Twelve

Dale listened closely to my account of Jayde’s accusation. He then, of course, had to know the full details of that wretched night when the Jays had shagged me in Toby’s flat. He must have wondered how anyone could stumble their way into such a daft situation. However he did not criticize, but shook his head, and uttered a long ‘H-u- u- u -mph’ sound. Then he said quietly. ‘Her whole story sounds like bullshit. That one night was the only time when you might, just possibly, have impregnated her?’

‘Yes.’
‘The odds must be against it. And Jake may have had a vasectomy, but you’ve told me that the Jays had an open relationship, so any of her other bedmates could be the lucky man. It sounds like a story made up to screw money out of you.’
‘Can she really be that evil? I suppose it’s possible, but if what she says is true the thought of having to pay up every week until the child grows up is very worrying. What happened that night wasn’t my fault. They spiked my drink.’
‘You can’t prove that. Let’s forget about being tricked by Jayde and her being after your money for a minute… suppose she is pregnant and the child is yours… in your heart, would you be pleased, or sorry?’
‘Having a child by Jayde? What do you think?’
‘Well, you’re not going to have one by me, are you? Try seeing it from another perspective. Wouldn’t the child be lucky to have a kind and sensitive man like you for a father?’
‘You’re joking. I’m like a sodding child myself half the time.’
‘Is that seeing it from another perspective?’
I turned the question back on him. ‘What about you, would you like to have a child?’
‘For lots of people the children are what they live for. Having kids is their big achievement in life. It’s not an easy decision for us to make, having no mum and two gay dads might be difficult for a kid, and this situation with Jayde is not a good context for thinking about it. We’ve never talked about what you and I want in life, though, have we? Not that I’m unhappy with the way we are, but what are the long term possibilities, not only whether kids might be part of what we do, but what about having HIV tests so we could stop using condoms if we both want to be faithful? Or should we think about a civil partnership? We would both need to be completely sure to make that kind of commitment. Even then, there is the risk that responsibilities and constraints might take the fun out of what we’ve got. We might be happier as we are.’
Anything that would bring us closer together sounded good, but how long would we last? Expecting too much too soon could invite calamity. I said, ‘I haven’t been with anyone else since we got together.’
‘Nor me.’
‘Does anyone at work ask, you know, if you’re with anyone?’
‘Yes, a few times. I’ve been saying I’m spoken for. If they’re interested, I tell them about you.’
Maybe that was enough commitment-making for one day. We fell silent for a minute or two. Then, no longer serious, he said, ‘So you haven’t been with anyone, but I hope you won’t mind me asking… have you had any offers?’
This was a leading question. If I said yes, lots, it would sound like I had been deliberately leading people on. If I said no, then it would sound like my faithfulness was a result of lack of opportunity. I said, ‘A couple of people looked like they might be interested. Has anyone been after you?’
‘Not a soul. Guess I’d better try to hang on to you.’

A letter from The Rocking Boulders’ management company arrived the next day. It commissioned me to provide professional services pursuant to the completion of an autobiography of Rick Schwagger. Further instructions were to be given by Andy Handman, who was authorized to supervise and give guidance on all aspects of the undertaking. A cheque for one hundred pounds was enclosed as a retainer. Any further fees and expenses were to be agreed in advance with Mr Handman.

The letter did not say that Rick’s life story was expected somehow to coalesce in my mind out of the ether, but neither did it suggest any more practical way forward. Whilst I liked The Handyman and his earthy outlook, he was an odd choice to give supervision and guidance on putting together a biography. I showed the letter to Jeremy, who studied it for a minute or two, then asked, ‘The retainer, they enclosed a cheque?’

I took it from the envelope and held it out for him to see. He said, ‘Good, you still have it. Hold on to it. Until you accept money, you’ve not committed yourself to anything. It gives us time to think.’ He read the letter again and smiled ruefully. ‘I’ve liked having you here in the shop, but it’s your future that counts. I won’t try to hold you back. Have to say I’m not a fan of The Rocking Boulders’ music. Jazz has always appealed to me more. I could once sing one or two of the old standards, a passable rendition, and given the chance I used to do so at parties. All a long while ago, of course.’

‘I was hoping somehow to fit this in as well as working for you. The Rocking Boulders are so unpredictable, and they still think that the book can somehow be written through extra-sensory perception. I’ll never be able to write it all on my own. You write all sorts of stuff, business letters and so on, so does Dale. I know you’re busy, but is there any chance of you helping me out?’

‘Would The Rocking Boulders accept me being involved?’
‘Would they have to know?’
‘Professional services are what this letter requires of you. I suppose that might allow calling on others

for help. This book project for Rick Schwagger has a surreal quality that appeals to me. We did talk about holding another meeting, but we haven’t fixed a date yet. I have mentioned it to Loyd, and he says he’ll come along, though like me he’s not sure how Alicia will react to him being there. I hope she’s not going to harp on about low-frequency energy fields all the time. If you give me some dates when you and Dale are free, I’ll speak to Alicia and Loyd.’
We set the meeting up for Tuesday in the following week.

The Sunday before we met, newspaper headlines announced that Rick Schwagger was to receive a knighthood. He was the sole rock star to be honoured among a motley group of celebrities, including a stand-up comic, an ex-pole-vaulter, a horse breeder and a pastry chef. None of the others were to receive anything as elevated as a knighthood. On Monday evening The Handyman collected me and took me to The Rocking Boulders’ villa. ‘We should find Quick at home again. Best not to say anything about the palace or his gong,’ he said.

‘The newspapers have been making a lot of it, especially since no hint of it leaked out earlier, but they’ve not sniffed out any scandal so far. I’ve heard a story that’s going round about what really happened. If I tell you, don’t drop me in the shit by repeating it to anyone, especially not Quick, will you?’

‘No, of course not.’
‘This is supposed to have come from an equerry, via a stable boy at the palace. Word is Quick got off with a lady-in-waiting at a party he went to in Belgravia. She invited him into Buck House and up to her room. Silly cow let him have half a bottle of champagne. As you know he can’t cope with drink. Well, after a bit of hanky-panky with the high-class bird, Quick staggers off into the State Rooms and falls asleep on a sofa. Cleaner sees him, thinks he must be one of the family’s hangers-on having a nap, and covers him up with the ceremonial cloak that what’s-her-name wears when she dishes out the gongs. The cleaner wasn’t to know he’d had half a bottle of champagne and would be out of it for hours. Anyway after a while herself comes in, and, well, you can imagine, her equerry reaches out for her togs, but… no bloody ceremonial cloak on the hook. They say she’s getting forgetful, and one of the corgis has been trained to sniff about and find any clobber she’s mislaid, so the dog runs round, finds the cloak with Quick lying underneath it, gives his leg a sharp nip, he lets out a scream, and the corgi runs off with the cloak back to her in charge.
‘She goes over to Quick and asks what the fuck he’s doing there, but her main worry is he’ll make a stink about being bitten by the dog. So, to avoid giving the tabloids another scandal to bash the royals with, they decide to add Quick’s name to the honours list and pretend he’d been missed off the press notice by accident. Don’t let on to anyone about this. It’s a story that’s going round, it might all be bollocks.’
‘Okay, Ma’am’s the word.’
‘What’s that, Bendy?’
‘It was a joke. Since we’re talking about her in charge, I said Ma’am’s the word, not Mum’s the word.’
‘Don’t think I’m with you.’
This was the man who was to give me guidance on writing Quick’s ‘auto’biography. ‘Forget it.’
At the villa, going into the upstairs sitting room, I said cheerfully, ‘Hi Quick, hi Teef.’
Quick responded in an offended tone, ‘I think a quick apology is in order here. You’re not keeping up with the news, Bendy. Surely you must have heard. I am now Sir Quick, if you don’t mind.’
Teef said, ‘Don’t overdo it, Quick.’
‘Was that Mister Teef esquire who just spoke? Should a mere common guitar plucker be talking to a knighted person without first asking permission? Give us a quick opinion, Mister Handyman and Mister Bendy?’ He glared at each of us in turn, but we said nothing. He pulled a face. ‘What’s the matter with you lot?’ he asked. ‘You should know me well enough to know when I’m joking. I only accepted the bloody gong because some well-past-their-best-days so-called bloody rock and rollers have been going around pretending they’re better than me. Anyway, reason I’ve hung about here is to ask you, Bendy, when you will be giving me a quick dekko at my autobiography? You’ve been working on it for at least a couple of weeks now. It must be more or less finished.’
‘Now you are having a joke. If you give me a regular half-hour slot to talk to you a couple of times a week, I could make progress. It needn’t even be face to face. We could talk over the phone.’
‘Don’t start that again. I’ve already told you I’m too busy, and that the book has to be done quick. That was the whole point of bringing in a psychic. You’re sure psychic is what you are, not psychotic?’ He said this with a sneer, though he may have intended it to be funny.
The Handyman intervened. ‘That’s not nice, a psychotic’s someone who’s mentally disturbed. Bendy’s all right, I’ve checked him out. If you give him a rough time and he walks off, don’t expect me to go searching for somebody else.’
‘All right, all right. Don’t start ganging up on me. Actually, you could say having a sixth sense is being mentally disturbed, in a way. It can’t be natural, can it? What you need to understand, Bendy, is this: Teef, The Handyman, and Alicia have all assured me you’re the right man to do my autobiog. The public has been begging for a proper book about me for years, so I am requesting politely that you get your pen out quick and start making marks on paper. Quick as you can. Got it? Especially now the palace has given me some well-deserved official recognition. And I don’t want no funny made-up stories being put in it neither. A bit of respect is due, so no more of the old sideways glances and quick snide remarks behind my back. Well, I can’t hang about. Been invited to stay at a stately home for a quick few days hunting. Don’t suppose you get many invitations to the hunt, do you Teef ? No? Thought not. Of course, now I’m Sir Rick Schwagger, expect I’ll be invited to all the high class social gatherings. Good thing about the nobs, if the weather’s bad you can go indoors where they have the servants and plenty of rooms for having a good time in. Well, tally-ho, as we say in the country.’
He left, followed by The Handyman. Quick’s knighthood must have driven ideas of drugs from Teef ’s mind. He did not, as before, ask if I had brought him any gear, but joked that a gong was probably not a bad thing to give Quick, since it was one of the few instruments he might be able to play.
‘Couldn’t he learn the drums?’ I asked.
‘One drum. He might be able to learn to play one of the drums. Well, nobody’s good at everything. My voice is lousy, but all the same I have a go at singing once in a while. Do you know our fourth big hit, Maple Syrup? How about if you try playing the guitar chords while I do the vocal? Just for a laugh, neither of us would win any prizes.’
Minutes later I was sitting in front of a music stand holding one of Teef ’s very own Fender guitars and studying fingering diagrams for the chords. I struggled to press down the strings and fluffed at least half the notes, while he gently beat out a rhythm on the table and sang gruffly:

‘Maple syrup, don’t you be coy, Maple syrup, be a good boy, Maple s’rup, from my fav’rite toy, Maple syrup, fill me with joy.’

Thankfully, no one was around to hear the agonized racket we made. The effort needed for me to reconfigure my fingers for each new chord demanded all my concentration, and my stopping and starting spoiled the flow. Teef had to wait for me before he could continue, his voice almost as awful as my guitar. After the first verse he asked, ‘Has it ever occurred to you that it’s a gay song? The singer, Quick, a bloke obviously, has smeared syrup over his favourite toy, we know what that means, and is asking a boy to be good and fill him with joy. Don’t go getting any ideas though, Quick and me both go for the birds, not the lads, but if you actually listen to the words themselves, it is a gay song.’

I always feel uneasy when a straight man decides to make a point of the fact that he is not gay. Is he implying that being hetero makes him better than me? As for the song being gay, surely different people interpret lyrics in different ways according their own predilections. Anyway, my fingertips were becoming sore from pressing the metal strings down hard on the fretboard. When The Handyman returned, I was not unhappy that the session had come to an end.

When Alicia joined Jeremy, Dale, Loyd and me at the bookshop, she set entirely the wrong mood for a business meeting by wearing the beige trilby with darting humming birds fixed to wires. She had added a couple of imitation gladioli, positioned so that the birds kept dipping their beaks into the centres of the flowers. Struggling not to laugh, I began the meeting by passing round the letter hiring my services for Quick’s book, and reminded everyone that squeezing any usable information about his life story from him or his side-kick Teef was not possible. Quick had also ruled out talking to anyone else who knew him. Save for the very helpful information Alicia and Loyd had given me about the Oracles of Aten and Rick’s school days, the only other sources suggested were old newspaper reports and public records of births and deaths.

‘But Ben,’ Alicia interrupted, ‘I’ve already found the answer for you. Those wonderful low-frequency energy fields that hold residues of all our experiences. All those preserved trace memories are just waiting for you to tap into them. Surely you’ve been able to use your powers to access them by now?’

Loyd saw me struggling to reply and tried to help. ‘I’m sure Ben has been using his “powers”, as you call them, in so far as he can. But my guess is that today he is hoping for some rather more down-toearth suggestions. How best to locate relevant newspaper cuttings, for instance. You find researchers who undertake that kind of work, for a fee, naturally.’

Alicia was not deterred. ‘Well, you can’t get more down to earth than low-frequency energy fields. Experiments have shown that they hug the ground and will even follow the curvature of the earth! I was reading about the latest discoveries on the Philadephia Psychics website only the other day. The Professor Emeritus of Physics at the University of Pottsville was asking if anyone could get their hands on a klystron, and if so would they contact him urgently. He says that before transistors were invented, klystrons were a special type of electronic valve.’ As Alicia was speaking, I started to imagine I could hear a faint sound emanating from her hat.

Alicia glared impatiently at him. ‘Physics, Jeremy, I said physics! Given the number of physics professors there are in the world, some of them must be psychic, I dare say. Psychic professors of physics? I wonder.’ The noise coming from her direction, a humming sound, was getting louder.

Loyd weighed in again, but now in a dangerously patronizing tone: ‘My dear Alicia,’ he said, ‘you may be interested to hear that I worked on radar systems during the Second World War, and I happen to know that the klystron valve is used for high-frequency circuits. Not low, not even medium, but high. Very high in fact.’

Hoping to divert them from an argument about the klystron valve, Dale asked, ‘Alicia, is that humming sound coming from your hat?’
She glanced briefly at him, but turned swiftly back to Loyd, setting the humming birds whizzing ever more energetically in and out of the flowers. ‘Surely, my dear Loyd,’ she said, ‘you’re not claiming to know more about low-frequency energy fields than a professor of physics? Physics, in case you didn’t catch the word again, Jeremy, not psychics, although I’m sure a professor of psychics would know as much, if not more, about the new and exciting developments in the subject.’
Loyd said: ‘You said professor emeritus, didn’t you? That is retired professor is it not? Of where did you say? Pottsville? I’ve heard of the world famous Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but never of the University of Pottsville. Are you sure he’s not some crank inventing fancy-sounding titles for himself ?’
The humming from Alicia’s hat became ominous, and when she threw back her head the birds darted to and fro alarmingly. I kept trying to appeal for a return to the topic of Quick’s book, but they talked over me. Dale put his hand over mine, pursed his lips and tilted his head slightly in a silent appeal to remain calm.
Alicia delivered her counterblast. ‘What a talented man you must be, Loyd, not only a veteran author, but an expert on low- and high-energy physics too, and with an encyclopaedic knowledge of American universities. An ordinary woman like me can never hope to compete! I’ll leave you to provide Ben with the answer to all his worries, since nothing I have to say is appreciated.’ She stood abruptly, causing one of the humming birds to dip down so low it became lodged under the brim of her hat. She ignored this mishap and strode out, slamming the door.
Jeremy remonstrated with Loyd. ‘However impractical her ideas may be, she was intending to help.’
‘And so was I! Did you want the whole meeting hijacked by a lot of arrant nonsense?’
The following discussion, without Alicia, was rational, but not much use. We talked about possible sources of press cuttings about Quick and The Rocking Boulders, but the task sounded as though it would be awfully slow and tedious, and there was no guarantee that the articles would be reliable. We soon ran out of ideas and the meeting petered out with feeble promises to give the subject more thought.
On our way home Dale said, ‘Not much help, were we Ben? Alicia must have been drinking some of those magic potions she has in the shop.’
‘The whole thing is more and more like a pipe dream, isn’t it? Maybe I will have to turn it down. I can send the Boulders’ cheque back. Alicia and Loyd are an explosive mixture. How the hell did her hat make that humming noise?’
‘She must have fitted some sort of novelty sound-effect box into it. You can get burglar alarms that sound like dogs barking, and clocks that reproduce birdsong, so someone could have brought out a gadget that makes a humming sound. You know how much she likes making a show, it’s all part of the business she’s in. More than likely she is now congratulating herself on a successful performance.’
‘Successful? From her point of view, maybe. No one else’s. She can’t have felt too clever when that humming bird got stuck under the brim.’
‘If only we had caught that on video. Don’t give up on the book yet. We can surely come up with something better than low-frequency energy fields, or hunting for old press cuttings. The meeting was a disappointment, but let’s talk about it in a day or two, just you and me. Try to persuade The Handyman you need a lot more time. See what he says.’
That evening Alicia and Loyd both rang, full of apologies. Jeremy had contacted each of them to complain that their row had ruined the meeting. He had persuaded them that we should get together again, and made them promise to keep their personal animosity in check.
After dinner Dale and I went for a drink at the Give and Take. Smiles was chatting to a saxophonist from the Gay Symphony Orchestra who liked jazz as well as classical music, and he and Dale were soon engrossed in conversation. Smiles and I did not know enough about serious music to join in, and I began talking to him about Alicia having got to know Rick Schwagger when he was involved with the Oracles of Aten. I was about to mention my visits to The Rocking Boulders’ villa when Dale, overhearing me, grabbed my arm, dug his fingertips into my flesh and said, ‘Nothing has actually happened yet, has it Ben? This story of Alicia’s, if she was being serious, happened yonks ago, and she only made a few offhand remarks. Anything else, at the moment, is all speculation, not to say wishful thinking.’
How could I have been so stupid as to chatter about The Rocking Boulders to Smiles? Good friend though he was, one of the reasons for the bar’s success was that he always had lots of gossip to pass on. ‘Er… well… um… speculation, yes, you’re right there.’
On the way home I said to Dale, ‘God, what have I done, prattling on to Smiles about Rick Schwagger and the Oracles of Aten?’
‘Did you mention the ‘auto’biography?’
‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘We must be more careful. We’ll have to hope Smiles doesn’t make a big thing out of what you said, and The Rocking Boulders don’t suspect that any stories they hear have come from you.’