37. Little Wing

So, that's why it's called JellyBread

3am Friday

Moses is surprised by Waingard’s place. A huge old merchant’s house on the hill behind the Civic Hall looking out over the town centre. Three storeys, bare wood floors, intense clutter. Waingard leads him into a large reception room dominated by the record player and shelves of vinyl, three mismatched sofas positioned around it. Stereo system as guru dishing out morsels of wisdom. The respect for the music is strong in this one. Moses approves and takes note of it. It’s also a house where lamps are left on through the night. The house is an amber hive.

“Do you live here with other people?” Moses says.

“Kind of,” Waingard says.

“Kind of?”

“This is my father’s house. My parents’ house before that.” Waingard is fixing them drinks at the kitchen counter, Moses leaning against the door frame. “My mother died a long time ago. My dad is in a home not far from here. I look after this house.”

“So, do you live here or is this your second secret abode?” He smiles wryly. “Are you married or something?” Married because of her age. He’s referencing her age and he doubtful even realises it.

She hands him a drink. Peppermint green in a highball, he looks at it suspiciously.

“Gin and bitter lemon,” Waingard says, and passes him in the doorway, kicking off her flats as she goes back into the music room. The listening room, she calls it when he follows her. He sits on the sofa and she bends at the table next to the sound system and leafs through a pile of vinyl. The room smells of smoke absorbed by the wood, of a slight mustiness, but it’s not unpleasant. The drink tastes a little of soap suds.

“What are you putting on?” Moses says.

Waingard looks over her shoulder at him. She has a look he isn’t used to. Sobriety. This time of night, back at a girl’s house, drinks made, music going on, that’s not the time to see a straight face and a steady hand, normally a glazed look and half-in-the-room purse to the lips. No, Waingard is sober.

“You want me to put something sexy on?” she says.

Moses laughs. That’s not his thing. She stands, a record hissing in the turn on the table. It’s the first Roxy album. That country guitar lick opens at the perfect volume. The room holds the tune in its heavy curtains and leather upholstery and worn boards and expensively woven wallpaper. Waingard sits next to Moses.

“Are we going to do it to Bryan Ferry?” Moses says. Waingard half-smiles. “Not sure how I feel about that.”

“Will this be a tale to tell, Moses? Fucking a cop to Roxy Music on a leather sofa?”

“I’m a master of discretion,” he says.

She kisses him. Her lips are full and salty like the edge of a margarita. And they’re cold from the drink. His lips are full too, but he’s a bit wet, slippery, drunk.

“I have a question,” she says. She’s so pretty close up, Moses thinks, he’s now realising how lucky he is to be here.

“Shoot.”

She can see in his sloppy eyes that Moses thinks this is part of some foreplay, and although he hopes any such fencing won’t go no for too long, he’ll spar for a little while.

“I want to know who you think killed Aaron,” she says.

Moses’s face drops.

“Really?” he says. “That?”

“What’s wrong with that? It’s my job.”

“Is this your office?”

“I don’t have an office.”

“No?”

“I don’t. Which means everywhere is my office.”

“Maybe we could just leave this metaphor for a while and come back to it.”

He leans in to kiss her, but she pulls back.

“Okay, you want to do this,” Moses says, thinking nothing more than she wants to drag him further into some game before they get down to it.

Waingard stands and starts swaying to 2HB and all that does is make Moses think of Med on the dancefloor and if she’s never danced to this song before him she is doing it now in his mind, transposed over the stocky form of this police detective. Trying to get Med out of his head, Moses stands and joins in, tucking his arms slowly into the cool space between Waingard’s suit jacket and her the black silk of her blouse. She looks up at him, Med expunged, and she smiles in a way that Moses interprets as coyness. They kiss. The record ends. She pulls away from him.

“Another drink?”

She’s nervous about this, he thinks. He wasn’t expecting that. And he respects that. If she wants to take it slow, even if she changes her mind about the whole thing, that’s fine by him, and they can still have a good night, talking shit, going through these records, hammering the drinks cabinet.

“Sure,” he says. “Something else though?”

She heads to the kitchen. “I’ll surprise you,” Waingard says.

“I don’t doubt that for a moment.”

She shouts from the kitchen. “Put another record on. I only like those two songs from that album.”

“What do you want on?” he calls back.

“Talk me through them,” she shouts, but not because she cares what record he puts on, but so that she can hear his voice and gauge if he’s getting closer or staying where she should be, in the listening room, while she is in the kitchen dropping three pipettes of scopolamine into Moses’s gin and bitter lemon.

He’s calling back to her, “Astral Weeks. Another Music from a Different Kitchen. Ram. Bluesbreakers.” She’s in the room, the drink held out to him. Moses is by the player bent over the pile of unshelved records. “Your dad has great taste in music. These are all in such good condition too. This…” He holds up Axis Bold as Love. “Is Hendrix’s best album. Controversial. But I don’t care.” He drops the black vinyl out into his cupped hand and places the disc respectfully onto the turntable. “I mean it has Little Wing on it. His greatest song. That intro is the closest thing rock music has ever gotten to Bach. You know, Hendrix said they worked for months to get that guitar sound and eventually they plugged it into a Lesley speaker for an organ, and there it was. He said it sounded like Jellybread. Whatever the fuck that means, but also… it’s the exactly right description of that sound and that feel.”

“It was my dad’s pet name for me,” Waingard says.

“Little Wing? That’s beautiful.”

“No,” Waingard says. “Jellybread.”

Moses realises he isn’t sure where Waingard is, and as the stylus drops onto the record he turns and sees she’s sitting back on the sofa, drink cradled in her lap, her face distant and hardened. Jellybread. Is that funny? Or is that tragic? What place is this? Some mausoleum to her bastard father? What are they doing here?

“Is that funny or sad?” he asks because he’s drunk and it sounds half funny to him to ask.

“Neither, probably,” she says.

The genius of that intro, playing out its jellybread journey behind them, has never seemed so irrelevant. Even Moses, who holds that thirty seconds of music like some kind of Holy relic in his bosom, isn’t really taking with it right now. He sits next to her, almost ready to hear her share her life traumas. He’s ready. Somehow, he wants to be there for her.

“Do you want to talk about it?” he says, and he swallows hard the moment he hears himself like he’s reading lines for a soap opera. And not only does she not want to talk about it, evident in the look she shoots him, but what even is it? Does she want to talk about the nickname, pet name? Does she want to talk about her relationship with her father? Her childhood? What made her want to become a police officer? How come she’s still single? Is she still single? Does she do this often, whatever it is she and Moses about to do or not do?

Moses stands and walks over to the player. If 6 was 9. Saucy song. Hendrix would fuck anything, that’s what that means, right? He thinks of saying this to Waingard but maybe it’s not the right kind of joke for now. He looks back at her on the sofa and she seems to have softened. That comes a little from seeing him up there at the record player, drunk but holding it together well, and she’s genuinely excited to see what effect the scopolamine is going to have on him and when. He seems pretty together still. But it also comes from the fact she’s had a word with herself about the Jellybread thing. She shouldn’t have let it slip, but Moses won’t remember anything tomorrow. She’s just disappointed in her own lack of discipline. Get the info she needs, tip him back into the land of nod and let him speak it out, blab away, then a heavy yank to his dick and roll him over.

Moses turns to her and it’s obvious he’s had an idea.

“Your top ten albums,” he says to her.

“My top ten albums?”

“Yes. You’re top ten. In order. Well, that doesn’t matter. It might be too hard. Unless you have them ready to go?”

Boy’s games. Incessant list-making. But what else would they talk about in the pub all day if they didn’t have list-making?

Waingard plays at thinking it over, but she already has something in mind.

“Okay,” she says. “Quid pro quo.”

Moses nods. He knows what that means because he’s seen Silence of the Lambs. Something for something or something like that.

“Okay,” he says. This sounds like it might be fun. “What do you want from me.”

“Your top ten suspects,” Waingard says.

Moses thinks on this for a moment but the idea grows on him and he laughs and skips to join her on the sofa. The skip is laboured and as he lands next to her his eyes, for a second, go back into his head.

“Are you okay?” she says.

“Yeah yeah yeah,” protests Moses. “Excellent. Go ahead. Your top ten.”

“We go one each,” she says.

“No no no,” Moses says. “If I was doing my top ten albums then we could shove them back and forth like that but it’s different with the…”

“Okay okay, I’ll do my albums first,” she says. Let’s just get to the gold, for fuck’s sake. “Reverse order?”

“Whatever suits,” Moses says with a ravenous grin on his face, and he takes a swig of his drink. She’s going to have to be quick. He’s getting drowsy, and he’s smacking his lips together and looking into the glass. No taste of washing up liquid this time. In fact, it has a clear salty taste, and something he can’t identify. He’s thinking.

“Number ten is Yellow Moon by the Neville Brothers. Nine is Songs From Northern Britain by Teenage Fanclub. Eight is Otis Blue. Seven is Extensions of a Man by Donny Hathaway. Can’s Future Days at Six. Juju by Siouxsie and the Banshees at five. Controversy by Prince at four. The Idiot by Iggy Pop at three. Low by Bowie at two. And Disintegration by the Cure is undoubtedly the greatest album ever made.”

Moses is astonished, and drowsy, and has no idea that apart from the number one spot, Waingard has just read the spines from a pile of records belonging to her father stacked on the card table over Moses’s shoulder.

“Great list,” Moses slurs. “Let’s take that first one. The… what was it?”

He’s slumping.

Waingard leans over him and shakes him by the shoulders. He wasn’t supposed to crash like this. “No, we don’t have time to analyse my list, Moses,” she says. “I need yours. Quid pro quo.”

He blinks, straightens, and Waingard lets go of him and sits back in her corner of the sofa.

“Sorry,” Moses says, his pride hurt by a perceived succumbing to the booze. “I don’t normally flag like this.”

“Water?”

“No. Fuck no. I just feel right out there.”

The trick with scopolamine is to catch the subject right at the cusp of a twilight sleep. It’s like trapping them in an anteroom, somewhere between arrival and the party. The lobby of some great exclusive high society orgy. And in that spot they’ll be excruciatingly honest. She’s used it many times before, every time when someone is being coy about theories and opinions. Don’t want to drop anyone in it. Don’t want to say something I may come to regret. Don’t want overstep the mark.

Waingard slides up the seat and puts her hand on Moses’s forehead. He’s clammy, his eyes are like slits. At some point, one of them has put on Tago Mago and Paperhouse is not helping Moses’s slide into a psychedelic waiting room for the fuck of his life. He smiles weakly. “Am I going to die?” he says, his voice like that of a small boy.

“Not unless you surprise me,” Waingard says.

His eyes are closed now, but his lips trip and mumble something.

“Your list of suspects, Moses,” she says quietly into his ear. Can shuffle and sway from the record player, there’s a depth to the sonic structure of this record that Moses has never heard before, like the band is set up in the bay window, chugging through the album, and by the time they get to Mushroom they’re set up in his skull, Holger Czukay playing bass on the porch swing of his Sylvian Fissure, Damo Suzuki raging in his frontal lobe, Karoli’s guitar whining and snapping in the cerebellum, and those drums from the drummer whatever his name was rattling somewhere in God’s own heaven, unseeable but everywhere.

“Talk to me, Moses. Who do you think killed Aaron?”

An explosion that fades into rain. The record. And out of the rain comes a locomotive groove and tape looped vocals. They’re off. All of them.

Waingard straightens in her seat from leaning over Moses, and leans across to a drawer to take out a notepad.

“Give me some names,” she says.

Moses grumbles at first, but he’s in that special twilight spot where all the barriers are down or fluid or porous or whatever it is the appropriators of this drug call it.

“Name,” she repeats.

“It honestly could be anyone,” Moses says.

His voice is different, calmer, the slur has gone and so has that confident energised rasp that underlines it normally. Now it is low, flat, as if his voice is reclining, sinking into an uncovered depth of comfort.

“Was it you?” says Waingard, her pen hovering over the pad. “Did you kill Aaron?”

“No.”

“Did Vardaman do it?”

“Maybe. I doubt it.”

“Are you covering for him?”

“No.”

“Then did he do it?”

“We fell asleep. This afternoon. He could have done it then.”

“So, he has no alibi?”

“Not from me.”

“But why would he do it?”

“He was scared Aaron was going to kick our heads in.”

“A pre-emptive strike.”

“Maybe.”

It’s slow. Moses takes a deep sigh before every answer, his eyes lightly closed, his face strangely handsome from this angle, tipped up to the ceiling, his chin and nose forming a pleasing opposition to one another.

“Do you think Vardaman is capable of killing Aaron?”

Sigh.

“No.”

“But you’re not a hundred percent?”

Sigh.

“I’m never a hundred percent on anything.”

“Who else, then?”

“Who else what?”

“Who else are you not a hundred percent on?”

Sigh.

“Nobody you know.”

“Assume I know everybody.”

“You’re not from around here.”

“You’re wrong. I’m born and bred.”

“Jellybread.”

Moses smiles.

“Give me your list, Moses. I know you have one.”

Sigh.

“Lists,” Moses says. “It’s what we do instead of real work.”

“You think you’re coming up with great lines, Moses, but all you’re doing is wasting my time.”

Moses farts. Waingard has had worse kickbacks in her time, but she still clips the end of her nose between her fingers. Had Moses been awake, she would never have shown such weakness. “Or I’m going to cut off your penis.”

From the twilight sleep, this registers as a real-world threat to Moses and he scrunches up his nose and the upset on his face morphs into the twisted tomato expression of a displeased baby. Waingard works to pull him back from this unhelpful and time-consuming state and she rubs his forearm and gives it the there there treatment. It works. “I won’t cut off your penis,” she says, and Moses comes back from the precipice. “But you need to give me some names, Moses.”

Sigh.

“Raul, maybe. I don’t know. I don’t have a list.”

Moses sounds like a teenager, ragged and stroppy. Waingard hasn’t seen this before. It’s not regressive therapy, or at least isn’t usually. She needs him back to where he started. She stands and says with an authoritative tone, “You can’t lie to me, Moses. Not now.”

Sigh.

“Okay. Yeah. So, Raul, maybe.” He’s back on dry land by the sounds of things. Waingard sits and pick up her pad and pen.

“Raul,” she says as she writes it down.

He slips into a mid-place, his head back, eyes closed, his voice off into the dream. He says his list. Where it’s come from is anybody’s guess. Maybe he has been formulating one, in his unconscious, all this time. And here it is. He says it and Waingard write it down. CHUD. Pistol Pete. Padeo Grin. The Eagles. Is Moses taking the piss? Are these real people? But she outs them down. It’s something to go on.

Moses sinks into the sleep Waingard has been keeping him at the edge of for the last fifteen minutes. The first side of Tago Mago grinds to a close. Moses starts to snore. Waingard lights a cigarette, pours another drink, and puts Disintegration on the turntable.