The Run-Out Groove Read online

  “I hope you weren’t too inconvenienced,” said Freddie. “Or frightened.”

  “You told me you were going to be at home.”

  He shook his head. “I know, I know. We had to pop out for supplies. We were planning on getting back before you arrived and Gwenevere sprang on you. She’s better than any watchdog, eh?”

  “She certainly is,” said Nevada, keeping a wary eye on the goose.

  Freddie stroked Gwenevere’s sleek head. “We’ve had a problem with local kids breaking in. Probably on a dare, raiding the garden, that sort of thing.”

  “Like apple scrumping,” said Magda, savouring the odd English idiom. “Just kids having fun. Harmless.”

  “It won’t be so harmless if they break into the barn and get at my stock,” said Freddie. “Anyway, Gwenevere makes short work of them whenever they come around.”

  “I’ll bet she does,” said Nevada.

  Magda opened the back of the Volvo and began to take out trays of small green plants. They’d evidently been shopping at the local garden centre. As she took them out Freddie hastily said, “Let me show you around the place,” in a transparent attempt to avoid helping his other half with the unloading. He led us down the same path from which the goose had so recently and so furiously emerged. The barn loomed towards us over rows of bamboo poles covered with what looked like string beans.

  It was a tall, modern structure of pale, unstained wood. It stood on the site of an original farm barn but had been rebuilt from the ground up. Above its wide doors a looping red neon sign read SINGLES BAR. A large yellow neon N in a completely different font completed the name. The unpowered neon tubing appeared pale and sickly in the daylight. At night it looked great.

  “Oh, the singles barn,” said Nevada. “I get it.”

  “Duh,” said Tinkler, making a drooling cretin face, and Nevada punched him on the arm.

  “So that entire structure,” she said, “is full of singles.”

  “Yes,” said Freddie proudly.

  “And our Valerian record is in there somewhere.”

  “Yes.”

  “I think I will leave you gentlemen to it,” said Nevada.

  9. BUTTERFLY DREAMS

  While Nevada went off to explore the gardens and presumably bond with Magda, Freddie let us into the barn. There was a proper security system in place with a key punch on the wall beside the barn door. He keyed in the number and a big lock clunked open inside and we spread the twin doors wide. It was dry in the barn, as it needed to be, and just a little cooler than room temperature, thanks to the heating system Freddie had embedded in the concrete floor to drive the damp out of the place.

  Our search wasn’t as much of an ordeal as I’d feared. The barn was pretty much full of singles, untold tens of thousands of them, but they were well organised and properly catalogued. All we had to do was laboriously manoeuvre down from a shelf the three boxes of Valerian 45s and look through them. We each took a box.

  Tinkler went through his, sorting the singles like a professional blackjack dealer shuffling cards in a casino. He was obviously energised by the thought that the single might end up in his collection.

  But it was Freddie who found it.

  It was in a plain white sleeve with a hole at the centre to reveal the original pale blue label and white horse logo. I slid it out of the sleeve and went out in the daylight to check the vinyl. It was perfect. “It looks unplayed,” I said.

  “Well, let’s go and fix that,” said Freddie, grinning. We trooped back towards the farmhouse, keeping an eye out for Nevada on the way. I spotted her sitting on the bench by the pond. Then I saw the white shape of the goose on the bench beside her and my stomach went cold. Gwenevere had her long neck extended, her sharp head hovering beside Nevada’s face, bobbing slowly up and down like a cobra waiting to strike.

  Nevada sat there unmoving, hunched and paralysed as the goose probed towards her face.

  I started running towards them.

  But I had hardly gone three steps before I got a better look and realised that I’d got it all wrong.

  I’d thought Nevada was frozen with fear. But if anything she was frozen with sheer pleasure. I could see now that she was smiling in mesmerised delight as the goose took her long black hair, strand by strand, and ran it carefully through her beak.

  She worked methodically and gently, moving around Nevada’s head. Nevada looked up at us as we joined her. “She’s combing my hair,” she said.

  “Gwen likes you,” said Freddie.

  The goose made happy little sounds as she worked. “She’s been talking to me,” said Nevada, “doing a lot of squonking and squanking.”

  “I’ve done a lot of squanking myself,” said Tinkler, “over the years.”

  “No smut,” said Nevada sternly. “Not in front of the goose.”

  We waited until Gwenevere had finished with Nevada’s hair and then we all started for the farmhouse, the goose cheerfully following us. I showed Nevada the single.

  “So that’s it?” she said.

  Freddie nodded. “Do you know why it’s called ‘Butterfly Dreams’?”

  I said, “Does it have something to do with an ancient Chinese philosopher?”

  Freddie laughed. “You’re way ahead of me.”

  “Oh, of course,” said Nevada. “Butterfly dreams.”

  “All right,” said Tinkler, “what the hell are you all talking about?”

  “The story goes something like this,” said Nevada. “Once there was a Chinese philosopher who fell asleep—”

  “It was Chuang Tzu, actually,” said Freddie.

  “Okay,” said Nevada.

  “He was a contemporary of Meng Tzu.”

  “Good old Meng Tzu.”

  “And he’s widely regarded as the greatest Taoist philosopher.”

  “I meant to say.” Nevada was starting to get a bit tight-lipped. I recognised the signs.

  “Except for Lao Tzu, of course,” added Freddie.

  “Well, moving right along here,” said Nevada, “he had this dream. He dreamed he was a butterfly.”

  “Was he smoking opium?” said Tinkler.

  “I don’t know,” said Nevada, who was by now thoroughly exasperated.

  “I think he probably was,” said Tinkler.

  “Just listen! Anyway, he had this dream and then he woke up and he found himself thinking about it, the dream, pondering on it philosophically, its philosophical implications, and he ended up wondering if he was a man who dreamed he was a butterfly or, in fact, and this is the meat of it, a butterfly who dreamed he was a man.” Nevada paused and looked expectantly at him.

  “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard in my life,” said Tinkler. Then, “Why am I the only one who hasn’t heard of this fucking Chinese philosopher?”

  “Chuang Tzu,” said Freddie.

  * * *

  Freddie had a proper listening room, which was situated at the back of the farmhouse and ran the length of the building. It was a rectangular space with the speakers at the far end, firing down the long axis of the room to a sofa and some armchairs at our end.

  “Aren’t those speakers like yours?” said Nevada. “Only bigger.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Mine are Quads and those are stacked Quads.”

  “Well, don’t go getting a set. We won’t be able to see out of the windows.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said, “I won’t. It’s a mod.”

  “A Quad mod?”

  “Yes, an unofficial modification. I’m not sure I approve.”

  “But they sure sound good,” said Freddie, smiling. Tinkler nodded happily in agreement, the hypocrite—he had a pair of Tannoy horns at home. Freddie showed me his amp, a very respectable Copland integrated tube model, connected to a lovely vintage John Michell phono stage. But I was more interested in the turntable he was using.

  “What the hell is that? Is that one of the original singles players?”

  Freddie bobbed his head. “Tha
t’s right. An RCA J-2 45 player with the thick spindle.”

  “Ah, the thick spindle,” said Nevada. “How the young lady of today yearns for that.”

  It was clearly Freddie’s pride and joy. “And it’s got the rare red spindle cap!”

  “Of course,” I said. Nevada couldn’t think of anything prurient to say about that, though I could see her trying.

  Freddie had also modified the J-2 so it used a modern playing arm that could be fitted with an assortment of interesting cartridges. I noticed at the moment he was running a Sumiko Blue Point Special. He switched on the Copland and took the record from me and lovingly fitted it on the turntable. He set the turntable in motion and carefully lowered the stylus into the run-in groove.

  Warm music immediately filled the room. It was a standard—Gershwin’s ‘Summertime’. “This is the B-side,” I said. Freddie nodded. “But the hidden message is supposed to be on the A-side.” Freddie shrugged. Then I shrugged. “Okay,” I said. “No problem. We’ll listen to this first.” It was no hardship. Valerian’s extraordinary voice probed the beautiful contours of the song, turning it from a lullaby into something else, a folk ballad from a lost world.

  “Doesn’t she have an extraordinary voice?” said Nevada.

  Freddie nodded doubtfully. “Though I still say Janis has got the edge on her.” One of the two big clichés about Valerian was that she was the English Janis Joplin. This was only superficially true. She had something of Janis’s bluesy edge and knack for wracked distortion, but she also had an instinct for unconventional sound shapes and rhythms, like a great jazz experimenter.

  The other big cliché about Valerian was that she was the female Jim Morrison. And when you considered her penchant for dark poetry, her charisma and gift for offending society—not to mention her rapacious drug use, sexual excesses and her extraordinary early end—there seemed a little more truth in that.

  ‘Summertime’ came to an end and Freddie turned the record over. We all leaned forward. ‘Butterfly Dreams’ began.

  It was a minimal production, just acoustic guitar, piano and backing vocals filling in the spaces around Valerian’s singing. The lyrics were spare, obscure, allusive. Her voice moved from sexual intimacy to outer-space abstraction. She slowed words down, broke them into fragments and stretched them to the breaking point.

  She sounded like a cross between the much-cited Janis Joplin and the jazz goddess Betty Carter. And despite the enigmatic poetry, or perhaps because of it, it created an eerie mood. It lingered, yet it had swing. It had both strangeness and charm.

  What it didn’t have was a hidden message.

  With the simple instrumentation and the sparse vocals, there was nowhere for anything to hide. Nothing was buried in the mix. Freddie’s speakers revealed every note and syllable.

  No hidden message. Backwards or forwards or sideways. No trace of anything.

  We all looked at each other as the song came to its end. So much for that, I thought. One more urban myth bites the dust.

  And then the stylus reached the run-out groove.

  The run-out groove exists at the end of a vinyl recording to protect the needle, to prevent a noisy and potentially damaging excursion into the paper label at the centre.

  The idea is that the stylus rides there in a blank groove in the vinyl, endlessly and harmlessly, with no more noise than the occasional subdued thud, until the lazy audio enthusiast gets up and lifts off the tone arm. But, apart from the endless loop structure, a run-out groove is just like any other microgroove on the playing surface.

  And there’s no reason that it can’t have something recorded on it.

  As we hit the run-out groove Valerian’s voice suddenly came back, a warm whisper, intense and intimate, saying,

  Love is this…

  Love is this…

  Love is this…

  We all looked at each other again. Nobody moved. We sat and listened, as though expecting something to be revealed, even though we all knew that it was only those three words, could only ever be those three words, repeated over and over again. We wouldn’t hear anything different from what we’d already heard.

  But we did hear something different.

  It grew on you. The very repetition of the words began to have an almost hypnotic effect. Valerian’s voice was soft, sultry, and infinitely intimate. Suggestive and erotic. A lover whispering in your ear. I began to realise why someone might have wanted this banned. Any prurience was entirely in the mind of the listener.

  But, in a way, that was the most powerful place for it.

  Love is this…

  Love is this…

  Love is this…

  I looked at Nevada and she raised her eyebrows and fluttered a hand towards her neck in an ‘I’m too hot’ gesture. Tinkler leaned over and silently mouthed something. I had no idea what he was trying to say, but it was clearly pornographic.

  Freddie was just sitting with his hands folded between his knees, staring intently towards the speakers as if he expected Valerian to emerge from behind them and start to perform a strip tease.

  But even the intensity of that sweet, insinuating voice, promising untold sensual pleasures, began to wear thin. I was on the verge of suggesting we switch the record off; after all, it was just three words, repeating forever. Unchanging.

  Then the strangest thing happened. It was not unchanging.

  It changed.

  Not the words themselves. The sequence of them.

  Up to now there had been no question that Valerian was whispering “Love is this,” leaving the listener’s mind to invent the exact details, but it was nonetheless a statement of erotic pleasure, an unequivocal declaration. But suddenly she was saying something different. Not “Love is this, love is this, love is this”, but…

  Is this love?

  Is this love?

  Is this love?

  It wasn’t a statement. It was a question. Without doubt, this was now the true intent of the words. It wasn’t pleasure. It was pain. She wasn’t describing the joys of communion. She was begging to know if such a thing existed. To identify what she was suffering and give it a name.

  Is this love?

  Is this love?

  Is this love?

  It was eerily as if her intonation had changed, although I knew that was impossible. We were listening to exactly what we’d been hearing before. What had sounded like erotic bliss now sounded like emotional torment. Instead of a statement by an accomplished temptress it was a desperate question by a disturbed and despairing girl.

  I looked at Nevada. She’d got it too. It was utterly eerie. The hair on the back of my neck and arms was standing up in atavistic reaction. And then the meaning shifted back again. Without any warning, smooth as silk, the voice was back to its warm insinuation of carnal delight. The pain and longing and questioning were gone.

  The meaning shifted back and forth. It was like watching a bicycle wheel spinning and then, at a certain point, the motion of the spokes suddenly seem to reverse and start moving in the opposite direction.

  Love is this… Love is this…

  Is this love? Is this love?

  “Well,” said Nevada. “I’ve got goose bumps. Which is very appropriate. Where’s Gwenevere?”

  That broke the spell. Freddie got up and carefully lifted the needle from the playing surface. He took the record off the turntable and put it back in its sleeve. Then he cleared his throat. He seemed a little reluctant to look at us. I understood why. We’d all been through something strangely intimate together, something secret and almost shameful. It had been like peeking under someone’s sheets. But it had also been like looking under their bandages.

  “Okay,” said Tinkler. “That really did my head in.”

  * * *

  Tinkler and Nevada were waiting for me outside on the driveway after I finished talking to Freddie. I understood their need to get out in the fresh air. Nevada looked at me as I came out of the farmhouse and said, “So there is a hi
dden message after all.”

  “Yes.”

  “But it’s of no use to us in our quest.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t see how it can be. It doesn’t tell us anything.”

  “It certainly tells us about her state of mind,” said Nevada. “The poor girl.”

  “Well, I’m going ahead on the assumption that the Colonel still wants us to secure the record for him, so I’ve discussed purchasing it with Freddie. He’s agreed not to sell it to anyone else until we check back with the Colonel.”

  “But the Colonel may not want it now. After all, whatever else it might do, it can’t be said to shed much light on the little boy’s disappearance.”

  “True,” I said. “That’s why we have to check with him.”

  “How much does he want for it?” said Tinkler. “Freddie?”

  “He asked for twelve hundred pounds.”

  Tinkler jerked as if stung. “You’re kidding. That’s completely out of order.”

  “He’s just drawing a line in the sand. He had to say something. I haggled with him a bit but there’s no point really getting down to particulars unless we know the Colonel wants it. If he does, I’m going to try to get Freddie down to three hundred quid.”

  “That’s more like it,” said Tinkler.

  Nevada put an arm around me and said, “My negotiator. Why can’t you be like this with the household budget?”

  “Anyhow, I’m sure we can get it for no more than five hundred.”

  Tinkler kicked at the gravel despondently. “But if the Colonel doesn’t want it, our trip has been a complete waste of time.”

  “Not a complete waste of time,” said Nevada. “We got to meet Gwenevere the goose.” She scanned the gardens around us. “I wonder where that girl has got to?”

  “There’s something else.” I took out the piece of paper Freddie had given me with his ungainly angular writing on it. I suspected he was trying to make even his handwriting Edwardian. “Apparently there’s a place nearby we should visit. A house called Catherwood. It’s the last place Valerian lived. Freddie knows the people who live there, two brothers, Timothy and Gordon Treverton, and he says they knew Valerian at the time. Maybe they can tell us something.”