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  LITTLE GOD BLUES

  A novel by

  Jeffrey M Anderson

  Published by Iken Press

  ISBN: 978-0-9909795-0-0

  Copyright © Jeffrey M Anderson, 2014

  Visit Jeffrey M Anderson’s official website for the latest news, book details, and other information

  e-book formatting by Guido Henkel

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, places and events are products of the author’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission, except in the case of brief quotes embodied in reviews. The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. No part of this book may be scanned, uploaded or distributed via the internet or any other means, electronic or print, without the author’s permission.

  Part I

  CHAPTER 1

  Two months ago this sweep of cobblestones was a possible crime scene: a forensic team sifting the area for clues; a photographer working the angles; a medical official examining the body for signs of external injuries, any clues to the cause of death. The paramedics would have been hovering nearby with the body bag, their ambulance and three police cars bracketing the scene. All pre-dawn one Friday morning in early October.

  Now, in late November, I stood in that same London alley, the place where the object of all that police attention, my best friend Kirk Howell, had died. It was see-your-breath cold, the drizzle thickening towards sleet as I stood in this closed-off world of wet cobblestones and brick, buried between lines of grand Regency buildings.

  I tried to imagine Kirk’s final steps. He had to have been disoriented to have come down this remote, dead-end lane at night. I had only ever seen him sharp and connected to the world. The man, my friend—brilliant, provocative, restless—was coming back to me. The adrenalin-charged ride we’d been on; our fervent yet essentially good-natured co-leadership of the band; the wild theories and sardonic comments; my songs, his, and how hard we worked to make them our songs; his pranks; our in-jokes. How I’d spent the last ten years playing off him—like tennis against a wall. First there was no ball; now, no wall.

  I knelt down without thinking of kneeling. I made the sign of the cross—something I hadn’t done since I was eleven, two decades ago now, when my father forced me to attend Russian Orthodox Church to learn his language.

  Still kneeling, my knee wet, I strained for any psychic echo or rattle of my friend, my musical mentor, alter ego, lead guitar of the now-defunct Eyebeams. How did he face his death? Was there a point, as he sunk in front of these black garage doors, when he knew he was never getting up again? Kirk had completed two years of med school, considered himself a doctor. Would he have been able to diagnose the cerebral hemorrhage that killed him? It was flat-out impossible that a man who hesitated to take an aspirin could have ingested cocaine and meth. But you had to assume the coroner was not mistaken. It didn’t make any sense.

  The insistent yee-yaw, yee-yaw of an approaching police siren echoed down the stone and brick passageway, cruelly taunting my already edgy mood.

  It was just as hard to leave now as it had been at Kirk’s viewing at the funeral home in San Francisco. Back then, as I had looked down on that serene face, pale against the white satin lining of the casket, I had been captured by that patented half-smirk, as if Kirk was waiting for another of his pranks to present itself, so he could rise up and give me the full smirk. Now, it was an itching need to find any hint of Kirk at all, a few lingering atoms of his presence here.

  Finally, I managed to walk away. I told myself I could always come back, suspecting I never would. This visit wasn’t just another item in my sketchy to-do list, I realized. It was why I’d come six thousand miles.

  As my driver, Frank, took me back to my Zen and Armani hotel with its slatted wooden blinds, platform bed, and black lacquered furniture, I balked. I didn’t want to return to default mode: front man on tour. It was easy; it was what I knew. Now it felt elegantly tiresome. I needed to strike out on my own, create some private space to mull things over. Figure out what I had to take forward and what direction that could be. And ruminate over the impossible conjunction of Kirk and drugs. It felt right that I looked into it; I had to figure out how to do that, or where to start.

  Occasionally, I blurt out words, a straight shot from some other part of me. Maybe it comes from being a songwriter, part of which is a constant striving to pick up faint and erratic signals, interior and exterior. Maybe it comes from the Eyebeams and our improv spirit. I said, “Frank, I need an apartment. Nothing fancy.”

  Frank said, “Know just the place, don’t I? Ten a.m. tomorrow. Have your kit ready.”

  CHAPTER 2

  My visit to the lane was on my third day in London. Now, the fourth, I sat at a dining room table in an anonymous London flat, my guitar case and kicked-off boots out of place among the lithographs of hunting scenes and eighteenth century river views. I was nursing the espresso I had made in the Eurokitchen full of pint-sized appliances, jotting down ideas for songs. My life had jumped its rails: only yesterday I had been in hyper-transient touring mode, half the time having to remind myself what city I was in. Now, I was a resident, a life that felt unexpectedly comfortable. I had just returned from a long, seemingly familiar, walk on Hampstead Heath (giving the musty rooms time to air out). Surely I had been living in this flat for a lot longer than five hours.

  My jump to temporary London resident had started in that lane—what I’ve come to think of as Kirk’s Last Stand. As I sat in the back of Frank’s silver Mercedes—Frank is Jack Ross’ driver, and Jack is the London agent who works with Lenny Fox, our LA one—the scene worked in me. My overall plan, apart from the Last Stand and a general need to move, had been to spend a week away from home and, by stepping back, create a wider perspective. My gig as Eyebeams front man was over. My former girlfriend had my Noe Valley house, renting it with a book of guilt coupons. I had been staying out by the ocean with Hassan, our drummer. He and Kirk had been the substance-free axis of our band. That had been the first step in distancing myself from friends and associates all too eager to share the next chemically-induced epiphany. I had leaned on drugs during that last difficult year of keeping the band going, then had climbed out of that habit rung by rung. But my nature, ever impulsive, meant one slip was back to the bottom. I was beginning to realize that there was no middle ground between all and nothing at all.

  In the late afternoon of my first full day in my new digs, I was noodling on my guitar and thinking about this new life as a London resident. When was the last time I had made a bed, cooked for myself, made coffee even? I felt comfortable (except it still hadn’t warmed up enough), almost as if I had merged with a clone who had never been a rock singer, who had finished college and been blown by the winds of chance to this far shore. No doubt the novelty would wear off in weeks, maybe months, and I would be on a plane home. For now, though, I felt unexpectedly settled here.

  My stay was more an improvised house-sit than a rental: there had been no effort to de-personalize it from the distinct character and tastes of its owner, Sir Clive Wormsleigh, a business friend of Jack Ross’. I was living someone else’s life, using—or purposely ignoring—his things, making mental notes about replacing the coffee, sugar, the last of his antiseptic gel (a cut). His flat was filled with traces of his heritage. Old sepia photos of stern-looking couples. An aerial shot of a large building and grounds. No end of personal correspondence on the desk in the second bedroom. I tried not to open drawers unless I
had to.

  Then the music began in the flat below me. The bass line, all I could hear, might have been Cash, our bass. Then the volume went way up. Hell, it was us. Our last album, Back to Blank. And I had been hoping for anonymity in this pocket of London’s sprawl.

  I went down and knocked between tracks, more curious than bothered about the noise. The door opened to reveal a girl, early teens, a boyish build, tall, with auburn hair cut severely at mid-neck. I gave her my name and apartment number. She introduced herself as Natalie between leisurely pulls on her cigarette, a practiced ease in the way she angled it away from me. Another girl sat on the couch; blond, with a cool, fierce glow to her British Barbie face—nose more sharply ridged than pug. She adjusted something about her hair, a little too quickly, and shot me an assessing yet dismissive smile, like a bored divorcee incapable of surprise. Seen it all, see? You wondered what chance a teenage boy had with a girl like this.

  “So…” Natalie said. Clearly, my name hadn’t registered.

  When you’re in a rock band, teenage girls are lethal. Screaming, giggling, taunting you with their precocious come-ons. There is absolutely nothing good that can come from their proximity. I’d had my run-ins, back in the early days before we’d learned to seal off hotel floors. Even then there were always a few resourceful ones. Now, however, I was a retired rock dude, an espresso-sipping scribe.

  “Could you turn that down for a minute?” I asked, while on the stereo I sang “Sky only means a long way to fall.” An eerie duet.

  Natalie turned to the blond. “Nicky,” she said with a sigh.

  Nicky shrugged, then got up wearily and ambled over to the stereo. She scooped a gym bag off the floor and announced, “I’m off to my ballet class,” as if she may as well, as long as she was up—her life a quest for the most efficient use of her limited energy. She paused at the door, bag on her cocked shoulder, and gave me an indecent, lascivious once-over. Shouldn’t these kids have childhoods?

  Natalie frowned, clearly annoyed. I had disrupted some schoolgirl intrigue, whatever that could be.

  “That music—” I said.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Natalie interrupted. “Look, I rang 5B and nobody answered, okay? The Mortimers are at work. So…‌so, okay, I apologize.” She took a long drag, exhaled it to the side in a smooth rush.

  She was lying about 5B; I let that pass. “This is your type of music?” I asked.

  “No way! I mean, it’s all right, but…” Here she made a hand-fluttering gesture.

  “Not your generation,” I said, mostly to myself.

  “Ye-ahh. That’s what I don’t get. I mean, what’s my mum doing with stuff like this?” She walked back into the room and tapped her cigarette against a plastic snack container on the coffee table. “Nicky put it on. I don’t think of music…‌here.”

  Our album was winding along in the background. Kirk’s song “Piece Of A Scream” was in full flood. Soon it would be my turn with “Fill It ‘Til It Cracks.”

  “That music…‌it’s the Eyebeams.”

  “Are you coming in?” She faced me now, standing in front of a yellow sofa, left hand in her back pocket.

  “No, thanks.” We stood there for a long moment. “The Eyebeams is my band. I mean, what are the chances?”

  “This is your music?” She managed to pack that “your” with enough doubt to acquit a murder suspect.

  I shrugged. What did I care whether she believed me or not?

  She ran over to the stereo rack, her tomboy figure in low cut jeans a tad ungainly, and retrieved the CD cover from the cabinet. She read, “Jim Shalabon, lead vocals, rhythm guitar. That’s you, right?”

  “You left out harmonica.”

  Natalie stood lost in thought. “But it doesn’t make sense. My mother? No way this is her music. Mum doesn’t even like rock.” She flitted her sharp, blue-gray eyes to mine. “There’s only one reason she’d buy this. One of her campaigns.” She turned her back to me and buried her cigarette with a hiss in the plastic container.

  “Campaigns?”

  She squared to me. “If Mum fancied a man she was not, like, all that shy about it. But you?”

  “Me? I just got here.” The romantic forays of Natalie’s mother were not a subject I wanted to get into. I got my keys out, played with the metal icon on the fob. Aston Martin.

  “Sometimes I come here and I sit in her flat. I pretend she’s just down the hall, that any minute she’ll walk in.”

  “You don’t live here?”

  “No one lives here.” She said this as if naming the title of a book, some long saga that ended—from her abrupt tone—badly.

  This required delicacy, not my strongest suit. While I was working on a way forward, she continued. “Mum’s disappeared.”

  “Disappeared?”

  “Mum hasn’t been…‌around since the middle of October. The police can’t…” she shook her head, her lips twisting into a grimace. “Dad says it’s probably for good,” she said, suddenly sunnier.

  “Man, that’s got to hurt,” I said, then told her —briefly, so as not to intrude in her story—about my father leaving us to return to his motherland. “I was about your age, twelve.”

  “I’m a year older than that, if you must know,” she said, smiling at my obvious ploy. “How long did it take you to…‌you know, not get over it, but at least not think about it all the time?”

  That answer would not be what she wanted to hear. “All I can remember from back then is being restless. I had to keep moving. Anyway…‌your mother, there’s no trail, like…‌last seen at the airport? You haven’t heard from her?”

  Natalie shook her head. At least my father had sent a letter. Was that better?

  “I’m sorry about your dad,” Natalie said.

  “Likewise, your mom.”

  She gave me a victim’s smile, a brief curtain parting to reveal her pain. I nodded, understanding the hard and weary road she was on. It felt like the start of something; I couldn’t imagine what.

  “So, coming here makes you feel better?”

  “Not really, no. It’s one of those things…‌I can’t stop doing it.” Her voice had a rawness to it, a high-pitched innocence. She came up and met my eyes now. “What I don’t understand is…‌she’s been, been gone since October. It’s practically December. How does Mum know you’ll be here?”

  I explained about Kirk, that he was in London in late September, early October. I stopped short of his death.

  “You mean…” She picked up our album and read, “Kirk Howell, lead guitar, vocals, piano?”

  “Piano? What?” There were no pianos on Blank. It had to be another of Kirk’s pranks. He was so subtle. No doubt there were others still out there.

  “So you guys follow each other around?” For a moment I thought she meant musically.

  “Not any more. He’s gone now.” My voice sounded flat and monotonic, like a bored cop who has seen it all, compared to Natalie’s much more dynamic range. There were accents here that could turn “really” into a five syllable essay on doubt.

  “Are you just gonna stand there?”

  I nodded. “What did, does, your mom do?” I was trying to get my head around Natalie’s campaign comment about her mother’s formidable dating habits.

  “You mean work? She owns a publishing company. Iken Press.” She spelt it, assuming a Google search. Then she gave me her mother’s name and spelled that. Claudia Steyning. There was a pause just as Kirk launched into the final verse. We listened to it for a long moment. I couldn’t help flashing back to the studio in LA, to the monumental fight we’d had over that track. Kirk hated any kind of overdubbing, but he didn’t have the patience for twenty or thirty takes. We almost didn’t get this one away. “Do you mind if we turn that off?”

  Natalie did this, turning it up loud first. “Is this him?” she yelled over the music.

  I nodded. Kirk. Playing around with the juxtaposition of piece/peace an
d scream. Yeah, I missed him. “Do you think your mom met my friend?”

  “Of course she did.” She lifted the back of her short hair, resettled it. “Mum said something about a musician. I thought, you know, some orchestra guy. ” She turned and met my eyes with a brave so-there-I’ve-said-it glare.

  “How does she know about him?”

  “How should I know? But if she went as far as buying this…” She held up our album. “Anyway, what are you doing here? In the Worm’s flat, I mean.”

  “Just passing through, more or less.”

  Sir Clive Wormsleigh, aka the Worm, was obviously not all that popular with 4B. I asked Natalie about my landlord.

  “He’s in prison. I don’t know the details.”

  One disappearance and one jailed landlord were enough for a day. I took my leave and headed up the stairs. I had little sense of Natalie’s mother, Claudia, other than she was late thirties and, according to her daughter, tended to go after and through men. I couldn’t see her capturing Kirk’s interest. Yet, if I had met the daughter, sent to Onslow Mansions by Jack Ross, then it was certainly possible Kirk had been similarly directed and met the mother.

  CHAPTER 3

  I’d just got off the phone with our agent, Leonard Fox. Lenny was still pushing for what he called Eyebeams II. Even from six thousand miles away, it was hard to give him a straight no. He’d talk you to death; examples, logic, the arc of your career, obligations to our fans, the expectations of a waiting nation. This time he even resorted to an ego massage, proposing, “Jim Shalabon and the Eyebeams.” I bought him off with vague promises. I think he knew it was always going to be no. Without Kirk, we’d be not much more than our own tribute band, grinding through our greatest hits and slipping in a few weak and recent efforts.

  I wasn’t ready for solo, either. My entire nine-year career as a songwriter had been based on playing off Kirk. My strength was words; his, music. The songs I wrote had the confidence of Kirk’s musical intelligence behind them. For each of my brooding, slow-building rockers—my specialty—there were several that Kirk would gently shake his head on. Another steal. I never knew; he always did. Without Kirk, I would soon be in court for plagiarism.