Brothers of the Head (3 page)

In any case, little news filtered out of Humbleden. Humbleden had been designed for that end.

Humbleden was one of Zak's country places. It was a grand Georgian mansion (with part of an earlier Tudor manor still preserved) standing in two hundred acres of ground with its own private lake and airstrip and a view across the Solent. What went on there was nobody's business. All the same, rumours trickled out.

Nick Sidney's training methods were known to be rather rigorous. He was a man in his late thirties, thick-set and running slightly to fat, with a shock of greasy curly hair. He had been a second division football team manager before becoming first a disc jockey and then part of Zak Bedderwick's entourage.

Sidney went to work immediately on the Howe twins. He got them cleaned up and groomed and suitably dressed, and christened them officially with their professional name, the Bang-Bang. Tom and Barry Bang-Bang.

Musical training commenced the day after they arrived at Humbleden. There were one or two second-string Bedderwick groups which Sidney could have used for backing. Instead, he chose a heavier group, the Noise, then being led by the guitarist and songwriter, Paul Day.

The Noise was in some disarray. Morale was low ever since its leader, Chris Dervish, committed suicide by driving his Charger Daytona into Datchet Reservoir immediately following a Noise concert in the Albert Hall. The Noise wanted a new image and a new direction; the Bang-Bang wanted a new noise. The two went together.

Nick Sidney had virtually built the Noise and their multimillion dollar success story, as well as Gibraltar before that, and he set to work with a will on licking his new team into shape. He had to begin at the beginning, by teaching the Howe twins to play a few basic chords on guitar and to project their singing voices. Fortunately, the twins – like every other youngster on the globe – were familiar with the conventions of pop. They disliked being prisoners of Humbleden; they had no objection to becoming prisoners of fame.

Their rages, their frequent outbreaks of recalcitrance, were dealt with by Nick Sidney with the zest he had shown towards Nottingham Albion. On the one end of the scale, he employed cold water hoses and a new-fangled electronic stun gun; on the other, he employed the more traditional lures where pop groups were concerned, the three Ds of the trade: drugs, drink and dollies.

Despite these inducements, progress was slow. I saw Zak on one occasion, just after he had returned from what he always termed ‘the Manor'. Zak was quietly fuming at the lack of response from the Howe twins. I recommended sending for the sister, Robbie or Roberta, of whom the twins were obviously fond, to see if that improved matters, but Zak brushed the suggestion aside. He wanted the Bang-Bang to sink themselves into their new roles, not to be reminded of the old ones. A preliminary tour for the Bang-Bang, on a Northern circuit and with a tie-in with Scottish television, was already scheduled for a few months ahead. As far as Bedderwick Walker were concerned, the operation had to start earning back its investment as soon as possible – any refinements to the act could come later, etc., etc. Of course I had listened to similar talk many times before. Training hooligans to bellow and strum was nothing new in the music business. Nor was failing to do so necessarily an obstacle to a profitable career.

But the day came when my gogglephone gonged and Zak's face looked out at me, voicing a new complaint.

‘Henry, hi. You know of a magazine called
Sense and Society
?'

‘I do. One of the Humanistic Sanity group of magazines. Left wing, of course. Circulation not more than 25,000 a month. Influential among middle-of-road socialist circles, you might say. What of it?'

‘I've just had an anonymous phone call.
Sense and Society
have time-tabled for future publication an article on the exploitation of teenagers by the middle-aged, treating them as another underprivileged minority. The article will instance pop groups and make particular mention of the use of freaks to attract live audiences, complete with details of cruel training methods, including use of electronic weapons. How do we stop them?'

‘That shouldn't be difficult. Humanistic Sanity depend for their liquidity on voluntary contributions, including a substantial one from the Borghese Tobacco Corporation, who happen to be clients of ours. Will the information in this proposed article come within appreciable distance of being accurate?'

‘That's what I'm afraid of. It's being written up by a woman.'

‘I'm sure you can manage that better than I.'

‘This isn't just a dolly, Henry. She's old. Thirty-five. You know her name. Laura Ashworth. Dervish's girlfriend. Daughter of the clergyman who was in the news a few years ago.'

‘I recall.'

‘She's a contributor to
Sense and Society
or whatever the damned thing's called. You know how she hates me, silly bitch. If she lets out some of the murkier details – particularly if she links the Bang-Bang's name with Chris Dervish – as well she might – then our goose is cooked just as our publicity machine gets into gear. Ashworth could do us a moderate amount of damage. I want you to get her off our necks.'

While he was making threatening noises, I was thinking. Laura Ashworth was an emotional woman. She thought reasonably clearly until her adrenalin started flowing. There were ways of getting it flowing again which could guarantee she never wrote her article.

‘I don't see why we should have to trouble the Borghese Tobacco Corporation, Zak. You have trouble with the Howe twins and you have trouble with Ashworth. Why not put the two sides together and see if the problems don't iron themselves out? I suggest you entice Ashworth on to your payroll and despatch her forthwith to Humbleden. She will not be able to resist the chance of reliving some of her former glories.'

That was how it worked out. Ashworth accepted Zak's offer. Whatever her intentions were about discovering ‘the truth' about Humbleden – which she knew from Chris Dervish's time – may never be revealed. A friend of mine wrote a letter to the editor of
Sense and Society
asking him if he knew that one of his female contributors had taken up employment with a right-wing organization with considerable interests in the Bedderwick Development Corporation, whose exploitation of black labour in Africa and Sri Lanka was well known. Miss Ashworth's connection with that journal was speedily terminated.

In Laura Ashworth's background lay an involved story which I have no intention of relating here. Suffice it to say that she was the only daughter of a Church of England clergyman who later abandoned the cloth, and that she had no real place in society. She was one of those drifters our age so characteristically throws up. Equally characteristically, she gravitated towards the pop world – one of those homes for drifters where the inmates have taken over the asylum.

At one time, Laura Ashworth had held a post in a Department of Abnormal Psychology in a northern polytechnic, after which she had qualified as a prison probationer attached to an open prison – another home for society's drifters. Whilst at the prison, she had encountered Chris Dervish, who was there serving a sentence for drug smuggling a considerable quantity of heroin from Bahrain.

It was at this stage of her life that Ashworth got herself divorced from her college professor husband, one Charlie Rickards, reverted to her maiden name, and devoted herself to Dervish. When Dervish emerged from prison – and of course his stretch in the nick merely enhanced the glamour of his image with his particular public – he reformed the Noise and went on two extravagantly successful tours of the States and Scandinavia. Ashworth went with him. As her enemies liked to point out, Ashworth was almost exactly twice Dervish's age. But she had stamina. She survived Los Angeles and Stockholm and all the godless cities in between, and lived to return with him to the relative peace of Humbleden when the tours were over. I was always mystified as to how she avoided finishing up in Datchet Reservoir with him.

Some claimed that Ashworth's influence on Dervish had a stabilizing effect, others that it was she who drove him to take his life. Nick Sidney informed me that she had a disruptive effect on the Noise as a group, by which I took him to mean merely that she was par-ticular with whom she slept. Be all that as it may, and it is pointless to bring charges where evidence is incomplete, Dervish was a psy-chotic from the word go. For all his ranting before the microphones, in private he was an inadequate little wet. Which made Datchet Reservoir a not unsuitable terminus for his existence, whether or not Ashworth was involved.

How the members of the group would take to her reappearance, I had no means of judging. That was not my problem. The vital thing at this juncture was that she should not raise any adverse publicity concerning the Bang-Bang in the media, when Zak's plans were maturing. I let Zak get on with it and returned to my African lawsuit. He was running the freak-show, not I.

The tale of corruption in high places which I was investigating was not then public knowledge. A few newspapers had begun to leak circumspect stories dealing with one aspect or another of the scandal: some charges facing a British Cabinet Minister, the dismissal of the head of an international contracting firm, the disappearance of a well-known architect. The trial still lay some months ahead when I was flown out to the West African state of Kanzani on behalf of Beauchamp-Fielding Associates. I was able to question some Kanzani politicians. The Minister of Health himself drove me out secretly to the chief item of evidence in the case.

Fifty kilometres from the nearest river, two hundred and fifty kilometres from any township worthy of the name, we arrived at our destination in the bush. There stood a great disconsolate white building, its tiers of windows shuttered like closed eyes, its portico already in a state of collapse. This was the multimillion dollar hospital built merely to line the pockets of a few avaricious men. The main structure had been completed. Nearby, the foundations of an X-ray unit lay open to the sky. Goats wandered about the builders' rubble.

I walked through room after room, ward after ward, all deathly quiet. No healing would ever take place here. There was no way in which one penny of the investment could be retrieved. Only the termites would benefit.

When I flew back from Nairobi, it was to find that the Bang-Bang had taken off and their first single was already in the charts.

I walk left, I walk right,

I waste no sleeping on the night –

It's two by two, the light the dark

Just like animals in the Ark

Because I'll tell ya

Tell ya

I'm a Two-Way Romeo

Hatched right under that Gemini sign

Magic number Sixty-Nine

We're two in one and all in all

Shoot double-barrelled wherewithal …

Girls cumma my house, I let 'em in,

I say Wait, I say Begin –

At first it's strange but then it lives

They grow to love the alternatives

'N' then they'll tell ya

Tell ya

I'm a Two-Way Romeo

Bang-Bang

A Two-Way Thru-Way New-Way Romeo
¹

Looking back, one is astonished to recall the fury which accompanied the success of this execrable song. On their first Northern tour, the Howe twins appeared as support to another of Zak's groups. Their gig, as I understand the term to be, was closed down in Sunderland for reasons of indecency; with Zak's financial backing, the manager of the Sunderland club contested this decision in the courts, and the affair was given some publicity. From then on, a trail of accusations of indecency and innuendo followed like exhaust fumes in the wake of the Bang-Bang's speeding career.

A question was soon raised in the Houses of Parliament. National debate followed, to the strains of that tuneless song. Should the physiologically deprived make capital of their deprivation? Was it fair to themselves and their public?

We can see now why the Bang-Bang was difficult to take. At the time, much of the discussion centred on whether their songs and performances were good or bad; in fact, the question of art hardly entered into the matter. The question of morality was a good deal more pressing (but the British public is well accustomed to confusing art with morality).

Two overlapping areas of morality served to make the Bang-Bang hot news. The Bang-Bang were Siamese twins and therefore represented a deformity (for libel reasons, the word ‘freak' was rarely used in public); should deformity be exploited in this way – indeed,
was
it being exploited?

And – this was the more painful area – should deformed people be allowed to flaunt their sexuality? The deformed, the handicapped, were supposed to keep quiet about their natural desires. There was enough material here to keep the pot of virtuous sentiment, seasoned with prurient interest, a-boiling for a long while.

Self-appointed guardians of the country's moral fibre claimed that sexuality and music were being debased, that national sensitivities would suffer. Then a Liberal Member of Parliament went on television to state that, in his humble opinion, it was all to the good that minorities such as Siamese twins should have their voice; and moreover that his family (although not he himself) had greatly enjoyed the energy of the Bang-Bang, as well as the pagan innocence of their songs. He considered them good-looking young men. He did not see anything unpleasant in deformity, and looked forward to the day when greater enlightenment brought multiple sclerosis olympics and similar events.

This speech was so widely reported, with further photographs of the Bang-Bang and other deformed people who had immediately sought to cash in on the Bang-Bang's success, that it drove out the news of two more African states, including Kanzani, being overtaken by Communist coups.