They caught the announcement on the news, Mum said, on a twenty-two inch screen in the window of Jerry Dickson’s TV & Radio Hire (in Medlar Lane, just off the High Street, as was), as they crossed the road on their way up to the sports centre.
She said it took less than twenty minutes to get home at a run and, though Granddad never approved of modern music in general, and men with hair below their ears in particular, parental arguments and work commitments alike got swept aside with the full force of inconsolable, desperate teenage tears. The three of them leapt aboard the train from Bishop’s Stortford within the hour, more or less, and by half past four that afternoon, they’d become part of the throng that flowed into Gloucester station. People, mostly girls, pooled for taxis, buses or sympathetic local drivers to take them to the hamlet of Rodley and the renovated sloop captain’s house with electric gates that lay between it and a muddy, shallow strip of the Severn.
The TV reports soon showed drifts of limp flowers and pale faces, clustered in silent despair at the end of the driveway. Mum said the most striking thing was the quiet. Even when the rain came, a real downpour, the first breakthrough rainfall of that drought year, they never really noticed it, just standing, watching the cars come and go, uniformed officers redundant in the damp stillness and the blue lights of panda cars reflecting in puddles.
At least, that’s how she told it.
Brent had been idolised enough—and the transport, in those years of three-day weeks and power cuts, was bad enough—for the vigil to last days, with more people arriving well into the night. By dusk, Mum said the rock star death reportage, moving from full flow to torrent, suggested Brent died in his bathroom, encouraging the assumption that a drug binge had ended finally and messily on the tiles.
She said it took less than twenty minutes to get home at a run and, though Granddad never approved of modern music in general, and men with hair below their ears in particular, parental arguments and work commitments alike got swept aside with the full force of inconsolable, desperate teenage tears. The three of them leapt aboard the train from Bishop’s Stortford within the hour, more or less, and by half past four that afternoon, they’d become part of the throng that flowed into Gloucester station. People, mostly girls, pooled for taxis, buses or sympathetic local drivers to take them to the hamlet of Rodley and the renovated sloop captain’s house with electric gates that lay between it and a muddy, shallow strip of the Severn.
The TV reports soon showed drifts of limp flowers and pale faces, clustered in silent despair at the end of the driveway. Mum said the most striking thing was the quiet. Even when the rain came, a real downpour, the first breakthrough rainfall of that drought year, they never really noticed it, just standing, watching the cars come and go, uniformed officers redundant in the damp stillness and the blue lights of panda cars reflecting in puddles.
At least, that’s how she told it.
Brent had been idolised enough—and the transport, in those years of three-day weeks and power cuts, was bad enough—for the vigil to last days, with more people arriving well into the night. By dusk, Mum said the rock star death reportage, moving from full flow to torrent, suggested Brent died in his bathroom, encouraging the assumption that a drug binge had ended finally and messily on the tiles.
The Sun proclaimed, by the evening edition, although they later apologised and retracted the allegation. The Times carried a discreet four-line obituary on page five, and even The Express took a day off from their anti-immigration bashing of the ‘4-star Malawi Asians’ to run a condescending opinion piece or two. Mum and Auntie Jan had all the cuttings, carefully pasted into the sad final pages of their Damon Brent scrapbook.
The initial shock of it soon got subsumed by the scandal of drug investigations and the clamour of the tabloids preaching, while simultaneously dishing out their column inches to ‘insider’ exposés from guests and former friends of the deceased. Worse—or luckily, depending I suppose on what kind of PR team you had—there had been a party at the house the night before and, even as the police carted Brent out in a body bag, nearly two dozen rock and pop luminaries of the day were being expected to give urine samples and full witness statements.
Of course, the inquest quashed much of this ghoulish fun by establishing that Brent, although well under the influence of both drink and drugs, had merely slipped, fallen, and hit his head. The whole thing was chalked up as a stupid accident, the misplacement of foot on soap and an advertisement to the young to stay clean. It crashed his image somehow, wrecking any chance of rock martyrdom. Shunned and embarrassed, Brother Rush split before Christmas, their music fell from fashion, and Damon Brent’s death, if at all remembered, simply became an unfortunate and foolish codicil to a life and a career cut short.
The CD had played on while I thought and now a live cut of that classic standard Sit Tight, Baby twisted out of the speakers, the sound of the band broader and harder over the top of a screaming audience. Mum always said how incredible Brother Rush were live. Brent’s voice vibrated in the air, shining as the chords tumbled around him like sweaty roses.
She got a face like the Mona Lisa / (Sit tight, baby)
But she ain’t smilin’ / And I can’t see her….
A strident guitar lick topped the four-four bass in a drawn-out crescendo, pierced by the characteristic Damon Brent battle cry: the sound of a vibrato bar pushed to the limits and a jubilant, orgiastic ‘Yeeeeeeaaaaahhhh’ closing in a breathy leer right up against the microphone. You heard it on nearly the all the live sets, but it vanished in studio recordings, somewhere in amongst the mumbling and the synthesisers.
“Not bad for a man with a dodgy perm and lurex trousers,” I murmured, taking off my glasses to rub eyes bees-winged enough to be buzzing.
“Well that’s charming,” he said. “Thank you very much.”
I wished, in a way, that I’d been having weird experiences for months before. It might have proved me crazy, but—knocking pipes, catching strange reflections in the mirror, hearing things on the wind—I hadn’t had any of that. That’s what made it so odd. So believable.
So clear.
I blinked at the papers in front of me. They still lay there innocently, black-and-white photo repros and colour plates, page after page of my chicken scratch notes. My wineglass and my coffee cup to the side. The computer screen flipped to its screensaver. Very retro toasters flapped through endless space.
I’d have to turn around eventually. I tried to picture the worst possible thing I could see and, considering that, what I saw wasn’t half as bad as it could have been.
He sat…no, that wasn’t the right word. Nobody could just sit like that. He sprawled, but in an extremely stylish way, on the window seat, one knee drawn up with his right arm propped carelessly across it, his foot tracing circles on the sheepskin rug and a cigarette smouldering in his left hand, threatening to deposit a pillar of ash on his bright purple loon pants.
It was pitch dark outside. I hadn’t bothered to draw the curtains; the window wasn’t really overlooked, so I rarely did and, in any case, I liked the moonlight. The dim tanné glow of streetlamps further down the road gave the blackness a warm edge, backlit him with an odd, pale aura against the dark glass. In which he had no reflection. He looked out, as if trying to see the sea. You couldn’t, not at that angle and not at this time of night. Nothing but the smudges of pavements seeming wet under the lamplight and, in very late or very quiet moments, the distant sound of the waves, somewhere in the blackness beyond.
I’d seen Mum’s famous scrapbook more than once. Oh, the blond perm seemed a little more natural-looking and—apart from a lot of heavy, Theda Bara-style kohl—he had none of the stagy make-up he’d worn on half a dozen different album covers.
Definitely Damon Brent, though.
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