‘Where’s your horse?’ I said.
‘My horse is a white Ford Transit with a ladder on top,’ he said, and gave me his card:
Dick Turpin
The Highway Roofer
‘We’ve got it covered.’
‘Great,’ I said. ‘Next time I need a roof I’ll ring you up.’
‘I’m putting together a brochure,’ he said, ‘and I want to feature you in it.’
‘Wow,’ I said. ‘This could be my big break. Does that happen before or after you ask me up to see your roof tiles?’
‘Come on, do I look like that kind of guy?’
‘Yes.’ He looked like Jack the Lad with an indoor complexion even though he did outdoor work. His mouth was smiling but something about his eyes made me wonder if there was a peephole in the dressing-room wall. He was a big man with big strong hands. Like my stepfather who was always opening the door of my room without knocking. He’d managed to catch me in my underwear once or twice but he’d never got further than that. I’d been thinking it was high time I got a new roof over my head.
‘What I have in mind,’ said Jack the Roofing Lad, ‘is a back view of you climbing a ladder in a Dick Turpin T-shirt and a skirt a little shorter than the one you have on now.’
‘Cheeky,’ I said. ‘Do I get to show my face at all?’
‘Of course. When you reach the scaffolding you turn and smile and we’ll have a close-up with my message under it: FOR A ROOF YOU CAN LOOK UP TO, PHONE DICK TURPIN FOR A FREE ESTIMATE! There’s three hundred quid in it for you.’
So I did it, one thing led to another, and I very quickly got a new roof over my head. Dick got what my stepfather hadn’t and it was legal. He was not a gentleman in bed or out of it. He drank a lot of beer and he watched a lot of football, sometimes at our house with men from his crew who also drank a lot of beer, sometimes at other places. The house was nothing wonderful, a small brick end-of-terrace with two up and two down. With a leaky roof that he never got round to fixing. The Nectarines disbanded and there I was being some kind of housewife. It wasn’t quite my idea of getting out into the world.
It lasted almost a year and by that time Dick had knocked me about a few times too many with his big strong hands. He went off to work one rainy day when I was wishing he’d fall off a roof. He did and it killed him. My judgement has never been good but neither was his.
I wonder what Elias would think if I stopped being a mystery and told him just how risky it is to get too close to me. Stevo’s been OK so far but maybe he has nine lives. When I got back to my house after Django’s death I found this tiger-striped kitten in a basket on my doorstep. He looked up at me as if Django’s spirit had gone into him. I couldn’t give a cat his name so I named him after Stephane Grappelli.
If Elias were smart he’d find somebody safer to get mixed up with.
11 Anneliese Newman
24 January 2003. I don’t think of my daughters very often. Wherever they are, they have done all right, that I know. Sometimes I think of Elias because there are things I want to tell him. These things he knows maybe, maybe not.
Everything is twice itself, this I often think. Things are what they are every day, but then sometimes they are not. Sometimes I see people talking, crossing the road, running to catch a bus. Suddenly it is like TV with the sound turned off and I see that this is really Death dressing himself up as these people talking, crossing the road, running to catch a bus. So that is what is really happening, no?
But who am I that I should say this? My mind is like a top that spins crazily just before it falls over.
12 Elias Newman
24 January 2003. Sometimes I wonder if I am the sort of person who’s really suited to a career in medicine. My mind is subject to fits of strangeness; this morning coming to work I looked out of the bus window at people talking, crossing the road, running to catch the bus and I thought, all this is really only Death dressing himself up as people talking, crossing the road, running to catch the bus. Ought a doctor to see things in that way? But it’s not surprising that Death comes into my mind; I know quite a few people my age who are dead, even some younger than I. I do what I do and I advance in my profession but it could well be too late for any personal development, any future with a woman. I’m sure there are people who get all the way to the end of their lives and die without ever having been in love. Still, I do feel that connection with Christabel that was there even before we met. Did it will be?
13 Christabel Alderton
24 January 2003. The cyclops turned up in a dream last night. Staring at me through a clump of trees. Birches, thin scraggley ones. The ground was boggy, squelching under my feet and there was that hideous face gawking at me with its one staring eye and its disgusting little mouth saying something but I couldn’t hear what it was. ‘What?’ I said. ‘Are you the Erlking now?’ But it just kept moving its mouth and my own voice woke me up.
Adam Freund was Django’s father. Although I was sharing a bed with Sid Horstmann we hadn’t had sex since my last period and I was ovulating when I was with Adam. The band was back in London two days later and I never saw him again. When I found that I was pregnant I wondered how he’d feel about it if he knew. When we were together in that borrowed room, before he told me he was married, I knew that he was the right man for me. If he’d asked me to drop everything and go away with him I’d have done it. But as it was, even if I’d known where to reach him, what would have been the point? I used to lie in bed and grind my teeth thinking about it. If only he weren’t married!
Sid Horstmann was wrong for me but I was with him long enough for him to kill himself. Why did I take up with him? Working together and travelling together made it easier of course and he had had a sort of doomed air that attracted me. Did I think I could save him from whatever he was heading for? I know now that you can’t save anybody. He had a lot of talent and he wrote some good songs but he had black moods and fits of depression that weren’t helped by his drinking. Maybe I helped him over that balcony railing by getting bored with his need for special treatment. It would have been better for both of us if I’d said no the first time he wanted to get a leg over.
My night with Adam was in 1988. In 1990 Mobile Mortuary were back in Vienna and Sayings of Confucius were our support band again. Adam wasn’t with them. ‘He’s dead,’ they told me. ‘We were in Hamburg setting up for a gig at Onkel Po’s Carnegie Hall and the light rig fell on him.’ So he wasn’t married any more but he wasn’t available. When Django was three I told him about it and some time after that he showed me a drawing of a man. It was done the way little kids draw people, a big head with arms and legs growing out of it. Big smile on the man’s face and he was holding a guitar.
‘Who’s that?’ I said.
Django said, ‘Dad. He played me a song.’
‘In a dream?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you remember how it went?’
‘Yes.’
‘Can you hum it?’