Dead Men's s Boots

If I missed the train I’d be stuck there, and in the dream that seemed like a very bad option. I turned corners at random, sure that I’d see the station in the distance, but each turning was either a blind alley or an avenue that stretched into the distance with no station in sight.

Then I passed a man sitting at the side of the road – in the same attitude, I guess, as Doug Hunter when the cops found him and took him in. But this wasn’t Doug Hunter, a man I’d yet to meet: it was John Gittings.

I sat down next to him. It would have felt rude to just walk on by.

He gave me a look – more in sorrow than in anger, which came as something of a relief considering his propensity for violence on the spirit level. He was dressed in the shabby brown jacket and tan chinos he’d worn on the day of the Whipsnade Zoo debacle the year before, when he’d taken his eye off the game during a tag-team exorcism and I’d come within an eighth of an inch of having my head bitten off. It was the last time I’d seen him alive.

He showed me his hands, which were bloody. My subconscious mind was definitely raiding Doug Hunter’s story for narrative guidelines here.

‘Not much left of me now, Fix,’ John said lugubriously. Psychologists tell us that you can’t really hear voices in dreams, but this sounded like the John I remembered: as much vaguely comical self-pity as Morrissey, but John played the drums when he was ghostbusting and no group he was in ever stayed together for very long, so in most respects you’d have to say he was more like Johnny Marr.

‘No, mate,’ I agreed. ‘You’ve seen better days, that’s for sure.’

Since it was my dream, I checked my pockets for booze. Nothing there but a sprig of silver birch: okay, that was the ward that was stuck up on John’s door to keep the restless dead out. I felt almost ashamed: as dreams go, this was turning into something of a busman’s holiday.

I offered John the silver-birch ward: it was looking a little ragged now, the white thread that bound it starting to unravel, but he didn’t seem to notice it in any case. He shook his head, staring sombrely at the gutter where a trickle of black water was now running along past us, detouring around the toes of his shoes. ‘Nobody wants to know, do they, Fix?’

‘Wants to know what, John?’ I asked.

‘How the bastards killed me.’

kn""-1em"" width=""2em"">I put the birch twig back in my pocket. ‘Umm – you killed yourself, John,’ I said, as tactfully as I could. ‘You didn’t take any chances about it, either. You stuck a shotgun in your mouth and pulled the trigger. It took Carla two days to get your brains off the walls.’

John looked up at me, his expression slightly reproachful now. ‘I might not have had to,’ he said, ‘if you ever picked up your phone.’

I’d been expecting that one: you didn’t need to be Freud to know why I was dreaming about John Gittings while I was sleeping in his bed with his dead body in the room next door. ‘Yeah, I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Really, really sorry. On the other hand, you could have left a message that made some kind of sense. You never told me what was at stake, John. You never tried to meet me halfway.’

He was rummaging in his pockets, patting his jacket, a distracted frown on his face. ‘I thought I could handle it,’ he admitted. ‘By the time I decided to bring someone else in on it, I was already in way over my head. I always was an arrogant sod, Fix. Almost as bad as you. I think I was supposed to give you something.’

‘The letter? I got it.’

‘No, not the letter. The score. The final score, after the whistle blew.’

‘The whistle?’

‘Or the drums. I forget. It’s like a skeleton, Fix. The skeleton of a song.’

‘Yeah, well, thanks for the thought, John. I guess I’ll live without it. What’s inscription night, by the way? It sounds like something you’d get at the local bridge club.’

John sighed and stood up, very slowly, with great reluctance. There was a faint splash as he disturbed the water in the gutter, the rippling after-effects lasting longer than I would have expected. I looked up into his pleading, hangdog face.

‘I’ve got to go,’ he said. ‘It’ll have to wait for another time. You won’t let them get me, will you, Fix? I can rely on you for that much? Blow me away, if you have to. Play me a song and blow me out like a candle. I don’t mind. Just don’t let them get me.’

I stood up too, because the street was filling with water now. The trickle in the gutter had grown into a flood while I wasn’t looking, and it was already up to our knees. It was cold, and completely opaque – like a rising tide of ink.

‘Who, John?’ I asked. ‘Who wants to get you?’

‘The same ones as before,’ he said, with a helpless shrug. He stared into my eyes, his jaw tightening with fear. ‘Always the same ones, again and again and again. That’s the point.