Show Me The Sky Read online

  Before a set of 20,000 fans, the ‘gross sexual indecency’ was allowing 22-year-old Veronica Fry to climb onstage and unbuckle his trousers. Billy K did not resist her advance.

  On his release, the Seattle Star quoted Billy K as saying, ‘I had the time of my life.’ Two weeks of prison, before the judge threw out the case, had allowed him to take a breather from the baying press and screaming fans. During the internment he scratched a whole new album on to the ceramic walls. He even asked if he could purchase the tiles lining his cell. Warden Brubaker refused, declaring his etchings, ‘Nothing more than typical and wanton disregard for state property that is endemic of a generation lacking respect and, dare I say, artistic aptitude.’ The angry thrash of ‘The Philistine Burns with Eyes Closed’ was dedicated to him.

  The Lightspeed tour finished in Europe. And so did the band. At the Red Square Rocks concert, Billy K slipped offstage mid-set, replacing himself in Houdini-like fashion with a pre-briefed, pre-rehearsed double, who for two songs fooled both the band and crowd.

  For the Feeney brothers this proved that Billy K was superfluous to the sound. ‘He took the piss,’ said Tommy. ‘He got bigger than the band, bigger than us, when we were all just as talented as he was.’

  How wrong they were, embarking on a lacklustre album that proved only their mediocrity without the sparkling brilliance of their lead singer or drummer Ronnie Strong, who along with Billy K fronted the slimmer, louder, pared-down sound of the Notorious.

  Again, his arcadia was a studio. Involved in the production, mixing, as well as playing bass on four of the tracks, Show Me the Sky was his coming-of-age record. Slower, more intelligent, yet still bristling with the angst let loose on previous albums, it was another global smash.

  Despite the success, he began to spend more time away from prying eyes at his sprawling manor in Cornwall. TV interviews and live performances were scarce. Rumours he was training with the Russian Space Agency circulated on news of zero gravity flights he took on a free-falling airliner above Siberia.

  In an act of generosity we must now analyse as a precursor to his ‘disappearance’, Billy K auctioned off almost everything he owned. Music awards, furniture, cars, an antique jukebox, his three Persian cats, and the warehouse in East London. Sotheby’s auction director Harold Wapshott would only comment that, ‘Mr K was adamant that not a single possession remain in his property. All belongings went under the hammer, or into the skip.’

  Homeless charities received all monies raised from the sale. When police searched his Cornish mansion they discovered floorboards stripped of carpet, rooms devoid of fixtures and fittings. His final possessions were a reed mat, a penny-farthing, and his empty guitar case. The Les Paul has never been located. Score marks on the floorboards were attributed to the solid rubber tyres of the antique bicycle. His final days had seemingly been spent sleeping on the reed mat, riding a bicycle around an empty house, and strumming his beloved guitar.

  Had the teen-turned-rock-legend burned out? Has he joined the other doomed icons too delicate to survive the chaos and fury of their own fame?

  He’s been spotted on every continent. Mediums have conversed with his floating soul and transcribed their conversations for Sunday magazines. A Cornish farmer swears he saw him pilot a microlight towards France. A plastic surgeon in Sao Paolo sculpted him a new face. Zdenka kidnapped him. Gene Fontaine killed him. Ricky Wise has imprisoned him until he records a new album.

  A year on since his disappearance, police have drafted extra officers to pursue the deluge of reported sightings. So far, all have proved to be dead ends. Inspector James Dent, leading officer on the case, and much maligned for lack of progress, has refused to speculate on whether murder is a line of inquiry.

  The tragic fact is that Billy K, singer and guitarist of the Notorious, who streaked across our heavens with a comet-like burn of glory, is still, by legal and spiritual definition, Missing in Action.

  PART TWO

  Morning rush hour in downtown Sydney. Towers of the Central Business District reach for the sun. Below, commuters step through sliding doors, footfall the rhythm of daily routine. In two hundred years, from a harbour of wooden ships filled with marines and convicts, aborigines on the shore with painted skin and ancient song, to a city of steel and glass, a way of life erased.

  I have to think what day it is.

  Wednesday.

  By now the rest of the bureau will know I’m AWOL.

  I feel the weight of my cell phone in my jacket pocket. It’s switched off. If I turn it on there’ll be messages. An irate Roberts, a concerned Meg. Or is this wishful thinking? Anna will be angry, furious even, that I turned to smoke on a Qantas plane. Then the anger will be worry, hurt. But if I think of her now, I’ll end up catching the next flight home.

  I take the phone from my pocket. Inside the maze of microchips and solder, there are names, numbers and hundreds of photos, mostly of Gemma. The wallpaper is a shot of her in Regent’s Park feeding the ducks. With her big green eyes and floppy blond curls, she can extract a chocolate bar from me at will.

  I clip off the back cover, slide the memory stick out, and dump the phone in the nearest bin. Carefully I wrap the memory stick in an old receipt, and slip it into my wallet.

  I tell myself I couldn’t have kept the phone, even switched off. The temptation to check for messages would defeat my lonelier moments. Feeling guilty for making those who love me worry, I keep walking, towards the shopping district, every step closer to him, Billy K.

  And I think of Robbie Reynolds, a legend of the estate I grew up on. We estimate he nicked a thousand cars in less than five years. His secret? He said the first thing he did after starting up the engine was to rip off all the mirrors. No need to look backwards when he was going forwards. No time for glancing over his shoulder with a pedal pressed to the floor. And it worked, because he was never caught.

  Until he was shot in the face, double-crossed by the thugs he was driving a getaway car for. Killed the only time he turned around.

  So the tossed-away phone is the ripped-off mirror, no looking back now. Maybe to catch Billy K, to understand how and why he vanished, I have to disappear too.

  It’s hardly the first time I’ve run.

  In a large, bright, empty department store, I fill a basket with shirts, underwear, trousers, jeans, shorts, and a pair of dark trainers. The cashier watches me peel notes from the fat roll.

  Outside I find the nearest public toilet, duck into a cubicle and change into my new outfit. I leave my stale clothes folded on the cistern, and step out on to the sunlit streets, flowing with the surge of late commuters and office workers.

  I feel so light I could be blown to the sky.

  After an hour drifting streets and parks, afraid to actually sit and think about Billy K, I walk round the Botanic Gardens mindlessly reading plant names: kangaroo paws, flannel flowers, paper daisies. Signs in the ‘Palm Grove’ date the trees from the 1820s, and I wonder if Nelson Babbage strolled these very same paths on his stop here in 1834.

  We should have investigated Ms Draycott more thoroughly before flying out to Fiji. My mistake. It all sounded so promising, an Australian marine biologist, researching parrot fish in the South Pacific, seemed a woman possessing the scientific rigour necessary to state fact before fiction.

  But she was also a founding member of the Oceania branch of the K Club, fan club of the Notorious.

  Ms Draycott contacted the Met after a Fijian member of her research team recounted meeting a ukulele-playing Englishman ‘living and singing like a local’ on a visit to Tavu Na Sici, an island located several hundred miles from the mainland in the southern Lau group. What astounded Ms Draycott, and myself, was that when addressed in English, the young man either replied in pidgin Fijian, or simply quoted passages from Show Me the Sky – the book discovered in the glovebox of Billy K’s abandoned Lotus, minus the last page.

  And I was desperate for a lead.

  I knew she was president of the
the K Club but avoided asking myself if she was just another nut making up fairy tales. She was adamant it was him, Billy K, castaway in the South Pacific. So I convinced the chief super this was our man.

  Even though Ms Draycott had never met Billy K, I believe she was truly in love. She couldn’t bear the fact he was gone so resurrected him, washed up on Tavu Na Sici. And Billy K lived until we stepped ashore and Ms Draycott started wailing. Because by arriving on the island we actually killed the myth.

  And I take the blame. Entirely. I was in charge. I’d become that much of a bear my colleagues were afraid of speaking their mind.

  Bad policing.

  Bad policeman.

  Along with his electric guitar, a pair of jeans and a white shirt, we know Billy K vanished with the final page torn from his copy of Show Me the Sky.

  If his songs, lyrics, and even conversations were not obsessed with escape, I’d mortgage my house on foul play. But he wanted to fly. I’m sure of that much. And the journal was a pair of wings, a lost manuscript discovered by a lost motorcyclist in the Australian outback. No wonder the teen star found kinship in a Fijian boy brought to England and groomed by the church, an identity manufactured by third parties.

  Show Me the Sky is all I have to go on. Every other lead has been exhausted, the reported sightings and forensic tests, even the visions of deranged fans. But what kind of lead is this? The church, not surprisingly, will only acknowledge that there was a Fijian translator on the Caroline voyage to the Pacific, accompanied by a Reverend Thomas. The final entries of the journal, which Billy is, or was, most occupied with, can’t be confirmed as fiction or truth.

  Therefore this will be my starting point. It’s all I have left. I missed the plane home because I don’t have a lead, not because I do. Monique Cabanne, French girlfriend of the motorcyclist who discovered the manuscript, is now settled on a homestead south of Alice Springs.

  I scan the case contact list and find her number. Then, covering the tracks of a Jim Dent trail, I make the call as a Dr Adams from the University of East London. Maybe I’m paranoid, thinly disguising my identity, thinking my disappearance more important than it actually is. But I’d rather be paranoid than caught, pulled from a case I’ve lost a year of my life on.

  ‘Researching the manuscript,’ I lie. Ms Cabanne agrees to meet me at her home tomorrow. ‘It would be great help to the faculty,’ I enthuse.

  I kid myself I have a mission, a tangible goal. I ask the cashier the best way to Coober Pedy, an opal mining town in the outback of South Australia. He directs me to the coach station, tells me it’s a town in the middle of nowhere.

  I walk the wide streets with a carrier bag of clothes.

  I sleep on the coach, the sleep of a dead man, dreamless and empty. When I wake just before dawn, the bus is cutting through a glowing moonscape of low, craggy hills. And looking from this tinted window to the reeling scenery, I’m a boy again, a ten-year-old on a trip to the seaside, the three of us together, my mother and Gary, my younger brother. The days before my stepfather. I used to scream if not sat by the window, head pressed to the glass, watching the trees and fields rolling past, imagining myself astride a white horse with a flowing mane. While Gary scrawled in colouring books, and mum circled names of flowers in a bumper wordsearch, I galloped across meadows and leaped over streams, raced to the tops of hills and danced across rooftops, felt the thunder of hooves in the hollow of my bones.

  No wonder I made a career chasing those who’ve bolted.

  The coach squeals to a halt by a gas station. And I’m glad to stand, shake off sleep. I wake with such physical longing for my mother and brother that I wonder if I close my eyes I could travel time, inhabit again that ten-year-old on a trip to the beach, unclipping the lid from a plastic lunchbox and pulling out a cheese and pickle sandwich. Before the driver called out ‘Coober Pedy’ I swear I heard my mother ask if I wanted a biscuit.

  But she didn’t. And I’m here, in the middle of nowhere.

  British, Dutch, and German backpackers crowd the aisle with tents and sleeping rolls. I carry a plastic bag with my one change of clothes. I want no awkward small talk with other travellers, and keep my head down as I pass a huddle turning a map looking for the youth hostel. I head in the opposite direction, go by two bottle shops, and several boutiques selling opal. Looming above the frontier town is the Big Winch, a remnant of better days digging precious stone from these dusty plains.

  Temperatures reach 50 degrees in the summer, and locals have tunnelled homes out of the red rock, hiding from the simmering heat like gophers. I stop and stare at the descending staircase of the Catacombs Hotel. But when I imagine curling up to sleep in a hole in the ground, I feel tightness in my chest, and walk on.

  Beyond more souvenir shops, another liquor store, a sporting goods shop selling hunting rifles, and a peeling billboard advertising a grassless golf course, I read that the Prince Albert Hotel has vacancies.

  In the gloomy bar men sit on high stools, construction workers with muddy boots and pitchers of beer. It’s only 10 a.m. The TV flickers with a rugby league match. I ask the barman about a room, and without looking at me, he says, ‘Other door.’

  I go back outside to the next entrance along. An aboriginal woman is also watching TV, but a different channel, a soap opera with cardboard characters on a cardboard set. She glances from the TV and says, ‘Thirty dollars a night. No breakfast.’ I unpeel three tens from my roll. She reaches up to the keys hung on a row of hooks and plucks number 32. ‘Third floor. Lift’s broke.’

  A dump, a fucking dive. This is what I think walking up the stairs with my plastic bag. But this is what I want. No comfort. I’m the barefoot monk in the snow, the firewalker on white-hot embers. No distraction from the case, the state of my life, when I’m brushing dead cockroaches from a bed sheet.

  From my window, once I slide back a rickety mosquito screen, I can see a dirt yard patrolled by two mangy dogs. Beyond the mesh fence is a second-hand car dealership, or maybe a scrap yard. Looking at the hulks of cars corroding in the desert winds that sweep off these vast plains, it could be either. But somewhere in this desolation of space, beyond the glitter of cracked windscreens bouncing the relentless sun, Monique Cabanne has made her home.

  The man at the tourist information booth suggests I rent a bike to get to her house. I pay $20 and leave my passport as a deposit. Just in case I ride into the desert and never return.

  I raise the seat, check the map and follow the wobbly pen line drawn by the assistant. Not a hill or dale in town, and I ride easily through the quiet, glaring streets, past a man jogging, then a woman changing the wheel on a beaten-up ute.

  Beyond the houses and asphalt I pedal an unsealed road, winding between small knolls of rock, many cut and drilled into subterranean homes, like burrows.

  On the edge of town, before civilisation gives way to desert, dingoes and snakes, I find the house of Monique Cabanne. She lives in a rock home. Crude windows dot the walls at different heights. I kick out the bike stand, knock on the door, and reach into my top pocket.

  There I have a Dictaphone. Before boarding the bus, I walked into an electrical shop to buy a device small enough to conceal on my person. Certain protocols and ethics don’t apply to police officers outside their jurisdiction. Like requiring permission to record private conversations.

  ‘Hello, Ms Cabanne?’

  ‘You must be Dr Adams. Please, please. Come in.’

  ‘Thank you for seeing me.’

  ‘No problem.’

  ‘At such short notice.’

  ‘Really. No worries. Ha, ha! You see I even speak Australian now. Have a seat.’

  ‘Thank you. What an amazing place. I imagined it would be cramped and dark, but all the windows really spread the light. Coober Pedy feels like the real outback. Well, whatever that is.’

  ‘They filmed Mad Max III here. Have you had a chance to see the Oldtimer’s Mine, the opal reefs?’

  ‘Not yet, no.’

/>   ‘You should go to Crocodile Harry’s.’

  ‘Sounds ominous.’

  ‘No, no. It’s just one of the dugouts, a huge cave home.’

  ‘Maybe later.’

  ‘Iced tea? Beer?’

  ‘Tea, thanks.’

  ‘You haven’t been in Australia long enough. Not many Aussies take tea before beer.’

  ‘Well, I am working. Here at the expense of the university.’

  ‘The University of … ?’

  ‘East London. I’m a doctor of South Pacific history.’

  ‘So that’s the interest in the manuscript. And who found it.’

  ‘Yes, yes. It would be interesting to know as much as possible about the circumstances surrounding the finding.’

  ‘Two years I have talked to not one person about this, then two of you arrive at my door in the space of two weeks. Amazing.’

  ‘Two of us?’

  ‘A childhood friend of Cal’s. Philip Bell. Said he wanted to meet me, to know more about his friend.’

  ‘That’s quite a coincidence.’

  ‘After what happened, you know, I think I need other people to make me talk. It was hard enough breaking the news to his family, well, if you could call them his family. But you want to know something more about the manuscript, the journal?’

  ‘Yes, and how Cal found it.’

  ‘We were only together a month. But for three of those weeks it was the two of us on his motorbike. He’d just arrived in Darwin from London, and needed to shake off the city before crossing the deserts. He knew I’d cycled all the way from Adelaide, and his chat-up line was something about me saving his life, and if I didn’t teach him a few tricks of the desert he’d probably get lost and die. I told him this wasn’t funny, that he should take the outback seriously. Forget the snakes and spiders, it’s no water that will kill you.’