And so Clara told him everything.
And Keith listened to this everything with a perplexed expression on his normally cheery chops. And when Clara had done with the telling of everything, he reclined back in the Parker Knoll Recliner [19] and said, ‘By golly, by gosh.’
‘By what?’
‘By golly?’
‘Golly, where?’
‘Not here.’ And husband Keith patted the wrist of his wife and told her that this was a right old pickle, as well as being a fine kettle of fish and a rum one, to be sure. And then he took to thinking. And then he said, ‘Wait here.’
And he went upstairs and rummaged about. And then he returned, bearing in his hands his old service revolver, which he had been allowed to keep at the end of the Second World War, as a gift from a grateful officer-in-command for the many valorous deeds that the then Private Keith had performed that were above and beyond the call of duty. And he showed this service revolver to his wife.
And his wife was further alarmed by this display of hand armament. Although also strangely comforted. And she asked her husband Keith what his intentions were concerning the deployment of this weapon.
And husband Keith twirled it upon his finger, as John Wayne was wont to do in the movies. And he told his wife that it would put an end to their particular problems.
And then he aimed it at Clara’s head and pulled the trigger.
And the last thing that she noticed, before all-encompassing blackness closed in about her, was that the raised arm of her husband cast two shadows.
And Neil dipped once more into the strawberry bowl.
‘No, no, no,’ I said to Neil. ‘Although very good in an Outer Limits kind of a way, that still doesn’t explain Club Twenty-Seven’s Shadow Night. Or much else when it comes right down to it.’
‘Well, there is another version,’ said Neil, who now seemed to be growing rather animated.
Clara noticed that double shadow as her husband raised that gun. And she screamed once more in that high soprano, which had her husband flinching. And Clara wrestled away that gun and ran in fear of her life, far away from Croydon, and was never seen again.
And Neil had one more strawberry and great big dippings did.
‘I will punch you, Neil,’ I told him. ‘And if not me, then Andy will.’
‘I’ll punch him anyway, if you want,’ said Andy. Who, I noticed, was dressed in the police uniform of one of New York’s Finest.
‘I’ll have him killed,’ said Toby.
And Neil continued with haste.
She left England (Neil continued, with haste). Jumped a liner to New York. Submerged herself into the New York scene and wrote about her experiences in the Underground Press. You’ll find a lot of her stuff if you flick through back issues of Flaky Fruitcake Today magazine. She played the part of the mad old bag lady.
‘Hold on there,’ I said to Neil. ‘Mad old bag lady?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Neil. ‘This all happened back in the nineteen-thirties. ’
‘They didn’t have Ford Sierras in the nineteen-thirties,’ said Toby, who already had several cars of his own.
‘They did in Croydon,’ said Neil.
‘And what about the doctor who looked like Elvis?’ said Andy.
‘I think she added that into the story later,’ said Neil. ‘She met the real Elvis, you see, and realised that he was the dead spit of the doctor that she had met twenty years before. Which is kind of weird, isn’t it?’
Andy grunted that it was and had another strawberry.
And Neil continued, ‘So Clara became an outsider, an eccentric, a bogus bag lady, to avoid the attentions of the Men from the Ministry. But she could see who was who. And she published her findings in all kinds of off-the-wall publications. And some folk took her seriously, these folk being those whose own mental-meshes were either damaged, or missing.’
‘And Shadow Night at Club Twenty-Seven?’ I asked.
‘She founded Club Twenty-Seven,’ said Neil, ‘as a means of Purging the Taint.’
And I knew that expression. I had heard it used to describe what went on when the helicopter gunships strafed that Hanwell cemetery.
‘How does this work?’ I asked Neil.
‘They are lured into the club,’ said Neil, ‘the others, those casters of the double shadow. They are reanimated corpses, you see. Clara eventually figured it all out. They have their own shadow, but also another – the shadow of the ungodly thing that has been inflicted into them. Shadow Night sorts them out.’
‘How?’ I enquired. Although, in truth, I wasn’t particularly caring too much by then, because I had by that point eaten my way through about half a pound of snowily dusted strawberries.
‘Well, you didn’t know what Shadow Night meant until I explained it to you,’ said Neil. ‘So neither do they, and no one explains it to them. They come into the club, looking for a good time, but they never leave. There’s a hotel over on the West Coast, also founded by Clara, where the same thing goes on.’
‘The Hotel California?’ I said.
‘You know of it?’
‘Only a lucky guess.’
‘So they get exterminated. And it’s really entertaining to watch, apparently.’
I registered the looks upon the faces of the other guys in the band. Apart from Toby, who appeared altogether keen, the other guys, even though now buoyed-up considerably by copious quantities of coke, didn’t look altogether enthusiastic.
‘It’s one of those rich people things,’ Neil explained. ‘Those exclusive things that only the rich are privy to. We can watch because we are rock musicians. I’m up for it – what about the rest of you?’
‘How do they do the actual butchering?’ Andy asked.
‘I think you can have your choice of weapons.’
‘What? ’ I said to Neil. ‘What did you say?’
‘Oh, I forgot to mention that. If you bung a contribution into the Extermination of the Undead Fund, you can butcher one of the blighters yourself. With your choice of weapons.’
I did shakings of my head. This was all a bit sudden. And a bit unexpected.
‘Well, I’m up for it,’ said Toby. ‘Can I choose one of those General Electric miniguns? They look like a lot of fun.’
‘Well, I’m not up for it,’ said Rob. ‘It all sounds most dubious to me. What if they’re not undead? And frankly I don’t think I believe in the concept of the undead. It sounds rather cheesy to me. You might kill some innocent party instead.’
And so we did not attend Shadow Night. It was a group decision. A band decision. And I for one am glad that we took it. It wouldn’t have been right if we’d got involved in something like that and butchered an innocent party.
So we all went back to the hotel and to our original plan for the evening: to live the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle and set the standard by which other rock bands would be judged in years to come.
Yes, follow our original plan.
And eat one of the groupies.
37
We didn’t eat all of the groupie.
We left the trotters and the snout.
I really took to New York, which, I learned, was so good they had named it twice. It was midsummer, but as this was New York, it was snowing heavily and folk were skating about on various outdoor ice rinks. All the women looked like Barbra Streisand and the blokes like Elliott Gould. Which meant very little to me, because I was English.
I had no idea just how much kudos being English held in America. Folk just ‘love that English accent’, and we were asked repeatedly whether we owned bowler hats and regularly had the Queen round to tea. Which was handy for Toby because, apparently, he did!
This was nineteen sixty-nine and New York was in the throes of a big Jewish craze. Being Jewish was the in thing and people who did not look even the remotest bit Jewish were adopting yarmulkes and Jewish accents, greeting each other with oy veys and catching gefilte fish. The year before it had been fashionable to be Irish. And in the early seventies you weren’t anyone in New York if you weren’t black and didn’t sport an afro. I don’t know what the present fashion is in New York, but I have heard talk of cross-dressing.