Stardust Read online

  Stardust

  RAY CONNOLLY

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter One

  Mike didn’t hear the news for some hours. About halfway through the evening he’d wondered why there were so few punters around, but it was well after ten o’clock before Ear-Ring, one of the Big Wheel operators, got back to the fair with the explanation. Ear-Ring had sloped off for a beer, business being so bad, and found the whole pub gathered silently round a television set watching the tributes, obituaries and newsreel. The way he explained it to Mike and the rest of the fairground workers it almost seemed as if the world had come to a temporary stop. Years later Mike tried to remember his first emotions when he heard the news, standing there, hanging with one arm from the upright which supported the roof of the dodgems arena, but all he was able to recall was a numbing surprise. Doreen, the middle-aged Anybody’s who ran the coconuts, broke down and cried, and wouldn’t even be consoled by Ear-Ring on this occasion, but Mike just sat down on his steps and wondered how such a thing could have happened, and felt instantly frustrated at the sense of isolation from the rest of the world that working on the fair produced. They were always the last to know anything. No wonder business had been bad. The kids who’d been there earlier in the evening must have left home before it happened and when they’d spent their pocket money and gone coldly away home, no adult children had come to replace them. He looked round the fairground. It was a miserable night anyway, and already some of the lads were beginning to pack up, covering their rides in great heavy tarpaulins to keep rain, frost, cats and vandals away. Always silent, sullen workers, tonight they were particularly thoughtful. Jack, the manager, had taken the news more personally than his staff, possibly on account of his being of Irish Catholic stock, and had retired with a shocked kind of dignity into his caravan to watch his television. Had Mike been on better terms with Jack he might have asked if it would be possible to join him. But Jack had not been overly pleased with Mike since his leg had been crippled and he knew that his job and home might be in some jeopardy. You needed to be particularly fleet of foot to hold down a job humping dodgems but with a twisted knee and smashed ankle Mike wasn’t the athlete he had once been. Before he disappeared to grieve alone, Jack had ordered that the music be turned off as a mark of respect, and that, together with the bad news which had now reached even the most manic roller coaster addict, more or less ended the night’s work.

  Mike watched contemplatively as the last of his customers made their way out of the fair and back across the black field. He would like to have gone back to his caravan to listen to his radio but he remembered with some annoyance that he had rented it out until twelve o’clock to a rather suave, tweedy looking bloke who was up to a bit of adultery in there at that very moment. Rather him than me, anyway, thought Mike, thinking of the bouffant tart, who smelling like a cosmetics counter, had accompanied the sueded fornicator furtively round the back of the vans earlier in the evening. He would probably have to fumigate the place after they left, or risk suffocation from perfume poisoning during the night.

  He was just about to begin herding his dodgem cars together at one end of the arena when he noticed the pale, whitish glow from Jack’s television shining through the caravan window. Distantly he could make out the sound of an American commentator. He moved across the rough grass and mud, stepping carefully over threadbare generator cables and creeping softly up to the caravan he looked inside. Jack was sitting in front of his set, wiping his eyes with one hand and holding a consoling glass of brandy in the other. From where Mike was standing he could easily watch the television without being seen, and leaning with an ear to the thin walls he watched and listened as the newscaster went solemnly over the events of the last few hours:

  ‘Three shots were fired as the President’s open car passed under an intersection in the main business area of the city. One witness said the shots were fired from the window of a building. People flung themselves on to the ground and armed police and secret service agents rushed into the building - the Texas Book Depository.’ Mike found himself staring in silent fascination at a newsreel showing a motorcade driving past cheering crowds and then at a rather fuzzy and indistinct photograph of a tall, ugly building. Then the announcer’s face reappeared: ‘A rifle with telescopic sights was found there. The President was wounded in the head and collapsed into the arms of his wife. Mrs Kennedy was unhurt, but Governor John Connally of Texas …’ two more photographs flashed on to the screen in quick succession … ‘who was riding with the President, was hit and gravely wounded. Mr Kennedy died at 1 p.m. U.S. Central Time, which is 7 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time, about thirty-five minutes after the shots were fired. Vice-President Lyndon Baines Johnson was later sworn in as the new President on board the Presidential aircraft at Love Field, Dallas, while it was preparing to fly back to Washington. Earlier this evening we received by satellite, film of the scenes outside Parkland Hospital in Dallas where the President was taken after the shooting.’ Again the pictures became less distinct and Mike leaned forward to concentrate more carefully and try to make some pattern out of the chaotic events being shown on the screen. As he concentrated he heard a footstep trip on the cables behind him. Without moving his head his eyes flicked to the side and he studied a reflection in the caravan’s murky window. Since he’d had his leg broken he had become particularly cautious of being caught unprepared, alone and in the dark. For a moment he didn’t recognize the face behind him, but then just as it leant forward to speak he remembered, and with a quick impatient movement of his hand motioned that the silence be maintained while he continued to watch the television news. He needed a minute or so to recover from the shock, and it wasn’t cool to show any kind of surprise - although he was indeed very surprised. He stared straight ahead at the television, not even allowing himself a peripheral peep at his companion, and waited while the newsreel finished and the announcer came back to the screen.

  The Queen has sent personal messages of sympathy to both Mrs Kennedy and to Mr Johnson. In her note to Mrs Kennedy she said: “I am so deeply distressed to hear of the tragic death of President Kennedy. My husband joins me in sending our heartfelt sympathy to you and your family”.’

  Inside the caravan Mike could see Jack folding a handkerchief carefully on his knee and putting it away in his pocket. He would be coming out soon to see that everything was neat and shipshape for the night. Mike looked again at his silent companion’s reflection. And then turning abruptly he began to move back towards the sanctity of his dodgems: ‘You’re looking older,’ he rasped.

  It wasn’t quite the welcome that Jim Maclaine had been expecting: but then he wasn’t sure if he expected a welcome at all. The last time the two had been together had been three years earlier when they’d worked together humping dodgems, but their partnership had ended one night when Mike had unfortunately tried to fiddle one person too many, and ended up on the wrong end of some steel-tipped boots and a couple of bicycle chains. At the time Jim had felt some degree of guilt about not going to the aid of his friend, but that quickly passed when he reminded himself that his involvement would only have lengthened the brawl, and that there was no point in his risking his neck when the odds were so hopeless. Besides he was pretty certain that Mike hadn’t seen him there. And what you don’t know you don’t feel. All the same he felt distinctly awkward as they made theirway back thro
ugh the mud.

  ‘Bad news, isn’t it?’ said Jim conversationally, indicating the television.

  ‘What? You turning up, or Kennedy getting killed?’ Mike was in razor box form.

  Jim took the callousness lightly. By tomorrow, he thought, the world will be dry-eyed and the jokes will be sick. Mike got over things more quickly than most people.

  ‘It was very quiet tonight …’ Mike was beginning to stack the bumper cars alongside each other, hardly glancing at Jim… I thought there must be something good on the telly.’

  ‘We should have been playing at a dance, but it was cancelled when the news came through,’ said Jim, quickly trying to get some kind of conversation going, and at the same time casually helping with the cars, savouring that slight feeling of nostalgic romanticism he’d known when he worked the cars every night, and feeling instantly more secure as he felt the familiar trolley power gliding him across the arena. ‘D’you know, all the girls started crying!’

  Jim felt Mike looking at him with a somewhat theatrically exaggerated amazement: ‘Playing?’ said Mike. ‘You can’t mean playing in a band?’

  Jim was determined to keep smiling: ‘Been at it over a year. I play bass … I’m not fantastic, but you know … I can keep up. Sing a bit, too.’

  Mike stared at him, forcing him to carry on talking: ‘Well, I mean … it’s a better life than this …’ Jim cast his arms generally about him, indicating the peeling paintwork, the poor lighting, the mud and the old vans. Mike allowed his eyes to wander appreciatively over his surroundings and then turned slowly back to Jim, his expression still one of forced amazement. ‘I mean, there’s none of that living in grotty caravans.’

  Jim knew that his chagrin was beginning to show, but he didn’t know how to hide it. He was already beginning to regret coming. Had he known Mike was going to behave like a prat he would have tried a bit harder for that Judy, instead of letting Johnny make all the running. He’d felt sure she was a certainty, particularly from the way Johnny had got her up against the wall to comfort her when she’d been overcome by grief.

  Mike was smirking: ‘Caravan’s all right. Nice little pension there. I rent it out to the locals to do their courting in. Car salesman in there now. He’s worth being in with. You could call me Mr Rent-a-passion-wagon.’

  Jim saw his chance to snipe back: ‘Key to the executive washroom next?’

  ‘What?’ Obviously Mike hadn’t seen Jack Lemmon in The Apartment, but the point could still be made.

  ‘But sticky sheets.’

  Mike smiled, a dirty, wicked grin. That he understood. The atmosphere eased. They’d finished stacking the cars and, turning off his lights, Mike led the way to the steps and sat down. Feeling in the pocket of his battered leather and sheepskin pilot’s jacket he produced a packet of Marlboro Kingsize and offered one to Jim. He’d always had expensive tastes in American cigarettes.

  ‘You’d like the group, Mike …’ Jim wasn’t certain of how to put it: ‘D’you want to … why don’t you join us?’

  Mike looked nonplussed: ‘Playing bumpers?’

  ‘We need a road manager.’

  ‘Oh … I see. Errand boy. No … I’ve got a good job here, thanks.’

  ‘No … not the errand boy. Honest. We need someone like you. You’d be on equal money with the rest of us.’

  ‘I’m happy here.’

  ‘But you’ll never get rich, will you? Never be a millionaire.’

  ‘No, not smart like you.’

  ‘You’d like the life. Great birds … every night, you can take your pick. Good money.’

  Mike looked sceptical: ‘What about tonight? No birds tonight ? Or has the assassination made you impotent with emotion?’

  He stood up, and shoving his hands in his pockets, kicked at a carton lying on the grass just in front of the steps, sending it skimming past Jim sitting in the goalkeeper’s position at the entrance to the dodgems arena.

  ‘One nil,’ he shouted.

  Jim stared at the limping foot as Mike trotted away to dribble another carton to his self-appointed penalty spot. He placed it, and backed off to shoot.

  ‘How did you get your limp?’ Mike stopped short on his run up, and stared at Jim.

  ‘I fell out with bad company.’ For a long moment they looked at each other unsmiling. He knows, thought Jim. He bloody well would know. He just would.

  The morning papers of November 23 petrified in ink the turmoil of the previous day. A few days earlier the Beatles had been seemingly the only subject to occupy the minds of British news editors, but for the next month, and in some respects for the next decade, the assassination made ever more glamorous the Kennedy myth. There was something disturbingly wasteful in the death of a young man, thought Mike, as he studied the headlines, and looked from one paper to the other as they repeated the story of the murder and reproduced the one good picture they all had - that of the secret service man leaping for the Presidential car as it accelerated away towards the hospital. Last night probably half the world had watched the news from Dallas by satellite television, and today they would buy the newspapers to re-read and consider the things they already knew-Mike included. He chose his usual Daily Mirror, and tucking it into the pocket of his black donkey-jacket he walked out of the little newsagents and went in search of his breakfast - tea and toast in a transport café at an overnight parking lot for heavy diesel trucks. He was known there and this gave him a sense of some security, and a feeling that he belonged in a breadth of society quite outside the fair.

  The tea was steaming and it scalded his tongue as he sipped from the giant mug in which it had been served. He wondered how Jim had found him, and what coincidence had brought them to the same town at the same time. When they’d been together before they’d worked down in the West Country, but now they were two hundred miles away up in the Midlands. That was one of the troubles with working on a fair. Anyone could find you by simply following the kids to the ferris wheel; if you made any enemies there was no escaping them, nor friends either. And how should he classify Jim? Was he a friend or an enemy? Certainly he couldn’t help liking him, but then he had to remember he was about as trustworthy as quicksand. And yet from the moment they’d met the previous night he’d known that they were going to be inevitably together again. Jim had the charm, but Mike had all the skills, all the chat, all the guile and all the wit to have made him successfully self-sufficient during the thirty-three years of his life. Together working the dodgems they’d been an outrageously successful partnership, taking money from under the noses of both the boss and the punters.

  But after his injuries and Jim’s hurried departure, the job had never been the same. Jack tightened up on the fiddling, and he’d had to find an alternative way of supplementing his income. The pension he got from pimping his caravan was okay: but, in an uncharacteristically conservative way he occasionally felt a twinge of moralistic guilt.

  Mike finished his breakfast and leaving a shilling under his plate for the waitress (he believed in strategic tipping in places where he might have to return) set off to find Jim. When they’d parted the previous evening he’d made no promises about going along to meet the group that Jim had taken up with, but they’d both known that he would turn up. Consequently by eight thirty he was up, shaved, and as smartly turned out as it was possible for him to be. He was a practical man, and the difficulties of life on the road had in no way allowed him to neglect his appearance. Indeed since he had virtually never known any other kind of existence he was intuitively adept at making a little cold water and soap go an extraordinarily long way. Wealth, he had often considered, would be constant hot water, a giant-sized bar of Knight’s Castile toilet soap (still in its wrapping paper) and a full tube of toothpaste. Barnardo’s boys were unused to such luxury.

  It was a dull autumn morning, fittingly drab in view of world events as Mike made his way across the waste ground behind the cinema towards the rusting old van, which he rightly recognized instantly as belong
ing to Jim and his friends. Not for a minute had he been taken in by the stories of the good life with which Jim had tried to tempt him the previous night, and it came as no surprise to discover that their home and mode of transport was nothing like so splendid as had been described. To be honest Mike was almost surprised to discover that the group and the van even existed. Truth had never been any barrier to the further limits of Jim Maclaine’s fond imaginings.

  The van was a badly abused Ford Commer; someone had driven it hard for maybe a hundred thousand miles and then unloaded it on to the nearest sucker around. And from then on its life had been a series of bumps and wrecks and sales, retread tyres, rebores, new bearings, worn clutches, old bruises: an old, exhausted ana neglected Ford van - maybe one oil change from the breaker’s yard, standing there in the midst of that bombed wasteland that the age decreed should remain a makeshift car-park until land prices rose enough for it to become profitable for office building. Mike reflected on its ugliness: a once-yellow, now battered and peeling old vehicle, with garish scarlet lettering scarred across its side -Stray Cats. Why should he for ever be surrounded by ugliness ? he wondered.

  Way across on the far side of the car-park an old man was rooting through a smouldering bonfire which blew gusts of seasonal smoke into Mike’s eyes, but from the Stray Cats van there was no sign of life. Approaching it like this, Mike felt almost as though he were intruding on a sleeping monster, and half expected it suddenly to come to life and bite him, but nothing inside the van showed any sign of life.

  ‘Sodom and Gomorrah.’ Mike was looking through the rear door windows: he’d expected squalor, but nothing quite so sordid as the scene which presented itself to him. If stray cats they were, he thought, they must surely be a nasty, mangy lot. Lying on the floor in the centre of the vehicle was a young girl of maybe 16 or 17, hiding under a ragged plaid blanket, and huddling close to a thin youth. Facing the opposite direction, with his feet and legs stretched across the gap between the front seats and on to the ledge below the windscreen, lay another form, cocooned inside a sleeping bag and using the outline of the girl’s bottom as a neat headrest. While in every other conceivable corner three other youths had draped themselves as comfortably as possible around a medley of instruments and their cases. Six people in a van not big enough for two. As Mike peered in, a pair of eyes suddenly appeared in the cocooned form, eyebrows moved up and down and the body stirred. Irritated by the wriggling around her bottom the girl opened her eyes, and looking out caught Mike’s unblinking gaze. She stared back. ‘Sodom and Gomorrah,’ repeated Mike, and giving the girl a slow wink walked round to the front of the van, suddenly and forcefully jerking open the door: ‘You are Loppy Lud and I claim my first million pounds!’