Dead Men's s Boots

I took it over to the table, laid it down and smoothed out the worst of the creases.

The skeleton of a song. I hadn’t even bothered to try to work out what that meant: begging to differ from Sigmund, I’d never believed that dreams were the royal road to anywhere very much. But John was a drummer, and drummers are different from normal people. The skeleton of a song: not what was left when the substance of the song had rotted away, but the framework, the scaffolding, on which the rest of the song could be built.

That might be how a drummer felt about rhythm.

The notations on the sheet music were as opaque to me now as they had been when I’d first seen them: vertical flecks of ink densely but as far as I could see randomly spaced across the lines of the stave and the width of the page. Occasionally a few marks interspersed that might have been letters or symbols: a vertical line with a horizontal slash near the top that could be a ‘T’ or a plus sign; another that looked like a crude asterisk.

Part of the problem was that I could never be arsed with reading sheet music even when I was trying to learn my own instrument: I picked out tunes in a rough-andready way, already listening more to whatever was going on in my head than to anything else. So now I didn’t even have much to compare this gibberish with.

If I was going to have a hope in hell of deciphering it, I was going to need an expert.

I picked up the phone and dialled from memory. Got some irate old man out of bed because I was one step away from falling over and my thread-stripped brain transposed two digits.

Tried again.

‘Hello?’ A woman’s voice, fuzzy with sleep.

‘Louise?’ I said.

The same voice, a little sharper. ‘Yeah. Who’s this?’

‘Felix Castor.’

‘Fix. Fuck your mother, look at the goddamn time. Are you on something?’

‘What’s the name of your band, Lou?’

‘My band?’ she echoed with pained incompÃh pem""rehension.

‘You still play, right?’

‘Yeah.’

‘So what’s the name of-?’

‘The Janitors of Anarchy. Fix, you didn’t call me up in the middle of the night to ask—’

‘No,’ I interrupted her, ‘I didn’t. I just want to meet the drummer.’

21

His real name was Luke Pomfret, Louise had said, but he played under the assumed splendour of Speedo Plank. I’d arranged to meet him at noon, allowing a generous seven hours for restorative unconsciousness.