I had undertaken this project with total enthusiasm, but as the days wore on I realized that I was no nearer the truth about R.D. than I had been before I met him. I should have already submitted my first draft, but as I scoured over my notes I realized that the old man had told me virtually nothing about himself. I had received two letters from Head Office asking me to hand in my manuscript, but as I had nothing of consequence to give them, I feigned illness. Then a letter came requesting an examination by a company doctor. I had to deliver soon, or risk an inquiry and possibly expulsion from the Corporation’s employ. This would mean complete ruin. Why did they want R.D.’s story so badly? What was so important about an old rock singer who could do no more harm to anyone?
I decided to look back into the history of the Corporation that employed me. It soon became clear that the reason they wanted him was that they had never had him. R.D. was dangerous to them because he had never been theirs. He was a renowned crusader against corporate control of any kind; he was, in fact, one of the last of the independents. I remembered R.D.’s flip-side to ‘Sunny Afternoon’ had been a song called ‘I’m Not Like Everybody Else’. R.D. was still running from an invisible force which he occasionally referred to as ‘them’. Although he had never explained who ‘they’ were, it was now becoming obvious to me that they were the same people who were starting to intimidate me: ‘they’ were my employers.
R.D. had told me that his great fear had always been that one day the system would take away his individuality. I concluded that I had never been allowed to be an individual in the true sense; I was spawned by the system, born into that autocratic mould so feared by R.D. when he had been a child. I had been created to respond in a contrived way without the ability or desire to make my own choice. R.D. had, without knowing it, given me back the ability to dream, to think for myself; make my own rules and even consider becoming an individual. It was then that I decided that I was not going to play their game. ‘They’ were not going to have the life of R.D. to put in their computer so that they could close the file on him. I was going to ensure that R.D. retained his independence.
But there were still so many questions that I needed to ask. Who was the girl? Was she really Julie Finkle? What had motivated R.D. to keep the Kinks going and to form his own independent record company in the 1970s, and why did he write the Preservation album over and over, then turn it into a touring musical where he became Mr Flash, the head of a corrupt corporation? What was it like having to form a completely new band with his brother after the Kinks had finally conquered America in the 1980s and were, ironically, inducted into the American Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990? What happened to make him turn into a complete recluse?
There was still so much that I needed to know, but I promised myself that the Corporation would not get what they wanted from R.D.D. The next day as I awoke fresh from a beautifully peaceful sleep, I threw my sleeping pills down the toilet and flushed them away. Project R.D. had done away with the need for sleepers. He had helped me confront my own demons. Now I had to make the decision between my obligation to the Corporation, and my newfound friendship with R.D.D.
The telephone rang. It was Julie on the other end of the line. Suddenly my confidence went. I found myself tongue-tied and making excuses. I could no longer trust her. I was still attracted to her, but I felt that everything she was saying to me was being monitored and my replies were being reported back to the Corporation. Perhaps she was an unwilling accomplice. Maybe they had something on her that was forcing her to act this way. They knew about my history, my emotional traumas and illness, God knows what they had on her. She went straight on to work as usual.
The questions were too intrusive, too pushy, so I brought the conversation to an abrupt end. She only let me go when I promised to hand in my notes and manuscripts by the end of the month. Just as I was about to hang up she said something which made me think that I was under surveillance.
‘Are you still taking your medication?’ she asked, almost as an afterthought.
‘Of course,’ I joked. ‘Where would I be without my medication?’
Her reply upset me deeply. ‘In an asylum for incurables and the feeble-minded, of course.’
I waited for her to laugh, as if she had been joking but she meant what she said. As if it were a statement of fact.
‘Then you know about my problem,’ I replied.
There was silence at the other end. She was obviously under pressure and hiding something from me. Then she spoke. Her voice was cold and to the point. ‘I can say no more now. It was a risk to give you this assignment, but they thought that Raymond Douglas would recognize a similar disorder in himself and open up to you.’
‘You’re using me to get R.D.’s story? God knows what it will do to that poor defenceless old man when he finds out.’
‘R.D., as you like to refer to him, must be exposed as a petty, inconsequential dreamer. He and his kind are totally out of step with the realism of our times. We have failed to suppress the music. There are still people who listen to it and not only aspire to write and live in his outdated manner, but actually try to emulate him. We must destroy their dreams.’
Hearing Julie talk like that unlocked a distant memory.
‘Like they destroyed mine,’ I replied.
‘You were sick for other reasons. Now, find out anything you can to discredit him. Forget about all this Preservation Society nonsense. It is sentimental shit and you know it. Expose him as a corrupt person, unsuitable for any worthy place in our culture. You must succeed.’
‘Why me?’ And whose dreams must I destroy?’
‘That will become apparent as you progress. Remember. In order to destroy their dreams, first we must destroy him.’
By now, I had lost all faith in Julie as a person. In a way, I had been writing R.D.’s book for her, but I felt that she had betrayed me.
I needed to confront R.D. on this issue. I had some serious questions to ask and I would demand some straight answers. My self-confidence was being eroded. My loyalties divided and my tolerance stretched to the limit. The following day I arrived at R.D.’s dark little studio to find him in a state of total panic. It was impossible to confront him.
He screamed out to me, ‘Last night the cloud came and wouldn’t go away. It hung over my head all night. It made me feel evil, as if I had corrupted all the innocence left in the world. The wretched sad world and all the sad people in it. I helped create the cess-pool that we all live in in this so-called country. All this reform and equality, what does it fucking mean? I dreamed about my father. My dad died believing that the world had given him a better deal than his parents before him. My dad choked to death with emphysema, after rolling around in agony in his bedroom at my house. He had staggered downstairs to the telephone, then into the kitchen, where his diseased lungs boiled over inside him. The poor old bugger fell over. The impact of his head against the tiled floor knocked him unconscious.’
R.D. sat down and composed himself before continuing. I handed him some fresh tea in his Coronation mug. I had questions I needed to ask, but it was obvious that R.D. needed to tell me about this time.
‘This was way back in the mid-seventies, when I was working in London. I was about to watch the Wimbledon men’s singles final on television. Dad phoned me up and told me to put a bet on Arthur Ashe to beat Jimmy Connors before the match started. Ashe, a black American, was a rank outsider, and Jimmy Connors was a white kid from Chicago, the darling of the centre court with all its strawberries-and-cream snobbery and class consciousness. Dad always liked to put a bet on the underdog. ‘Ashe will slap the bastards in the face for us,’ me old dad said. I found his reference to Ashe doing something for ‘us’ odd. Dad was no racist, but he rarely compared himself with black people. On reflection, I think that he must have meant Arthur Ashe was a dark horse. I tried to convince Dad that he would be wasting his money, but he shouted down the phone:
‘For once, son, do as I tell you, just bloody well do it! I love you.’
This was uncharacteristic. The shouting, I mean. I was also a little surprised when he said that he loved me. I mean, he didn’t even sound drunk. I picked up the Yellow Pages to find the number of the nearest betting shop. I called directory enquiries but it was engaged. Just as I put the phone down it rang. Mum was on the other end. She was weeping. She said Dad had died.
‘I don’t believe it,’ I said.
‘He’s not awake, son. He collapsed on the floor in the kitchen.’
Dad loved the garden in the big house I had bought near Guildford. The house represented all the unfulfilled things in my life. All the promises not kept. It symbolized a fresh start in life after a series of disappointments. My parents used to go down to the house every weekend to look after the garden and see that the house was aired in case I ever wanted to visit. After hearing the news of my father’s death, I had a slow-motion vision of him tending the rose bushes on the lawn outside in my garden. He loved his life as a gardener ever since his coronary made him give up all other work. He had started out as a stable boy when he left school at twelve, then he went on to become a groom, then to work at Smithfield cattle market. Then various jobs around the country. He was so British, and yet he would have been perfectly at home in Kansas.
As I could not drive, Gwen and Brian came and picked me up to take me down to Surrey. On the car radio, we heard that Arthur Ashe had taken a set from Connors and was in the lead. We drove across the River Thames at Putney and I remembered going fishing with Dad on the River Ouse at the Offords near Huntingdon. I could still smell the ground bait as he moulded it in his hands before throwing it in the river to attract the fish. The smell of Old Holborn tobacco on his breath. The sight of him rolling his own ciggies. Lighting up his fag with a Swan Vesta match. I thought about the knives he kept and all his yarns about cutting the heads off of serpents in Wales during the war. I thought and remembered.
I suddenly asked Brian to stop and telephoned Dave, who was at the hospital with Dad’s body. I told Dave to go check that Dad was actually dead and not just drunk. Once during a knees-up at home he had tried to do a somersault during ‘Minnie the Moocher’ and had fallen against a wall, knocking himself unconscious. All the family thought that he had had a heart attack, and my sisters were all crying. We even called an ambulance, but Dad woke up and asked where his beer was. But now Dave came to the phone. ‘I’ve checked. Dad is absolutely dead. The doctors are moving him into the mortuary now, Ray. I’ve got to go.’ The thought that the doctors were moving him meant that Dad was considered to be a non-person. That made me angry and aware of my own mortality. First a man with a name loses his life. Then he becomes a body. When death is confirmed he becomes ‘the corpse’. As we drove down the motorway Ashe was turning the whole tennis establishment on its head. He had taken another set and Connors was getting dejected. The dark horse was moving up on the rails. As we entered the driveway of my house in Surrey I saw the cars of relatives who had already arrived. On the radio Max Robertson was proclaiming in his magnificently articulate voice that Arthur Ashe had become the first black man ever to win Wimbledon and had caused one of the biggest upsets in the history of the tournament. I was elated and sad all at once. I remembered the flashbulb going off after Dad came to congratulate me after my first Number 1 record. Arthur Ashe, the dark horse, had done it and Dad had won the final bet of his life, but I couldn’t tell him.’
Raymond Douglas started slowly kicking his foot against the mixing console, and for a moment, I thought that he was a sad old geezer who had gradually gone off his trolley. Then I started thinking about what he was trying to say to me. He was not just telling me about his father’s death, or talking about ‘Days’ signalling the beginning of the end of his band, he was talking about the end of his family. The end of an age. He started talking about how he wrote The Village Green Preservation Society just to get away from the realization that the original group known as the Kinks was soon to be no more. My original decision to confront R.D. and burden him with my own doubts had to be put aside for the time being. The last thing he needed was to hear about my insecurities. He put on an old, scratchy Village Green album. The songs were deliberately under-recorded to give them an uncommercial quality. As if he didn’t want people to really hear them. They were a series of nostalgic images of a disappearing world.
‘We are the Village Green Preservation Society
God save little shops vaudeville and variety.
We are the Desperate Dan Appreciation Consortium.
God save the George Cross and all those who were awarded them
Preserving the old ways from being abused,
Protecting the new ways for me and for you
What more can we do?
We are the draught-beer English-speaking vernacular
God save Sherlock Holmes, Moriarty and Dracula …’
It was appealing but somehow unresolved. The subtext to the whole record was more interesting than the songs themselves. R.D. talked over the album as it played.
‘This record had first been called Four More Well-Respected Men, to capitalize on the hit the Kinks had had in America with Well-Respected Man years earlier, but we decided against it. The Vietnam War was in full swing, the Kinks were banned from touring the States and from what I could ascertain, there was no room for ‘Well Respected Men’ in America at that time. The Woodstock generation had arrived and the Kinks were almost forgotten.
‘However, a smart promotion man at Warner-Reprise Records came up with an unusual idea. The Village Green album had only sold about 25,000 copies, but there was a groundswell of what he called ‘the underground’. The Village Green was an anti-war album and there were many anti-war activists in America, particularly among young college students. Somehow this uncommercial record could spark off something in the American psyche. Grenville joked that Reprise had replaced all the promotion men in black suits and shades with pot-smoking hippies, and that Mo Ostin, the president of the company, had been seen wearing beads and eating organic food in a health-food restaurant in west LA. In a strange way, things were looking up. We were not selling records but we had become a cult band. Maybe The Village Green had rekindled lost dreams to the Americans. Perhaps it was time to return. Grenville and Robert knew that I had been disappointed that ‘Days’ had only got to Number 11 in the UK charts but said that Alan Klein had an idea that would resolve the dispute with the American Federation of Musicians so that we could get back into America.’
Raymond Douglas paused after the word America, and for the rest of the day I sat listening to The Village Green LP over and over again. Perhaps the ban had been a blessing in disguise. It had allowed him to make records about Britain and not get seduced by the acid-rock generation. I knew America had scared him, but I also knew that R.D. was a competitor and the thought of doing battle in order to win back the American market appealed to him.
That night I couldn’t sleep. I left my apartment and wandered the streets. I heard footsteps behind me and felt that I was being followed. I returned to my apartment. I turned on the light. Tried to write but felt a presence in the room. I turned around slowly and saw a dark cloud hovering just behind my back. I watched as it started to move around me like a strange predator waiting to pounce on its prey. I made my way to my record player and managed to put on ‘Phenomenal Cat’ from The Village Green. It was as if the cloud recognized the tune. It slowly dispersed and eventually disappeared. I let the record play continuously, knowing that it would protect me from the darkness. I slept and felt secure in the knowledge that the Phenomenal Cat would watch over me.
Suddenly I heard the voice of Raymond Douglas in my ear.
‘Hi there, kid.’ R.D.’s voice, had a touch of evil about it. ‘Thinking about that Julie Finkle, are ya, boy? You and me, boy. We have this telepathic communication. I was just thinking that you should go around to Julie’s place. Know what I mean? Borrow my car. It’s the old Merc parked at the back of the studio. The keys are in the exhaust. Do yourself a favour, son. Go see to that Julie for me. She’s a goddess; an English rose if ever I saw one.’
His voice faded away. I slept, but I was becoming obsessed by the mysterious Julie Finkle. Before long I found myself in R.D.’s beaten-up Mercedes. It was about four in the morning and I was driving through the suburbs of London. Then I realized that I didn’t know where Julie lived and, more to the point, I didn’t know how to drive. It didn’t seem to matter though. I just kept heading where the car was taking me and the old-fashioned automatic made it easy for me. I looked in the rear-view mirror, and for a moment I thought that there was someone in the car with me – the dark, shadowy figure that had tormented me in my nightmares for so long. I looked again and the figure was gone. The car, for it was almost as if the car was taking me, stopped outside a small thatched cottage in a village that I hadn’t even bothered to read the name of. There was a light on in the kitchen.
I moved towards the house and entered through the back door. Julie was in the kitchen waiting for me. Her thick hair hung down her back and she had a look of total purity. Raymond Douglas was right about her. She looked exactly like the true English rose. It suddenly occurred to me that R.D. had not met my researcher. Perhaps he was describing his imaginary Julie.
She spoke as if she knew everything. As if she had spoken to R.D. himself. ‘I’ve made you a cup of tea. You must be thirsty after such a long drive.’
I sat down at the kitchen table and she poured the tea in the way R.D. liked it.
She continued:
‘Have you ever-thought about what it would be like to write without fear? Loneliness can be a beautiful thing. There is no despair in loneliness, provided you can bear your own company. You must learn how to like yourself.’
Julie was a seductive and persuasive talker. She told me things about R.D. that were a revelation to me. His love for that place between Belgium and Holland known as Flanders. How in a dream he had once taken her there, and how they stayed in an attic with a view of the blue sky overlooking the red roof tiles of the house opposite. She was so young; I wondered how she could have known him? Perhaps Julie Finkle, like a memory, never ages.
Soon I found myself in Julie’s bed. I was making love to her when I heard a familiar voice outside the door, half whispering half shouting.
‘Well, kid. What did I tell you? Isn’t she just like May Day, Strawberry Fair, a stroll on a midsummer’s evening? Aren’t her thighs like strong oak trees, doesn’t her hair run through your hands like the water from a fresh mountain spring? And between her legs. Isn’t it like burying your face into those soft moist hills of Devon? Have you reached the valleys yet? And her lips? Like ripe fruit, mouth as cool and refreshing as a mountain stream. Her teeth as bright as the White Cliffs of Dover.’
Julie groaned with ecstasy.
‘Ray, my darling, I love you.’
Julie was calling me Ray. I couldn’t believe what was happening. I shouted, ‘But, Julie, it’s me.’
‘Yes, Ray. I know that it’s you. Give in to it. Accept who you are and be grateful.’
Then she started making love in the most outrageous and obscene manner. I was turned on and couldn’t stop. Sometimes she spoke in a low whisper, sometimes in high-pitched little-girl voice. She told me about her other encounters with men. It was as if she was almost deliberately trying to humiliate me and prove that she was a whore. She turned on her bedside light and suddenly she looked older and wrinkled, as if she had been doing heavy drugs. She looked like another person; she kept on about this guy, who had turned into the devil. I was still making love to her but she kept on talking.
‘It was so big but I couldn’t get any satisfaction – it just rammed against my inside. A woman can only take so much pleasure.’ Then she started to shout: ‘Get harder, you useless prick. Stick your hand in the light socket for me. Electrocute yourself and die with a hard dick.’
I shouted and realized that I was crying.
‘Why did you let him do it? Who was he?’ I was sobbing. I got off Julie but she kept on talking as if she was still in orgasm.
‘It wasn’t so much like a who, but more like a what.’ She screamed.
I turned to look at Julie as I spoke and saw R.D. on top of her. I threw up with disgust. The old man had used me to transport him to Julie. He was still wearing his scruffy old overcoat, but his eyes were red. He looked like the devil. He was foaming at the mouth and his voice was screeching in several octaves simultaneously.
I cried out, ‘What made you do this? Why are you destroying the thing you love most?’
R.D. yelled back, ‘Why boy? I’ll tell you. America. Fucking America! That’s why. And now I’m fucking England!’
In despair I crawled away from R.D. and Julie. I grabbed the lamp by the bed, took out the bulb and pushed my fingers against the live connection.
I woke up in my flat to the phone ringing. I fell off my bed. I was still clothed. I felt dried blood on my lips, as if I had fallen in the night. I picked up the telephone. It was Raymond Douglas.
‘I had a dream about you, son. I was worried that something had happened to you.’
I was so relieved to hear R.D.’s voice sounding normal again.
‘Are you coming over today? There’s something special I feel I have to tell you. I trust you now, so please.’
‘Sure. What do you want to talk about?’ I asked.
‘I thought that we could talk about America.’
‘America.’
‘Yeah. And the Corporation. Where all the corruption started. I’m not afraid anymore. I feel as though I can talk to you about it now. See you later, son. Sorry if I woke you.’
R.D. hung up and I stood there listening to the sound of the dead tone at the end of the line.
America.
I phoned Julie again and again, I must have left three or four messages on her video answer-machine, but I only got the same emotionless message: ‘I am not in. But I do value your call, so please leave your code and I will call back as soon as I am able.’ I had seen the video time and time again, but the more I called and the more I watched, the more I imagined she was saying something else to me. Hidden messages. I zoomed in closer. Looked into her eyes to see some truth, but the message always stayed the same. I called and called, now just to watch the video message. To look in her eyes.
I called up one more time. I put her image on freeze frame just as her lips were pouting to say ‘please’. She looked as she had when I first saw her in the dream. Before she became R.D.’s succubus. His fantasy. I whispered down the receiver: ‘Sometimes I wish that things could be different. But if they were, then they would not be the same.’
My message sounded trite, childish. I slammed down the phone, then called back immediately and said, ‘R.D. was not one of the last independents. He was one of the last innocents.’