I came back to the folly at last, decided that I just didn't want to live any more. I climbed to the top of my high, blasphemous tower and looked down at the street, but knew I couldn't do it that way.
What else? The only deadly drug I had was booze, and I suppose I could have tried drinking a couple of bottles of vodka, but my stomach has always protected me from the worst effects of alcoholic poisoning, acting as a safety valve and simply chucking back out the offending liquid before it has time to inflict maximum damage, so I didn't think that would work.
I lay, unsleeping and dry-eyed on my bed, and put on the radio, hoping to hear a human voice.
White noise; static.
It filled the darkened room, filled me, and I thought it might send me to sleep, but it didn't. The bright, meaningless sound washed and broke over me, and I let it, surrendering to its enfolding, random signal, closing my eyes.
And I knew then how I'd kill myself.
I switched the radio off again, as the chilly, watery dawn slowly heaved itself out of the cloudy eastern skies.
I had breakfast with Rick Tumber at the Albany, before he caught the shuttle back to London. We talked. I said I'd think about making a come-back. He seemed relieved, apparently believing I hadn't taken the news of Christine's death too hard. But then he didn't know how much of it had been my idea.
He checked out, paid his bill, and set off for the airport in the GTS. I walked back through a sudden, thin sunlit shower of sleet to St Jute's. The policemen came half an hour later.
Tommy was in custody; they'd gone to his parents' address to question him about the theft of a quantity of whipped-cream containers; he'd assaulted a police officer and resisted arrest.
Detective Constable Jordan took my statement. I said I hadn't known the cans were stolen, but that I had let Tommy snort the gas; how this fitted in with Tommy's own story, I had no idea. DC Jordan cautioned me and told me that charges might be brought against me at some point in the future. They'd be in touch.
I think they might have searched an ordinary house for drugs, but St Jute's must have looked a little daunting.
'Is this place used as a warehouse, Mr Weir?' Jordan asked, eyeing the chaos of crates and boxes and assorted plant and vehicles.
'Not really,' I said. 'This is my home.' The policemen looked at me sceptically. 'I used to be in the music business,' I explained. 'The record company sold a lot of records in the Communist Bloc, but they don't like to part with hard currency over there; we came to an agreement we'd take goods in lieu of royalties. This stuff is what we couldn't sell.' The two detectives exchanged glances. 'My lawyers have the appropriate bills of lading and import documentation; Macrae, Fietch and Warren. Contact them if you want to check.'
They took a desultory look round the place, perhaps wishing that the assembled merchandise really had been stolen, but they left with only the shopping trolley full of whipped-cream cans.
I watched them go, put my coat on again, turned off the space heater, the gas and the electricity, stood in the centre of the choir for a while, looking round (I listened for the pigeon, but couldn't hear anything), then I left by the Elmbank Street door, certain I would never see the place again.
Because I'd killed Christine, too. Me and my clever, stupid, blasphemous, believer-baiting ideas.
It went way back, the way these things usually did, rooted ineradicably deep in the past, tangled in with all the times you thought you'd done the right thing, made the correct decision. So you thought anyway, but always, in there, hidden away, was the thing that made you pay, the one wayward idea, the garbled but effective message, like a cancer, single-cell but growing, spreading, filling; killing.
After the first US tour, when I'd made my ill-advised remarks, and we'd had a little trouble with the fundamentalists, I'd been stunned that people like that still existed today — my sheltered upbringing, I suppose — and then angry that such idiocy could have that effect and be given the credence it was in schools and textbooks and people's lives. That anger surfaced once when I was with Christine, producing a bad germ of an idea.
Lying together in bed, in the Year of our Lord 1978, I believe, in one of the cavernously cold rooms of Morasbeg. I'd bought the place the year before, in a misguided fit of acquisitive enthusiasm, taken with the idea of being a Highland landowner (1 hadn't bought the island yet; that came later).
We'd been talking about the fortnight's touring holiday we'd just taken, on Mull and Skye and the Hebrides. Christine had driven. We hadn't been able to come back from Lewis on the day we wanted because it was a Sunday, and so we'd been stuck in Stornaway for a day, twiddling our thumbs and watching all the good folk going to the kirk. Remembering that had got me onto religion generally, and the Christian fundamentalists I'd offended in the States in particular .
'You know what we should do?' I said, sitting up and taking the binoculars from the bedside table.
'What?' Christine rolled over in bed, propping her head up with one honey-coloured arm (it had been a sunny second week on the Isles.
The bed in the main bedroom was situated within a huge, magnificent but heat-leaking bay window on the second floor, looking out across acres and acres of hummocky heather and marshy grass, with a glimpse of the sparkling sea to one side. I fiddled with the focus on the binoculars, searching for deer.
'We should make those Neanderthals really sick; I mean, they keep accusing us of trying to corrupt youth and all that shit, and taking the name of Christ in vain; well, we ought to think up something deliberately, that would upset them.'
Christine was silent for a moment or two. 'How about calling the next album "Puck God"?' she suggested.
'Too subtle,' I said. 'Needs to be more obvious. We're dealing with genuine rednecks here.'
'Uh-huh,' Christine said. I scanned the wind-blown waste of Ardnamurchan while Christine stroked my hairy back.
'Re-enact the crucifixion,' I said thoughtfully, my eyes screwing up as I pointed the binoculars towards the glittering sliver of sea to the south-west. 'But use a black man!'
'Too tasteful. Besides, they might like seeing a black guy getting nailed to a cross.'
'Hmm. You're right.' I looked into the burning golden glare of the distant sea, fuming light over silhouetted dunes and waving grass. For a second I thought a shadow against the brassy reflections off the sea looked like a deer, but as I juggled with the focus it disappeared.
I remembered the previous week, when we'd been together and alone on a beach on Iona, looking west to the sunset; the Atlantic rollers came crashing in long lines of surf and spray, and for a few moments the two of us, watching the head of what we thought must be a seal, suddenly saw its whole sleek-fat, suspended body within the green cliff face of the next up-rearing wave; outlined, upright, as though standing inside the wave, silhouetted by the sunlight falling from behind.
'Got it,' I said, putting the binoculars down.
'What?'
'Your name.'
'Christine? Brice? All of it?'
'Part of it; part of Christine.'
Christine looked quizzical. 'Forget the I, N, E,' I said. 'What's left? "Christ"!'