale scream or not. Maybe I imagined it but it sounded like the scream of fear she’d given that night when Frank had picked her up and knocked her across the room. I was in such a state of shock I’ll never know if I really heard it. The van backed off - it was a fifteen hundredweight - leaving her broken body lying at the foot of the wall. It roared off towards the Commercial Road putting on its lights..... I ran up to her. She was quite still, quite dead. No one except me had seen it happen. People came out of the pub and out of houses and pushed past me and soon I was standing at the back of a small crowd. Someone went off to call the police. I turned away and walked back down the street.