Toby was not put off by the misleading information I gave him about the sect in the Give and Take. He strolled into the bookshop a couple of days later to ask for a copy of their book. He even claimed to have persuaded Jayde not to hassle me about the baby, at least until after it was born. Alicia’s three copies were in store in Jeremy’s basement, and reluctantly I went down for one, reassuring myself that it did not even mention The Rocking Boulders. Wading through all that turgid prose ought to stop him pestering me for a while. He took it from me and said thanks, but did not offer me any money, apparently expecting to get it for nothing. We usually reduced the price of books that had been in stock for a long time, and I asked him for half what had previously been pencilled in. He raised his eyebrows, but another customer was waiting and reluctantly he dug out his money and left.
Later I took the coins into Hatshepsut’s Pavilion, telling Alicia that the customer was an exboyfriend. ‘Well done,’ she said, ‘I had begun to think those books would be cluttering up the place up for ever. Actually, if any of my stuff is in Jeremy’s way, I’ve got some space here now; one of the stallholders at the Psychic Fayre has taken a load of stock off my hands.’ She continued: ‘There’s something else I’ve been meaning to ask you. What would you think of Myrtle coming in to help again, now the rest of us are busy researching material for Rick’s book?’
‘You’re not going to fire me, are you?’
‘No, don’t be silly. Myrtle doesn’t want a long term job.’
‘Will she find out about Rick’s book?’
‘No, I don’t think so. She’s a music teacher and doesn’t think much of The Rocking Boulders. If we
happen to mention them in passing, she won’t take much notice. Her taste is like Jeremy’s, classical music and jazz. If she asks I can tell her we need her help because you’re doing some work for Loyd for a month or two, sorting out papers for him.’
‘She’ll probably spend all her time telling me how useless men are. But… yes, why not ask her.’ ‘Odd you selling that book about the Oracles of Aten today, though. I’ve been making enquiries about them for my section of Rick’s life story. I’ve tracked down a telephone number, in a town on the Sussex coast where the sect was based, for someone with the same name as their leader, though I can’t be completely sure it’s him until we’ve spoken. I’ll try the number again this afternoon. If he’s willing, I’ll arrange to go down and have a chat one day when Myrtle is here to mind the shop.’
Rick’s association with the Oracles of Aten was not covered in any of the books that Dale had borrowed from the library; more details were well worth hunting for. She thought it probable, for instance, that before the Boulders had split with the sect, they had worked out the story line of the rock opera together. Rick had once played her a tape recording of a couple of songs from it; sensitive and sophisticated, they were quite different from the band’s usual stuff.
That evening I rang The Handyman to ask him about the abandoned rock opera. ‘Oh that,’ he said. ‘You have been doing some digging, haven’t you? Now you mention Egypt, I remember ages ago seeing some boards painted with pyramids and an oasis with palm trees. They might have been for an Egyptian stage set, I suppose. The basement and attic rooms in the villa are stuffed full of old studio tapes and god knows what else. You could spend forever searching through all the junk. A lot of it is crap the lads picked up on tour, people give them pendants, arm bands, all sorts of souvenirs. Old stuff gets chucked out to make room for new, they bring more back whenever they go anywhere. There are reels of film and old video tapes; no one can be bothered to find out what’s on them.
‘That rock opera was long before I went on the payroll. A mate who worked for them in the sixties told me about it. He said Quick fancied some bird who was supposed to be a High Priestess. The rumour at the time was he got her pregnant. Most likely, in the end, the whole rock opera thing had got too big and complicated for them. I expect the lads couldn’t handle it. They’d have needed someone who could bring it all together and stage it – an impresario, if that’s what they call them. What they’ve got stashed away in the villa may be junk to me of course, but, who knows, one day someone might pay a fortune for it as band memorabilia. If you want, you can hunt through it to see what you can turn up. Teef would be pleased to see you.’
Dale and I were both so tired by the Friday evening of that week that we went to bed early. At about three o’clock in the morning, the phone rang. I woke first and answered. A flustered Handyman said he had been summoned by the manager of a night club in Soho that Quick frequented. A new relief barman was saying he needed to contact Quick urgently with a message from an old friend. The club manager was suspicious and had his bouncers search the new guy; they found pills and capsules, too many to be for his personal use. The manager had rung The Handyman straight away.
‘Is this barman called Toby?’ I asked.
‘You admit you know him then?’
‘I did mention some stuff about the Egyptian sect. I know it was stupid, but he knows nothing
Mercifully The Handyman accepted this explanation calmly. He said, ‘At this moment, Toby’s being held in the manager’s office. You understand now how dangerous it is to talk about the band to people who are not in the loop, especially if it involves Quick. To anyone dodgy it’s like waving a thick wad of money in front of their eyes. Your friend Toby says he’s met somebody who used to be in the sect. He claims to have an address in the States for this bird who Quick got pregnant all those years ago, but he admits there was never any message, he just made that up. He is going to have to be taught a lesson, that old mate of yours.’
‘We were friends once. He doesn’t know anything important, honestly. He’s nobody. How did he get into the club anyway?’
‘The regular Friday night barman called in sick at the last minute, said he knew someone who would cover for him. Normally they wouldn’t take anyone on without checking them out thoroughly, but they were already short staffed. Toby’s a crafty bastard, persuading the guy to call in sick. Trouble is, it’s the crafty ones you have to watch. And he’s picked the wrong time. Quick’s itching to get nasty with someone. You’ve seen those spiked cricket pads in the cupboard. He hasn’t blistered anyone’s legs with them for months.’
‘You could just give Toby a warning, frighten him, let him know what will happen if he tries anything again. Maybe he did have pills on him, and he might have tried to sell them, but you’ve caught him before he’s made any real trouble.’
‘You’ve got your job to do, writing Quick’s book. My job is dealing with shits like Toby. You get back to that boyfriend of yours and leave this to me. Bye for now.’
He rang off. Dale by this time was sound asleep again. I felt worried for Toby, and guilty. We might not be boyfriends any more, but he would not be in trouble now if I had kept my mouth shut about the sect. Was Quick really going to torture him with the pads? The anxiety kept me awake for a couple of hours, but my fretting was of no help to Toby. What more could I do?
Over a week passed before I learned that The Handyman’s threat had been carried out, surprisingly enough from Jake. He turned up at the Give and Take one night and came over to Dale and me to say hello. ‘I know you’re thinking Oh god, not him again,’ he said. ‘But how would you feel about making a fresh start? See this?’ He held up a half-pint of lager. ‘Two of these will be my lot for tonight. No more getting totally off my head, all that is past, over and done with.’
‘And you’re drinking in a gay bar,’ I commented.
‘Yes. Jayde and me have split up. You’re the one who made me face up to being bisexual. Well, I knew all along really, just never did anything about it. The time had come for me to be honest with myself.’
‘You seen anything of Toby lately?’
‘Yes. He was in a terrible state the other morning. Jayde had me go up to the flat to help her with him. He’d gone to some club in Soho with his usual menu of pills, been grabbed by some heavies who blindfolded him and drove him off somewhere. He claimed they’d strapped something to his legs that gave him electric shocks. He was put in the boot of a car and driven out to Dartford, where they dumped him in the mud on the river bank. His legs were so bad he could hardly walk. He had these horrible blisters, nasty red blotches and little puncture marks, the tops of his thighs were red raw. Jayde had to go and rescue him, clean him up and bring him back home in a cab.’
‘He didn’t go to the police?’
‘He can’t, can he? He’s been done for drugs before. They’d know what was behind it.’
Smiles came over to show me some leaflets about the school disco nights. There was a picture of a handsome young guy in school uniform, smiling broadly and holding out an apple. The heading was New Skewl Disco on Thrusday (sic) Nights, and under the picture it said boys in uniform get a first drink free wiv dis ad.
Dale pulled a face and said, ‘The bar is fine like it is. People come in here to meet friends and talk. Why go in for this type of thing?’
‘I’m trying to bring in more business,’ Smiles replied. ‘No one has to dress up if they don’t want to. Give it a chance, Dale, it will be good fun.’
‘It’s not for me,’ he answered.
Smiles looked at the floor, then at me, then back to Dale. ‘Is there really a problem? Are you worried somebody might put his hand up the leg of your shorts or something? Come on Dale, you and Ben are together, everybody knows that. Let’s not worry about it.’
Had something gone on between them in the past I knew nothing about? For Dale to be prickly over the school disco theme night was not like him. To break the silence I picked up one of the leaflets and said, ‘I love the spelling of skewl and wiv dis ad. Clever.’
‘Jake did them. He’s helping me out.’
‘Smiles is helping me out would be more like it. He’s taken me on part time at the bar, and put me onto another part-time job selling sports trophies and medals. Since I don’t have much of an employment record, it gives me a start. I’m doing some certificates for school disco nights on his computer, with a bit of artwork and fancy fonts, one for best school uniform, and one for the scruffiest. There could be others, let me know if you’ve got any suggestions. They’ll be impressive done up in a scroll and tied with a bit of rainbow ribbon. We could give one to Smiles for being best bar manager. What do you think? Worth a go?’
‘Yes. Good for you.’ Dale said, and not really interested he went to talk to someone else.
I asked Jake, ‘Do you see much of Jayde nowadays?’
‘Not really. Her having someone else’s kid was a show-stopper. My vasectomy was her idea. It’s not right, is it, getting me to go through that and then letting some other guy get her pregnant?’ ‘You know she and Toby claim that I’m the father?’
‘What? She told you that? She and Toby must have cooked that one up between them. Don’t worry mate, she didn’t fall pregnant until a couple of months after… ermmm… well, after that night we went to the fetish club. You’re definitely in the clear. The bastards are trying it on. Sometimes I wish I’d never had anything to do with them. I bet that’s down to Toby more than her. Living for kicks is one thing, but making trouble for you is completely out of order. Does Dale know?’
‘Yes. Funny really, but he said he thought me being a father might not be a bad thing.’
‘He could be right, I mean why not? You and Dale are pretty settled. Being gay doesn’t rule out having kids, not these days, does it? You might love it, having a little lad calling you Daddy.’
‘When I’ve grown up a bit more myself, like in twenty years, maybe.’
Previously, when Myrtle had helped print out and laminate Quick and Teef ’s palm prints, the congenial ambience in the shops was unaffected, but when she returned her tendency to challenge everyone and put them right could be extremely disruptive. Now and again she worked in the bookshop as well as helping in Hatshepsut’s Pavilion. She made it vociferously clear to Jeremy that she disapproved of the way he ran things. ‘Now let me see where everything is,’ she said, and began a tour of the shelves, pausing to read out a title every so often, in an enthusiastic tone if the author was female, but in a very disapproving one if the author was a man. ‘Jeremy,’ she said at last, ‘you’ve mixed up all the books by women authors with books written by men. They will have to be separated out.’
He thought for a moment and said ‘There are some books, encyclopaedias for example, which include contributions from both sexes. In any case, in my view, a rigid classification by sex would itself be discriminatory. Both sexes cook; both cultivate gardens. And surely you would not want to deprive women writers of their male readers, or vice versa?’
‘Exactly the kind of answer I expected. A lot of male-oriented, wishy-washy, liberal-minded tosh.The whole shop will have to be re-organized.’
‘I’ll get on to it tomorrow,’ he said dryly. ‘There are one or two practicalities that I need to explain to
you in the meantime. For example, sometimes you’ll find that customers want to haggle. Unless they’re
about to spend over fifty pounds, the answer is no. If they are spending that much, call me over, or if
I’m out give me a ring, or just say no. Or someone may come in with books to sell. If they are massmarket paperbacks, refuse them. If you think what they’ve got is rare and potentially valuable, ask me
about it. If anyone tries to leave books behind in the shop as a way of getting rid of them, tell them
most of what we’re given goes straight to charity shops.’
‘If that’s how you want it,’ Myrtle said, reproachfully. ‘If a poor woman, who has lost a dear one she
has spent years of her life nursing,comes in with the deceased’s books because she can no longer find
room for them, your policy is to send her away with a flea in her ear. Of course, if that’s how you like
to treat people…’
Jeremy replied wryly, ‘I’m sure you will treat all comers with equal delicacy and compassion,
whatever I say.’
Dale hit on a brilliant way of coping with her. Whenever they spoke he would introduce the name
of a prominent woman into the conversation. According to the topic being discussed he would praise
Jane Austen, Florence Nightingale, Emily Pankhurst, Marie Curie or any highly successful and
influential female. Myrtle could not fault his regard for them, and her usual stream of complaints and
invective against men was, at least temporarily, curtailed.
Her manner softened after a while, and she was actually very good with customers, whatever their
gender. Perhaps the pleasure of making a sale outweighed her desire for confrontation. The thing she
could never cope with, though, was the computer. Within a minute or so of being at the keyboard she
would be cursing, the expletives becoming louder and coarser until she exploded with a string of four
letter words and accused the device of being a pernicious, malignant, twisted invention, obviously the
creation of a man!
Once I was standing next to her, and saw her type in the capital letter ‘O’ in a space where the number zero was needed. When the inevitable error message came up, my explanation that she had pressed the wrong key aggravated her further, and she transferred her anger from the machine to me. ‘What are you talking about,’ she cried. ‘Capital ‘O’ and zero are exactly the same! Anyone can see that. Didn’t they teach you anything at school? How Alicia ever came to think you were gifted is beyond me.’
It was easier to get her to write things down on paper for Jeremy or me to key in later. She showed a better side when she gave Jeremy a thick brown folder of sheet music for once
popular songs. She explained she had bought lots over the years from one of the second-hand
bookshops in Hay-on-Wye. Each one was printed on a single sheet of paper, folded once to make four
pages. The fronts had youthful photos of singers such as Frank Sinatra, Rosemary Clooney or Elvis
Presley. The earliest of the printed sheets, with songs such as Young at Heart and Bewitched (bothered and
bewildered) had cost one shilling. Thirty years later the price had doubled.
Jeremy handled them excitedly, reacting much as he had when the Larcher first editions turned up.
He exclaimed ‘Learning the Blues, how wonderfully Rosemary Clooney sang it!’ and ‘It’s Now or Never, an
emotional Italian ballad if ever there was one, but enjoyable, for all that.’ He thumbed through them,
utterly fascinated, and for several days sang softly to himself, stopping at once if he thought anyone
other than me might hear him. After a week he became bolder. The baritone voice frequently drifted
from the little office into the shop, making customers look up and smile. He sang well, seldom missing
a note, and giving those old songs real charm.
‘You should be on the stage, Jeremy,’ I suggested, when he emerged after his swinging rendition of
Close to You.
He answered wistfully: ‘We used to perform at parties, Myrtle and I. She would play piano, and I
would sing. Our little turns were quite popular, among friends. She had a piano in her flat in North
Kensington, and in those days quite a lot of pubs had them as well, though they were often out of
tune. She was, still is, a talented musician. I’m not saying concert pianist standard, but she had a feel for
the beauty of a great variety of pieces. Not only the jazz standards we used to do together, but classical
music… pieces by Mozart and Chopin. Many of the most famous soloists are men. I always think that
could be part of the reason she’s so strongly feminist, the sense that being a woman held back her
career in music.
‘She and I were good friends back in the nineteen-seventies, long before she moved back to her
childhood home in Hay, and before she met Alicia. We were both in the Gay Liberation Front. I think I
was the only male friend she had. She used to love telling me that it would soon be possible to fertilize
a human egg cell without the need for a male contribution. The whole male sex would, she imagined,
be bred out of existence, if not humanely dispatched. At least she’s not quite so hard on us these days.’ Her temper could still be fearsome, though. One Saturday, worried her car was being boxed in, she
descended on the man who had parked too close. We could hear her scolding voice from inside the
shop. She insisted that, if he would not move his car, he should give her his mobile phone number.
Otherwise she would have a friend from a garage tow it away. When she had demolished him, she
stormed in to us and screeched: ‘Men, bloody domineering, stupid, thoughtless, inconsiderate men!’ Jeremy waited until she was calmer. When he judged she was ready, he slightly raised a finger and
said, ‘Something’s amiss, Myrtle. I’m sure it isn’t just that man out there. Come on now, tell me what
this is really all about.’
It turned out that for quite a few years, during the week of the Hay-on-Wye literary festival, she had
taken in lodgers. A children’s book publisher had reserved all four of her rooms months ago, but
yesterday had rung and cancelled. ‘I’d stocked up with breakfast things for them and everything,’ she
moaned. ‘They could not have left me in the lurch at a worse time.’
Jeremy made soothing remarks before tentatively asking if there was a chance that other lodgers
might be found.
‘I’m so fed up now I can’t be bothered.’
‘It would be a shame not to use it while the festival is on. That house of yours is a delightful place
for anyone to stay.’
‘Actually, how long is it since you have had a break outside London?’
‘Must be a good six months,’ he answered.
‘You wouldn’t fancy coming up for a few days? There’ll be plenty to see while the festival is on. As a
friend, of course, no question of money. If Ben and Dale liked the idea, they could come too. It would
be fun, a little group of us at the festival together. Hay is only a small town, but it’s well worth a visit.’