By Patrick Brock.]]> By Patrick Brock.

We went into this candle store in Astor Place because she wanted to check some scented wax. I normally hate this kind of casual shopping but on that day my mood was good; it wouldn’t take more than ten minutes or so, because I was the one fielding the bill. The store was small, but had rows and rows of multicolored candles, all sizes and shapes. One of them caught my eyes. It was a big one, twenty inches long, something out of a movie prop or soccer’s mom oversized wet dream. Printed outside of the white wax it was an image of Our Lady, the Virgin Mary. And everything came back.

When I was five years old, mom used to take me and my older sister to the countryside, to our uncle’s house, during the Day of the Dead. It was a long holiday weekend and almost half of it we spent on the bus going there, through dusty back roads and cities with decaying houses of disheveled dry walls or bars with liquor prices crudely painted on the facades. When we actually got there, mom would phone her brother from the bus station and he would pick us up with his battered Toyota, so we would go through some more dusty ways amidst the dry vegetation and sandy soil.

His house was nothing more than a hollow brick hut with an old ceiling in the middle of his land, where he managed to screw up even to toughest savanna crops. At noon, the sun would shine through the holes in the ceiling. Lucky for us, it never rained around there. You couldn’t raise anything in there, not even those goats that would eat everything, rubbish or newspaper.

The house had two rooms and a large kitchen-living room with a gas stove and a TV with awful reception. The only two books in the house were Germinal and the Holy Bible. Even though I already had learned to read a bit, I stuck with the illustrations from the ‘Book of Revelations’. The old guy, who wanted to be a priest in his youth but never got around to studying and praying all day (he preferred some good cane liquor and loneliness), actually had a copy of the Book with classic Albrecht Dürer illustrations, the sort that would be seen in a protestant German edition. And they were good; I spent hours checking out the four riders of the apocalypse or the dragon-headed snake, the seventh seal and such.

The real reason for those travels, I learned later on in life, was to escape my dad’s cheating and boozing ways. It was already pretty bad at that time, and she couldn’t admit it. I guess she just decided to escape to there, in the middle of nowhere, away from the shame of the neighbors peeking through the half-opened windows and seeing dad spread out on the sidewalk after some cab driver had dropped him off unconscious.

By that time she had become obsessively religious, and I suspect that those travels made her even more of a devout Christian. She picked out the fact that I was reading the Good Book at such a young age and took it as a sign. It was a sign all right; that I was terribly bored.

So after two weeks of the heat, flies, dried meat with manioc flour or rice, the skies closed and develop a deep grey tinge. People on the village started to whisper their concerns to each other, some of the old folks even screamed out of nowhere, like flesh barometers going wild in the unnatural humidity. Some of them started to pray. The mayor gathered some of the more concerned people and told them that it would rain hard, but that it would be good for the crops. I wouldn’t now what sort of crops he was talking about, all I saw planted around were manioc roots and sisal hemp, the kind you made ropes from. Those things grew on nothing, on a drop of dung, peasant blood and sweat.

When it became undeniable that the sky was going to fall on us, my uncle bought a bottle of liquor and some extra reserves, some brown sugar and coffee and extra bread, and told us to stay at home. Huge discharges fell from the sky and shook the ground like it was the end of it all. My mother prayed. And then a huge storm came, like the oceans where invading the barren lands and transforming the savanna into tropical lush.

The lightning came closer to the house. We had no lightning rod and therefore no way to protect ourselves. My sister, at that time a full blown rebellious teenager, became more and more restless. When a particularly strong bolt hit the backyard, she screamed and ran out of the house into the pouring rain. I ran after her in the new mud, but mom held me tight and pushed me back to the relative protection of the house. My uncle went after her.

Mom grabbed a candle from the kitchen and lighted it. Holding our hands together, she told me in a very quiet and desperate voice: “Now son, we must pray for your sister. If we fail, she will die. We must pray, and God will deliver”. I stared at her face, fascinated. The candle warmed and began to melt, little drops of fervent wax going down into our hands, burning the skin and then the flesh. “We must. Hold on. The pain is a sign. Is a sign that we are true to our faith. Hold on”.

“But mom, it hurts”, I said in a whiny voice, unable to cry or understand. She was oblivious, chanting a regular church-going song with her eyes closed. Now the wax covered our hands in multiple layers, cooling down, still warm though. My uncle came back, pulling my sister by the hair. She was crying and they were both covered in red mud. Mom wouldn’t let go of the candle. The pain made me cry, but soon enough it was over. The next day we left back for the city and huge red puddles soaked everything. But the grass was greener, like some miracle had revived the scorched land.

Of those burns from the candle, only a small spot remained after twenty three years. Mom continued to pray, even more when she was committed. Now she is dead. I never prayed again and I still can’t cry.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Patrick Brock was born in Brazil and is the author of the collections Velhas fezes (Edições K, 2004) and Textorama (Edições K, 2005), published in Portuguese. He currently lives in New York.

By Cathi Unsworth.]]> By Cathi Unsworth.

He stood at the back of the room, in a smartly cut pale blue suit, so cleanly shaven his skin still had a rosy glow from the razor’s kiss, thick brown hair set into a shiny pompadour that looked as though it had been set in plastic. His bulbous dark blue eyes darted around the cellar, and he pulled on a cigarette fretfully. For a second it seemed that he was too nervous to come across the floor, but then his eyes became still as they settled on what he was searching for. With a sudden sense of purpose, he walked towards Johnny.
And that was when all the trouble started.
In the autumn of ’59, Johnny had got us a regular gig at the Off Beat café. Us being The Buccaneers. Me, Fredo Long, the drummer; Dean Chainey on rhythm guitar; Jake Potts on bass and Johnny Murphy, our heartbreaker singer and lead guitarist. I was 21 years old, just out of my National Service and itching to get back on the scene. Before I went away, I’d been playing with Clive Kirby’s Rhythm Katz, a skiffle band on the up and up, but during them two years, that scene had been left for dead.
Rock’n’roll was what it was all about now – proper rock’n’roll mind, Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps, Eddie Cochran, Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard – not them stable of actors what Larry Parnes groomed and made acceptable to the great British Public. We had no time for Tommy Steele, Marty Wilde and the like. We named ourselves after the renegade pirates we thought we was, dressed up in striped shirts, drainpipe jeans and three-inch crepe-soled shoes. Johnny, who always had that dashing air about him, he took it the furthest – painting his guitar bright red and wearing a golden earring. With his black hair and matching eyes, his big wide smile and voice dripping with carnal intent, all the girls loved Johnny. He had that edge of danger about him that all them fake Elvis wannabes sorely bloody lacked.
We had the songs to match our look, though, that was the important thing. We’d only been together a matter of months, but already me and Johnny had written what we reckoned were our first two number ones. ‘Keep Your Distance’ was Johnny’s, it bore a slight resemblance to ‘Twenty Flight Rock’ but his lyrics and the way he delivered them were pure original – it was a seething song of unrequited lust. ‘All Shook Down’ was mine and I gotta admit, it was my attempt to get that voodoo beat from Gene Vincent’s ‘Cat Man’ nailed down, while Johnny spun around it a list of physical afflictions that assailed him once he’d spotted a swell looking dame. He shivered and shaked, shimmied and quaked, and the girls all screamed their lungs out with approval when he did it.
All in all, we was feeling pretty good about this residency, a month of Fridays they gave us. The Off Beat was a happening hangout on the end of Berwick Street, tucked behind the market stalls just across from Walker’s Court. At ground level it was a coffee shop with a jukebox full of jazz, making it popular with art students from nearby St Martin’s. Girls with Brigitte Bardot hair and eyes like cats, boys in check sports jackets trying to hide their acne under James Dean quiffs and a deluge of world-weary hepcat banter. I knew their sort all right, they were the kind of kids that hung out in the 2 I’s when I was playing with the Rhythm Katz. They always came holding a Jack Kerouac paperback as if that made them look hard, but looked quickly away when real Teds came through the door. Well, they’d lose their studied cool soon enough once the Buccaneers plugged in.
Because this was Soho, you’d also find a smattering of writers and artists nursing their hangovers or just killing time over a plate of egg and chips, chainsmoking French cigarettes and waiting for Gaston’s or the Colony to open. Then there was the Soho characters – like Ironfoot Jack with his top hat and cape and the six inches of metal that dragged from his shorter leg – and of course, the Soho sinners. The girls who worked in Walker’s Court, on the runways of Raymond’s Revue Bar and Les Girls, the strip joints sandwiched between the dirty bookshops along that thoroughfare of neon-lit thrills. Generally, these women looked about ten years older than the art school dames, although they might only be actually a few years apart. They had their hair set in solid helmets at Mr Teezy-Weezy’s and the faces underneath were harder still, masks filled in with pencil and lipstick, eyes that looked straight through you. When they spoke, you hardly ever heard a London accent.
These girls came from the industrial North, from Scotland and Wales, from steel towns and pit villages, the shadows of smokestacks and smog, chasing that age-old con of London gold, hoping to become actresses or models, or at the least, married to money. For the time being, them dreams had ended up a few yards northwest of Theatreland proper, where the lights were harsher and the dressing rooms more crowded, the uses of deportment and imagination kinked into the art of striptease. For all of them girls, an infernal clock was ticking. When pep pills and pancake were no longer enough to support their assets and the cheers turned to jeers, the road ahead looked immeasurably darker.
In amongst them sat a certain kind of man. One who always wore a neatly cut suit below a boxer’s face, only you somehow knew that broken nose or cauliflower ear was not a scar that had come from any sporting arena. These were marks of honour in the code of another world, the world that run Soho. Any apprehensions I had about the gig were directly related to them. I never in a million years saw what was actually coming.
We played in the cellar, which opened up as evening fell. Just as upstairs was carefully deco-ed in the latest Formica and chrome, Blue Beat album covers framed up on the walls above the brand new Wurlitzer jukebox, so downstairs was left to look as much like a cave as possible. What passed for a stage was really just an elevated platform a couple of inches above the stone floor, just high enough to differentiate between band and audience and hide the dodgy electrics. The lighting was a few bare bulbs swinging in the breeze above this primitive podium, the rest of the room making do with candles stuck inside glasses, perched on tiny tables at the back and in crevices along the wall.
Dean the bassist, a sparky himself by trade, almost fainted at the sight of these amateur electrics and spent our first afternoon checking out the wiring, fearing we might all end up frazzled to death by our own amps. Even after all his precautions he was still wary, when it heated up down there with a full crowd packed in all the sweat turned to condensation that ran down the cave walls, threatening to blow us into the next world. The Buccaneers’ brothel creepers became less a style statement and more a necessary precaution against frying tonight.
To begin with, only the art school crowd ventured downstairs to watch, along with the gang that followed us up from the Grove, our manor proper. But after a while, a trickle of exotic dancers started to follow. I would have liked to think it was the impact of the music what motivated them, but you had to be realistic. It was when the girls clapped eyes on Johnny that the hardness fell away from their faces and the lights came on behind their smiles.
We always finished the set with them two songs – ‘Keep Your Distance’ and ‘All Shook Down’ – and by the time Johnny was swivelling his pelvis in their faces and promising a night to remember, all the females in the joint, from snooty beat girls to hardened strippers, would be screaming out for more.
Which is what piqued the interest of the man in the pale blue suit.
I first spotted him the second Friday in, standing halfway down the stairs with an expression of wonder in those funny pop eyes as he watched Johnny do his stuff. He had an air about him that didn’t fit in with the rest of the crowd – he was too old and too smart to be a student, to clean and too prissy to belong to the firm that escorted the strippers. What it was about him was that he didn’t look comfortable in his own shiny skin, he had an air of agitation like someone had just tipped a packet of itching powder down the back of his shirt or something.
He came down the stairs and I lost him, it’s hard enough for a drummer to see anything other than the arses of the rest of the band as it is. But after we had finished, and I’d come out from behind my kit, I clocked him again, waiting in the corner where the candles flickered, for the crowd to thin out and head back upstairs as the band to began packing up their gear.
As was usual in these situations, I found myself surrounded by a gaggle of girls – all the ones who fancied Johnny would always come to talk to me first. I never knew why they all found me so approachable. I was six foot six in my creepers, with a body built up from two years in the army — I liked to think I looked quite intimidating. But to them I was just like the cuddly big brother they could continually pester for favours.
As I done my best to deflect all this attention without being rude, I noticed that Johnny was deep in conversation with the man in the pale blue suit. Who was talking nineteen to the dozen, making strange little gestures as he did, rubbing his earlobe and picking off imaginary specks of dust from his sleeve, puffing away at his fag like there was no tomorrow. Johnny seemed impressed by what the funny little fella was saying to him, I could see his eyes widen and his head nod as he took it all in. Whatever the cat was spinning, Johnny was getting caught up in his twine.
He must have sensed me looking, ’cos he turned his head and beckoned me over.
‘Fredo,’ he said as I picked my way through the beat girls and hepcats to stand at his side, ‘this is Joe. You gotta hear what he’s just been telling me. Joe, this is Fredo Long, he’s the best musician we got and he writes half the songs with me.’
The man in the pale blue suit offered me his hand and flashed his eyes up and down me. His fingers were long and thin, his nails manicured. I realised as I shook with him what it was about the fella. He was a fruit, a swish. I’d met a few of his type in the army, even though that’s supposed to be illegal, and I recognised that nervousness for what it really was. Just like all the girls, he had a crush on Johnny.
‘Pleased to meet you Fredo,’ said Joe, although his eyes, perhaps, said otherwise. ‘As I was telling Johnny, I’ve had some success as a producer recently, but I’ve been working with these jazz fellows who are really a bit stuck in their ways.’
He had a funny voice and all. I think he was attempting to sound like one of them BBC newsreaders, but there was something underneath it, a West Country accent, that still made him sound a bit of a yokel.
‘Oh yeah?’ I said, ‘Like who?’
Joe gave a little pout and looked from me to Johnny then back again. ‘Chris Barber, Humphry Lyttleton, Kenny Ball,’ he reeled off. ‘I got all of them top ten hits but none of them were grateful. I’ve got technology in my studio that no one’s ever thought of before, but all they want is the authentic sound of the 1930s. I don’t know.’ He shook his head.
‘But that’s why I’m looking to find someone a lot more modern to work with,’ the shining light was back in his eyes and the enthusiasm returned to his voice as he addressed the rest of his conversation to Johnny. ‘And you boys really are perfect. You’ve got the look and you’ve got the songs, and I can get that all down for you on vinyl in a way the public has never heard before. I can guarantee, those two songs of yours really will be number ones. That’s if,’ he suddenly looked panicked, ‘you don’t already have a recording contract?’
Johnny laughed and put a hand on Joe’s shoulder, a reflex, matey action.
‘’S’all right Joe, we ain’t had any offers yet,’ he said.
Joe looked down on Johnny’s hand and his bulbous eyeballs glittered.
‘What label are you representing then?’ I asked, trying to cut through the strange spell that was being woven between them.
‘My own,’ Joe looked up at me sharply. ‘I’ve worked long enough with the major labels to realise I’ll never get things done properly that way. Triumph Records I call it. I made enough on the royalties from the records I’ve written and produced to set myself up. It’s all autonomous,’ he said, then added, lest I didn’t understand his fancy words: ‘I’m in complete control.’
Well, I didn’t think he was being level with us, and as it turned out, he wasn’t. This label was the offshoot of a film company called Saga and Joe only had a joint interest in it, it didn’t last long neither ’cos he ate up all the funds quicker than he could put a record out. But I could see that Johnny was in no mood for caution that night. He was swept away by the glamour of it all and accepted there and then an invitation to check out Joe’s studio set up.
I should have gone with them, I know that now, but at the time, someone had to drive the van back with all the gear and as the only teetotaller in the band, that honour was usually reserved for me. And I have to be honest, as Dean and Jake joined in the conversation and the excitement levels grew, I started to feel a bit left out, a bit moody. I didn’t like the cut of Joe’s jib and was glad to have the option of ducking out. Despite all the hopes I had for them songs and the certainty I felt that they would be hits, I secretly wished that this option wouldn’t pan out.
Be careful what you wish for, they say.
I’d been home about half an hour, unloaded our gear and made myself a cup of tea to unwind and reflect on the events of the evening, when there was a fearful hammering on my front door.
‘Jesus,’ I said as I opened up, finding a wild-eyed Johnny standing under the streetlight. ‘What the bloody hell happened to you?’
Johnny said nothing, just shook his head and wiped his arm across his brow, pushing past me into the kitchen. He started opening all the cupboard doors, banging them open and shut, feverishly searching for something or other, making a hell of a noise that I was afraid would wake the whole street up. Then just as suddenly he stopped, put his hands down on the counter and slumped.
‘Fredo,’ his voice was a whisper, ‘you got any brandy round here?’
‘Why?’ I asked, ‘you had a shock or something?’
‘Yeah,’ he turned around, his eyes red and hollow. ‘Yeah, you could say that.’
‘Well hold on a tick, I’ll see what I can find. You sit down,’ I pulled out a chair for him and he collapsed over the kitchen table, his handsome head in his hands.
Somewhere in my bedroom was a memento from Malta, a bottle of brandy in a little wickerwork jug, with the cross of St George on the lid. I found the thing and poured a good measure in a glass for him, Johnny knocked it back in one and reached for another. Only when he’d poured that and lit a cigarette did he manage to spill his story out.
Joe’s set-up was impressive all right, he had a big suite up in Lansdowne Road, that big tall building there, just round the corner from Holland Park tube. He’d shown the fellas around, taking pains to point out the mixing desks, what he’d had made to his own specifications by some bigwigs up at EMI, and had features that even they didn’t understand. Then there was other, weirder stuff, a garden gate spring wired up so that sound could run through it and a taped-up metal box he referred to as his echo chamber. Naturally Dean had been very interested in all this gear, he understood electronics better than perhaps Joe had anticipated, ’cos he got a bit riled when Dean asked if he could open the box and examine how it worked. Banged on about how it was top secret, that people were spying on him.
‘I should have realised then he was a nutcase,’ Johnny admitted, ‘but he had all these ideas for the songs that sounded so cool. He played us back some tapes of stuff he’d been working on, and honestly Fredo, it was out of this world…’
After an hour or so of Joe’s studio tour and plans for chart domination, they’d made some tentative arrangements that The Buccaneers would come back and lay down some tracks. Jake and Dean had made to leave and Johnny was ready to go with them, but Joe had pulled him back, said there was just one more thing he wanted to show him. As soon as they were alone, he’d made the pass, sticking his tongue down startled Johnny’s throat. Johnny had retaliated swiftly and decisively, punching the fruit across the room right into his own echo chamber.
‘It was just shock what made me do it,’ he told me, lighting his tenth cigarette in a row. ‘I didn’t mean to hurt him, I wouldn’t have if I’d have realised what this was really all about, I’d have tried to let him down gently.’ He attempted to laugh but ended up grimacing. ‘But then, Fredo, then it all went really nasty.’
He had to pour himself another drink before I got the rest out of him. Apparently, Joe had reacted like a hornet, got to his feet screaming and shouting and threatening all sorts.
‘He said he was gonna put a curse on me,’ Johnny was shaking as he said it. ‘That he was gonna remember me and never forget me, that I would never make it in this business without him and that he was gonna destroy me for what I done, breakin’ his precious echo chamber, never mind his pride.’
I would have laughed at anyone else taking the threats of a swish scorned so seriously. But Johnny, well, his black eyes and his black hair came from his gypsy grandma, he believed in all this stuff so seriously that he truly believed he was doomed from that minute on.
And in a sense, he was right.
I took the rap for us not signing with Joe, we invented some cover story so that the others wouldn’t know what really happened. Some old pony about me not wanting to take the risk with the guy, not liking him – all of it true, but I wouldn’t have let that stand in the way if I had really thought he could help us. But my first loyalty was to Johnny and Johnny was too ashamed to be thought of as so gullible, and too rattled to face any kind of interrogation about it. Dean and Jake were a bit disappointed at first, especially Dean, who had been right intrigued to find out what really went on with all them pioneering electrics Joe had invented.
But it wasn’t long before others came knocking, and we got to release our first single on Parlophone, a subsidiary of the same label what had made all Joe’s fancy gear. Nothing so elaborate went down at the recording of ‘Keep Your Distance’, but they captured all the raw, frenzied edge of our live performance all right, and the record went to number five in the hit parade in November 1959. We was on our way, the start of the big time.
The Buccaneers set off for a life on the road that took us all across Great Britain and into Europe. Johnny was hailed as a trailblazer, the most exciting new singer since Elvis, and our fanclub swelled to the point that Parlophone had to hire someone just to open all our mail. All the gigs were a sell-out here and we was making a good name for ourselves on the Continent too, everywhere people were wearing striped shirts and golden earrings, just like Johnny. I loved being on tour. Travel was the one thing that I missed from the army, so I couldn’t have been happier, getting to see the world playing the music I loved.
Neither could the record company. Flushed with our rapid success, they let us release ‘All Shook Down’ at the beginning of 1960 and I’m proud to say, that did make number one. We were the biggest stars of the moment, appearing on telly the whole time, screaming fans at every venue, money rolling in, everything we could have wished for. We even got to meet and play with my hero, Gene Vincent, who said that he loved Johnny’s style. Those were the golden days all right, at the start of a new decade. We was waving bye-bye to the ration book Fifties, and it really felt like we was at the forefront of change, the people making things happen.
It weren’t for a long time that we even thought about Joe again. He had passed from memory in the whirl of our lives and even though he had managed to get a fair few records in the charts, he ain’t had no number ones to boast of, so it didn’t seem like his curse had worked too well.
Not until July of 1961. That night we was driving back to London from Dover, just back from playing Hamburg, where we always went down a storm on the rowdy clubs of the Reeperbahn. We was looking forwards to getting back to London and the studio, where we were gonna lay down the new songs we’d been working on for our second LP. We were the fittest and tightest we’d ever been, the new material honed to perfection over hundreds of gigs. It was going to be a cinch, or so I thought.
Dean had a little portable radio what we used to listen to in the back of the van, and they was running down the new entries in the charts on Radio Luxemburg. Feeling comfortably knackered, I had almost fallen to sleep when they started playing this eerie record, like some kind of cowboy song, but with a strange, electronic back-up and a girl’s voice singing a haunted refrain.
‘Johnny,’ she went, ‘remember me.’
Well Johnny he sat bolt upright at this and his face drained of colour as he took the meaning in. The song was about a fella whose girlfriend had died, but she kept singing to him from beyond the grave, calling him to join her. When it was over, the DJ said that it was the new 45 from John Leyton, and in his estimation, it was headed straight for the top of the charts. It was Leyton’s second collaboration with this dynamite producer who had written and recorded the song, from his studios in Holloway Road. The song was entitled ‘Johnny, Remember Me’.
That’s right. It was our old friend Joe.
And not only did he get his first number one with it, but it stayed there for 15 weeks. All that time, it seemed to follow us around, from coffee shop to pub, beat cellar to town hall, and Johnny was convinced that this was it, the curse in motion. No matter how hard we tried to convince him otherwise, with Joe taunting him from every radio, jukebox and TV set, Johnny seemed to just freeze inside.
Well, I tried my best to be pragmatic. We had a whole album’s worth of songs that would soon be knocking that little iron and his playthings off the top spot. The recordings went great, the record company loved it and I can tell you, hand on me heart, we had never sounded better. But the public obviously thought otherwise. Our first single, ‘You Tell Me’, a straight-up rocker what me and Johnny had written after we met Gene Vincent, crawled up to number 20 and stalled there. The album it self floundered even lower until it crashed out entirely after only six weeks.
That change we thought we was part of, it was happening fast and to other people, it seemed. The press and the radio started talking about us differently to what they had before. The image that had made us so special only a few months before was now beginning to seem to them like some kind of novelty.
Worse than that, when we done another single what missed the charts entirely, they started to call us one-hit-wonders.
The record company, they thought the solution to this was to put us on back on the road. Johnny’s reaction was to hit the bottle, earlier and earlier each day. His voice no longer resounded with danger and carnal delights, instead a steady desperation took hold of him and the audience could feel it. The girls stopped screaming. You started to hear cat-calls instead.
After a month of half-filled halls and dire reviews, Parlophone reverted to re-releasing ‘All Shook Down’, which somehow managed to get us back up the charts again – but not without cost. It reinforced the ‘one-hit-wonder’ label in everybody’s minds, including our own. On the last night of the tour, in some horrible backstage room on the end of a freezing cold pier in Cromer, Jake and Dean told us that was it, they were leaving. They’d had a better offer, to do something more modern and with it.
Johnny sat down and cried, a bottle of brandy stuck to his right hand.
I soldiered on with him for a while, recruiting a couple of new fellas from bands we had met along the way, but without the other two it was never the same again. Even I started to believe the curse when the next we heard of Jake and Dean was that they had joined this new band, The Tornados, who hit number one in November 1962. With a song about the satellite Telstar, produced by, you guessed it, Joe. It even knocked Elvis off the top spot.
After that, there was no living with Johnny. I swear that I tried, but his boozing got worse, his temper more volatile, his live performances frankly an embarrassment. We had one argument too many and for my sins, I got up and left him in the middle of a tour, another half-empty washout on the end of another pier, far away from everything we had dreamed of and everything that had once been in our grasp.
I went back to London and got myself involved with another couple of bands, while Johnny stayed on the circuit with a band of session guys, turning into a cabaret of his former self, even resorting to Gene Vincent covers to bring in the pennies for the record company, who, unlike everyone else, still hadn’t given up on him.
The Off Beat café had become The New Beat Cellar when I found myself standing at the top of the stairs, looking down, on the evening of 1 October 1966.
Things had changed an awful lot since the days when we played there. Upstairs had been completely remodelled and repainted, in eye-straining op-art black and white, and the art students these days looked like Mary Quant with their bob haircuts and miniskirts, the boys wearing collarless shirts and bowl cuts on their heads. I didn’t see none of the gangster crowd there, nor the strippers, and Iron Foot Jack was long in his grave. I guess the Soho sinners weren’t welcome here no more. It was a place for young folk and I was feeling old.
I checked the jukebox before I went down, but all the jazz and rock’n’roll was gone, along with Joe’s space pop ditties. Even he had finally fallen out of favour with the onslaught of the Northern beat sound that had come raging out of Liverpool to conquer the world. I was on my way to see a bunch of guys I had actually met in that city, back in the good times, when The Buccaneers were on a roll. They hadn’t forgotten me and it was only good manners to go and check them out.
But now I was here, any enthusiasm I tried to muster just evaporated. Maybe it was the way they’d changed this place, maybe it was just the happy, jangly sound the band was making what turned me off. I never made it any further than the top of the stairs, watching their mop-top cuts vibrating to the screams of a new set of students and decided to retreat back upstairs for a cup of java.
The jukebox had been turned off for the duration of the gig, and the guy behind the bar had the radio on. I drank my coffee slowly, leaning against the counter, lost in a reverie about our time downstairs, not really taking anything in until there came a sudden newsflash:
‘Johnny Murphy, the lead singer of The Buccaneers, has been killed in a car crash on the outskirts of Bury in Lancashire. Murphy, who was travelling back from a concert at RAF Waddington that had been cancelled at the last minute, was a passenger in the car that was involved in a head-on collision with another. He was taken by ambulance to Bolton Royal Infirmary where he was pronounced dead on arrival…’
I heard it but I didn’t hear it. In my head I was back down there, in that cellar, playing my heart out while Johnny shivered, shimmied and shook, the pirate king in all his glory, the world at his feet.
And then I saw him.
Standing at the back of the room, in a smartly-cut pale blue suit, so cleanly shaven his skin still had a rosy glow from the razor’s kiss, thick brown hair set into a shiny pompadour that looked as though it had been set in plastic. His bulbous dark blue eyes darted around the cellar, and he pulled on a cigarette fretfully. For a second it seemed that he was too nervous to come across the floor, but then his eyes became still as they settled on what he was searching for. With a sudden sense of purpose, he walked towards Johnny.
As the radio started playing ‘All Shook Down’ in tribute to my former friend, my mind was filled with a slower, more spooky refrain. It was a girl singing and a curse falling from her red lips, a ghost that echoes down my memory and never, ever lets me forget.
‘Johnny, remember me.’

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Cathi Unsworth is a former journalist for Sounds, Melody Maker and Bizarre and recently wrote the novels The Not Knowing and The Singer, as well as editing the London Noir crime writing anthology, all on Serpent’s Tail. (Photo credit: Ronnie Hackston)

By Noah Cicero.]]> By Noah Cicero.

please cum on my face
cum on my face
release your juice on my face
please cum on my face
beat me with a stick until I die
send me to prison
kill me
ruin me
cut my pussy off and feed it to your dog in front of me
do something with my pussy
don’t let it go to waste
pimp it out to your friends
give my life meaning
hurt me with a coat hanger
please beat me give my life meaning
please sick your alligator on me
please find a reason for me to die
there is a filthy sewer rat carrying the black death
I am that rat
that is the dream I carry in my heart
black death
please cum on my face
I want your white love all over my face
I want to put it in my mouth and taste it
please give me meaning my life has been on discount to a bunch of stupid white people
I don’t like white people the goy bastards
I’m Cherokee and Italian
I have the best hair on the planet
no other race can topple my hair it is beautiful and long and black
give my life meaning
my television is broke and no one will let me go to their house

they say I am a hoochie and I’ll fuck their boyfriends and if their boyfriends aren’t there I’ll fuck their dads and little brothers and if all else cannot go as planned I will fuck their sisters with their little pusssies raping and tearing at their pussies with my tongue feeling deep inside their rectums loving the stink of and taste of shit in my mouth

SMUT

I have my smut, my smut is what gives me life, I walk around, quiet, doing what needs to be done, being nice to those I hate, not having sex with those I want to fuck, not punching faces in, then I go home, and make my smut, it relaxes me, I make the smut I want, with my rules, no one tells me how to make my smut, I am the master of my smut, I am God over my smut, I don’t like to show my smut to people that know me or for my smut to become famous, my smut is too personal, I try to fuck it all out, if I need to take it in the ass by twenty men at once, that’s what I do, to make sure it is complete, my smut is how it needs to be, I don’t like being at work, serving tables, with people that have watched and jerked off to my smut, I can see that they are looking at me, knowing what kind of person I am, I don’t like that, I don’t want anyone to know what kind of person I am, I don’t like to share emotions with strangers or in public, but who isn’t a stranger to me anymore, everyone is, perhaps not Viper, but everyone is a stranger to Viper, we are strangers alone, alone and strange, she enjoys my smut, she jerks off to my smut, I have several fans in a far off city, I’ve been to this city several times, in this city smut is produced in factories made of highly educated flesh, all the flesh wanting to be validated, it is a big city, a city famous for many things, one of them being smut, many people jerk off to my smut there, I do not know why they jerk off to my smut there, it has always puzzled me, it is hard for me there in the city of smut, all those faces that have jerked off to my smut, knowing my dirty thoughts, my thoughts that come when I’m alone, when no one is looking at 3AM, when there is silence, I pour myself a drink and begin making my smut, I make it, I tear it from the earth, I beat it until it makes the noises I want it to make, freedom is what comes over me, freedom, a lot of people do not know freedom, the word has lost meaning over the years, people now think that love or true love is the most important thing in the world, our government ran media or media ran government has done a good job diverting everyone to thinking that love is important and not freedom, not individuality either, but freedom, one can have freedom in a group, freedom to and freedom from, when I make my smut, I am free, I am free, no one enslaves me, no one dictates my actions, I make my own laws, a lot of people don’t understand this, they don’t understand the difference between making laws and breaking them, I don’t break laws, I make them, a revolution in smut, the old smut will be destroyed, let all the smut makers die a cruel death before the public, put them in the stocks, I would list the names, but it would take too long, I don’t feel like sending my smut out for review anymore, the reviewers never understand, even if it is a good review, they fail to get the point, and they always like it for a silly reason I did not intend, my smut grows out of love, love, there is love in my freedom, freedom in my love, I love, I don’t do this to save the world or get mass amounts of attention, or to be praised, I do it because it is my way of being free, of showing love for life, all kinds of life, plant life, animal life, human life, the life of rocks and river and lakes, life, I love life, and I’m showing it through my smut, this isn’t my job, I can make money doing other things, many people have ways of showing love, a person might start a garden and give his freshly grown corn out to his neighbours, another might make afghan blankets and hand them out to their neighbours, there are many ways to express freedom and love, I have felt so oppressed by this world all my life, so attacked, so drilled, buried deep in the hard earth, that to make five minutes of my smut just the way I want it, means so much, so much more than fame, than money, than people caring about me, I like people to watch my smut, every once in awhile, but I still would do it, I will always be making my smut, not for anyone else or even for myself, just because that’s what I do, that’s how I get my freedom kick, I have a little piece of freedom, a freedom that I died for, I died and now my life is full of graves, now I have a weight, a yoke of human stupidity and misery, but I’m okay, I can still walk.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Noah Cicero is a writer from America. He has several books published: The Human War, The Condemned and in June Treatise. The last five times he submitted he was rejected. Two of the times the editor bitched about his grammar. He is currently studying history. He is also studying organic gardening and planning on having a quarter acre garden, and planting an orchard of apple and pear trees. He is the expo 1 cook at Lone Star Steak House and Saloon in Niles, OH. Which means he stands in the middle of the cook line getting yelled by managers, servers, and broil cooks. He has acid reflux disorder, sinus headaches, and haemorrhoids. By most anyone’s standards, Noah Cicero is a failure. But he believes or at least tells himself that he is a failure with style.

By Patrick Howell O’Neill.]]> By Patrick Howell O’Neill.

Standing next to my bedroom mirror and on a floor covered with flawless aluminum, I’d heard you died yesterday. I don’t remember your name but I remember your life.

Here is a brief summary for mourners:

(To be read on the roof of a skyscraper in the midst of a midday storm.)

Once, you were in love. Then you were in love again and again and again as often as you could muster the words. You were a fast speaker. As a stupid seventeen year old, I thought I was once what you were in love with. I didn’t know you’d move on so easily: the other dicks, the drugs, the overdoses and my best friends. Whatever you could get, you took.

I tried to help (you asked for it) and you angrily refused. Eventually you moved on from simple OD’s to fucking one of my best friends.

Hey, better luck next time, whatever-your-name-is.

(To be read as a super-villain’s super-villain-machine blocks out the sun.)

“If I don’t fuck them,” you had said years earlier, “they won’t like me.”

I scoffed then but what did I know? You spoke sage words, I now realize. Only an idiot could fool himself for as long as I did.

(To be read in some place that doesn’t exist.)

Jesus, how long was it?

Two years ago, you and I held each other’s sweaty, pulsing hands underneath some chic Williamsburg restaurant table. We rubbed our damp fingertips across one another’s palms and sent what we thought the other would take as brilliantly articulate declarations of intent. (I knew that I had no idea). All the while, our 15-person party continued to eat wet Thai food, mostly ignorant of us, mostly not caring. Our first kiss, in your darkened living room about four hours later, saw my heart attack my chest.

In some primitive fervor, a pale mesh of body parts and scary new ideas led me to the conclusion that I was in love. Maybe I was; it’s always impossible to judge those first times now.

You’re still the only girl I’ve been with that was stupid enough and brave enough and beautiful enough to ever sincerely call it ‘making love.’ You and I did not just ‘fuck’. Apparently, we made love. And when I thought I was fucking you about two months after the restaurant, you laid pinned on your back and screamed loudly that you loved me as if it were some sort of biblical revelation to you. You spoke, slightly unsure of what it meant going forward. At my hesitation, your eyes had shown a fear I’d never seen before.

You know, it wasn’t me wondering if I loved you – I was young enough then to scream it right back regardless. Thing was, I didn’t know what the hell you had just said. I wasn’t expecting anything about love to come out of your mouth and the conviction with which you spoke froze my ears. But, as you know, I eventually said it and we continued to fuck or make love or something in between.

Less than a year later, you were away at school drunk (at least) and some guy was inside you. You called me up begging me to not forgive you. I didn’t care.

I was hurt, but I wasn’t and I didn’t think I was hurting you (I knew I was hurting you). It was no one’s fault over the other’s. You had, as you have now, the weight that is slowly crushing your body very evenly and painstakingly spread out across your bare skin. It was some massive, heavy indifference (you and) I had about our futures being obviously separate.
I don’t regret it at all. I am glad it is over. It is over.

(To be read in some other city far away from here.)

The truth was that I had been thinking about you cheating for a while. I thought about it on several occasions while I was alone and touching myself and was beginning to wonder if I was fucking myself to fiction.

No, apparently not. Obviously that didn’t stop.

I’d moved on from our love a year ago and so had you. I guess I shouldn’t be mad? But you still spoke to me for a long time – you still came to me with your bizarre, self-imposed afflictions. You still got aimlessly angry whenever I tried to help you.

“I’m stopping this stupid conversation right now.” No, I don’t need any thanks for trying with you; you’re welcome.

I wonder if he would have helped you with your imagined episodes.

(To be read as the truth to a lunatic.)

Just kidding. I don’t wonder. He wouldn’t have.

I guess we’re all completely fucking selfish. Who am I to judge you both? What right do I have to get angry just because you two fucked? Sure, we were in love but that was a year ago! Ample time to start fucking my best friends, right?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Patrick Howell O’Neill is a young writer with nothing noteworthy to his name. He lives in Brooklyn and can be found here if you are interested.

By Krishan Coupland.]]> By Krishan Coupland.

It is fireworks night, and my throat is sore from faking orgasms down a phone line all afternoon. My back aches and I am cold, the air smells of caramel and gunpowder. Me and Amber are on the roof, watching the explosives climb and burst. The city is a universe. Someone, somewhere is getting burned alive.

“I’m tired,” I say. That doesn’t really cover how I feel, but I need to say something. Amber brushes her hair out of her eyes and nods. Amber has red hair. Amber is beautiful.

“This makes me think of coral reefs,” she says, pointing everywhere with one hand, at the fireworks. “You go down far enough, underwater enough, and all the fish have lights.”

Amber would be a poet if she had the time. She is places like Brazil and Turkey and Ireland and Japan. She is harsh and clever and sharp.

Downstairs again, my phone station blinks demandingly at me. I sit down, breathe, push the button. A man has called in to say he is going to kill himself. “I work in a factory,” he says. “We make drill bits. Today, the guys put a light bulb in the microwave in the break room.”

He tells me what happens when you put a light bulb in a microwave. In the next cubicle and the next cubicle and the next Amber and another girl and another are gasping and whispering their way to pretended climaxes. It doesn’t matter that I’m not.

“Gina,” says my guy on the phone, “she’s this girl. She has a pierced lip. I think she hates me. God, they all must hate me.” From his voice I can picture him as thin, tall. Bald perhaps, and scrawny; the kind of person who blinks with their whole face. His hands, his hand on the phone, his hand on himself-they are cartoon hands, the fingers long and slim and the joints as knobbly as marbles. Blue wires stretch back under the skin.

“Don’t kill yourself,” I say. In my voice is my mother from back when I was seven, telling me not to be sick. “Please,” I add, hopefully, just like she did. There are fireworks here and fireworks there-perhaps the same ones, echoing back and forth.

“But I love her. I love Gina, and I’m forty and she’s half my age and it’s messed up. I was there, looking at these little chips of glass and wire on the carpet and I knew she probably can’t stand me.”

“Don’t kill yourself,” I say again. I tap on the wall between Amber’s cubicle and mine until she comes over. We share the headset, the microphone on its wire hovering between us like a pregnant bug. Gina, Gina, Gina, love and hate and light bulbs and drill bits: the words haemorrhage down the line. I feel deaf and dull as a tree.

“I’m on a bridge,” he says. He has started to sob brokenly, in quick static rushes. “Can you hear me? Can you hear me?”

I imagine him on the bridge, cartoon hands gripping the rail as he leans out, out. Up above him the sky is a coral reef and the sea is a universe. Can you hear me?

Amber says, “we’re not the god-damn Samaritans, you know.” I shut my eyes. When I open them the line is dead. “Attention seeking little prick,” says Amber.

I stand up. My phone station is blinking again and I still have half the shift to go. I sit down and answer, but it is not my guy, so I disconnect it. Amber disappears back to her own cubicle and I follow her, then I come back. Suddenly thirsty, I get a drink from the water cooler in the corridor. I sit down again in my cubicle with my drink and there are calls queued up, waiting for me, waiting to beat off to the voice of a stranger. I watch the lights until they tremble away.

I interrupt Amber in the middle of a call to say, “you shouldn’t have done that.” Perfectly unselfconscious she continues with what she’s doing. She winks lopsidedly at me. I can’t watch her do this so I go back to my own phone.

It’s too hot in here. I feel ill. Sick. The phones at our workplaces aren’t made for outgoing calls, so I have to use the one in the corridor to call Scott. It rings seven times, and then he picks up. It feels weird calling him from here - he thinks I sell insurance.

“I need you to drive me somewhere,” I say. We argue back and forth a bit, give and take, push and pull. He says he’s on the way and the end of the conversation clicks. Scott was the one who taught me how to weld in college. Somehow, we are engaged. Somehow.

Waiting out on the pavement, Amber joins me. It is dark and everything is coloured and rippled by orange streetlamps. “You ill?” asks Amber. “You quitting?” Then, “This is about the bridge-jumper isn’t it? I swear, you get so damn obsessive . . .”

We wait together as cars scroll past, headlights interrogating us briefly. Amber brushes her hair out of her eyes.

“I told boss you were ill. Me too. Both of us are ill.” I don’t listen.

Scott pulls up exactly twenty-two minutes after I called him. He pops the door and I climb in. Amber gets in the back, saying that she is coming too, smiling bright-bone teeth at Scott, who smiles back in the mirror. I introduce them: Scott, Amber. Amber, Scott - like a snatch of Morse code.

“I’ve heard a lot about you,” says Amber, even though she hasn’t. Not that much anyway. I don’t tell Scott what has happened, only where we are going. He drives obediently-there is an understanding between us. The radio plays wordless songs that make me think of the ocean. Rockets screech up and detonate in the distance, building short-lived office blocks in the night. Towers, burning, for a few moments. I want to be like them, to scream, to burn up, to explode.

In the end, it is a good thing that Amber is with us, because she has to give us directions to the Itchen Bridge. She is speaking softly, holding back and not swearing. It doesn’t matter. We arrive and Scott says, “There’s no stopping on the bridge,” and then stops anyway, bumped right up on the pavement.

There are signs on the concrete parapet: “Suicidal? Despairing? Call -” and a number. Someone has to take responsibility, I guess. My shoes are too heavy to run in - I kick them off and run up and down. Sure enough, one of these signs has been altered. The 6 becomes an 8, the 0 becomes a 8, the 2 becomes a 4. In bad light it would pass, and I recognise the number. There is nobody here, and yet the place itself exists. I lean over and look down at the concrete-slab water. There are boats out there, bobbing like soap scum.

It is freezing out, and yet still I feel too hot-a band of heat and sweat climbing the back of my neck. Before, I always thought sick with worry was a metaphor.

Amber and Scott are leaning against the car, arms folded. They could be twins. Even as I watch she opens her mouth, bares her teeth. He puts a hand on her chin, as though holding a wine glass-Scott is a dentist. They both laugh and Amber brushes her hair out of her eyes.

“We have to do Northam Bridge,” I tell them. It makes me feel old, like a responsible parent.

“It’s kind of late,” Scott stops smiling to speak to me.

I get in the car and sit there staring straight ahead until Scott and Amber join me. We drive to Northam Bridge and the story is the same there as well. No signs, but no people either. I do not know what to look for, and I do not know what would happen if I found it. I feel faintly ridiculous. I feel like a stranger, in the car with those two.

We drop Amber off near her house, and we drive home in silence. Scott treats me like an invalid-he brings me soup and kind words. I don’t feel anything much. I tell him the story, minimising it, making it trivial. I was just curious. By the time I finish telling him, it’s as though it never happened. We eat dinner and watch TV for a while. “That Amber,” says Scott. “She’s nice. You never talk about your work friends.” We go to bed, and Scott kisses my neck. It has been a long day and I’m tired, but I relent and roll onto my back.

As he begins I wonder if I’ve cheated on him already. With words and grunts and noises fed into the pregnant black bug. Fed down wires to strangers who probably have wives and lovers and lives of their own. I should tell him the truth, really. If I truly believed that it was meaningless, that it was not cheating-then surely I would have told him a long time ago.

It is almost a distant thing-I cannot concentrate. He kisses me, but I don’t kiss back. I don’t do anything much but lie there. He finishes, rolls off me and we huddle together on the bed. He asks me if I enjoyed it, which he does sometimes because he cares about those kinds of things. I lie to him and he goes to sleep.

I wait, in the dark. Watch Scott breathing as he sleeps. It is not peaceful, it is not relaxing. I slip out of bed. I creep downstairs and pick up the phone.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Krishan Coupland is a student living in Southampton. He likes writing stuff down and does it a lot. Sometimes he takes pictures. His work has been published in several literary journals including Dicey Brown, WildChild and Verbsap.

By John Barker.]]> By John Barker.

What I’m saying is, he was a great man, paid my salary in fact, or there were people that clubbed together to pay it. You know, who looked after his expenses. A great man without a doubt, but he was not a man you would choose to spend time with.

You don’t understand? If you can’t hear what I’m saying to you then what am I doing here. A debriefing you called it, it’s part of the deal. OK, I just want my money and off, but it’s part of the deal so I’m here, I’m doing it, but what’s the point of me doing it if you can’t hear.

What, you’re worried for me, you think I’m going to be like that one in the christian book, the one who hanged himself the very next day. You don’t know what I’ve been through to get this far. I’m getting out of this crazy place, live a life, me and my family, maybe even enjoy myself. Yes, and I’d like it in deutschmarks. Any currency of my choosing is what you said. So, I’ve made my choice.

So you were listening after all. How can a man be great and someone you’d avoid if you had any sense? How is that possible? Look I’m only a driver, you know that, but I’ll give it a try. For one thing there was the, what would you call it, the purity, all that. I’m a religious man, I believe, I follow my observances, but what’s that to do with being hard on yourself all the time. All right for him perhaps, but for the rest of us, why? You work on depriving yourself even more than you’re already deprived, how’s that going to make you a better person. Take the driving for example, my job. When we started out, the early days, any long journey which was often through the night, we’d make a stop on the road. You know, at a sympathiser’s house, him, me, and the bodyguard. Drink tea. Refresh ourselves. Of course I’d check the engine, the tyres, but at the same time I’d relax, drink tea. Not any more.

Oh no, he wasn’t stupid, I’ve never said he was stupid. Of course we still stopped now and then for me to check the Mercedes, the tyres, the oil. I never said he was stupid. If he was stupid, what does that say about you people, stupid two times over. No we just didn’t stop any more for tea, to relax. I had a jerry can of water in front of the passenger seat. Wouldn’t have got halfway to wherever it was we were going and it would be warm or taste of plastic. And even if it wasn’t like that, if it had been a de luxe Merc with a fridge, even then it’s not like drinking tea. No rest for my eyes from driving one kilometre after another kilometre.

Yes, that’s what I’m saying. He was always giving things up. You know, like any pleasure he can think of, everyone should give it up. But what I think is, he wouldn’t have liked it, not really, if everyone gave up everything he’d given up, because then he wouldn’t have been any different. He wouldn’t have been special. I’ll tell you something I learned very young, when someone says something’s for your own good, that’s the time to be ready for the worst.

From who? My mother of course.

What? Some medicine she made me swallow that was bitter and slimy. Every time I thought I’d choke.

What medicine, I don’t know. I thought it was him you wanted to know about. He was a great man, no one ever did give up as many things as he gave up. And that was in spite of himself, of his efforts, of what he said he wanted, that everyone should give up what he had given up.

Yes in spite of himself, because he could talk. He convinced people. I’ve seen it happen. What he did was tell stories, you know, only they weren’t stories and just in case they hadn’t understood the lesson, he’d explain how the story told the lesson. All right for children but when you’ve heard them over and over, you know like the two brothers in the mountains and one of them goes this way and the other takes a different path.

Yes, hundreds of time. Driver, chauffeur, that was my job, that was my salary, but with him, with those people, you’re never off the job. I wasn’t driving all the time, of course not, but I had to be around. Lucky for you that I was. It was supposed to be an honour being on his staff, that’s how it was. Of course he wasn’t stupid or the people who looked after his expenses, they’re not stupid, they paid me a salary as well as it being an honour. But it was an honour so I was supposed to be around most of the time.

What lessons? Why, there’s a right path and a wrong path. In a forest; in the city; in the mountains; in the desert, whichever one, there’s a right path and a wrong one. Several in fact because there’s plenty of things you can give up. Tea; your life; dreaming about women; women altogether if it comes to it; a soft bed if you’ve got one which most of the people he told his stories didn’t have. That was the easy one. Didn’t stop him telling them they should do without a soft bed. Because the enemy can creep up on you in the night, he said, and then you wouldn’t wake up because you had been sleeping so good.

Another one, another of his stories, he really liked this one, was how you had this friend, someone you thought was a friend, and this friend didn’t give up what he said he’d given up, or didn’t show up when things were tough, had something else to do when you really needed them. That wasn’t a loss he said, when you found out the person who you thought was your friend had let you down. No, it was a gain, because then you knew. Someone you thought had value didn’t have any value.

You get the picture, how hard it was for me to keep my job. Because you didn’t have to do much or not do much to let him down. He was waiting for it to happen, it was like he wanted it to happen. But then he wasn’t stupid. Or the people who pay all his expenses, they’re not stupid, they knew a driver when they saw one, knew there’s not many can match me.

To be a good driver? Well I proved it didn’t I, you lot, your units, you never captured us. Two or three times it was close but you never captured us, not with my driving. Me, like I told you, I like a stop for tea, I like sleeping too but I’ve driven sixteen hours non-stop and never thought of it, never felt its velvet envelope not for a moment, not when the job had to be done. And you never did capture us. I’ve driven over rocks, over goat tracks…

Why did they listen to him, his little stories? You want the truth, or I can tell you he was the greatest storyteller ever, as good as Scheherezade.

Oh, that’s a debriefing is it, OK then. They listened those people because you, your lot with everything there is to give in this madhouse, you gave them nothing. And rubbed their noses in it, the way you people live. And they listened because they knew he’d done it himself. It wasn’t just words, anything he asked them to give up, he’d already done it. He wasn’t asking them to do things he hadn’t done himself.

Who are you? Who is this person, he wasn’t part of our deal. Tell him this is serious business.

All right, yes it’s true, it was the one thing he hadn’t given up. And it’s true there were people he’d told his stories that did, that gave up their lives. Plenty have, plenty. But then you know that, you lot. And now he has given up his life and I helped him do it if that’s the way you want to put it, but it’s not a joke, this is serious business.

A debriefing you called it, this is different. He wasn’t a man you’d want to sit down and have a smoke with, drink tea, that’s all I’m saying. Not that you ever could, he never smoked and then he gave up tea. I’ve got no dirt on him as you put it, I’ve just told you why I didn’t like him that much. What more do you want, what is it, for your propaganda? More benzine for the madhouse. I wouldn’t sit down and drink tea with you either, not if I didn’t have to.

Look I’m only a driver. I’m a good driver, that’s what I do. I’m not a psychologist, I don’t know why he turned out the way he turned out.. Maybe there was a girl he thought he was in love with when he was a young man and this girl was crazy with courage and said she didn’t want him. I don’t know. Or the children called him names at school. Look I’ve done what I was asked to do. I’ve kept my side of the deal so why don’t you just pay me as agreed and I’ll be off.

OK, OK, if I’m ever to get away from here. Let me tell you a story. Maybe that will satisfy you. A few generations ago there was this family X. They were hard workers, generations of them. Till one day there was just enough extra for them to open a store. You know, a general store, sacks of this, sacks of that. They made their percentage, of course they did, but they never swindled anyone, they never stole. Not more than ten percent their profit when there was always the risk, no matter the storage, sacks could go rotten. Which after a while they did do with some help from the family Y. Lazy people, full of tricks and with no excuse. They had more resources than the family X, a lot more, but they were lazy, too busy talking. Always talking. And they couldn’t stand it, seeing the success of that store which the family X worked hard at to make a success. They couldn’t stand it because it wasn’t just a success, they used it themselves. Where else would they get their sacks and not get short measure. Any other family, they’d have been pleased to have a local store to get their provisions without being swindled. But the family Y, they couldn’t stand it so they poisoned some sacks. Not all of them you understand, just enough. So a few people got sick and the family Y spent their time talking more than ever. This is how it went: people getting sick, it’s fate, God’s will; but no, wait a minute, lets think about this, where did that food come from; oh, those sacks from the store; poor family X, cursed for who knows what reason, some black spot, some sin lost in the mists of time. That’s how they talked, that family of talkers. And it worked, the store ended up in their hands.

You again, the joker, the clever one. Of course he was from the family Y. You’ve got the records haven’t you. They ended up with the store. OK that’s what happened, only when a family member becomes the Incorruptible One, it sticks in the throat.

Yes it was years later, what’s that got to do with it, it still sticks in the throat and since you’re the clever one who does his homework you’ll know of what family I am.

Did he know about me, my family history? Probably. I’ve thought about it a few times and the first time I thought his head’s so far in the clouds, so taken up with his mission, he just doesn’t notice who’s close to him, who they are. Later I started to think that he did know, that he’s so sure of himself, of the rightness of what he’s doing, the rightness for everyone, that even some poor soul from the ill-fated family X was bound to see the truth and justice of what he was saying. The Truth.

Probably that’s how it was because he wasn’t alone. There are those people who clubbed together to pay his expenses, you can be sure they checked family histories. And are members of the clan Y. Or associates. Associates at least, you can bet your last coin. Yes, and now I’ll have mine. Enough of this talking, my money. All that matters is that I was close to him. I was and I stayed that way, that’s why I told you I could do the job. I did my job and now I want my money.

Don’t make jokes. Really, don’t make jokes, this is serious business. A man has been killed, and not just any man, a man known by millions. Any currency of my choice right, that’s what you said.

I don’t believe what I’m hearing, The Treasury Says, The Treasury Says. What have they got to do with it, we had a deal. I’ve done my bit and now it’s my turn. Any currency you said. So I want deutschmarks.

The Treasury Says?! who are you people?! You’re the tough guys aren’t you, you’ve just killed a man. You planned to kill a man and you have killed him. Just pick up the phone and tell the Treasury this is serious business.

Retroactive legislation, what’s that, what trick is that?

Then why have laws at all. Don’t try and trick me with big words, I’m not stupid.

The economic crisis arose unexpectedly? I can’t believe what I’m hearing. What’s the matter with you people, there’s been an economic crisis all my life. There was a crisis when we made our deal, there’s always a crisis in case you hadn’t noticed, what’s that got to do with our business.

Don’t tell me how to be, don’t tell me how I should be. Be patient? I am being patient. I don’t know how I’m not crazy.

…

I am crazy.

Necessitating Stringent Foreign Exchange Controls? I’m not stupid, I’ll bet you have plenty of foreign currency hidden away.

…

Let me be clear about this, you are saying it’s local currency or nothing.

You can’t do this to me. I offer local currency in Paris, they’ll laugh at me. I offer it in Geneva, they’ll laugh, a second cousin told me. You do know that because your money won’t be in local currency. I know for a fact it isn’t, it was one of the things he told us, that you’re undermining the country with your foreign exchange deals, with your corruption. He was always telling us things we already knew. In your case there will be exemptions to those Stringent Limitations yes, so you can get an exemption for me.

…

Otherwise it’s a death sentence.

Don’t exaggerate?! Are you stupid.

You are stupid, I can’t believe how stupid you are. When we arranged this thing, the way it worked, it gave me a bit of time to get my family out of this madhouse. You killed him but arrested me so people could see you’d arrested me and nice touch, you arrested the bodyguard without killing him. Very good, you did it well but you think that’s going to make any difference if I can’t get out of this place with my family. You release us in this country, me and the bodyguard, and we’ll be dead. For a day we’ll be heroes and then the people who paid his expenses will have us killed.

I can’t be hearing this. You seriously think that if you treat me and the bodyguard excatly the same it’ll be all right. You think just because he’s innocent, he didn’t know anything, didn’t know about our arrangement that nothing will happen to him and so nothing will happen to me. You went to college, passed exams and this is what you think. You’re crazy, just give me my deutschmarks.

No.

No.

You couldn’t have done this without me. You tried enough times and just made yourselves look stupid. You couldn’t have done anything if I hadn’t been around him all the time. You know how hard that was. And by staying around, finally, one day I didn’t just do the driving, I knew where we were going to drive. And then you knew where we were going to drive. Him on a plate.

I don’t want your thanks, I want my deutschmarks.

No. No no no. I can’t bear it, he was right. All those stupid stories but he was right about you people, that you never keep your word, that you have never kept your word. You can’t even honour one simple deal.

It’s Not Your Fault. You think I care about that. Ring your Treasury, ring them now.

What do you mean, it won’t make any difference, I thought you were serious people. Now I know you’re not. You’re stupid. You think killing him is going to make any difference. It was just a stupid joke when you said it, but you were more right than you think. I did help him because now he has truly given up everything. Practiced what he preached down to the final sacrifice and that counts with people. It will count.

Oh, you again, the joker, Dead Men Don’t Tell Tales, is that right. You’re like a child, frightened and whistling in the dark. You’re just saying it to yourself to make yourselves feel better but you know. Maybe not tomorrow but you will lose, you people. He was right. I didn’t like him so help me, but he was right. Just give me my money.

…

He’ll come back at you from the grave, don’t think he won’t. His voice will be louder than ever because he’s done what he said he would do, and now you can’t touch him.

…

Give me my deutschmarks. Dollars, I’ll take US dollars if that makes it easier.

…

Give me my money

…

Please, give me my money.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Barker was born in North London where he still lives. He was imprisoned in the 70s as an Angry Brigade ‘conspirator’ and served a further sentence in the early 90s for hash smuggling.