The Cabin Sessions | Next Chapter

Apr 13

Apr 13 The Cabin Sessions

Book excerpt

Adam

Guitar case in hand, he shut the lychgate of the churchyard, relieved to close behind him his day. Still prickling in his mind was the certain knowledge that beyond the turmoil of the skies the Moon would tonight slide into the earth’s umbra and glow blood red. The day’s Gazette had given over a whole two pages to the event, including a coloured photo of a previous Blood Moon, an insert portraying an astronomical explanation, and the musings of stargazer columnist, Stella Verne.

That an eclipse augurs the death of a king, the ancients observing the firmament in the deserts of Mesopotamia knew. After all, they bore witness to the happenstance, those soothsaying men of yore, they would not have reasoned otherwise. Without the benefit of modern science, the correspondence had taken root in the collective psyche, even finding its way into early Christian history. Millennia later, in those predisposed, the omen still held sway; helped along by Stella Verne and the Gazette.

In the dawn of the day Adam had been feeling in the totality of his being in balance, if precariously. Then he’d read Verne’s piece and the news lodged in the vestibule of his mind. At first a mere filament of dust on the doormat. But on his way to work the filament soon multiplied into a cloud that threatened to suffocate his sanity. By the afternoon he had to reassure himself that he knew no kings. He tried to shake his mind free, anxious not to find himself unhinged.

On the journey home, he’d managed to reason away as sensationalism Verne’s Blood Moon auguring in what must have been an otherwise uneventful twenty-four hours. And in a fleeting moment of cynicism as he’d readied to leave his house for the evening’s sessions, he knew that no one in the region would witness the event as the heavens would be obscured by the rapidly coalescing cloud.

Noting the warmth of the evening air on his skin, he strode down the lane, passing the Stone’s weatherboard cottage: circa 1900 and tastefully restored, with a bullnose veranda and elegant finials. A house that stood in large grounds adjoining the once hallowed land of his own abode. He scarcely knew the owner, Philip Stone, but he pictured the sister, Eva, curled up somewhere inside, perhaps reading a book as she seemed wont to do. Or perhaps he’d find her with her brother, celebrating Christmas Eve at The Cabin. It was a thought that generated some cheer.

The day had been uncommonly hot and close; the time of year might otherwise have brought a light breeze to soothe the skin and a cool night for restful sleep. Yet the solstice had seen a climate so at variance with the norm, it had instilled in the residents of Burton at best puzzlement or unease, at worst a babbling hysteria. Several times in the previous few days he’d stood at the counter of the general store and found himself privy to the grim ruminations of someone or other on the topic of the weather, as if the sunny native disposition had arrested at the foot of that cleft of a valley. On Christmas Eve, the scaremongering had been worse than ever, as the prospect of a storm of hitherto unknown intensity moiled over the plains to the south and to the west. While not yet eight o’clock, the sun had long since fallen behind the mountains, leaving Burton in shadow to be darkened further by the cloud that amassed beyond the peak.

Wafts of cool air stroked his cheeks and the bare skin of his neck. Wafts that soon became a breeze and as he reached the bottom of the lane, a fearful wind funnelled its way up the valley. Turning the corner by the gnarly sycamore tree, he faced into the brunt of it, the wind buffeting his guitar case and pressing his trousers to his legs. He battled his way to the old beam bridge, with its timber deck and iron railings. He crossed halfway and set his guitar case at his feet and leaned against the metal, feeling through his pants the hard cold against his hips.

Below, the river flowed in deceptively languorous fashion, having long before carved a deep channel through the sandstone, moving apace, undeterred by the tangle of fleabane and horehound on its banks. Whence it began in the springs of the mountains to the east, the river gathered to itself numerous tributaries, pressing through the confining cleavage of the mountains to emerge like a blessing on fecund plains, and wending on through the city to the coast.

In the twilight, the water appeared black to Adam, the rush of its movement unheard beneath the wind about his ears.

He stood for some moments, pinned to the railings by the wind, uncertain whether to head back home and survive the storm on his own, or proceed across the bridge to The Cabin where he would find company, of a sort: the regulars, locals all of them. His indecision held him fast, for were he to return home he would endure a night of relentless wailing as the wind found its way through every crevice; much of the old church, after years of renovation, still in disrepair. It was not a comforting prospect, yet were he to join the others in The Cabin he would be forced to endure wailing of another sort, the bemoaning cries of a demented crone, the sort of demented crone one would expect to find in a strange old town like Burton. Yet he was beholden, for he’d been at last invited to fill the guest spot at tonight’s sessions, Christmas Eve no less, and whilst few would be in attendance on this foul night, he could not let down his mentor, the one and the great Benny Muir.

He picked up his guitar case, lifting his gaze from the watery gloom. The town, scattered to either side of the river, was obscured from view by thickets of laurel and dogwood, dwellings kept hidden by their owners covetous of seclusion. Even the general store squatted low on its haunches behind a privet hedge. From the vantage of the bridge The Cabin was barely visible, only its low gabled roof emerged from the slope of the hill. A few paces on and it would be gone.

He left the bridge as if leaving behind a watershed; so intense was his certainty that whichever path he took would somehow assure his fate.

His had not been a convivial day, riven as he was with anxiety that never left his soul. He had reached an age of slow recognition that the mess of thought and feeling that propelled him this way and that, affecting his every mood, was a fraying ball of wool. All he knew for certain was he might unravel at any moment and it was an effort to keep himself wound tight.

Yet his was angst he could make only partial sense of, the sort of inchoate angst manifesting in one who never belonged or was properly loved. He carried a gnawing sense of not being worthy, and as the world had rejected him so he rejected himself.

He never knew of his father, for his mother and grandmother never spoke his name after he absconded from his responsibilities prior to Adam’s birth. Although it was mentioned that he’d laboured at the steelworks on the far side of the city. His mother, a singer who earned a meagre living fronting skiffle bands and taking in washing, had been a bony, careworn woman, the one photograph in his possession rendering her more Billie Holliday than Sarah Vaughan in spirit. She took to mothering like a cuckoo, leaving him at his grandmother’s house whenever she performed, and one time she never came back. He was only two at the time. Left with no choice, his grandmother, a widowed pensioner who spent all day every day knitting and spitting platitudes by way of wisdom, raised him to be a good and honest boy. He did his best to fulfil her expectations, making sure he was well behaved, mild in manner and ever eager to please.

His grandmother lived in a plain old house in a suburb by the sea, a suburb filled shoulder to shoulder with plain old houses. While the other kids from the local school ran amok on the beach or in the park, chasing seagulls, skimming stones and building sand castles, or playing mock battles with stick swords, he sat alone in his room and read Tom Sawyer and Heidi and Little Women, in fact wading through all the classics on his grandmother’s bookcase indiscriminately.

He remained a good and honest boy until his voice broke and his eyes fixed on his music teacher, Mr Hodder. Angst grew alongside his fixation and he yearned to fall into Mr Hodder’s arms, kiss him passionately, fumble for his satisfaction. But Mr Hodder, he knew, was married, apparently happily, and there was never a glimmer of desire in those cool, recondite eyes. Adam had no choice but to repress his carnal urges and wait, wait until he’d escaped his grandmother’s knitted prison.

After many lonely years of adulthood, Adam relinquished his virginity to the front man of a Lee Reece cover band: The Reece Effect.

It had been a balmy summer’s night and the city bar full of smartly turned out, heavily scented men. The Reece Effect was crammed into a corner stage area, not much larger than a king-size mattress: two guitars, bass and drums. The singer stood on the floor in front, facing the left speaker as he talked to the bass player on the stage. He was a crane of a man, reaching the height of the guitarists behind him. His formidable stature enhanced by his hair: slickly quaffed, glossy and swept back from his face. Hair that lent him a further two inches of height. As the singer turned and Adam saw the width of his shoulders, he quickly adjusted his spindly crane analogy. The singer had a long, strong-featured face of Latin pallor, with the eyes of a hunter on the prowl, and a pencil moustache that accented his full spreading lips. The bass player struck up a pulsing groove and the singer slid into it. Holding his mike stand, he sang and those full lips parted, unveiling a complement of large white teeth. His appearance was altogether striking if disquieting, the sort that turned stolen glances into long gazes. As if underscoring the countenance, he wore black patent leather shoes with white button-down spatterdashes, an incongruent match with the red satin body shirt he wore tucked into black drainpipes. His manhood making a tennis-ball bulge in the crotch.

When their eyes met, Adam couldn’t help but be dazzled by the singer’s swaggering charm. Instantly beguiled, Adam left the bar, wine glass in hand, and took up a seat near the stage. At the end of the night, when the crowd had thinned and the band played their last song, the lead singer attended exclusively to this new adoring fan.

Always on the road, wooing audiences at venues far and wide, Juan Diaz was a rare breed of singer songwriter able to exist on the proceeds of his craft. With tattoos on his collarbone and a crucifix dangling from his left ear, he was ex-army fit, a man tough enough to front a drunken rabble. Yet his animal allure that could enchant the unwary from the first, fogged Adam’s vision and he became Juan’s partner and devotee.

Four turbulent years later, and Juan Diaz was a man Adam feared, a man too cruel, too vainglorious, too dangerous to countenance in his proximity.

Ever since the demise of this one union of promise, angst returned to become a fixture of Adam’s psyche, abrading his sensitivities like thistle.

It was with a leaden heart and an ambivalent mind that Adam followed the road that followed the river to The Cabin. He paused again, this time at the edge of the privet hedge outside the general store, a ramshackle hodgepodge of a building clad in rotting weatherboards and flitches, with closed in verandas of asbestos sheeting painted a pale cream. The roof sloped every which way to accommodate a concatenation of small and narrow rooms.

A dim light shone through a small window. The proprietors, Rebekah and David Fisher, would no doubt be partaking of an unhealthy dollop of festive fare, and with luck their bellies rendered so full neither would muster the will to move beyond their threshold, though he doubted luck had the power to override habit. A habit never once broken by either party, one that found them every Wednesday night in attendance at Benny Muir’s Cabin Sessions.

To his left, the northern mountaintop was shrouded in cloud. The wind pushed him on, past a vacant block where once he’d tried and failed to stave off Juan’s wrath after a night of heavy drinking, Juan in a frothing rage and Adam placating that he hadn’t, truly hadn’t flirted with Philip Stone. Seconds later, Juan abandoning him in a bruised and bleeding heap.

The flashback stirred in him another recollection, one he hastily pushed back under the trapdoor, where it languished in an interior space he named his oubliette, an appellation appropriate for its contents.

He turned up the track to The Cabin, now in full view: a log cutter’s cabin constructed from ancient trees that once towered in the forest. The logs of the walls were heavy and dark. In the wall overlooking the river, the square-eyed windows set wide apart, the long nose of brick chimney flaring between, and the low hat of roof, altogether lent The Cabin a menacing visage. A visage worsened when the proprietor of this lonely hostelry, Delilah Makepeace, had, in a whimsy of faux vintage, replaced the window’s glass with trellised panes.

The wind, much colder now, curled around his calves and coursed through the thin jacket he’d slipped into on his way out his bedroom door thinking at the time he might find himself overly warm. His guitar case swung about and slapped his thigh. The cold propelled him on and as he approached, The Cabin took on a softer feel, for the small amount of light that emanated from the trellised panes looked warm and inviting.

He came to a sudden halt as he rounded the front wall. Penetrating the howl of the wind were three sharp crashes as if something heavy and dense had slammed into metal. He listened, straining, unable to move, the wind hard on his side. The door to The Cabin not three strides thence, but a courageous impulse quelled apprehension, and he stepped on, cautiously, and peered into the gloom of the yard.

Beer kegs were lined up against the wall like fat men’s paunches. Otherwise the veranda was empty. He made out the elements of Delilah’s garden, the stone birdbath poised on its pedestal, the gnomes dotted here and there, and the clipped bushes of herbs. Beyond, where the garden petered, a woodpile and a corrugated iron incinerator.

Familiarity took hold and he relaxed at the sight of a figure heaving into the incinerator what looked like lengths of sawn branches. Beside the stranger, a barrow piled high with leaf litter. This was no time to be clearing debris but Delilah was a fastidious woman who had surely required of one of her patrons he clear away the remnants of a fallen tree.

Berating himself for his fearful sensitivities he made to turn when the figure straightened, and a quick burst from the headlights of a car flashed into sight a face of such unpleasantness Adam felt himself cower. He couldn’t recognise its owner. The light vanished and he heard the thud of a car door in the distance. Without wasting another moment, he turned back, desirous of the comfort of The Cabin, no matter who was inside.

He pressed the latch and pushed open the heavy old door, ready to greet Benny setting up the stage. A rush of hot, heavily incensed air belted his senses as Delilah called to him to close the door fast and tight. The Cabin’s ceiling was low, and the incense formed a dense haze anyone standing was forced to inhale. Wall lamps gave forth a subdued glow through crooked tasselled shades. Walls of logs piled one atop another and varnished brown mahogany sucked into themselves much of the lamplight. Delilah had yet to light the table candles. Adam was slow to realise there was no one seated at either of the two tables of polished oak—small and round yet still they took up much of the available floor space—and no one in the nook right beside him. The open-hearth fireplace with its carved timber mantelpiece was the main feature of the room. No fire had been lit in the grate, the heat source a column heater positioned over by the old oak barrel in the far corner of the room.

Delilah was standing at the mantelshelf in regal pose, bedecked in the full-length gown of deep purple she wore on Wednesdays. Her performance gown she called it, velveteen, with a plunging neckline and ruffled cuffs. Her lips were painted an equally deep red, her glossy black hair tonight swept back in a topknot bun with braided wrap, and she was holding her head imperiously high as if attempting to lengthen her neck. She looked as she always did, markedly handsome, yet she appeared distracted, the incense in her hand hanging from her grasp. Her gaze shifted from Adam to the stage to the bar, where it remained, leaving Adam to take in for himself Benny’s absence.

Where every Wednesday by seven o’clock a microphone stand and Benny’s Domino amp would be centred on the small dais of black carpet, there was an empty space. Adam turned, scanning The Cabin, absorbing the solemnity, opening his mouth to speak and closing it again when he noticed Nathan Sandhurst, bow backed on a bar stool, pretentious in his Ray-Bans, his head so low it might at any moment fall in his cider; and Rebekah and David’s daughter, Hannah, eyeing her sop of a boyfriend derisively from behind the counter.

‘There’s been a tragedy,’ Delilah said, directing her statement to Adam, a statement all the more ominous conveyed in a timbre uncharacteristically high in pitch, and not at all that deep, husky voice she had.

‘Benny?’

She made as if to answer when Adam’s neighbour, Philip Stone, came through from the kitchen, entering the room via the bar. He seemed out of sorts and Adam speculated that he, too, might have encountered the figure with the phantasmagorical face. For coming from that direction, he must have passed by the incinerator and it puzzled Adam why he had entered in such a manner, when he said, addressing Delilah, ‘The old gal’ pipe’s rusted through and needs replacing.’

‘Oh dear,’ she said indifferently.

‘Not to worry, I’ve fixed it,’ he said, rolling down his shirtsleeves and buttoning his cuffs. Seemingly not cognizant that when it came to the finer details of plumbing no one in the room gave a care, he went on, ‘The bitumen spray and tape is only temporary so you’d better put a bowl underneath to catch the drips and avoid using the sink. Should hold over Christmas. Then I’ll replace it with nice new PVC. And a waste trap.’

Delilah expressed her gratitude. Of course, Adam thought with some relief, Phillip was her plumber, he was everyone’s plumber. Standing there by the bar in a stark white shirt, tailored fawn pants and polished leather shoes, Philip Stone must have been the most well-groomed plumber the world had ever seen. Adam couldn’t fathom how a man who spent his working hours crawling under houses amongst blocked or leaking drains could present himself so impeccably, a practice that had instilled in Adam an inexplicable unease from the first. A reaction shored by a rumour Benny had given voice to, that untoward things had occurred in the Stone house. Then again, untoward things were said to have gone on in every house in Burton and Adam made every effort to dismiss the whole of it as gossip. Besides, although they were neighbours, Philip was to Adam virtually a stranger, Adam having had no recourse as yet to acquire his services. They’d not exchanged more than a sentence, save for that one occasion when they’d engaged in light-hearted speculations about the goings on of Nathan Sandhurst, the exchange that had resulted in Juan’s pummelling.

A self-contained man, when here for the sessions Philip generally maintained his reserve, talking almost exclusively with Delilah, or sitting alone waiting for his turn on the stage. He wrote soporific ballads, delivered in soft baritone, and Benny always put him on before or after the guest spot, a safe slot, for anyone present would either remain focused in anticipation of the main act or still be bathing in the afterglow of a dynamic set. Benny had let Philip perform the guest spot only the once, on a low-risk night years before Adam had moved to Burton, when the usual crowd was at the funeral of Rebekah’s older brother.

Adam shifted his weight, his guitar case heavy in his hand. Philip glanced around, hesitating at the sight of him then pinning him with his china blue eyes. Phillip had fine blonde hair cropped to within an inch of his skull, a cut that accentuated a receding hairline, giving his wide forehead prominence and hiding nothing of his elfin-like face. His mouth, small and irregular, the bottom lip thicker than its counterpart, looked pinched. Adam felt instantly disconcerted. He smiled and, thinking he’d hid his reaction well, steered his gaze back to Delilah.

‘You were about to tell me…’

She caught her breath. ‘Quite dreadful. You better sit down.’

Despite his guitar case pulling on his arm, he didn’t move. He detected beneath the fog of incense something sour, fetid: if he were not mistaken, the odour of rotting flesh. ‘What’s happened?’ he said in a low voice, mindful of the foreboding the ancients ascribed to an eclipse. The Blood Moon was still to occur and whatever had happened to Benny did not strictly align, but as Stella Verne stressed in the Gazette, the ancients allowed an orb of potentiality. At the very least, Adam sensed Delilah’s news would cohere with the tightening of his abdomen.

‘So sudden,’ Delilah said, her voice now modulated. ‘So terribly sudden.’ She tugged at the large green stone hanging from her neck, drawing it back and forth along its long gold chain. ‘One week a small growth on his back, the next,’ she clicked her fingers, ‘he’s gone.’

‘Gone?’

‘The funeral’s next week.’ She gave him a pitying look. And with that she crossed the room and joined Nathan and Philip at the bar.

Adam found his legs weakening and made for the nook. He put down his guitar case and sat side on at the end of the seat with his elbow resting on the table. His mind a tumult of memory, he sunk his head in his hand.

Last Wednesday, Benny had seemed in fine spirits. Adam had been on his way to The Cabin when Benny swung his Volvo estate into the patch of dirt that served as The Cabin’s car park, pulling up beside a pile of roughly sawn logs—the remnants of the tree that had fallen across Burton Road East the previous day, slamming into Rebekah and David’s garage and narrowly missing a passing car.

Adam waved from the footpath and Benny waved back, cheery as ever. He went over and leaned against the passenger-side window, watching Benny roll a pinch of pipe tobacco in the palm of his hand and tamp it in the bowl of his Peterson, tobacco falling like sawdust to join the scatterings of scrunched paper bags, loose CDs, empty coffee cups and unopened letters littering the car floor. ‘You’re nae gonna ask to get on early?’ he said. Adam laughed and told him no. He’d never pressure Benny.

A hefty man with a pork-belly paunch, Benny was not the sort Adam would normally consider a friend, for Benny looked as he was, forthright, in the tradition of rural Scotland: a farmer’s boy of sixty. He had thick wiry grey hair framing a large strong-boned face, with bottom-heavy lips, eyes small brown dots beneath thick angled eyebrows. He dressed casually in a plain white shirt and brown trousers buttoned below the belly, and ever since he’d taken to wearing a pair of fawn cowboy boots he had the look of the wannabe but well-past-it rocker. He was a Muir, an entertainer and an entertaining man at that, and Adam found his friendship restorative.

Benny sucked on his pipe, indifferent to the gurgling of the tar-slurried stem. When he’d had enough he plopped the pipe, still alight, in his shoulder bag and got out of his car. Refusing Adam’s offer of help, he opened the boot and heaved to shoulder and to hand his microphone stand, Domino amp and guitar case, along with his red tartan vanity case full of his ‘Only Muir’ and ‘More Muir’ recordings; all his own compositions, inspired by the Bothy ballads and cornkisters he grew up with.