The Dwarves of Death

Turnaround

‘I’d set my course to the land I love, The land my people dwell in.’ Well, I still wasn’t ready for that: I wasn’t going to let London defeat me, yet. But my thoughts did turn back towards home the next day, and I was reminded, with a clarity I hadn’t counted on, of some scenes from my past life which I had been doing my best to ignore. The reason for this was the arrival, sooner than I had expected, of a letter from Derek.

It wasn’t just a letter, in fact, but a parcel; and the first thing I found when I opened it was a record — a seven-inch single. The A-side was called ‘Violent Life’; the B-side was ‘Insomnia’. It was credited to a band called The Dwarves of Death.

A letter was folded up inside the picture sleeve; I took it out and started reading.

Dear Bill,

Nice to hear from you — at long last. What with nobody getting a peep out of you up here, and seeing as how you haven’t cropped up on Top of the Pops yet, rumours have been flying around the homestead that you must have fallen into the Thames and floated off to that great recording studio in the sky. But it turns out that you’re alive and well and living in Bohemian squalor. We’re all very relieved, I can tell you.

Well, you’re probably wondering about the contents of this parcel. It’s just another example of the astonishing efficiency of the Derek Tooley Musical Information Service Inc. All Your Pop Questions Answered. ‘Name That Tune’ Contestants Briefed. Fast, Reliable and Germ-Free. Your friend is absolutely right. There was indeed a band called The Dwarves of Death — one of those hundreds of forgotten little bands who sprang up during the punk era, made a couple of cheap indie singles, and disappeared without trace. Forgotten, that is, to all but a handful of memorabilia maniacs like myself. I don’t have a copy of the record your friend mentioned, ‘Black and Blue’, but I do remember it. The one you hold in your sweaty little hand at the moment (assuming it hasn’t got lost in the post, in which case the Post Office are in for a good hiding) is even rarer. It was their second (and last) single, put out on a label which even I’ve never come across anywhere else — probably their own. It must have been a pressing of about 100, and they may well have sold at least 6 or 7.

When you listen to this record you will find that the Dwarves tended to shun the finer feelings of the human spirit and were not given to subtlety or delicate shades of expression. ‘Violent Life’ offers a two-minute vision of Glasgow as urban hell: rape, mugging, gang-fights and drug abuse seem to be its main points of reference. It seems, however, like a gentle pastoral idyll beside the B-side, ‘Insomnia’, which, insofar as the lyrics can be made out, seems to consist of a woman screaming into the microphone at her ex-lover about how she hopes he’ll never have a proper night’s sleep again. It’s a bit like listening to chalk being scraped across a blackboard.

Incidentally, your friend’s memory is playing tricks if he thinks that the band had any bona fide dwarves in it. I can’t remember the exact line-up but this seems to me highly unlikely. As for those weird hooded figures on the cover of the single, it must have been a publicity shot. They got their name (aren’t you lucky to have a friend who can remember things like this?) from a newspaper headline in the Glasgow Herald which became quite a legend at the time. Apparently these two men — brothers — had just been arrested on charges of breaking and entering and armed robbery: they had gone into a warehouse at night and tied up the security guard and tried to shoot him but the gun had backfired and wounded one of them in the arm. They were both only about 3′6″ and were known in the area for a string of burglary offences which involved climbing through tiny windows, but they were pretty bad at it and were always getting caught. Vicious but incompetent, in other words. Anyway, they were convicted on the evidence of this security guard, and would probably have been forgotten altogether if that sarcastic headline hadn’t stuck. Even now I can’t remember their real names or how long they were sent down for.

OK, that’s enough pages from the scrapbook of musical history to be going on with. Show the record to your friend, just to settle the argument, and bring it home with you next time you come back up to Sheffield.

There was more to the letter but time was getting on and I was going to be late for work. I put the single on to my turntable, though, and turned up the volume so I could hear it from the kitchen while I was boiling the kettle. The record sleeve consisted of a rather grainy photograph showing this androgynous-looking figure — you could just about tell from her shape that it was a woman — standing with her back to the camera looking out over a river. Standing on either side of her, at the water’s edge, were two little people dressed in matching cloaks, with hoods shielding their faces. The overall effect was decidedly sinister, but the dwarves could easily have been superimposed on to the picture, I thought.

The music turned out to be a routine blast of low-grade punk, with a particularly nasty vocal over the top. That sort of thing sets my teeth on edge, I must say. The B-side was even worse, because there wasn’t even any accompaniment apart from a drumbeat. I half expected Tina to come out from her room and tell me to turn it down; but, as usual, my only communication with Tina that morning was via a note:

Dear W, I may see you this evening because I feel awful and won’t be going into work. Sorry about the bathroom I’ll clean it up. I’ve pulled the plug on the answering machine if that’s all right because I don’t want any messages. Please be quiet in the morning. Love T.

This note, so different in tone from her usual cheerful messages, left me very unsettled. Even the handwriting seemed shaky and untidy. I read it through a couple of times but couldn’t concentrate very well because of the awful screeching that was coming from my bedroom; so I ran inside and turned the record off. In the ensuing silence, I re-read the note and it seemed more disturbing than ever. Was Tina all right? Should I go into her room and see? No, surely not. Perhaps I would get a chance to find out if I spoke to her that evening: but I didn’t want to stay in that evening. I wanted to meet Harry and go to The White Goat, so I could show him the record, and (of course) see Karla. Should I put this visit off, and stay in with Tina instead?

I decided against it and set off for work, taking the single with me in a plastic carrier-bag. As an afterthought, I plugged the answering machine in again. I wasn’t going to let Tina’s whims spoil my chances of getting a job.

*

At lunchtime I phoned Harry and arranged to meet him for a drink that evening; and I read the rest of Derek’s letter.

Nothing much has happened up here that will appear exciting to a big-city dweller like yourself. I’m still working down at Harper’s and there’s talk of me becoming deputy shop-steward next year. The job is fairly safe but you have to keep your ear to the ground round here as you never know who is going to get the chop next. Meanwhile I’m always on the look-out for jobs with bigger firms, and I even had an interview in Manchester a couple of months ago, but it didn’t come to anything. Too many people chasing too few jobs, as usual.

The music business seems to be in as shocking a state as ever, with accountants and stock-brokers holding sway and post-modernist pirates rifling through old record collections looking for anything half-way decent from the sixties that can be plundered and decked out in 1980s fashions. I trust this will all be put to rights when the biscuit factory or whatever you’re called gets its act together and takes the charts by storm. My only advice is this: for God’s sake find yourselves a good hairdresser.

That’s it for now and I hope maybe to hear from you sometime in the next ten years. Keep on rocking, and all that, and look after yourself.

Regards,

Derek.

P.S. I’ve seen Stacey a few times recently and she’s looking happy and as well as ever. In fact I saw her last night and told her I’d had your letter and asked if there was any message. She said, ‘Don’t forget the phone, Bill.’ — D.

I smiled at this message, which I recognized as being at once a rebuke and a coded intimacy. It was one of those not particularly witty or original jokes which you will always find in the private language of lovers. I couldn’t even remember when we first started using it. It must have been after I had become a student, I suppose: when I was at Leeds.

The funny thing about me and Stacey, it seems to me now, is that we never really split up. We broke off the engagement, yes, but we didn’t actually stop seeing each other. My memory of the order in which things happened starts to get very confused here. Feelings ran deep between Stacey and me but they were never overt. Decisions were taken, often quite major decisions, without either of us realizing it, sometimes, and certainly without a lot of discussion or heart-searching. I can remember telling her that I had decided to leave Boots and go to university in Leeds, and she accepted the idea without a murmur of disagreement. I suppose it wasn’t as if I was going to be far away. Perhaps that was the first time, round about then, that she said, ‘Don’t forget the phone, Bill.’

If I were to call Stacey down to earth, it wouldn’t be because she was unglamorous. On the contrary, with her cropped but slightly curly black hair, her wide shoulders and slender hips, she was always attracting attention from men. And if I were to call her uncomplaining, I wouldn’t want it to sound as though she was weak, or had no mind of her own. Maybe a better word would be ‘unflappable’. A slightly worrying theory occurs to me, which is that she saw right into the heart of me from day one, knew me through and through, knew exactly what to expect from me and so was never surprised when I behaved badly or put a difficult decision before her. In all my floundering, all my efforts to carve out a life for myself up there, she was always one step ahead of me. I dare say she’d already worked out for herself that it would be a good idea if I went to university, and was just waiting for me to realize it too.

We were engaged by then, but perhaps even so she saw it as the beginning of the end of our relationship, and accepted the fact, as readily as she accepted the prospect of my frequent absences. We continued to see each other, most weekends — sometimes in Leeds but more usually in Sheffield, where we would stay either with her family or mine, taking pleasure in being under the same roof even though provincial proprieties would not allow us to share a bed. Every Sunday, if it was a reasonable day, we would go walking up on the dales. Our favourite was to take a bus out to The Fox House, and then walk down the valley to Grindleford railway station, just by the Totley tunnel. It was a walk which could change dramatically with every season, and we did it in deep snow and bright sunshine; the leaves brilliant with the colours of spring or turning to copper against blue, autumnal skies.

That was how things were for the first couple of terms, anyway. When did it start to go wrong? When did we realize — long after the event, presumably — that we had become no more than a habit to one another, that the freshness and the admiration which we had taken for granted had faded into mere tolerance? To a sort of lazy familiarity, in fact, which was worse than indifference. I can’t even remember which of us suggested breaking off the engagement; what I can remember (and it seems peculiar, at this distance) is that we were more affectionate towards each other, that evening, than we had been for months. After that, there was a gradual drifting apart. Maybe she was seeing somebody else, or maybe she thought I was. I went back to Leeds to start my second year, continued to write to her occasionally, even saw her once or twice at weekends. We weren’t in each other’s thoughts much, for a while.

The last time I really spoke to her was the weekend I came down to Sheffield to say goodbye to my parents. We went on the same walk again, even though it was a grey and misty morning, and as we sat beside the edge of the stream, eating the sandwiches which Stacey’s mother had made for us, I told her:

‘I’ve decided to give up my degree.’

‘I know,’ she said.

‘Who told you?’

‘Derek. You’re going to go down to London, and become a musician.’

‘Are you surprised?’

‘No. I thought you might.’

I turned to her and said, earnestly, as she munched an egg mayonnaise sandwich, ‘I just think that if I don’t try now, I may be leaving it too late. I mean, chemistry’s something I can always come back to, and — ’

She interrupted me.

‘You don’t have to justify yourself to me, Bill. I know the kind of person you are. I think it’s good.’

I smiled, thankful, and didn’t try to explain further.

‘Have you got somewhere to stay?’

‘Tony — my piano teacher — he’s down there now. His sister-in-law’s got a flat and that’ll do to be going on with.’

‘When are you going?’

‘Soon. Next week some time.’

Stacey said, ‘Let me know when. Will you, please? Will you be going from here?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ll take some time off work. I’ll come and see you off at the station.’

‘Don’t be silly, you don’t have to do that.’

‘I want to, though. I think it’s important.’

And so she was there at the station that morning, along with my mother. We didn’t get a chance to talk properly — you never do, on these occasions — and I can’t remember much that we said; but I’d be surprised if she didn’t find time to take me aside at some point and say — smiling, of course — ‘Don’t forget the phone, Bill.’

I hadn’t contacted her once since coming down to London.

*

Stacey had been eclipsed by Madeline; and that seems strange, in a way. Stranger still, though, is the thought that, temporarily at least, both of them had been eclipsed by Karla, and by that single, crystalline image I had of her voice cutting through the half-silence of a London night. I could hardly wait to get up to The White Goat that evening to tell her about it. I stopped off at a hamburger place on the way, bolted down some food, and arrived at the pub shortly after six o’clock.

Unfortunately I had forgotten how crowded it would be, this being Friday evening. She was being kept busy behind the bar, with a whole row of men’s faces lined up in front of her, waving money and barking orders, and although she nodded a friendly ‘Hello’ to me as I asked for my first drink, it wasn’t until I came back for my second that we managed to get talking. Even then, there was a crowd of people around, and I only had half her attention.

‘Can we talk?’ I said in a loud whisper.

‘Sure,’ she answered.

‘I mean — there’s something I want to tell you.’

‘Can’t it wait?’

‘Well… maybe when things have quietened down a bit.’

She shook her head.

‘Fridays are like this all night. What’s the matter, is it something personal?’

‘Well yes, in a manner of — ’

Just then some bloke in a suit with a wad of ten-pound notes in his hand cut across me and started ordering about fifteen lagers. While Karla was pulling them, I followed her up the bar and said:

‘It’s about something that happened last night.’

‘Oh yes?’

I paused, and announced, in a low voice: ‘I heard you.’

‘What do you mean?’ she said, not looking up from her work.

‘I mean I was there. Outside your window, last night.’

She stared at me.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘It was absolutely beautiful. I’ve never heard anything like it.’

‘A few packets of dry roasted, too, while you’re at it, love,’ the customer shouted. ‘And a box of Hamlets.’

‘Are you some kind of pervert or something?’ she said.

‘Don’t be silly. I wasn’t following you, or anything like that. It’s just that I wanted a word with you last night, but after I’d heard you singing I didn’t have to. I just listened and then went away again.’

‘Listen.’ She left the pumps and faced me squarely across the bar. ‘For your information — and not that it’s any of your business — I didn’t get back till two in the morning last night. I was round at a friend’s place. So I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.’ She turned to her customer. ‘How many packets was it?’

‘Four’ll do. Thanks.’

‘I mean — you don’t even know where I live.’

‘Yes I do. You told me you lived right opposite here, above the video shop.’

She went to fetch the peanuts, and when she came back I continued: ‘I stood outside your window — it was open — and there was this woman singing. She was Scottish, she was singing a Scottish song.’ I voiced the awful question: ‘It was you, wasn’t it?’

The customer paid her, she took the money and before going over to the till she said, impatiently: ‘That’s the flat below mine. There are a couple of hippies in there. They’re always getting pissed and playing their bloody folk records at top volume. The whole building stinks of real ale and roll-ups. You’ve only given me twelve, here,’ she added, to the man in the suit.

‘Sorry.’

He gave her the extra money and I stood there, feeling more stupid than I’d felt in a long while.

‘Do you have to stand at the bar?’ she said. ‘It makes it hard to serve the other customers.’

There was a small table free in the corner, so I went and sat down. If I hadn’t arranged to meet Harry, I would have run out of the pub there and then. But it wasn’t just that I had made a fool of myself in front of Karla: that was bad enough, but what really shocked me was the light it threw on my behaviour yesterday. Was my commitment to Madeline really that feeble? Was I really so lazy about putting any work into that relationship? We had had one little argument — our first genuine argument for months — and instead of following her and attempting to resolve the issue I had gone off on my own, full of self-pity, got drunk, behaved like an idiot in Samson’s, and then gone to eavesdrop outside the flat of another woman, someone I had barely met but for whom I had felt, the last time I saw her, a vague physical attraction. It was pathetic. No wonder Madeline had been angry with me. Somehow or other, I was going to have to get back in touch with her and make a big effort: some gesture — a present, perhaps — flamboyant but sincere, which would convince Madeline once and for all that I was in earnest about her.

I put this proposition to Harry, after he had arrived and I had shown him the record (which gave him considerable satisfaction).

‘What was this argument about, exactly?’ he asked. He seemed a bit nervous talking about it, because affairs of the heart weren’t his strong point, and besides (as I think I mentioned) I had never spoken to him about Madeline before.

‘Well, I don’t really know. That’s the problem. She was late arriving, and we quarrelled about that a bit. Then things got even worse and I asked her if something was the matter and she said she wanted… a change.’

‘What sort of change?’

‘A change in the relationship.’

Harry frowned.

‘What sort of change in the relationship?’

‘I don’t know, do I? If I knew that, then I wouldn’t be asking you about it.’

I sipped my Becks angrily while Harry sat there looking sheepish. Finally he said: ‘Perhaps she wants you to get married.’

I looked at him in astonishment.

‘What?’

‘Perhaps that’s what she meant, when she said she wanted a change. Perhaps she meant… marriage.’

I considered this for a moment.

‘Are you serious?’

‘It’s just a thought. I don’t know much about these things.’

After a pause, I said, ‘She would have said so, wouldn’t she, if that’s what she meant?’

Harry shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Women are funny about things like that.’

I shook my head. ‘No, it’s ridiculous. She must have meant something else.’

‘Like what?’

‘Well…’ No alternative suggested itself to me. ‘But that’s crazy — I mean, I’m not in a position to marry her.’

‘True. But that’s not to stop you asking. She might just want that feeling of, you know, security.’

I was still trying to come to terms with this suggestion when I heard Karla’s peremptory voice behind me.

‘Excuse me, would you?’

She wanted to wipe our table down, and the record was in the way. I removed it, she gave the table a quick, careless wipe with a damp cloth, and left without saying anything else. A distinct chill remained after she’d gone.

‘I thought you were quite friendly with her,’ said Harry.

‘Oh, she’s just busy tonight, that’s all.’

I lapsed into silence again, and when Harry next spoke, his tone was gloomy.

‘I’ve been listening to the tape we made on Tuesday.’

‘And?’

He shook his head meaningfully.

‘As bad as that?’

‘I think we’d be wasting time and money if we tried to send it off to anybody.’

I sighed. ‘I knew we should have done a different song.’

I was just fishing for a compliment here, and he duly took the bait.

‘It’s not the song. It’s a great song. But the whole thing doesn’t gel: it sounds a mess. Perhaps we didn’t have enough time to rehearse it.’ Looking forlornly into the middle distance, he said, ‘Shit. I really did want this one to work, too.’ He drained off the last of his beer. ‘We’re in a mess, Bill, we really are.’

*

I was in a mess, too. For the second night in a row, I was drunk. Even though Harry had been with me this time, it was a joyless experience. When I got back to the flat, shortly after midnight, I could hardly fit my key into the lock, and I was conscious of making an enormous amount of noise as I clattered around and started to run the bath. There was no sound from Tina’s room, and her door was firmly closed. Perhaps she’d gone to work after all. I pushed the door open and looked in: after a few seconds, I could make out her sleeping body. She was breathing deeply and lying on her side. Everything seemed all right.

They’re good things, baths. You can get a lot done in a bath, in my experience. Thinking, I mean. It was while I was in the bath that night that I had my brainwave, and the two problems I had been discussing with Harry — the problem with Madeline, and the problem with our tape — suddenly cohered: it seemed a sort of natural miracle, as when two elements react together to form a completely new compound.

It wasn’t by means of a conscious thought-process, either. I was singing the tune to myself in the bath, the tune of ‘Stranger in a Foreign Land’: only where I should have been singing the words ‘Now and then’, at the beginning of the verse, I was singing ‘Madeline’ instead. It seemed to fit perfectly. And all at once I thought — well, it would only take a few more changes, and the whole song could be about her. Better still, it could be for her. And what about that line — ‘When I’m down, will you carry me?’ There was something else, surely, that was crying out to be sung there: ‘Madeline — will you marry me?’

A marriage proposal in the form of a song. Words and music entirely by myself. If Harry was right, and this was what Madeline had really been trying to tell me that evening, how could she possibly resist such a novel approach? What better way, not only to bring about a reconciliation, but to put everything on an entirely new footing? It had been music which had brought us together in the first place, so it was only right that it should be music — my music — which should heal this temporary rift and ensure that nothing like it would ever happen again.

Five minutes later, still wet from the bath, I was telephoning Harry.

‘Bill, it’s nearly one o’clock,’ he said, in a voice heavy with sleep. ‘This had better be important.’

‘I’ve been thinking,’ I said. ‘It’s not too late to do something about that song. I’m going to write some new words and we can record the whole thing again.’ There was silence from his end. ‘Well?’

‘I can’t see Martin and Jake jumping at that idea, to be honest.’

‘Never mind about them, we could do it ourselves — just you and me. Look, I can come over tomorrow and we can write a drum pattern together on your machine. Then we can take it into the studio on Sunday and get it all done in less than four hours. I’m sure of it.’

‘What about the guitar part?’

‘You can do that. Let’s face it, Harry, you’re better than Martin anyway.’

He went silent again, and I could tell that he was coming round to the idea.

‘New words, you say?’

‘Yes. New words. Don’t worry about those. Leave those to me.’

*

It was now early December, 1988: a time of bleak and perfunctory afternoons and long dark evenings. Winter is a bad time to be in London, even a mild winter like this one. Some people manage to make themselves comfortable: I could imagine, for instance, that for Mrs Gordon, tucked up between linen sheets in her Kensington mansion, with Madeline always on call to bring her tea and buttered toast at the touch of a bell, the passing of the seasons might have made very little difference. It was easy to forget, at times, that such people existed and that such lives were lived. I had little to complain about, myself. I had a roof over my head and a cheap one at that; a couple of miles away, men and women were sleeping in cardboard boxes under Waterloo bridge. So it wasn’t a sense of material hardship which made me shiver and ache for better things, as I battled against the wind on my way to the studio through the grounds of Guy’s Hospital (the coldest and windiest place in London). It was four o’clock on a Sunday afternoon, the world was getting dark, and I tried to promise myself that there would not be many more afternoons like this, afternoons when I would stagger along with my keyboard under my arm from one hopeless engagement to another, the ambition which was meant to be driving me on nothing but a memory, lodged in my brain like a dead weight. All that would change. Not that I thought the tape we were about to make would ever impress a record company (even if it got as far as one): I had more or less given up on The Alaska Factory. But I was confident of the impression it would make on Madeline; and confident, too, that if I had before me the prospect of marrying her, I would feel a new sense of responsibility which might force me to think harder and more intelligently about my career.

Funnily enough, I look back on that recording session with some fondness. The fact that Jake and Martin weren’t there, and knew nothing about it, put us in a conspiratorial mood and infected the whole occasion with a sort of cheerfulness which I didn’t normally associate with Thorn Bird Studios. The only real argument we had was at the very beginning, over the changes I had made to the lyrics. At first Harry couldn’t believe I was being serious, but I pointed out to him that it was his idea that I should propose to Madeline, originally, and besides, he had to admit that in this version the song was definitely more memorable.

For instance, the second half now went like this:

Madeline

You look at me without a murmur

The time has come

To make the bond between us firmer

I’ll give you every token

Precious gifts from out of Araby

Why am I heartbroken?

Oh Madeline, will you marry me?

Harry shook his head.

‘I can’t sing this,’ he kept saying. ‘I don’t even know the woman.’

All the same, I soon talked him round to it.

As usual we got precious little joy out of Vincent. I suppose it was our fault for antagonizing him to start with. I hadn’t been able to resist bringing the Dwarves of Death record along with me, just to prove that he had been wrong. His initial reaction had been one of surly disbelief; he took the record off me and said that he wanted to look at it more closely. I hate people who can’t bear to lose an argument. After that he didn’t talk to us much, just sat in the control booth reading a back issue of Midi Mania while making occasional adjustments to the faders. At the end, when we asked him how it had sounded, he said: ‘Brilliant. I should get on the phone to EMI right away, if I was you. Which one of you’s going to have the golden disc on his bedroom wall, then? Or do you both share the same bedroom, eh? Har, har, har!’

Then a strange thing happened: when we asked him to give us the record back, he couldn’t find it. He claimed to have taken it upstairs with him and left it on his desk, and now it had disappeared.

‘Typical!’ he said. ‘I should know better than to leave anything lying around in this place. The kind of low-life I get in here, they’re no better than criminals, most of them.’

‘Look, that wasn’t even my record,’ I said. ‘It belonged to a friend of mine. And it’s extremely rare.’

I was appalled to think what Derek might say when I told him that I’d lost it. Nevertheless, Vincent was blithely unapologetic, and to make things even worse he charged us twice as much for the session as we had been expecting.

‘Your manager didn’t tell me anything about this,’ he said, ‘so I’m going to have to charge you normal rates.’

‘The man’s a total bastard,’ said Harry, as we sat, a few minutes later, in a café near London Bridge station, eating sausage and chips. ‘I reckon he stole that record himself. He probably knows how much it’s worth on the collectors’ market.’

I nodded, and chased a recalcitrant baked bean around my plate before saying, ‘It makes you wonder about Chester a bit, doesn’t it?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, how come Chester manages to get on with him? How do you come to have such a good business arrangement with a man like that?’

‘That’s the sign of a good manager, though, isn’t it? Being able to get on the right side of different sorts of people.’

I considered this and shook my head.

‘No, there’s more to it than that.’ I tapped my fork against the table in frustration. ‘There’s something going on at that place, and I don’t know what it is. You know Karla, the woman behind the bar at The White Goat?’

‘Yes?’

‘She doesn’t trust Chester. She says she sees him there all the time, with all sorts of strange people. And last Sunday, just after we’d all had that… discussion, this bloke came in. Paisley, his name was — he’s the lead singer with this other band that Chester manages. And he was desperate for a fix or something. In the end they went off together.’

‘You think Chester was supplying him?’

‘Maybe. And if Chester’s involved in all that scene, what about Vincent? Where does he come in?’

‘Don’t get carried away, Bill. Vincent’s just a mean-minded little bastard, that’s all. I don’t think he’s up to anything shady.’

‘So what does he keep in Studio B? You’re not telling me that’s really a rehearsal room. Nobody’s allowed to go near the place.’

Harry resumed his eating. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘You’ve lost me.’

I leant forward, and said in an urgent whisper: ‘I heard voices behind that door, Harry. I’m sure of it.’

‘If you ask me, you’re letting your imagination get the better of you. In any case it’s none of your business, and the less I know about what that guy gets up to in his spare time, the happier I’ll be. At the moment, I’m more interested in this.’

From his coat pocket, he brought out the spool of tape containing the new version of ‘Madeline (Stranger in a Foreign Land)’.

I smiled.

‘How do you think it went?’

‘Pretty good. Pretty bloody good. Probably the best thing we’ve done.’

I thought so too, but it was reassuring to have it confirmed. Using the drum machine had enabled us to create, at last, exactly the rhythm we wanted, with some extra effects like shakers and handclaps, and Harry had added a funky little guitar pattern which went against the basic drumbeat: it gave the whole song a far busier and more purposeful feel. The new words I had written were easier to sing, and he had slightly altered the vocal part anyway to bring it within his range. It was an enormous improvement on our other effort.

‘I’ll buy some tapes tomorrow and get about a dozen copies done,’ he said. ‘I’ve already been to see a printer about the inlay cards. He said I could pick them up tomorrow.’

‘What did you put on them?’

‘I just said who was in the band, and I credited Vincent as producer, and I gave a phone number.’

‘Whose phone number?’

‘Yours. You’re the one with the answering machine.’

‘Fair enough. I’d like a couple of copies as soon as possible, then.’

‘A couple?’

‘Well, one for me, and one…’

‘Yes?’

I didn’t bother to spell it out, and Harry was too nice to want to tease me about it. All he said, with a friendly smile, was ‘Good luck.’

*

It was not quite midnight, this time, when I got back to the flat, and Tina was awake for once. There was a light coming from the kitchen, where she was sitting at the table with her back to the door.

‘Hello,’ I said, agreeably surprised.

She answered, ‘Hello, William,’ without looking round. ‘I was just going to write you a note, only now I needn’t bother.’

‘Oh. Anything important?’

‘Only to say that you still owe me for rent, and that I’d drunk some of your milk. You don’t mind, do you?’

‘No, not at all.’

It was the first time we had spoken for weeks. It seemed absurd that we should have so little to say to each other.

‘Is Pedro coming round tonight?’ I asked.

‘He’s already been.’

‘Oh.’

Tina got up, and with a slow, careful movement she pulled her green cotton dressing-gown tightly around her.

‘I’m going to bed.’

She walked quickly past me, and neither of us said good night. Her face was badly bruised, her throat red with finger marks.