It had taken long enough: three different recording-sessions and more than eight hundred dollars, but at last Bertie was completely satisfied with the end result. It had indeed been third time lucky and Bertie had promised himself that if the song had not worked out this time, then the A&R man down at Geffen was simply going to have to listen to either one of the previous two versions of the number. Bertie had had it up to the eyeballs with the infernal tune, no matter how good everyone said it was.
Therefore, it was with a great sense of relief and perhaps a small twinge of excitement about what might lie around the corner, that Bertie lovingly laid his big Yamaha twelve-string acoustic guitar down in its velvet-padded case. Then, retrieving the cassette and reel tape duplicates of the completed master recording, he strolled somewhat jauntily out of the recording studio and into the cool autumn night.
The following morning reality swept aside, as Bertie sat at his desk in his spartan two room cold water flat. Staring at the telephone bill and also knowing it was nearing the end of the month, he wondered how in the world he was going to come up with close to five hundred and fifty dollars by the end of the week.
For a brief moment or so, Bertie pondered on his current situation, both financial and otherwise. By any account he was close to completely broke. On average he earnt about a grand a month, which was barely enough to scrape by, far less pay for luxuries like studio time in expensive downtown recording studios. However, somehow, he got by, although admittedly he was living, by most first world standards, below the poverty line.
Bertie remembered thinking that his mother, upon first visiting her son's 'pad', had not seemed overly impressed with the place. Right now, though, it was all he could afford and it really was quite nice compared to a great deal of other places. Besides, Bertie liked it and that was he main thing, seeing as he was the one who had to live there, he reasoned.
Like most boys/girls, men/women in their late teens and early twenties away from home and on their own, fending for themselves for the first time in their lives, Bertie's culinary abilities fell something far short of limited: he could boil and fry an egg and that was about it. In any event, he was not the slightest bit interested in cooking, which was hardly unusual for an adolescent male and so his diet consisted pretty much solely of microwave-able TV dinners and cans of soup. He discovered, after about the first six months of his being away from home, that one could quite easily survive on not two or three, but just one half-decent meal a day. In addition to this revelation, he also found out, that if he kept himself busy and did not really think about food, then he didn't even get hungry! However, the generally poor - bordering on abysmal - quality of his diet, rendered him an easy prey to the various bugs and viruses of any sort, that chose to attack his weakened boy's defence mechanisms and so it followed that Bertie was often suffering from either flu or chest colds. Nonetheless, as far as Bertie saw it, he was still doing exactly what he wanted to do in terms of trying everything in his power to realise his dreams and, above all, he was without a doubt being true to himself. If poverty and the occasional discomfort were what he had to endure along with that then, Bertie surmised, so BE it. To one thing he was resolved: nothing, but nothing on God's earth was going to knock him off that chosen path.
Yes, if it took five years or fifty years, Bertie had made a promise to himself that he would never give up - for him it was very much conquer or die. He recalled an occasion when his mother had asked him, "But what will you do if you don't make it?", and Bertie had replied, "Mum, I never WON'T make it, because I'll never stop trying."
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Bertie had woken up that morning with acute chest pains around his rib-cage. At first, he had put it down to the exquisite salmon sandwiches he had consumed in somewhat vast quantities the night before. He suspected he was suffering from an attack of mild food poisoning and poured himself his by now customary shot of Jack Daniel's into the crystal tumbler he kept on the table beside his giant sixteenth century Louis Cinque poster bed. The fiery liquid did not fail in producing the warm, comforting sensation deep in his bowels he had become so accustomed to. Opting for the safe side, he swallowed a couple of the little yellow pills his doctor had prescribed for him recently, designed to combat any form of common stomach disorder. Then he switched on the gold-plated miniature radio he had received as a gift from his producer for his twenty fifth birthday a couple of weeks back.
The sound of 'The Steroids' latest single, blasting out of the little receiver did little to lighten Bertie's looming depression and he quickly switched the thing off in disgust.
"Those sad, deluded little glove puppets," he said out loud, "think they're going to be riding high for the next twenty years - little do they know, little do they damn well know."
Bertie had often been asked his opinion of the latest teeny-bop sensation whose every release was being gobbled up hungrily by the hordes of little girl fans who plastered their bedroom walls with huge colour posters of the little gits and flung themselves like pubescent lemmings towards the stage everywhere the squirm dogs performed. Of course, it made Bertie puke.
"We never started off as a teeny-bopper's band," he would say. "All we relied on was the music and nothing else - no peripheral bullshit. Those muffin-crappers think they can take over the whole world just 'cos they look nice. Well, they're in for a nasty shock, for in total they'll last about nine and a half minutes."
In his despondent state Bertie forgot he'd left the kettle on and it was only the fierce hissing sound of the boiling water overflowing onto the electric burners that alerted him to the fact.
"And it goes from bad to worse," he said to himself, "from bad to worse, right enough".
As he hungrily consumed his favourite breakfast meal of four fried eggs on buttered toast, washed down with lots of Jack Daniel's and cokes, it occurred to Bertie that he had a recording session booked for four o'clock that afternoon and he stopped chewing for a brief second to swear eloquently.
So far, he had two tracks completed for this, his latest album. It was now July and his contract stipulated that the finished work should be delivered to Geffen for pressing before the end of the year. Preferably and perhaps crucially, it should be on the shelves in time to catch the Christmas spending rush of early to mid-November.
Bertie's original plan had been to have a total of twelve tracks on the album, but now, with the month slipping inexorably by, he had decided to limit the number of songs to nine, if he was truly going to be able to inject the required amount of work into each of the numbers. The two tracks he had 'in the can' at the moment were both ballads and he had arranged with his producer to book in a couple of session-musicians for the coming afternoon's session, to play violin and horn overdubs on a ballad he had begun a couple of days previously. Bertie just hoped it would go okay: session-musicians had an irritating tendency of acting like stuck-up supercilious boors whenever Bertie ever attempted to direct their playing on one of his songs. It was his experience that they treated him with supreme contempt, as an illiterate buffoon with utterly no musical talent whatsoever. He had come to accept this attitude as part of the bullshit potpourri he had become embroiled in as a global superstar. After all, Bertie was a millionaire many times over, whilst the session-players were always paid their fixed hourly union rate.
Today however, was different. Bertie could not recall the last time he had felt quite so awful and sick and he was unable to hoist himself into the required frame of mind to mosey on down to the studio an start playing music. It was just too hideous a prospect to contemplate.
For not the first time that year, he asked himself the same question: am I happy? He really was not entirely certain that he truly knew the answer. Yes, he was rich, yes, his talents were recognised and yes he could go on playing rock n' roll to whacked-out teenagers the world over for as long as he so wished, but there was something missing from his life - something lost...
Ironic as it seemed, he had no freedom. Sure, he had the freedom of going anywhere in the world on a whim. Certainly, it was a fact that he could buy practically anything his heart desired. But what freedom did he really have, if every time he stepped out the front gate of his property, he was mobbed pestered, screamed at (something which particularly perturbed him) and generally terrorised by the fans who so loved him? What type of freedom was that? After half a decade at the so-called pinnacle of his profession, nine consecutive top ten singles under his belt, a clutch of Ivor Novellas, Bertie was burnt out - exhausted and utterly drained by the pressures and unique demands of stardom. It really had reached the point where he honestly did not feel he could live in this self-created prison anymore. He wanted an out and craved for some inner peace and in his desperation, he had formulated a plan, a crazy twisted radical solution to all his crushing problems and crises. It was now that Bertie realised the time was never riper to act on that plan.
Kneeling on the edge of the bed, as if disconnected from his limbs, Bertie watched his forefinger dial the number of the studio. His hand was trembling slightly, yet Bertie felt an incongruous calm such as he had not experienced in some considerable time.
"Solvent Studios," said the bland, emotionless voice.
"Oh hi, this is Bertie Stone. Listen would you do me a favour? Would you tell Max that I'm going to be just a little late for the session this afternoon? I'll be there about half two/twenty to three, okay?"
The voice, disapproving in tone, answered, "Yeah, sure I'll tell him, Mr Stone."
Bertie said, "Thanks a lot," and hung up.
The work of rock music and big-business are, in the minds of many, if not all, entrepreneurs on the scent of a fast buck, inextricable. Fortunes are made and lost in the music business every day. It went without saying that Bertie had brushed shoulders with a good deal of completely unscrupulous "wheeler-dealers" since signing his first modest record-contract, and he knew several extremely rough "boys".
Slowly, he made his way down the steep polished mahogany stairs to the basement of the gargantuan pre-Victorian mansion. He had had it converted into a state-of-the art recording studio as a way of celebrating his third year at the top and his fifth consecutive number one.
The century-old planks creaked and groaned with the weight of Bertie's one hundred and seventy pounds. He felt calm and in control of his life for the first time in bloody ages - for now he was taking the bull by the horns, no longer manipulated by the merciless management machine.
Flicking on the light switch, the studio was illuminated by the harsh fluorescent lights which swung from the seven-metre-high ceiling by huge cast iron hoops - a remnant from the industrial revolution.
Battered and savagely dented guitar-cases stood cluttered in corners of the cavernous room, while microphone-stands and drum-sticks littered the thickly carpeted floor.
Sliding open the massive glass door to the control room, he stepped inside. The room was spotless, for, as all record engineers and producers commonly acknowledge, dust is their universal enemy.
Kneeling down, Bertie rolled back a corner of the carpet to reveal a trapdoor set in the thick planks of the building's foundations. This was a special and unique feature of the old house: a false bottom i.e. the basement did not lie at the foundations of the mansion, rather it was located one level below the true basement.
Grasping the stubby iron ring, Bertie pulled back the trapdoor and shone a flashlight down into the murk. All that was visible were metal-rungs leading down the damp granite wall into the impenetrable murk. Without hesitation Bertie lowered himself down into the chasm and began to descend the primitive ladder. The rusting metal felt rough and jagged on his baby-soft palms as his feet groped tentatively for the next rung.
His foot landed on a smooth surface and he jumped down onto the marble slabs that lay at the building's foundations.
With the probing beam of his flashlight, he located the elongated white shape that was the industrial size fridge freezer and made his way across to it. Lifting the lid, the frozen body of a murder victim long dead met Bertie's gaze and he shuddered inwardly at the sight.
The pop king had indeed brushed sides with some extremely sinister human beings in his brief reign at the top. When he had secretly rendezvoused with an ex FBI man whom had defected to the mob, their conversation's content-matter had been more fantastical than even the most crass tabloid newspaper story.
"Supply me a body," Bertie had said to the man, "some guy in your family that went soft." The hood did not ask, "Why?", he asked, "How much/" and the star's figure had been considerably more than substantial."
When the little white Ford van from the TV cable company had pulled up in the elegantly curved drive way of the star's breathtaking mansion less than a week later, none of the help had bothered themselves with a second look. Even less interest was aroused when the two ugly men in white overalls had carried in a long tarpaulin-wrapped bundle, ostensibly containing heavy industrial wiring and followed Bertie obediently down to his private recording studio.
The dead man's entire body was sheathed in ice and he lay on a bed of frozen carrots, lettuces and about half a dozen bags of new potatoes. Reaching down into the narrow gap between the moisture-dripping wall and the appliance, Bertie located the tightly knotted thirty metre nylon rope and jerked it free. His nimble fingers worked quickly and soon the rope uncoiled in a neat pile at his feet. From a dirty khaki webbing shoulder bag in the only dry corner of the old room, he extracted a heavy steel karabiner and attached it to the climbing belt around the corpse's waist.
Placing the free end of the nylon between his teeth, Bertie then ascended the metal ladder. Slightly out of breath he reached the lip of the trapdoor and threaded the rope through a pulley system attached to the ceiling of the lower basement by an expansion bolt. He then sat down on the edge of he open trapdoor and began to jerk up the heavy frozen corpse from the big fridge-freezer below.
The actual effort required was minimal. As a child Bertie had often amused himself by hoisting himself up to the top of trees. He would simply slip his rope over a branch, make a loop for is foot to rest in and raise himself up hand over hand. One did not have to Jean-Claude Van Damme in order to perform such a feat.
Unclipping the body from the rope, Bertie unfastened the climbing belt and dragged the corpse across the carpet. Then he propped him up onto a black leather studio chair. Ambling over to an equipment cluttered corner, he pulled out a priceless red and gold 1958 Les Paul electric guitar and slipped its wide embroidered suede strap over the body's shoulders. He then lay the instrument in such a way that it was cradled in the corpse's lap and inserted a guitar lead into the back of the guitar and plugged the other end into a big fifteen-hundred-watt Marshall amplifier.
Stepping back into the space age control room, Bertie flicked a single switch on the huge studio console. There was a blinding flash and then a puff of acrid smelling smoke and Bertie could see the body convulsing and twitching with the shock of three thousand volts pulsing through its lifeless limbs. The guitar slid off the dead man's thighs and onto the floor with a euphoric cacophony of noise as the strings vibrated through the amplifier. Bertie could not help but notice incongruously that the guitar was out of tune.
Already sparks were flickering around the wall socket and Bertie thanked the lord that those Mafia heavies were true professionals: they had rigged the circuit to exude just enough voltage to be creditable - anything greater would have been asking for trouble.
Quicker than Bertie had imagined, the first few flames of spasmodic phosphoresce flickered into life at the edge of he carpet and he knew he had only minutes to escape safely. Soon the astronomically expensive studio would be a raging inferno.
With not one glance back, he dove down into the trapdoor-exit, pulling over the carpet behind him. His torch picked out the ancient secret-passageway that led into the vast pine forest at the back of his residence. The passageway was an underground tunnel, chiselled out of the solid limestone more than a century previous, that ran for a mile from Bertie's house and exited deep inside the forest. He opened the thick wooden door and a rush of sweet-smelling subterranean air swept over him. As he clambered onto his Yamaha 350 Trials Bike, he wondered fleetingly at the incredible advances of science that could replicate a man's dental features on another human-being, and patted the three million dollars in American Express Traveller's Cheques he had in the inside pocket of his windbreaker. Then he turned on the ignition.
Flicking the bike into gear with his foot, he brought up the throttle and released the clutch. The powerful machine jerked into motion down the muddy, puddle-smattered path that led to the long-ago established smugglers' cove, where the wealthy pop-star's custom built mini-sub awaited him.
Cape Horners don't know about rock-singers!
THE END
