The Brothel Creeper: Stories of Sexual and Spiritual Tension (22 page)

“Shut up, for Gawd’s sake!” bellowed Verno.

I spotted a dark silhouette beyond the gaping main door of the factory. I couldn’t imagine why our quiet colleague had decided to become a hero over such a stupid thing as a factory. Did he think there were people still trapped inside? Had he heard voices?

“Mouthy! You idiot! Come back out here!”

I said, “Can you hold the hose without me? I’ll go and get him!” Then I began running, sliding over rubble, the arc of water above me like a monochrome rainbow vanishing through the eye of an upper window. I jumped through the main door. Flames. Blackened machinery and rows of crates. The crates were blazing and the things they contained were also blazing and Mouthy was crouching.

I saw what he was doing. He was dipping his gloved hands into fire and scooping up smoking pencils. Dozens of them. This was a pencil factory! He was trying to stuff them into the pockets of his trousers and his face was bright, brighter than the reflected glare should have made it. I called out but he didn’t heed me.

I couldn’t comprehend the value of those writing implements to him but his greed and excitement were intense. So many different kinds of pencil! The entire trove of the Penguin Pencil Company’s Fine Arts Lead Pencils (slogan: thirteen degrees of hardness) was open to him alone. From the crumbly soft 6B to the spike-like 6H; and he wanted them all. And he was oblivious to everything else.

And everything else was oblivious to him.

The roof collapsed at that point and Mouthy was gone. I couldn’t see my own hand in front of me. Dust and embers. I coughed a hasty retreat and rejoined the men. “Help me!”

We dropped the hose and it undulated itself in the crazy dangerous dance that should be comical but in truth is dreadful; and we rushed in together. But the heat was impassable.

“Back out!” screamed Verno.

We managed to pick up the hose again, train it on the blaze once more and hold it steady until the fire was dead, just before dawn. Stiff and aching, we picked our way through the smoking ruins, levering aside fallen joists and brushing brick dust off our shoulders.

When we found Mouthy, only half of him was left.

The lower half. His legs.

And there was something strange about them.

For one thing, they were bare.

Smyth leaned forward and blinked. “Well, I’ll be damned! Take a look at that, will you? Take a look!”

Lofty leaned in, and then it was my turn, and then Bumble and Clark; and we all stood up straight and rubbed our red eyes until they hurt, but I couldn’t rub out of them that image of the two legs with the two stripes down the back of them, carefully drawn straight lines, legs like the tarts on the postcards sold by Verno’s dad in Lambeth before he retired and closed his newsagent’s forever.

We walked out with our heads lowered. We drove back to the station and breakfast was waiting for us.

The tea tasted cheap; it was bitter on my gums. Lofty finally broke the silence. “Who would have thought?”

“Mouthy a bleeding poof!” confirmed Verno.

Smyth sniffed. “Disgusting.”

“No wonder he was so quiet all the time,” mused Bumble. “With all the shortages he didn’t have a chance to indulge his perversion; so that factory must have been like a department store to him. Just like lingerie, those pencils. The dirty sodomite.”

Something came over me. I stood and pushed back my chair with my foot, scraping it across the floor. Words filled my throat. Sentiments. I wanted to talk about respect for the dead, about hypocrisy: was Mouthy’s crime worse than gambling or using prostitutes? But I couldn’t get any of this out. There was a realisation deep inside me that even those protests were wrong, that they stressed forgiveness instead of pointing out there was nothing to forgive in the first place.

I was still standing, and everyone was looking at me, when Clark said the right thing, the words I couldn’t bring myself to utter. “Who are we fighting against? What are we fighting against?” He turned to Bumble and Smyth, and then also to Lofty, Verno and finally myself. “I’ll tell you what. Against
us
when we
act
like this…”

The moment had arrived for me to redeem myself. I knew the reaction to Clark’s speech could go either way.

So I raised my cup. “A toast. To Mouthy!”

And I knocked it back quick.

I was already standing, as I’ve said. The others stood up as well and also drank. The fight against fire was easy in comparison.
This
was my real contribution to the war effort.

Progressive rock musicians. Where do they go after they die? They go to Hell, that’s where, to a corner reserved just for them. I know this for sure because I was a prog rock musician, then I died and began the long slide down to Hell, where I am now.

What happened was that the instant after my death, a flight of steps appeared in the ground, a spiral staircase without a visible base, but it had a bannister running alongside it, and I had a sudden urge to straddle that bannister and corkscrew to the bottom, and that’s what I did and thus I reached Hell, where I still am.

Not everybody who ends up in Hell gets there like that. Prog rockers nearly always do, nobody knows why.

People wonder what it’s like down here. It’s Hell.

That doesn’t mean it’s unbearable. It’s unpleasant rather than nasty. There’s a lot of resentment among my fellow sufferers because nobody ever told them that prog rock was a sin.

Some of them still don’t think it is. Others even deny that they were prog rockers in the first place.

Take Jan Hammer for instance. He won’t stop making speeches about how the music he played in the Mahavishnu Orchestra and other bands was fusion jazz rather than prog. He writes long letters to the Devil explaining the difference between the two styles.

The Devil never answers. Damned if I know why.

The crux of Jan Hammer’s argument is that fusion jazz was played by jazz musicians who were attracted to rock music while prog rock was played by rock musicians attracted to jazz.

I doubt he’ll get anywhere with that approach.

I guess the term ‘prog rock’ is defined by excessive length of songs, unnecessary time changes, difficult keys, unusual rhythms, obscure lyrics, self indulgent solos and heavy use of electricity rather than the precise cultural history of the players.

That’s probably how the Devil sees it. And he should know. He has all the best tunes, or so it’s said.

On the other hand, or claw, it could be that he’s simply ignorant but doesn’t care. If he’s truly the Lord of Chaos it’s unlikely he spends time agonising over the precise meaning of terms. His album collection probably isn’t even in alphabetical order.

It hardly matters one way or the other.

I know Jan Hammer’s complaints off by heart. Down here in this corner of Hell we have to work in pairs, preparing snacks for musicians who play any type of music
other
than prog rock. Jan Hammer is my partner. Our main job is to crack nuts. Sometimes we prepare canapés or dishes of olives and other pickles, rarely cheese and biscuits. But nuts are our speciality. We crack all kinds but pistachios are the most common by far. Since my demise I must have cracked a billion nuts.

Jan Hammer has cracked even more. Time is the not the same down here as above. One of our years can fit inside one of your seconds. Decades of cracking nuts, centuries, millennia. That’s our punishment, our punishment for our concept albums and gatefold sleeves. Disproportionate, I hear you cry? Yes I agree it’s very unfair.

What was that? The sentence should be even harsher?

I think you’re a swine and probably in the pay of the Devil. How can you be so cruel to someone you don’t even know? And that reminds me, no introductions have yet been made.

I already know who you are. You are the reader.

Now I’ll tell you who I am. My name is Anthony Lewis. I was the lead singer of a prog rock band called Satori. We never made it big in the prog world like Yes, Genesis or Jethro Tull, we came on the scene too late, two and a half decades too late if truth be told. Or if you prefer truth not to be told, we were ahead of our time.

We underwent some personnel changes, as all bands do, not just prog rock bands, but our quintessential lineup was Stuart, Lee, Steve, John and myself out front. I am not tall, not slim, but my voice is astounding. My mortal enemy, Huw Rees, told me that I don’t have the charisma to get away with what I attempt on stage. This criticism baffled me. I never attempted anything too theatrical or melodramatic. My efforts to engage the audience were ironic, playful, sparse. I just wanted to sing and that’s what I did, without frills and only one hat.

Huw Rees played drums for folk bands.

Satori played prog rock at a time when almost nobody else was capable of structuring a song that lasted longer than three minutes. I still think that’s something to be proud of.

The Devil has appalling taste. That’s why he’s the Devil.

He relishes the sort of music that was ubiquitous when I was alive on the circuit, lazy folk rock, singer songwriters crooning sentimental words to simple strummed chords on an acoustic guitar, young girls and boys with names like Maria, Tracy, Damien or Jeff. The city where my band was based, Swansea, was awash with acts like that. The Devil must rate Swansea as one of his favourite music hangouts.

In some ways I’d rather be here in Hell.

It’s much worse for Jan Hammer, of course. He was a big star in his day, highly respected, quite wealthy. He could afford to live in any city he liked, Miami, Prague, London, Paris. He knew the good life. Hell is a considerable drop in standards for him. That’s why he still hopes he can escape his destiny, argue his way back to the surface, insist that he has been bracketed in the wrong musical category. But only one reprieve from Hell has ever been issued since the origin of reality and the chances of him earning another are negligible.

No, he’s stuck with me, Anthony Lewis, forever.

The other reason he’ll never be set free is that he’s a superlative cracker of nuts. A really fine nutcracker. He can crack ten nuts with his ten fingers all at once, as if he’s playing a really big pistachio chord, or he can crack them in rapid succession, like a really fast arpeggio, or he can crack them under the toes of his shoes, the same way he pushed down on an effects pedal to modulate the output of his synthesiser on some of those early Mahavishnu recordings. No nut has been cracked properly if it hasn’t been cracked by Jan Hammer.

The musicians who eat them don’t understand.

I detest having to crack nuts for bands who sound like Joy Division, The Cure or Oasis. I don’t think they deserve them. Nor do they deserve the stuffed vine leaves, pitta bread or houmous that other prog rock pairs are condemned to prepare for them.

Jan Hammer claims to have access to the internet. There’s a hole in the ceiling of the little room where we sleep and occasionally I agree to help him climb inside it. I crouch and he stands on my shoulders and grips the edges of the hole with his skilled fingers and takes his own weight as much as he can bear and then I slowly rise, pushing the soles of his feet and the rest of him upwards and after lots of puffing he manages to enter the hole and vanishes for an hour.

There’s a computer in that cavity and Jan Hammer uses it to look up facts and rumours about the Devil. A lot of potentially useful data can’t pass the firewalls of Hell but enough gets through to give us an inkling of why the Devil hates prog rock. It has nothing to do with any inherent flaw in the music itself or any law of the cosmos. It’s purely personal. It seems the Devil had an upsetting experience while listening to Gentle Giant’s fourth album. The upsetting experience itself remains a mystery. I suspect it was something to do with finding out that a friend had betrayed him, that’s the standard reason.

I have never entered that cavity. I don’t fit.

I don’t really believe a computer exists up there. Whether through stress or mischief, Jan Hammer often tells lies to me, lies that are so ludicrous they might form part of some obscure test. Once he told me that the drummer Carl Palmer was a saint and that his cymbals were spare halos. But I’ve glimpsed Carl Palmer down here in Hell and I know he was merely a prog rocker like the rest of us.

In fact I’ve seen all of ELP. It happened a few weeks ago when I went to empty the bins that were full of nut shells. I glanced into a room as I walked down a passage and I saw Keith Emerson forcing slices of pineapple and cubes of cheese onto little sticks. He was working with Greg Lake. It is rare that musicians who played together on the surface are permitted to stay together in Hell. Maybe this was an extra punishment for the pair of them. In that case, the Devil has got it right for once. When I returned along the passage they had gone.

The Devil does regularly move us around. This is to keep us unsettled and agitated. The next time Jan Hammer and I are relocated we’ll lose the internet connection that probably doesn’t exist anyway. That’s a shame. I would love to e-mail all my friends and colleagues who are still living, especially the surviving members of Satori, to warn them. The only other option is to visit the surface, a privilege very difficult to earn. Just one working pair are awarded that honour for one hour every year and each time it goes to Darryl Way from Curved Air and Peter Hammill from Van der Graaf Generator, I don’t know why.

Not long after I first arrived I went to see the Devil, to clarify my rights and obligations during my stay. I set out with high hopes but after a journey of many nights I was stopped by a sentry guarding a door of ice set into a wall of molten iron that somehow kept its shape. The Devil was in a meeting, I was informed, but a brief audience might be possible with his secretary, the squat helium voiced designer lesbian, Julie Burchill. I declined the offer. Behind the ice, a bulky shadow pressed its bare thighs to the chilly translucency. I retraced my steps and so began my afterlife in perdition with Jan Hammer.

I now wonder if the Devil is a prisoner.

Nobody ever sees him, nobody hears from him directly. His wishes are passed to us in scribbled messages, yellow memos that we can stick only on our walls, for there are no fridge doors down here. It might be that Julie Burchill or someone like her runs the entire show, in the same way Martin Bormann controlled the final days of the Reich by reinterpreting Hitler’s orders according to his own agenda. It’s not infeasible that the Devil is completely ignorant of what is happening in his realm. He might even be a fan of Supertramp or Steely Dan.

If Milton was allowed to fantasise about him, so can I, Anthony Lewis of Satori. I don’t intend to glorify him, nor even to forgive him, but he deserves at least as much of a fair hearing as Andy Latimer’s guitar work on Camel’s debut album, an underrated release with a fine cover. If by any slim chance he’s a prog rock fan...

No, I’m getting carried away now, falling into the trap of pretending some sort of mistake has been made, that I shouldn’t really be here. It’s what I criticise Jan Hammer for. I’m more realistic than that. I’m in Hell for my crimes and that’s that.

Back to cracking nuts, I guess. Tedious.

Jan Hammer is in a talkative mood today. He keeps firing questions at me. Do I think that the ‘Canterbury Sound’ pioneered by such bands as The Soft Machine, Matching Mole and Caravan is a subset of prog or a separate category? If a separate category, why hasn’t fusion jazz been accorded the same distinction? Is art rock identical to prog rock and if not, why not? Are the members of Henry Cow in Hell preparing snacks? What about outfits like Can, Faust and Cluster? Do they escape the prog label simply because they influenced electronic dance music? I don’t care about the answers to any of these pointless riddles.

The only musicians I’ve seen down here so far apart from Jan Hammer, ELP, Darryl Way and Peter Hammill are Chris Squire and Rick Wakeman from Yes, Neil Peart from Rush, Tony Reeves from Greenslade, Christian Vander from Magma, Euan Lowson from Pallas and Dave Stewart from Egg. Maybe we’re the only ones in Hell to date. Perhaps King Crimson and Pink Floyd found a loophole. There are too many questions, too many unresolved issues. But I am Anthony Lewis.

That’s the only certainty I’m left with.

My lyrics made a lot more sense than Jon Anderson’s ever did. I wrote a song that was a history of the entire universe, not a concept album but a single song. That shows conciseness as well as grandiosity. I remember a few lines from it too. The sulphurous clouds of Hell haven’t fully addled my senses yet. Not yet...
370 million years ago / the forests took over the land (you heard about it) / About the same time cats appeared
... That’s how it went in part. It’s not entirely accurate. Forests came long before cats and both came long before prog.

But it’s music. I was an entertainer.

Jan Hammer insists that instrumentals are superior to songs. I wonder if he thinks that pistachios are better than cashews? It’s all academic, I don’t mean academic in a good way, with professors debating it and writing papers on the theme, but pointless. That’s the only sort of academic there is in Hell. Learning stops here.

I worry about the other members of Satori. I dream about them touring the venues of Swansea, paying homage to me every time they mount the stage and dedicating each song to my memory, and I want to rise out of Hell and shake them and shout at them to stop playing prog rock, to warn them that their souls are in danger if they continue. But in my dreams all my cries are swamped by Lee’s elaborate saxophone lines, John’s technical drumming, Steve’s fancy keyboard work and Stuart’s fiddly bass. I wake with a sweat slicking my furrowed brow, that forehead that knows no fringe, and the bad thing about waking with such a sweat from such a dream in Hell is that the sweats of the day are even worse.