A NIGHT IN TUNISIA

Tony Richards

Copyright © Tony Richards 2011.

‘A Night in Tunisia’ first appeared in Extended Play: The Elastic Book of Music, ed. Gary Couzens. Copyright © Tony Richards 2006.

This is a work of fiction. All the names, places, events and characters portrayed are either fictitious or are represented entirely fictitiously, and any other resemblance is wholly coincidental.

www.richardsreality.com

Who are … ‘they’? Good question.

What you have to understand is – if you don’t already know it – jazz music, rather like life, isn’t just the formless, spur-of-the-moment mess it at first seems to be. There are, in fact, certain famous numbers everybody knows, everyone can hum out loud, and any artist worth their salt has a go at their own version of at some juncture in their career. The most famous and most recorded has to be ‘Round Midnight, originally composed by Thelonious Monk and covered by every artiste from Charles Parker to Elkie Brooks – it even wound up being used as the title and the theme tune for a major motion picture.

Then there’s Nat Adderley’s Work Song – oh, a real toe-tapper that.

And then, of course, there’s A Night in Tunisia. ‘Cannonball’ Adderley? Davis? They have all laid down their own versions of that one.

A night in Tunisia.

Which is precisely when and where we first met. On a hot and humid night out there, the sky all drenched with stars.

He never liked to be called ‘Bob.’ In the first place, probably, because ‘Bob Biko’ would have sounded like the tag of some stand-up comedian.

But most of all because ‘Robert’ wasn’t actually his name.

He was born Royston Prince Hoyle down in Charleston, South Carolina, although his family moved up to Harlem when he was just five. Never liked the ‘Royston’ bit from the outset, and changed it to ‘Robert Hoyle’ when he began his musical career at seventeen. Then he changed his stage surname in 1979, out of sympathy when news of the killing of Steve Biko leaked out of South Africa, apartheid as it was back then.

That was back in his ‘solidarity’ phase, his ‘roots’ phase, call it what you will.

He went through a lot of different phases. Most good artists do.

When I heard he’d died, I put on the record almost straight away. An inappropriate record to accompany most deaths. And yet … the right one for his, from my perspective.

And in case you’re wondering, this isn’t going to be a ghost story as such. I’ve written a good few of those down the years, but this one’s ninety percent real. Most of it did happen, in precisely the same way that I’m about to set it down.

So, which of this is the remaining ten percent that isn’t based in fact? Well …

Somehow – and don’t ask me how – Lauren had done it once again. She didn’t even have the Internet to help her in those days, but she spent the best part of an afternoon scouring through the travel ads in the backs of the dailies, looking up stuff on Teletext, then getting on the phone. And by the end of it, she had booked us a holiday at half the normal price. Two weeks at the Hotel Splendid off in Gamarth – you pronounce it ‘Gam-art’ – which was on the Mediterranean coastline half an hour’s cab ride outside Tunis. It was early in our marriage, and the first time that we’d ever visited North Africa.

The hotel lived up to its name and then some. It would, under normal circumstances, have been way out of our league in fact. Rich Arab businessmen would be chauffeured there for a drink, a meal, come evenings and weekends, and even the country’s President showed up for an hour.

Most of the other foreign guests were conspicuously well heeled, middle-aged and deeply sun-bronzed French and Germans, chunky gold watches, designer shades, and polo shirts with alligators on them everywhere you looked. There was no beach, merely big rocks that the green-grey sea beat up against. But the pool was massive, there were tennis courts – we were the only people out on them who were not wearing whites. Otherwise we’d hang out in the local souk, or head off by bus to Sidi-bou-Said , further down the coast, or the ruins of Carthage.

The waiters in the hotel’s restaurant were utterly mild and charming. And, considering that this was Ramadan – a summer one at that, the daylight only starting to fail some time after nine o’clock – their good humour was remarkable. Since … what must it have been like for them? I still can’t imagine -- serving food, smelling it right under your nose, and not being allowed all day to touch the smallest morsel.

There was a nightclub in the hotel’s basement. But the whole first week that we were there it remained firmly closed. Due to the religious festival, we both supposed a little disappointedly. But right at the beginning of our second week …

“They’re open again! They’ve got jazz!” Lauren announced as we were passing by the entrance to it, off on our way to the restaurant again.

I gazed at the brand new poster stuck there on the wall.

JULY 11th TO JULY 14th. ROBERT BIKO, JAZZ SAXOPHONIST, AND HIS QUARTET. 10:30 P.M.

Robert Biko? The name rung a bell somewhere. Hadn’t I seen it on a free-jazz album I’d got hold of in a bargain bin at Our Price? Playing alongside Archie Shepp or Sonny Stitt, somebody like that?

We went in for dinner, which was tuna brik and cous-cous. Then migrated through into the outdoor bar. The air had grown dim by this time and cicadas called. It was still pretty warm, and far closer than it had been during the daylight hours. We drank some wine and peered at the massed stars overhead, which were growing brighter as the last light disappeared. It was an amazing sky that night, as I remember.

The hour rolled around to ten twenty p.m., and we went down into the nightclub.

I woke up suddenly on my own, a good deal more than a decade later. Thinking, before my head had even lifted from the pillow, He’s still here!

It was autumn, maybe a dozen years after Tunisia and late in the afternoon. The sky was overcast, and there was some damp in the air. Lauren by now had this job which took her to a lot of conferences overseas and, given the number of international organizations which have bases in Geneva, she was visiting the city maybe four, five times a year. It was only forty minutes from there to Lausanne. So I’d go with her when I could, and take the opportunity to drop in on Robert, if he wasn’t away touring somewhere.

The train snaked gently through the low Genevan suburbs, and then gathered speed as it approached the countryside. There were vineyards around me before too much longer, broad green fields speckled with pale dots that moved occasionally and were cattle. The dim shapes of mountains hung off in the distance. Buzzards circled, high above. Beside the track was Lake Geneva, Lac Leman, slate grey with a tinge of blue, the snow-capped French Alps rising on the other side.

I was alone in the carriage, and spread myself out. Had bought along a book to read, but something other than that caught my eye.

A newspaper had been abandoned on the seat opposite mine. And by the look of the headline – which was upside-down – someone well known had just died.

I picked it up and turned it over. DEXTER GORDON EST MORT, it read.

Dexter Gordon was one of the principal saxophonists of his generation, the kind of jazzman who would play to a packed house at the Royal Festival Hall. And even if you know nothing about the music, then you still might have seen him. I mentioned that great Bertrand Tavernier film -- ‘Round Midnight’ -- at the start of this? Dexter Gordon played the leading role.

Only in French-speaking Europe could the death of a jazz musician make a national newspaper’s headline. And it made me rather sad, since I had ten of the guy’s albums. So I hung onto the paper when I finally got off the train, and had it in my grasp as I went quickly down the slope.

By this time, Robert had quit his studio flat on the Rue du Haldimand for a neat one-bed apartment in a far more modern block, half way down the gradient to Ouchy on the Avenue de Cour. It took me fifteen minutes to walk there. After which I buzzed. He let me up.

There’s another thing you have to understand – if you don’t already know it – not about jazz music this time, nor the guys who play it, but about the fans. When it comes to the all-time greats of our beloved musical form, the stellar superstars of it, we have a habit of referring to them in the familiar, like they somehow are, or were, extremely close friends of ours. So, Chet Baker is simply ‘Chet.’ Miles Davis is simply ‘Miles.’ John Coltrane is ‘Trane,’ Dizzy Gillespie’s flat plain ‘Diz,’ and Charlie Parker’s always ‘Bird.’

So when Robert opened his front door to me I waved the newspaper at him and asked him, almost yelping, “Hey, did you hear? Dex is dead!”

He already knew of it. He looked from the headline to me, jutted out his lower lip.

Then shrugged softly and commented, “It happens to us all sometime. You can’t stay here, man – they won’t let you.”

Who the hell are ‘they’?

It was a broad, low-ceilinged area normally designed for dancing, except tables had been set up all across it now. We were the only tourists who’d come down here. All the rest were those businessmen I’ve mentioned in their dark, sleek suits, who’d come out from Tunis with their fiancées and wives. They appeared very still, I noticed, as though in a partial trance. The lowest of murmurs escaped them. I couldn’t remember, ever, seeing such a quiet and moveless crowd. A closer look around at them gave me a hint of why.

Their faces were glossy, their cheeks puffed out a little and their eyes noticeably glazed. This was Ramadan, remember? They had gone the entire day without a single bite to eat, then, once the sun had set, had gorged themselves on flat-bread and harira soup. Which had had quite an effect on their blood sugar levels. They were drunk simply on sustenance, a phenomenon I’d never come across before.

They kept gazing at the stage in happy expectation, smiling gently, eyes like mirrors in the gloom. We found ourselves a table with a clear view. Lauren ordered drinks.

Three young local men in pale grey suits came shuffling out onto the stage, and took their places respectively behind the drum-kit, piano, and base. They started tuning up, and took their time about it. We waited impatiently, the only people like that in the entire place.

A spotlight shone down suddenly on the microphone out front.

A voice announced over the Tannoy, in clear English for some reason, “Ladies and gentlemen … Robert Biko!”

And out walks this tall, broad-shouldered black man, holding in his king-sized grasp a gleaming alto sax. Dressed with incredible stylish smart sharpness in a blue suit with a matching tie and a pale yellow shirt. His cuffs were evenly presented and a handkerchief was folded to perfection in his breast pocket. His shoes were cleanly buffed. His nails the same. There was not a hair nor a thread out of place.

Like so many black jazzmen – and I came to understand this only later – it was a pride thing for him. A desire to be taken seriously and a rebellion against stereotype. He hated any kind of sloppiness. Despised street-fashion when it came along, with its baggy trousers and its back-turned baseball caps.

They had to get in a replacement pianist at short notice one time when he was playing here in London. When the guy turned up, it looked like he’d been wearing the exact same clothes the past couple years. Filthy sneakers. Badly crumpled, grubby jeans. A maroon woollen cardigan that had halfway unravelled. Robert was polite enough to him while he was present … but I can still remember clearly the look of disgust on his face once the man had gone away.

Smartness was synonymous with self-respect in Robert’s mind. And – whatever life threw at him – he always possessed that.

“Hey, did you hear …?”

I have no musical talent whatsoever, but I have one claim to fame in that regard.

About six months before the ‘Dexter Gordon is Dead’ evening, Robert had finished cutting a new album. And, for some reason, was at a total loss as what to call it. He was sitting in his new apartment, literally racking his brains, when his gaze fell on a book that I had sent him.

He always liked to read my stuff. And I had posted him a new tale in the Twelfth – and as it turned out final – Orbit Book of Ghost Stories.

And so he called the album Ghost Stories. I beamed hugely when he phoned me up to tell me that.

You must have heard the term ‘infectious grin’? He had one to a tee. He stopped in front of the mike, cast his gaze across the audience. And, satisfied with what he saw, broke into the widest, laziest, and most unaffected smile you could imagine. Everybody – including ourselves – could only smile right back.

I can’t remember what he said, exactly. Nor the first couple of numbers that he played. What I can recall is the way the three local musicians struggled to keep up with him.

He played like a bird in flight, soaring and then swooping, only to next spread his wings and ascend to new heights. He spiralled on thermals of inner feeling, let an unexpected draught of creativity take him to a new place entirely. His eyelids were gently closed, his shoulders bowed with the strain of his efforts. Riffs and licks exploded from him, dazzlingly bright.

His backing band looked more nervous as every minute passed. They were actually sweating, glancing helplessly around at each other with their eyebrows raised.

Don’t get me wrong here. Robert wasn’t an ungenerous performer. Every so often, he’d glance back and notice the trouble they were in, then slow his pace a little and allow them to catch up.

But then some brand-new flight of fantasy would take him over. He’d be off again, forgetting them. Lost only in the music.

By the time that he was halfway through his set, the audience had been completely roused out of their torpor. Were shouting encouragement, applauding wildly at the end of every number. Robert nodded modestly and gave them a dose more of that infectious grin.

“We’re gonna finish up now,” he announced at last. “And, seeing as where we’re at, what better tune to finish with than this one?”

The band knew where they were at last. The drummer took his place behind a set of congas and set up a backing beat. The pianist came in next, low and insistent. And finally, Robert lifted his mouthpiece to his lips again, and A Night in Tunisia came skirling out.

The entire audience was on its feet by this time, Lauren and myself included.

It was over. Robert and the others bowed, then emptied from the stage. We settled back down, chattering busily, the adrenalin of the performance coursing through our veins.

Except … some fifteen minutes later, Lauren happened to glance across to a table in the corner. “There he is!”

Still dressed as he’d been on stage, he was sitting drinking quietly with a small brunette who turned out to be, back then, his fiancée.

We wandered across cautiously, not wanting to intrude. Said things to him like “Great set, man! Terrific set!” and reached across and shook his hand.

“You guys English?” he asked us, and he looked slightly relieved when we confirmed we were from London. We figured out in that moment that, apart from Birgit, he had no else to talk to.

“Why don’t you join us for a while. What’ll you have to drink?”

We were faintly surprised but accepted, settling down across from him. And started to converse about the hotel we were in and its surroundings, where exactly we lived and where else we had been. And then the subject turned to music. Jazz, of course.

And, during the next couple of hours – by that unguessable magic that a hot, close night off in a foreign country can sometimes impart to life – we became firm friends.

This next bit happened a few years later, but is far too relevant to put off any longer. It’s a perfectly true story about man’s inhumanity to man. I still can’t believe that things of this sort happen, but they do.

In between us visiting him and vice versa, the three of us would go up to see his then-fiancée Birgit, who lived in the Swiss capital, Bern. There was no need for us to book a hotel, she told us the first time that we went there, since she knew some people we could stay with.

It turned out to be a gorgeous city, its centre a medieval fairytale full of arcades, old statues, and spires. Birgit’s friends – Astrid and Ivan – lived in the best part of it, the embassy district. Astrid had been married to a leading surgeon once upon a time, and come off splendidly in the divorce. So she now inhabited, with her bohemian boyfriend, a truly massive townhouse, an ornate wrought-iron staircase spiralling up the core of it to scores of wooden-panelled rooms. Most of these she let to students, so that at least a dozen people sat down at the dining table every single evening.

She and Ivan were both in their fifties, and extremely unconventional inhabitants of such a neat, smart, rather stuffy district. She had been a beatnik in her youth, and still dressed mostly in plain black. As for Ivan -- as the name implies, he was a Russian. Was an aging hippy too, his thin hair trailing halfway down his back. He dressed in an odd ragbag of ethnic clothing and smoked skinny little Indian cigarettes tied up with cotton at the filter end. But he turned out to be highly intelligent, cultured and thoughtful, as well. He could speak and read High German, and discourse on any of the arts.

Which he did, for the first couple of hours at least of our very first meal together. During which, several bottles of red wine mysteriously disappeared.

By ten o’clock, his speech had become pretty slurred. And by eleven, he was fast asleep, his head lain on the table.

When precisely the same happened the next evening, it became pretty obvious that Ivan had a problem.

Astrid might have been a freer spirit than her neighbours, but she was still Swiss. And so, the next day over washing-up, she apparently felt obliged to try an explanation.

So she told me Ivan’s story.

He was by birth Jewish, and while still in his twenties he had emigrated to Israel. There, he’d settled happily until he was conscripted. He didn’t like the army much, but things were to get even worse. The Yom Kippur War came along, and he found himself in the thick of the fighting.

A gentle and cerebral man, the sights and smells of battle sickened him. So, once it was all over, he decided he was moving to America instead.

Remember the date? 1967? Like a lot of people who live a life of the mind, Ivan wasn’t paying attention to his surroundings properly when he visited the US consul.

“You’ve got military experience, I see?” an attaché asked him, glancing down his application form.

Ivan got his citizenship in something near to record time. Flew out to New York. Put his hand over his heart, recited the Oath of Allegiance.

And, as soon as the last word of it had dropped from his lips, he found himself conscripted again. He was off to Vietnam.

“You know who were the worst amongst his comrades, yes? Those white, clean-cut, college football types? They’d shoot people for no reason and think that it was funny. Or they’d cut a prisoner’s head off and play catch with it. Only the black soldiers were decent. That’s one of the reasons Ivan enjoys seeing Robert.”

A year of this awfulness came to a head with Ivan being captured by the Viet Cong. And how did they treat this mild, pensive, cultured man who didn’t even want to be there in the first place?

Astrid’s face turned away slightly and her voice went very stiff.

“They buried him alive for three days. Not even in a box, you understand? In the raw earth, with just a bamboo pipe to breathe through. By the time they dug him out again …?”

She could only sigh and shake her lowered head. “He’s a good man. But finished.”

I could scarcely take in what I had just heard. Tried to imagine how it must have been for him during those seventy-two hours. Dead yet not dead. Clutched in the grip of the very earth itself, entirely unable to move. The soil pressing in at your mouth, your nose, your eyeballs, and your head all filled up with a soundless scream.

I tried to imagine it for a long while. Then I tried to stop.

How’s this relevant? You’ll see.

Robert was modest, didn’t disclose a lot. And so I found out most about his career by buying up his records and then reading the sleeve notes.

He had played with Archie Shepp and with Sonny Stitt. He was acknowledged, in fact, as one of the founders of ‘free-jazz,’ although later on he was disparaging about that whole adventure. He’d started as a flautist before switching to the saxophone. And he’d had a string of three hit albums with Atlantic in the Seventies.

Like so many African-American jazzmen before him, he had finally tired of the urban USA and made the exodus to Europe, leaving behind an ex-wife and three children. He’d lived in Paris first, for a few years, before moving to Lausanne.

He and Birgit had a kid too, but they finally split up.

Before he started on his jazz career, he’d had a brief spell as a boxer. He only mentioned it in passing, and the subject never came up again. Except once.

One day he was in London, maybe six years after that night in Tunisia, and I casually mentioned the recent, infamous Chris Eubank-Michael Watson fight. The one that finished up with Watson seriously brain-damaged.

Robert’s normal calm expression disappeared beneath a furious scowl.

“Both of those guys black?” he asked me, with rather more sharpness than he usually would ask me something.

Mildly puzzled, I stared back at him.

“Two black guys whalin’ on each other till they’re almost dead!” he burst out fiercely. “Oh yeah, white folk just love to watch that!”

So I suppose it doesn’t take much of a genius to figure out why he gave up on boxing.

There’s something else you have to understand, if you don’t already know it. Robert was the first jazz musician who I became friends with, but not the only one. Usually, I’d get to know them the same way, go over and congratulate them after a good set, or else I’d know someone who knew someone who knew someone well known.

But the point about them is that when it comes to times, dates, places, life in general, they are flotsam, they just mostly drift. Bump into you or not. Linger for a while, or wander off elsewhere. There’s no rhyme or reason to the way they live their lives – they’re as impetuous and improvisational as their music can be.

Lauren picked up Time Out one day, about ten years after Tunisia, goggled at the ‘music listings’ page, then told me, “Robert’s coming over! He’s playing the Jazz Café on …”

She read the date, and looked severely disappointed. By this time, she had already got that same job that involved a lot of foreign travelling, and she was out of London the whole week.

But the point is this. He was playing one of the best venues in town and, although he’d call us on the phone on the most casual of whims, it hadn’t even occurred to him to actually let us know.

I turned up at the Jazz Café some half an hour before the set was due to start. Scoured the whole ground floor of the place. Couldn’t see him anywhere. And so I went on upstairs to the balconied section.

There he was, sitting at a table with his new quartet, all black American exiles like himself. As I approached, he caught sight of me in a wall mirror and looked smoothly around.

I’d expected him to be surprised, but he simply wasn’t. Not a bit of it. There was no trace of startlement or puzzlement in his happy, mild expression.

Like … we lived around the corner from each other, and he’d been expecting me to show up the entire time.

“Hey, man!” he grinned. And pointed to an empty seat. “Set yourself down. What’re you having to drink?”

What I’m really getting at is that, if jazz musicians never let you know what their plans are, it’s generally because they have none. I wouldn’t understand how important that was until just before the end.

He visited us in London several times. Firstly at the fourth-floor walk-up that we had in Bayswater, but after that in West Hampstead, on the first floor of a vast Victorian Gothic house just off West End Lane. It had a double bedroom that was ours, and a much smaller second bedroom half-filled with the big, grey-painted metal office desk that I still write at. There was a futon sofa-bed in there, and he was quite happy with that. The few nights we remained at home, he’d turn in early, maybe ten o’clock. And sit there for the next couple of hours, writing down new music scores that he’d later perform. He didn’t need a harmonica, or even a tuning fork. The music would simply pour from his head straight down onto the lined paper.

But mostly we’d visit him in Lausanne, a miniature Paris set on a low mountaintop. He lived at number 6 Rue du Haldimand, around the corner from the University.

The first time that we went there, he met us at the station and then led us through the town’s bustling centre. We went up the stairs and in through the front door. And I stopped, looking round surprisedly.

It was a studio apartment. A large one, with an elevated section for the bed. But a studio apartment nonetheless. Where were we going to be staying, exactly?

Robert took in my numb expression. Grinned, then told me, “You guys take the bed. I’ll sleep on the couch.”

But we were here the entire week.

I opened my mouth to protest, but the look in his eyes forbade it. And that’s the way it was for the entire seven days, without the slightest grumble or complaint, not a hint of it, on his part.

In the mornings, Robert would teach class at the local music school, which gave us a chance to do some sightseeing. He’d be back by one in the afternoon, and then we’d spend the rest of it hanging round some bar or other, bumping into his numerous friends, or else we’d take the funicular Metro down the entire way to the lakeside at Ouchy, an Edwardian spa-town in its day.

In the evenings, we’d usually dine at the little green-frontaged bistro just around the corner, and then go up through the Old City, across the Pont Charles Bessières, and stride along the Avenue Mon Repos to the Black Note Club, where Robert played.

We’d head home come three in the morning, the town completely quiet around us now. The streetlights made the paving stones look amber-coloured. And it would strike me, occasionally, that perhaps we were abroad on some nocturnal Yellow Brick Road. A nightlife road. A jazz one.

Leading to some bright, jewelled city? No. In jazz there is no destination, only the road itself.

“Hey, did you hear? Dex is dead!”

“It happens to us all sometime. You can’t stay here, man – they won’t let you.”

He looked faintly sad a moment. But then that grin of his came flooding back. Neither of us had actually known Dexter Gordon. He might be gone, but we were still here, and that was the only thing that really counted so far as he was concerned.

There was a little more grey around his temples than the last time that I’d seen him, but otherwise he was exactly the same. The precise same person that I’d met those many years back in Tunisia. He led me through into his kitchen, where he was preparing an early supper, mussels cooked Provencal-style, on pasta. We chatted generally as we ate it, then went to a local bar. But it was almost empty, very quiet and dull, and so we only stayed some forty minutes before heading back.

He’d given up smoking by this time so, every half an hour or thereabouts, I would go out onto his small balcony, smoke a Gauloise and gaze at the vast surface of the lake below me in the darkness. And then pitch the finished butt over the railings, watch it explode like orange fireflies on the paving stones below. And then go back in, and resume our discussion.

We talked about what we were doing these days – he had quit his job at the école and founded his own music school, devoted just to jazz. He told me about his kids – both the grown up ones back in the States, who he spoke of with genuine pride, and the newer one in Bern. And then we set about putting the entire world to rights.

When we finished up at last, it was about four in the morning. He pulled out the sofa-bed for me, and both of us turned in.

The next morning was bright and pleasant. He rode with me on the tram to the station. He had work to do, and his stop was the next along.

I got off with my overnight bag. Turned around as the doors hissed closed. Raised a hand and waved to him as the tram pulled away.

He did likewise, flashing me that same infectious grin I’d seen when I’d first met him.

And then the tram-rails moved off at an angle. The morning’s soft, clear light made the glass turn reflective. He was lost from view.

I turned around and crossed the road towards the station, never realising once that this was the last time I’d ever see him.

The next time I was back in Lausanne it was very early in the Spring. Unseasonably warm and bright though, with a lot of trees already bearing blossom. I was grinning as I walked down the hill from the station – for once, I’d not phoned ahead, and I was planning to surprise him.

I turned right at the Avenue de Cour, and a few minutes after that was outside his apartment block. I reached out for the buzzer, and then noticed the front door had been left open. So I went inside.

There was something not quite right. Don’t ask me how, but I could somehow sense it. It simply didn’t feel as if Robert was still around.

I looked at his letterbox, and that confirmed it. His nametag had been replaced by a new one, a Swiss-German name.

I buzzed up all the same. Several times. No answer. The whole while, the truth of it was sinking slowly in. He’d been talking about moving the last time we’d met. And now, he’d gone and done it and, in typical fashion, hadn’t thought to let us know.

He’d mentioned, several times, the possibility of setting up in Fribourg, Germany, for a few years. He’d even toyed with the idea of Geneva itself. I tried both cities through directory enquiries, and got no result either for a Robert Biko or a Royston Hoyle. We’d long ago lost touch with his one-time fiancée, Birgit. Astrid and Ivan had emigrated to a small Greek island several years back. And the Black Note club had, by this time, closed down.

All of which was bad enough. But a couple of months later, Lauren and I moved as well. We left a forwarding address with the couple who bought our flat, but it was all that we could do.

We’d scour Time Out occasionally to see if Robert’s name turned up. And, any time we were in mainland Europe, I’d look through the entertainment sections of the papers in case he was featured on their list of dates.

There was nothing. We had no way of knowing where’d he gone.

Life – and especially life in a city like London – simply moves on like a steamroller at break-neck speed. We had our work and other friends, places to go and people to see. And in time, memories of Robert were slowly jiggled to the hindmost of our thoughts. I’d still play his albums every so often, and wonder where he’d got to. But then remember that I had a dozen other things to do. The phone would ring. I was due out somewhere. I had the last draft of a new story to complete.

It was only about four years later – I was putting together my own website – when it suddenly occurred to me that perhaps, by this stage of the game, Robert had a website of his own, or at least was mentioned somewhere.

I was surprisingly nervous as I worked the keyboard. Those numerous memories had suddenly come flooding back. And could it be …?

On Google, I typed in “robert+biko”. A list of addresses almost instantly popped up.

I clicked on the first one. And two seconds later, his photo was right there on my screen.

That infectious grin was still there, but his hair had turned enitrely white. My eyes slipped across the bio underneath his photo, taking in the fact that he was twelve years older than I was. Somehow, I’d never really noticed that, it had not even occurred to me, before.

He had not moved to Germany or to Geneva. He had gone back to New York instead. He was teaching one day a week in Boston, and playing gigs the rest. And was living in the Village, down on Bleecker Street. One more call to directory enquiries and I had his number.

It was six o’clock in the evening. Which made it, in New York … midday? I punched the digits in.

A feeling overtook me as I listened to that slow bell ringing on the far side of the ocean. There was something definitely not quite right again. The ringing sounded … far too shallow, flat in tone. Like there was something missing.

This was happening so quickly, and I tried to tell myself that I was being stupid. But the last time I had felt that instinct, it had been inside Robert’s block on the Avenue de Cour, when I had known deep in my gut that he was no longer around.

Someone picked up.

“Yes? Hello?”

It was a black woman’s voice, a reasonably young one in so far as I could tell. He had a new female friend, I tried to tell myself. But …

“Who is this?” I asked her.

“This is Kisha Biko,” she replied.

I recognised the name immediately. We had never before spoken, but this was Robert’s eldest daughter. He had mentioned her a whole lot that last evening in Lausanne, telling me proudly how well she was doing for herself. I think she worked in the Mayor’s office, or something like that.

“To whom am I speaking, may I ask?”

I explained to her who I was and how I knew her father. But I couldn’t help noticing that the information didn’t seem to be sinking in properly. Her responses were rather vague. She sounded very distant, and it wasn’t just the line.

“I’m here picking up a few of Daddy’s things. The funeral was yesterday and –“

Funeral?

The sole reason I could believe what I was now hearing was that my instincts had already warned me of something like this.

I felt the carpet dropping out from underneath me all the same, and I could scarcely keep my balance.

“You didn’t know?” Kisha was saying.

I reminded her – my voice stumbling and hoarse – that Robert and I had been out of touch for a few years.

“Ah,” she murmured. “I’m sorry to have to break this to you, then.”

Taking a few moments more to gather herself properly, she told me what had happened.

He’d been perfectly fine. His usual self, the way I’d always known him. He had gone up to Cape Cod to play a small festival there. Checked into the hotel they’d booked him, still perfectly fine. Gone into the restaurant for his evening meal, and then decided to turn in early.

He had never woken up again. His heart had simply stopped.

Then Kisha told me where the funeral had taken place. How many people had attended. And how emails, telegrams, and flowers had turned up from half around the world. All the friends that he’d made. The people who had known him and admired him.

She had started crying softly by this point.

“I’m so sorry,” I could only mumble. “If I’d only …”

What? Thought to use the Internet a little sooner? That wouldn’t have prevented anything. Except this sudden awful emptiness, perhaps?

There came back a faint snorting noise, like she had wiped a palm across her face and tried to pull herself together.

“Thank you,” she said. And then, “Oh! That’s odd!”

I waited, my head still spinning, for her to continue.

“There’s a book here, by the telephone. I think a British paperback. The 12th Orbit Book of Ghost Stories. He had an album called that once, Ghost Stories, but I didn’t think he read this stuff.”

I heard her flip the cover open. “Hey, it’s signed. This you?”

I can’t remember, either, how our conversation finished up. I wanted to sit down now, since my legs had become very weak.

Lauren was away that whole week, off at a big international conference in Montreal or some such place. When she called me that evening, I did not tell her the news. Wait till she gets home, I’d already decided. Not over the phone

I poured myself a scotch though, and I did put on an old tape of A Night in Tunisia, a tune thumping and insistent as a steam train. It was a live recording from some ballroom in Southern California in the Fifties. Walter Bishop. Walter Yost. Roy Haines. Cran Candido. Dizzy Gillespie on trumpet. Charlie Parker – ‘Bird’ – on alto sax.

You could hear the crowd in the background, simply murmuring at first. But, after the first few minutes, they were applauding and yelling with approval.

I poured myself a second and then a third scotch, remembering those evenings with Robert, those terrific gigs he’d played. How could anyone just go to sleep like that and not get up again? I was starting to get slightly angry. How could he just go like that, when I had only just caught up with him again? I’d wanted him to pick up the phone. I’d wanted to say “Hey, man! What’s happening?” and hear his big, infectious grin break on the transatlantic line.

I kept on pacing back and forth and getting more worked up and drinking more, until I’d finished up the bottle.

I don’t remember how I actually got to bed. But, once there, I had the strangest dream.

I had become Ivan, that aging Russian hippy back in Bern. The Viet Cong had captured me, and buried me alive. Worms and grubs brushed up against me, and the soil was damp and warm. I tried to move, but couldn’t shift a muscle. The earth pressed against my eyeballs, tried to push its way right up my nose. But the worst thing was that I didn’t dare open my mouth, which was unbearable, because I needed so badly to scream.

But the next second, I wasn’t Ivan any more. Instead, I was Robert, buried and yet still conscious. Simply lying there.

I woke up very sharply, thinking to myself, before my head had even lifted from the pillow, He’s still here!

Call me crazy if you will, but the feeling hung around me the entire next day. The same kind of instinct I had had at the apartment block and when I’d yesterday been listening to that ringing phone. Perhaps it was because we’d been so much on the same wavelength, but I seemed to have developed this sixth sense. Knew if Robert was around or not.

And that sixth sense was telling me, right now, that he was still present somehow. That he had somehow not departed, as he should have done.

It was foolish, nonsense, the worst possible case of wishful thinking. But it just wouldn’t let go of me, clung to me like an angry crab, bothering me so terribly I couldn’t do a thing all day.

And when I dreamt again that night, it was a similar bad dream. I was Robert again, but I wasn’t lying placidly this time. I wanted to get out and move around. I was struggling to scream beneath the earth.

Only half-awake, I rolled out of my bed, lurched to my feet. And then I stood there, shivering and sweating, with my eyes clamped fiercely shut.

Somehow – I just knew it – he’d remained behind. And was, right now, trapped underneath the ground out in New York somewhere.

The knowledge was like a ball of concrete in me by this time, paining me terribly, wholly impossible to ignore.

And so … what was I going to do?

This was the most bizarre thing that I’d ever done in my entire life – I knew it. But I also understood that I had little choice. I simply had to get out there.

Heading down the motorway – the night air close and smoggy – I phoned ahead on my mobile. Yes, there were some free seats on the next United flight to JFK, and I could make it in good time. I pulled onto the hard shoulder and read out the details of my credit card.

Impatient hours later, I was stepping out onto the tarmacked soil of Queens. The time was round one thirty in the morning here. There were a few cabs waiting. I approached the first one in the line.

In any other city, the driver might have looked surprised when I told him where I wanted to go at this late hour of the night. But this was New York – a fare was a fare. He simply pursed his lips and shrugged, then took me.

It was one of those enormous cemeteries that sprawl across the borough like some macabre golf course. Was set mostly on a slope, so that the headstones ascended in pale tiers above me. It was hotter and even muggier here than it had been in London, such a thick haze on the night air that the distant outline of Manhattan could barely be made out.

There were no railings, just a brick-built wall some five feet high which I climbed over easily. I’d brought a flight bag with me, with a few odd items in it.

A small torch, for instance. When I switched it on, I felt slightly dismayed. Not only were there literally thousands of headstones, but a fine mist was gathering about them. Tendrils of it swarmed about my ankles when I looked down. And I hadn’t even thought to ask Kisha which section he was buried in, so finding him was going to be a good long job.

I set off all the same, casting my gaze everywhere for fresh flowers and newly turned earth.

It must have been more than an hour before I finally stumbled across his stone. His family hadn’t used the name he had been born with, I was pleased to see. They’d had engraved the name that he had chosen for himself, and paraded on spotlit stages half across the world.

In loving memory of ROBERT BIKO composer, musician, and father

1942-2004

“Hey, man,” I said, relieved, and sat down.

I could almost hear him breathing underneath the earth. What exactly was he doing down there? Lingering, because the mood had taken him to do so and he had no other plans?

What should I do? He couldn’t stay here. He was probably okay at the moment, but what about later, when the box rotted and the soil came tumbling in? Then, he’d be like Ivan, and I couldn’t bear the thought of that. I was his friend. He was relying on me, even if he didn’t know it. I had to find a way to persuade him to go.

Maybe some music would stir him into action. It always had done in the past. I’d bought that same tape with me, the Parker/Gillespie session, along with an old, beat-up portable cassette player. And so I laid it in front of the headstone, switched it on.

A Night in Tunisia came flooding out again, for the last time.

I closed my eyes at that point, and then began talking gently to him. Ploughing through the past and reliving old memories. That first night in Gamarth, all the evenings since. That time that I’d turned up (un)expected at the Jazz Café, and the way that Ouchy looked in the late afternoon sunlight.

Perhaps, if I ran through it one final time, then he would recognise that the hour had come, at last, to let it go.

It took me a several minutes to realise that something had changed. The music … was no longer as it had been. It was still A Night in Tunisia playing, but when I listened properly, I could hear there was only a saxophone now. No Dizzy and no backing band, no congas by Cran.

My eyes snapped back open. And I almost scrambled backwards at that point. Because the little spoked wheels in the cassette player were no longer turning. The tape had fouled, I could now see, big tangled loops of it protruding from the lid.

The music was coming from underneath the ground. They might have buried his sax with him, but I don’t think it was that. Rather, it was coming directly out of him, directly from his soul.

I took in what was happening with a drained, bloodless amazement, and then got up to my feet, angry again.

“You can’t do this Robert!”

His playing just got louder.

“You just can’t –“ I turned around on the spot, trying to think how to say this.

“You remember what you said to me the day that Dexter Gordon died? I can still recall your exact words. ‘You can’t stay here, man. They won’t let you.’ So, you think the rules have changed? What the hell are you trying to do?”

The music stopped for a few seconds, as if he were thinking. Then resumed more fiercely than ever, filled up with a savage intensity by this time. Fired, ablaze with impertinent life.

I understood now. He wasn’t simply hanging around, not loitering like flotsam the way he usually did. He was remaining here because this whole business was so unfair. To go to sleep like that and, without warning, simply not wake up again? Where was the justice in that? He had so much music to compose and play still, and so many places left to go. And all of that potential had been casually snatched away from him.

Whose justice was that? Who were the ‘they’ who won’t let you stay here?

I was shaking now, my own thoughts feverish and verging on the crazy … when something new caught my attention. There was something moving at the corner of my vision, and I’d thought I was alone out here.

The mist, which had grown slightly thicker, was starting to coalesce in places. Starting to form expanding, pallid blotches.

Within seconds, I realised there were dozens of them. Growing ever larger now, and gradually taking shape.

I did stagger back a little, my heart hammering, my breath turned solid in my throat.

There were several ranks of them, their features becoming apparent. Was there the faintest glow about them? I couldn’t really tell you. I was too astonished now to take that kind of detail in.

Human faces were now being formed out of the massed condensation. Limbs, and even fingers and toes, all melded into view.

And, once they were whole, these beings began to move towards me.

There was nothing threatening in the way they moved. Rather, they approached respectfully, making not a sound.

The first rank seemed to be babies, with massive heads and tiny digits. But they walked entirely steadily on their hind legs. There was a quality about them that was unlike any normal infant. Their large eyes shone with intelligence. Their brows were creased with thought. Their lips kept pursing and their fingers flexing, as though they wanted to …

Wanted to do what, exactly? Play an instrument, the way that Robert had once done?

The second rank were six or seven years of age. Boys and girls, of all races and colours. Clutching in their hands recorders, triangles, and penny whistles. All of them just starting out, I understood numbly, on the same road Robert had travelled along.

And the third and last rank? They were all in their pre-teens. And they were holding proper instruments this time, clarinets and oboes, violins and trumpets …

And yes, saxophones.

I had thought at first they might be ghosts. But now, I recognised the truth of this.

They were not the lost souls of the dead, quite the opposite, in fact. They were the spirits of those still to come. Of all the talents waiting in the future.

They were not even looking at me, I saw.

I went back a few more paces, staying very quiet myself. And watched, as they gathered by the side of Robert’s grave.

‘You can’t stay here, man – they won’t let you.’

These were ‘they’, I now took in.

And why did they require him to go? Because they needed their own spot. Their time. Their debut. Their career. Their turn. No one could just remain here and deny a place to one of them.

Robert’s saxophone, still playing beneath the soil, had become uncertain, muted.

The mist-children just stared down silently and waited.

After another short while, the tune faltered to a stop.

I don’t think I was breathing at all by this time. But I was still shaking. What exactly would he do? Which direction would he choose to take?

I got my answer finally when a last extended lick came blasting out from underneath that gravestone. The most beautiful short flurry of chords I’d heard in an entire life of listening to jazz. All the spirit, the soul and humanity Robert had ever mustered were contained in there, and a dozen other things as well.

It was fireworks at New Year’s Eve. It was dawn’s rise on the ocean. It was a sudden flight of birds against a sky of azure, and the crackle of a log fire on a freezing night. It was making love for an entire weekend in Paris, stepping out into Manhattan your very first time. It was being drunk and very happy, and being at some fiesta in Spain so wild that you were simply drunk on that.

It coruscated, seemed to burn my eardrums, and it scorched the very air.

And … as it finally echoed away into silence … then that instinct I’d developed kicked in once again.

He was gone. I knew it just as well as I’d known that he’d remained here.

The mist-children remained in place another moment. And then …?

They smiled simultaneously, a thankful if faintly apologetic smile.

Then they swiftly faded, until there was only mist again.

And I know what you’re all thinking. The death of a close friend is hard to take under any circumstance. But when that friend dies out of the blue, entirely without warning, there are always things you wish you’d done earlier, thought of earlier, said to him while you still had the chance. A yawning, guilt-edged void is left. And, the mind being what it is, half-formed dreams and imagination soon rush in to fill the void.

There is – in fact – another way of looking at it though. There are certain religions in the world, certain philosophies which hold that our genuine existence lies elsewhere entirely. That this place we call the world is no such thing in truth, and this thing we call life upon it is merely a passing dream, of little consequence.

And if that’s true then, in spite of my claim at the beginning, none of this is in the slightest bit real.

Including my setting it down on paper.

And you reading it.

By the time I’d climbed back over the wall my face was wet with tears. They were stinging my cheeks, and my eyes were burning.

It had to be four in the morning by now, still dark if it wasn’t for the streetlights. A car hummed by in the distance and was gone.

You couldn’t see even the faintest outline of Manhattan any longer, the mist had spread everywhere. But it only rose to chest height.

I set down my bag, tipped back my head. Above me, the sky was a clear, deep, purplish black, entirely filled with stars.

I could have been anywhere right then. New York? Tunisia? Lausanne? What did it matter? There are a hundred thousand places in the world with humid, star-drenched nights like this one.

The kind of night during which anything might happen, and occasionally does.

In loving memory of

ROBIN KENYATTA

composer, musician, and friend

More of Tony’s short fiction is available, both in Kindle and in print, from Dark Regions Press -- www.darkregions.com

Other self-publications by Tony Richards on Kindle include:

THE BLACK LAKE: 13 CLASSIC TALES OF TERROR

SHERLOCK HOLMES IN THE 21ST CENTURY

MORE SHERLOCK HOLMES IN THE 21ST CENTURY

THE 3rd SHERLOCK HOLMES IN THE 21ST CENTURY

HOT BLOOD #1 -- THE SEDUCTRESS -- vampire novel.

HOT BLOOD #2 -- CAPTIVE OF THE NIGHT -- vampire novel.

UNDER THE ICE -- supernatural novella.

DARK FUTURES: HORROR MEETS SF

TO STEAL AN ANGEL: SF STORIES

TOUCHED BY MAGIC: HUMAN DRAMAS IN THE PARANORMAL WORLD

ALSISO -- suspense.

TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE -- horror.