Dr. John took another swig of his c.o.c.ktail and said, "Sabbath, man, they're the only ones who can do this kind of thing properly. Did I tell you about the gig at Colston Hall this spring?"

"Only about a hundred times."

"It wasn't loud enough, but that was the only thing wrong with it. A thousand kids belting out 'Paranoid' at the top of their lungs, it was a religious experience. But this, this is like . . . " He looked up at the sky for inspiration, failed to find it, and took another drink.

"It's prog rock c.r.a.p," Martin said, "but Dancing Jesus likes it."

The barechested guy stood in the middle of the thin crowd, arms flung wide, face tilted to the blue sky, quivering all over.

Dr. John's lifted his upper lip in a sneering smile that showed off his broken tooth. "Where his head's at, man, he'd groove on anything. I sold him my last three tabs of acid and he dropped them all. Anyone's in UFO heaven, it's him."

"Made much money here?"

"I'm here for the vibe, man."

"Right."

"Truly. I'm down to seeds and stems until Tuesday or Wednesday, when this a guy I know is going to deliver some primo hash. Moroccan gold, man, the real no-camel-s.h.i.t-whatsoever deal. This guy, his brother's a sailor, gets the stuff straight from the souk. I'll put you down for an eighth, seeing as you're a good pal and a professional musician and everything." Dr. John looked around and sidled closer and said, "Plus, you can help me out a little right now."

Martin was instantly wary. He said, "I'm on after this lot finishes."

"I've seen these f.u.c.kers play before, man. They're getting into the drum solo, and then there's the ba.s.s solo, that plonker's endless guitar w.a.n.kery . . . You've got plenty of time. And it's a really simple favor."

"I bet."

"A lot easier than saving someone from a beating."

A few weeks ago, at a dub concert in a community hall in St. Paul's, a gang of Jamaican youths had decided to get territorial on Martin's bloodclat white a.s.s. Dr. John and his dealer had chased them off, an heroic deed Dr. John had mentioned no more than fifty or sixty times since. Martin said, "I believe it was your friend Hector who actually saved me."

"But I alerted him to the situation, I asked him to help you out because you're a good friend of mine. And friends have to look after each other, right?"

Martin sighed. "If I do this thing for you, will you promise to never mention St. Paul's again?"

"Cross my heart and hope to die, man. See that girl?" Dr. John put his arm around Martin, enveloping him in a powerful odor compounded of stale booze, sweat, and pot smoke, and turned him around.

"What am I looking at?"

"The girl, man. Black hair, white dress."

She stood beside the St. John's ambulance, in the narrow wedge of shadow it cast. Tall and willowy in a long white dress that clung to her curves, her arms bare and pale, her elfin face framed by a Louise Brooks bob of midnight-black hair.

"I've been watching her," Dr. John said.

"I don't think she's your type."

Regulars at the Tap sometimes speculated about Dr. John's s.e.x life. Everyone agreed that he must have one, but no one could imagine what it could be like.

"She's dealing, man. Actually, she's not really dealing because there's no money changing hands, she's been handing out freebies all afternoon. What you can do for me is sashay over there and cop a sample of whatever it is she's holding. See, it really is an easy-peasey little favor."

"If it's so easy, why don't you do it?"

"Man, that would hardly be cool. I'd blow my reputation if I was seen taking a hand-out from some hippy chick."

"But I wouldn't."

"That's different, man. You're not in the business. You're a civilian. Go get a sample, okay? And talk to her, try to find out where she's getting her stuff from. A chick like that, she has to be fronting for someone. Maybe those guys who muscled into my business at the Student Union."

"The ones who put the Fear in you," Martin said.

One day at the beginning of the long, hot summer, Dr. John had walked into the Tap with two black eyes and a split lip, and insisted on showing everyone the st.i.tches in his scalp whether they wanted to look or not. "Four f.u.c.kers beat me up round the back of the Student Union. Told me that it was their territory from now on. Some pockmarked guy with a goatee is working my spot now, turning the kids on to brown heroin by telling them that he's out of gra.s.s, but if they'd like to try a sample of this nice powder. . . " Dr. John had looked solemn for a moment, then had put on his Get Carter voice. "Still, look on the bright side. They're only f.u.c.king students. Maybe a little bit of heroin will light up their immensely dull lives."

Now he told Martin, "I'm scared of nothing, man. Still, if she is working for them, and they see me talking to her . . . You see what I mean? But you're a civilian. They won't touch you."

"She looks like she's from some cult," Martin said. "Like the Hare Krishnas who were here earlier, handing out copies of George's favorite book."

"Don't knock the guys in orange, man, they serve a mean lentil curry to people who, because of the government's att.i.tude to alternative lifestyles, often find themselves having to choose between eating and paying the rent. Just walk over there, cop a little of what's she's holding, and come right back. It'll take you all of thirty seconds, and I swear I won't mention saving your life ever again."

"I'll do it," Martin said, "as long as you stop making those puppy eyes at me."

He tried to affect a cool stroll as he moved through the crowd towards the girl. The closer he got, the less attractive she appeared. Her face was plastered in white powder, her Louise Brooks bob was a cheap nylon wig, and her skin was puffy and wrinkled, as if she'd spent a couple of days in the bath. Martin told her that he'd heard she had some good stuff, and she stared at him for a moment, a gaze so penetrating he felt she had seen through to the floor of his soul, before she shook her head and looked past him at something a million miles away.

Martin said, "You don't have anything for me? How about for my friends? They're playing next, and they could do with a little lift."

She was staring straight through him. As if, after she'd dismissed him, he'd ceased to exist. Her eyes were bloodshot and slightly bulging, rimmed with thick mascara that made them seem even bigger. Her white dress was badly water stained, and a clammy odor rose from it.

"Maybe I'll see you around," Martin said, remembering how he'd felt when he'd suffered one of his numerous rejections at the school disco. It didn't help that a gang of teenage boys jeered and toasted him with bottles of cider as he walked away.

Dr. John was waiting for him backstage, a plastic pint gla.s.s in his hand.

"I see you found the free beer," Martin said.

"You really are a superstar, man. I mention your name and it's like magic, this beer suddenly appears. What did she slip you? What did she say?"

"She didn't say a word, and she didn't slip me anything either. It's probably some kind of scam involving herbal c.r.a.p made from boiled nettle leaves or gra.s.s-type gra.s.s, and she realized that I'd spot it right away."

"All the best gear is herbal," Dr. John said, and launched into a spiel about William Burroughs and a South American Indian drug that was blown into your nostrils through a yard-long pipe and took you on a magical mystery tour, stopping only to give Simon Cowley a s.h.i.t-eating grin as he came off stage, saying, "Fab set, man. Reminded me of Herman's Hermits at their peak."

Simon looked at Martin and said, "Still hanging out with losers I see," and walked past, chin in the air.

Then Martin was busy setting up his keyboards while the two festival roadies took down Clouds of Memory's drums and mikes and a.s.sembled Sea Change's kit, and before he knew it the set had kicked off. The sun was setting and a hot wind was getting up, fluttering the stage's canvas roof, blowing the music towards the traffic that scuttled along the far edge of Clifton Downs. Martin concentrated fiercely on playing all the right notes in the right order in the right place, but whenever he had a few moment's rest he glanced towards the girl. Seeing her beyond the glare of the footlights, seeing her with a hairy hippy with a beer-drinker's belly, a couple of giggling girls who couldn't have been more than fifteen, a bearded boy in bellbottoms and a brown chalkstripe waistcoat, a woman in a summer dress and a chiffon scarf . . .

When he came off, sweating hard after two encores, the rhythm guitarist of Clouds of Memory got in his face, saying something about his loser friend spiking beer. Martin brushed him off and went to look for Dr. John. There was no sign of him, backstage or front. The crowd was beginning to drift away. Two men in black uniforms had opened the back doors of the ambulance and were packing away their first aid kit. The girl was gone.

Martin didn't think any more about it until early the next morning, when he was woken by the doorbell. It was Monday morning, ten to eight, already stiflingly hot, and Martin had a hangover from the post-gig pub session with the guys from Sea Change and their wives and girlfriends and hangers-on. When the bell rang he put a pillow over his head, but the bell just wouldn't quit, a steady drilling that resonated at the core of his headache. Clearly, some moron had SuperGlued his finger to the bell push, and at last Martin got up and padded into the living room and looked out of the window to see who it was.

Martin's flat was on the top floor of a house in the middle of Worcester Terrace, a row of Georgian houses which various members of the professional middle cla.s.s were beginning to reclaim from decades of low rent squalor. Four storeys below, Dr. John stood like a smudge of soot on the clean white doorstep, looking up and waving cheerfully when Martin asked him if he'd lost his mind.

"I've had a bit of an adventure," he shouted.

Martin put his keys in a sock and threw them down. By the time his visitor had labored up the stairs he was dressed and in the kitchen, making tea. Dr. John stood in the doorway, making a noise like a deflating set of bagpipes. He had turned a color more normally a.s.sociated with aubergines or baboons' bottoms than the human face. When he had his breath back, he said, "You should find somewhere nearer the ground. I think I have alt.i.tude sickness."

"I should punch you in the snout."

"Whatever it is you think I did, I didn't do it." Dr. John flopped heavily onto one of the kitchen chairs. He had the bright eyes and clenched jaw of a speed buzz. There was fresh mud on the knees of his jeans. Gra.s.s stains on his denim jacket; a leafy twig in his bird's nest hair.

"Then you didn't spike Simon Cowley's beer."

"Oh, that." Dr. John opened a Virginia tobacco tin and took out a roll-up. "Yeah, I did that. You have bacon and eggs to go with this tea?"

"If I had any bacon I'd give you bacon and eggs if I had any eggs."

Dr. John lit the roll-up and looked around the little kitchen. "I see you have cornflakes."

"Knock yourself out. What did you spike him with?"

"The herbal s.h.i.t I scored off that girl." Dr. John poured milk over the bowlful of cornflakes. "Is that hot chocolate I see by the kettle?"

"So you blew your reputation as a professional drug dealer to check out this hippy chick."

Dr. John shook chocolate powder over his cornflakes. "My curiosity was piqued."

"Did she give you anything?"

"She handed it over without a word. Check it out." Dr. John fished something from the pocket of his denim jacket and showed it to Martin. It was the size of his thumbnail and crudely pressed from a greenish paste; it looked more like a bird-dropping than a pill. "Weird-looking s.h.i.t, huh? So weird, in fact, that even I wouldn't take it without testing it first. So I broke off the smallest little sliver and dropped it in Mr. UFO's beer."

"Too much acid has fried your brains."

"But in the best possible way." Dr. John was bent over the bowl, spooning up chocolate powder/milk/cornflakes mix. The roll-up was still glued to the corner of his mouth. Although the window was open, his funky odor filled the kitchen. "So, did my freebie take your w.a.n.ky friend to somewhere good?"

"Good enough for his pal to know he'd been spiked."

"It didn't give him fits, make him foam at the mouth, make him sing in tune?"

"I didn't hang around to find out. He just looked very s.p.a.ced. Had a thousand yard stare and a stupid grin."

"Cool. Maybe I'll give it a test flight this afternoon. Make me some more tea, man, and I'll tell you about the girl."

Dr. John said that he had followed her across the Downs into the wild strip of woods along the edge of the Avon Gorge. "She was like an elf, man. Breezed through those f.u.c.king woods as if she was born to it."

"So she isn't the front for Turkish gangsters. She really is just some crazy hippy."

"She might have been crazy, but she really could move. Floated right down those steep narrow paths to the bottom of the gorge in about a minute flat. I got stuck halfway, saw her cross the road at the bottom, saw her climbing over the rail on the other side, down to the river." Dr. John lit a fresh roll-up and looked at Martin, suddenly serious. "You know how the Avon is almost dried up because of the drought? There's gra.s.s growing on the mud, and where gra.s.s isn't growing it's all dry and cracked. She walked over that s.h.i.t, man, straight towards what's left of the river. Then a couple of lorries went past, and when they were gone she wasn't there any more."

"She jumped into the river? Come on."

"One moment she was walking across those mud flats, and then those b.a.s.t.a.r.d lorries came along, and she was gone, that's all I know."

"Let me get this straight. She was giving away some kind of drug for free, and then she was struck by a fit of remorse, so she walked down to the river and drowned herself."

Martin, used to Dr. John's fantastic stories, reckoned that about half of what he'd been told was true. He believed that his friend had tried to follow the girl and lost her in the woods; the rest was just the usual bulls.h.i.t embellishment.

"I don't know what her motivation was, man. I only know what I saw."

"You didn't go look for her? Or call the police?"

"I was on this dead-end path halfway up the side of the f.u.c.king gorge. I couldn't go any further, all I could do was climb up and start over, and if she reappeared while I was finding a new way down I would have missed her. So I sat there and kept watch, but the light was going, and I didn't see her again, and after a bit I suppose I fell asleep. Woke up this morning covered in dew, with this b.a.s.t.a.r.d headache."

"Let me guess: while you were keeping a look-out for this girl, you finished off your party c.o.c.ktail."

"It was my only sustenance, man. I wasn't about to start eating leaves."

"Well, look on the bright side. If she did drown herself, you don't have to worry that she'll steal your customers."

"You don't believe me. That's cool. But I viddied it, brother, with my own glazzies. She walked over the mud and then she . . . s.h.i.t!"

Dr. John's chair went over as he pushed away from the table. Martin turned, saw the bird on the stone ledge outside the window. His first thought was that it was a gull, but although it was the right mix of white and gray, it was twice the size of any ordinary gull and sort of lop-sided, and it stank horribly, like rotten meat and low-tide sewage. When he reached out to shut the window, it fixed him with a mad red eye and snapped at his hand, its sharp yellow bill splintering the window frame when he s.n.a.t.c.hed his fingers away. Then it stretched its wings (one seemed longer than the other, and both had growths, bat-like claws, at their joints) and dropped away in a half-turn and floated out across the communal gardens of the terrace, a white speck dwindling away towards the docks.

Dr. John kept glancing up at the sky as he walked with Martin up the hill towards the centre of Clifton. He was convinced that the bird had something to do with the girl. "It was a spy, man. A mutant gull from the lower depths of wherever she came from."

"It had some sort of disease," Martin said.

Dr. John turned a full circle, his face tipped skywards, and said in a sonorous film trailer baritone, "A mutant gull on a mission from h.e.l.l."

"You see pigeons with parts of their feet missing all the time. It's something to do with walking on pavements."

Dr. John laughed. "You're so straight, man, they could use you as a ruler."

"Maybe it ate a bad kebab on a rubbish tip."

"Maybe it ate one of the Tap's mystery meat pies. I'm pretty sure they've fried my chromosomes." Dr. John did a lurching Frankenstein walk for a few steps, arms held straight out, eyes rolled back.

They parted by the tidy park landscaped around the ruins of a church that had been hit by a German bomb during Bristol's Blitz. Dr. John said he was going to go home and drop that pill and see where it took him.

"Don't be crazy," Martin said.

"It's all part of my ongoing exploration of inner s.p.a.ce, man. Cheaper than TV and a lot more fun."

"It's probably made out of hemlock and lead paint. Weedkiller and rat snot."

"Don't be such a worrywart. There isn't a pill or powder I can't handle," Dr.John said, and sloped off across the gra.s.sy s.p.a.ce, a squat stubborn figure listing slightly to the left.

The next day, lunchtime in the Coronation Tap, one of Dr. John's grebo pals lurched up to Martin and asked where the little f.u.c.ker was hiding himself.

"I'm not his keeper," Martin said. He was having a quiet pint and a pastie, and thinking about whether to shut up shop for a couple of weeks and go on holiday. The only customer he'd had all morning had been a confused old lady who, after poking about in the bins for ten minutes, had asked him if he had any Ken Dodd records. Scotland, perhaps. Apparently it had rained somewhere in Scotland only yesterday.

The grebo peered at Martin through a shroud of long, lank hair. He was barefoot, barechested under his filthy afghan coat, and stank like a goat. "I got something for him. The stuff he's been waiting for. You know."

"Not really," Martin said, and remembered that Dr. John had mentioned something about expecting a delivery of hash.