Brothers of the Head. Brian Aldiss
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of the use of freaks to attract live audiences, complete with details of cruel training methods, including use of electronic weapons. How do we stop them?’
‘That shouldn’t be difficult. Humanistic Sanity depend for their liquidity on voluntary contributions, including a substantial one from the Borghese Tobacco Corporation, who happen to be clients of ours. Will the information in this proposed article come within appreciable distance of being accurate?’
‘That’s what I’m afraid of. It’s being written up by a woman.’
‘I’m sure you can manage that better than I.’
‘This isn’t just a dolly, Henry. She’s old. Thirty-five. You know her name. Laura Ashworth. Dervish’s girlfriend. Daughter of the clergyman who was in the news a few years ago.’
‘I recall.’
‘She’s a contributor to Sense and Society or whatever the damned thing’s called. You know how she hates me, silly bitch. If she lets out some of the murkier details – particularly if she links the Bang-Bang’s name with Chris Dervish – as well she might – then our goose is cooked just as our publicity machine gets into gear. Ashworth could do us a moderate amount of damage. I want you to get her off our necks.’
While he was making threatening noises, I was thinking. Laura Ashworth was an emotional woman. She thought reasonably clearly until her adrenalin started flowing. There were ways of getting it flowing again which could guarantee she never wrote her article.
‘I don’t see why we should have to trouble the Borghese Tobacco Corporation, Zak. You have trouble with the Howe twins and you have trouble with Ashworth. Why not put the two sides together and see if the problems don’t iron themselves out? I suggest you entice Ashworth on to your payroll and despatch her forthwith to Humbleden. She will not be able to resist the chance of reliving some of her former glories.’
That was how it worked out. Ashworth accepted Zak’s offer. Whatever her intentions were about discovering ‘the truth’ about Humbleden – which she knew from Chris Dervish’s time – may never be revealed. A friend of mine wrote a letter to the editor of Sense and Society asking him if he knew that one of his female contributors had taken up employment with a right-wing organization with considerable interests in the Bedderwick Development Corporation, whose exploitation of black labour in Africa and Sri Lanka was well known. Miss Ashworth’s connection with that journal was speedily terminated.
In Laura Ashworth’s background lay an involved story which I have no intention of relating here. Suffice it to say that she was the only daughter of a Church of England clergyman who later abandoned the cloth, and that she had no real place in society. She was one of those drifters our age so characteristically throws up. Equally characteristically, she gravitated towards the pop world – one of those homes for drifters where the inmates have taken over the asylum.
At one time, Laura Ashworth had held a post in a Department of Abnormal Psychology in a northern polytechnic, after which she had qualified as a prison probationer attached to an open prison – another home for society’s drifters. Whilst at the prison, she had encountered Chris Dervish, who was there serving a sentence for drug smuggling a considerable quantity of heroin from Bahrain.
It was at this stage of her life that Ashworth got herself divorced from her college professor husband, one Charlie Rickards, reverted to her maiden name, and devoted herself to Dervish. When Dervish emerged from prison – and of course his stretch in the nick merely enhanced the glamour of his image with his particular public – he reformed the Noise and went on two extravagantly successful tours of the States and Scandinavia. Ashworth went with him. As her enemies liked to point out, Ashworth was almost exactly twice Dervish’s age. But she had stamina. She survived Los Angeles and Stockholm and all the godless cities in between, and lived to return with him to the relative peace of Humbleden when the tours were over. I was always mystified as to how she avoided finishing up in Datchet Reservoir with him.
Some claimed that Ashworth’s influence on Dervish had a stabilizing effect, others that it was she who drove him to take his life. Nick Sidney informed me that she had a disruptive effect on the Noise as a group, by which I took him to mean merely that she was particular with whom she slept. Be all that as it may, and it is pointless to bring charges where evidence is incomplete, Dervish was a psychotic from the word go. For all his ranting before the microphones, in private he was an inadequate little wet. Which made Datchet Reservoir a not unsuitable terminus for his existence, whether or not Ashworth was involved.
How the members of the group would take to her reappearance, I had no means of judging. That was not my problem. The vital thing at this juncture was that she should not raise any adverse publicity concerning the Bang-Bang in the media, when Zak’s plans were maturing. I let Zak get on with it and returned to my African lawsuit. He was running the freak-show, not I.
The tale of corruption in high places which I was investigating was not then public knowledge. A few newspapers had begun to leak circumspect stories dealing with one aspect or another of the scandal: some charges facing a British Cabinet Minister, the dismissal of the head of an international contracting firm, the disappearance of a well-known architect. The trial still lay some months ahead when I was flown out to the West African state of Kanzani on behalf of Beauchamp-Fielding Associates. I was able to question some Kanzani politicians. The Minister of Health himself drove me out secretly to the chief item of evidence in the case.
Fifty kilometres from the nearest river, two hundred and fifty kilometres from any township worthy of the name, we arrived at our destination in the bush. There stood a great disconsolate white building, its tiers of windows shuttered like closed eyes, its portico already in a state of collapse. This was the multimillion dollar hospital built merely to line the pockets of a few avaricious men. The main structure had been completed. Nearby, the foundations of an X-ray unit lay open to the sky. Goats wandered about the builders’ rubble.
I walked through room after room, ward after ward, all deathly quiet. No healing would ever take place here. There was no way in which one penny of the investment could be retrieved. Only the termites would benefit.
When I flew back from Nairobi, it was to find that the Bang-Bang had taken off and their first single was already in the charts.
I walk left, I walk right,
I waste no sleeping on the night –
It’s two by two, the light the dark
Just like animals in the Ark
Because I’ll tell ya
Tell ya
I’m a Two-Way Romeo
Hatched right under that Gemini sign
Magic number Sixty-Nine
We’re two in one and all in all
Shoot double-barrelled wherewithal …
Girls cumma my house, I let ’em in,
I say Wait, I say Begin –
At first it’s strange but then it lives
They grow to love the alternatives
’N’ then they’ll tell ya
Tell ya
I’m a Two-Way Romeo
Bang-Bang
A Two-Way Thru-Way New-Way Romeo 1
Looking back, one is astonished to recall the fury which accompanied the success of this execrable song. On their first Northern tour, the Howe twins appeared as support to another of Zak’s groups. Their gig, as I understand the term to be, was closed down in Sunderland for reasons of indecency; with Zak’s financial backing,