A Blue Coast Mystery, Almost Solved
A Blue Coast Mystery, Almost Solved, the brilliant cover from the design team at Histria Books
I knew this junkie in the mid-seventies, when I worked in St Giles Hospital in Camberwell, South East London. He was there because of malnutrition, and general neglect, and not treatment for drug abuse, and every time he was discharged I knew it would not be long before he was back. I also knew that, one day, he wouldn’t make it. I knew him as much as you can, or want to, know junkies if you’re not one, and even, I suppose, if you are. His name was Henri, pronounced as in French, though there was nothing French about him, really.
In response to a locum who asked questions that made plain his disapproval of junkies, Henri said quietly, “I’m not into debating things that ought to be clear to people who claim to be intelligent.” I stifled a laugh. The locum did too, to be fair. I caught a brief wink from our bed-bound junkie, who then settled down for the mid-morning nap that countered his usual sleepless night, his veiny arms outside the sheet, his bitten nails neat and pink. I wagged a naughty-boy finger at him, before catching up with the locum on his round.
Henri’s whole life wasn’t in St Giles, of course. Nor was it in the streets of Camberwell, where I’d see him occasionally whenever he was discharged. He never seemed to stray far from St Giles, as if he wanted to keep the place in sight, just to be safe. I watched him, noted his collar askew, one trouser leg shorter than the other, the scrappy end of a scarf sticking out of one sleeve, as if he’d dressed in a hurry in somebody else’s clothes. I saw him affect affability as he asked people for money. Though haggard, haunted, even, he never quite acquired the patina of the tramp, nor the patter of the beggar, being too long-winded, and too diffident. People who donated despite this were rewarded with a look of fake gratitude. It was fake, because, after a certain point, nearly everything a junkie shows the world is fake.
Early on, he told me that he had been born in Boston, the one in Lincolnshire, but, as if the subject bored him literally unutterably, he stopped the autobiographical details there. He fast-forwarded twenty five years through schools, playmates, sports, university, jobs, girls and pubs to the nineteen sixties, when he lived on the French Riviera. It was a place I knew by proxy, through the fascination with it in James Bond films, and then spoofed in one featuring comic duo Morecambe and Wise.
Somewhere between Boston and the Blue Coast Henri had got himself a countess – one from a strain of French aristocracy left unbeheaded in the Revolution, but a real one, all the same. I never got much of a picture of her, just a stark outline revealing that she was a junkie too – how else could it have been? She introduced Henri to the fringes of the Rolling Stones’ tax-exiled circle from a connection with her dealer, a guy called Jean who had been Marianne Faithfull’s beau, and sometimes still was. “My countess was what they call chic,” Henri said. It was the first time I’d heard that word, and he had to explain it to me. “Part of this sort of… beau monde – beautiful scene,” he translated further. “But up close, it often wasn’t so beautiful.”
They were welcomed in to Keith Richards’ mansion in Villefranche sometimes, by Keith’s vigilant girlfriend, Anita Pallenburg, but at other times shooed out of it, when she wanted to remind everybody that the party, for a time at least, was over. Henri dropped the names, but only as background to his tale; he claimed that his life was uninteresting, even with the Stones in it, and, in any case, a bit of a daze. Perhaps he was that joke come true: if you’d truly lived through the sixties, you wouldn’t be able to remember it. That sixties story had been told so many times by then, and at tedious length, by chroniclers and documentary-makers, using a lot of faces prettier than Henri’s to populate it, and he seemed happy to wash his hands of it.
So begins my novella about the sixties, the Stones in their exile, and about genocide and its survivors, people from places that no longer exist.
It is out now with US publisher Addison & Highsmith, an imprint of Histria Books, and is available now from Amazon, using this link.
In response to a locum who asked questions that made plain his disapproval of junkies, Henri said quietly, “I’m not into debating things that ought to be clear to people who claim to be intelligent.” I stifled a laugh. The locum did too, to be fair. I caught a brief wink from our bed-bound junkie, who then settled down for the mid-morning nap that countered his usual sleepless night, his veiny arms outside the sheet, his bitten nails neat and pink. I wagged a naughty-boy finger at him, before catching up with the locum on his round.
Henri’s whole life wasn’t in St Giles, of course. Nor was it in the streets of Camberwell, where I’d see him occasionally whenever he was discharged. He never seemed to stray far from St Giles, as if he wanted to keep the place in sight, just to be safe. I watched him, noted his collar askew, one trouser leg shorter than the other, the scrappy end of a scarf sticking out of one sleeve, as if he’d dressed in a hurry in somebody else’s clothes. I saw him affect affability as he asked people for money. Though haggard, haunted, even, he never quite acquired the patina of the tramp, nor the patter of the beggar, being too long-winded, and too diffident. People who donated despite this were rewarded with a look of fake gratitude. It was fake, because, after a certain point, nearly everything a junkie shows the world is fake.
Early on, he told me that he had been born in Boston, the one in Lincolnshire, but, as if the subject bored him literally unutterably, he stopped the autobiographical details there. He fast-forwarded twenty five years through schools, playmates, sports, university, jobs, girls and pubs to the nineteen sixties, when he lived on the French Riviera. It was a place I knew by proxy, through the fascination with it in James Bond films, and then spoofed in one featuring comic duo Morecambe and Wise.
Somewhere between Boston and the Blue Coast Henri had got himself a countess – one from a strain of French aristocracy left unbeheaded in the Revolution, but a real one, all the same. I never got much of a picture of her, just a stark outline revealing that she was a junkie too – how else could it have been? She introduced Henri to the fringes of the Rolling Stones’ tax-exiled circle from a connection with her dealer, a guy called Jean who had been Marianne Faithfull’s beau, and sometimes still was. “My countess was what they call chic,” Henri said. It was the first time I’d heard that word, and he had to explain it to me. “Part of this sort of… beau monde – beautiful scene,” he translated further. “But up close, it often wasn’t so beautiful.”
They were welcomed in to Keith Richards’ mansion in Villefranche sometimes, by Keith’s vigilant girlfriend, Anita Pallenburg, but at other times shooed out of it, when she wanted to remind everybody that the party, for a time at least, was over. Henri dropped the names, but only as background to his tale; he claimed that his life was uninteresting, even with the Stones in it, and, in any case, a bit of a daze. Perhaps he was that joke come true: if you’d truly lived through the sixties, you wouldn’t be able to remember it. That sixties story had been told so many times by then, and at tedious length, by chroniclers and documentary-makers, using a lot of faces prettier than Henri’s to populate it, and he seemed happy to wash his hands of it.
So begins my novella about the sixties, the Stones in their exile, and about genocide and its survivors, people from places that no longer exist.
It is out now with US publisher Addison & Highsmith, an imprint of Histria Books, and is available now from Amazon, using this link.
