Richard Read online

  BEN MYERS

  RICHARD

  PICADOR

  For Adelle Stripe

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  1. BOMB THE PAST

  ‘He was a man, take him for all in all . . .’

  2. CLASSIFIED MACHINE

  ‘And then it started like a guilty thing.’

  3. LONDON – DEATH SENTENCE HERITAGE

  ‘A violet in the youth . . .’

  4. NE TRAVAILLE JAMAIS

  ‘I am thy father’s spirit.’

  5. BORED OUT OF MY MIND

  ‘The time is out of joint: O cursed spite . . .’

  6. SCARS – DEAD – HATE – VOID

  ‘God has given you one face . . .’

  7. FUCK ME AND LEAVE

  ‘My words fly up, my thoughts remain below . . .’

  8. THERE IS NO CHOICE

  ‘If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart / Absent thee from felicity awhile.’

  PREFACE

  Richard James Edwards was born in Blackwood, Wales on 22 December 1967.

  In 1989 he joined the Manic Street Preachers with his childhood friends James Dean Bradfield, Sean Moore and Nicky Wire. During his time in the band he was also known by his stage name Richey James or in the press as Richey Manic.

  On 1 February 1995 he left a London hotel and was never seen again. His car was discovered two weeks later at the Severn View service station on the M48 motorway, near to the old Severn Bridge. Many sightings of him were subsequently reported, some of which are considered more plausible or credible than others. The most notable sightings are those which occurred in the two weeks following his disappearance. In referencing these I no way suggest them to be true.

  Richard Edwards was legally declared dead on 23 November 2008.

  This novelization of his life features characters based upon certain real people and fictionalized interpretations of real events and reported sightings. Other characters and situations are entirely fictional and this story does not purport in any way to be the truth. It is instead one outcome out of an infinite amount of possibilities and therefore artistic licence has been duly exercised. This account is written with respect to all concerned.

  1

  ‘He was a man, take him for all in all,

  I shall not look upon his like again.’

  (Hamlet, 1. 2)

  BOMB THE PAST

  Room 516.

  A turned-down bedspread, a screwed-down TV and a locked minibar.

  Frost on the window. London dark blue and dormant.

  Five storeys up, encased in brutalist concrete and alabaster. Up in the air. It’s all up in the air. Everything. Everything.

  Trapped up here in the room where someone has removed the doors. Concreted them over. Filled in the gaps. All that’s left is this window. A window that won’t open. They’ve nailed it shut. Nailed me in.

  Nailed me in, five storeys up. Up in the air.

  It’s all up in the air.

  It’s not blackened slag heaps or eternal grey skies, but the sun’s rays shining through the inch-wide chink in your floral print curtains turning your golden hair nut-brown.

  This is what you remember.

  The floral-print curtains. The sun on your face. A box of crayons upended on the worn olive-green carpet. Sugar paper.

  The sun on your face.

  The smell of baking. Margarine and sugar. Burnt Golden Syrup. The clatter of pans. Mum in the kitchen. Radio 4.

  The sun on your face.

  Dust dancing in shafts. A cloud that looks like a cat. The rattle of keys, Dad in the doorway.

  This is what you remember.

  The sun. Your face.

  A warm glow of happiness.

  Because the human mind continuously edits and self-censors. It writes its own history and romanticizes events in order to make sense of a life. The very earliest memories are buried so deep they rarely rise to the surface of the conscious, yet you definitely remember the day Mum and Dad bring home your baby sister. It is 1969. You are two years old.

  You don’t remember clothes or the weather or even sounds or smells. All you remember is an image and a feeling.

  The image of the three of them behind the cobbled glass of the porch door that fragments them, turns them into abstractions. You are on the floor, playing with a toy car on the olive-green carpet. Your world is knee-high; everything above is an alien landscape.

  Then the feeling you get as the door opens and the abstractions become something real and tangible: Dad smiling, with a white bundle in his arms and a night bag hanging from his arm, Mum behind him, looking tired, but flushed with rosy joy.

  — Richard. We have someone here to see you.

  You stand, your toy car in hand.

  Mum and Dad coming into a huddle and bending over the bundle.

  — Look who it is.

  You don’t know whether they’re talking to you or the bundle, but they crouch down so that you can see too. You can see the tiny face with the closed eyes. The tiny fists and the gurgling mouth.

  — It’s your new baby sister, Richard. She’s called Rachel.

  Maybe you have imagined this. Maybe photographs and retellings of the moment have helped you build a mental picture, but you know the feeling is true.

  Outside, across the road, Kensington Palace Gardens is framed in the half light. The city home to generations of blue blood and international embassies, stately homes and multi-multi-multimillionaires’ mansions. The playground of the super- and the stupid-rich; people with more money than the entire town of Blackwood. The most expensive street in Britain. A home to wealth and intrigue. Sex and power.

  And pain too.

  They kept torture chambers in there during the war. Right across the road in those beautiful buildings. MI19-owned, they were. I read about it. The London Cage, they called it. All very hush-hush. Down there in the basement was where they tried to extract information from German prisoners of war. Hundreds of them, maybe thousands. Physical and psychological torture and pioneering techniques of interrogation – right here on the doorstep, in good old cor-blimey-guvnor London.

  For the good of the country.

  Beatings and threats. Threats and beatings. Sleep deprivation and the promise of ‘unnecessary surgery’ hanging over the heads of those subdued German soldiers. Cold water and cudgels.

  Cold water and cudgels.

  Right here on this doorstep. Out there in the darkness of the park over the road on the most expensive street in Britain.

  For freedom.

  For democracy.

  For King and country.

  Hide and seek in the long grass in the summer time. Peeling scabs from knees and poking the raw flesh beneath them, which is more red than anything you’ve ever seen. Hurling rocks into the beck. Gulping down a tall glass of concentrated orange juice, helping yourself to another biscuit, then running out the door again. Out down St Tudor’s View and onto Gordon Road. Left through the estate and down to Pengam Road or right down to the High Street and, beyond that, the river. Each presents so many possibilities.

  So, so many possibilities.

  Because life presents options to you in all directions.

  Life can be whatever you want it to be, but right now it is a fat lip from a misjudged frisbee in the face. It is a Twix melting into a gooey mess in the back pocket of your shorts. Life is Jason Stoker eating a worm for a dare and Roobarb & Custard. It is you squashing your balls during a backer on someone’s Chopper, or slip-sliding in dog shit down the rec.

  Life is a mixture of the mundane, the mysterious and the magical.

  And endless possibilities. Endless options. There is so much fun to be had.

  Sledging down the Scrambles in winter. The world’s largest snowman – coal for eyes
and a carrot for a nose, naturally. Blackwood down the hill in the distance. Numb fingers and numb toes. Red cheeks. Blockbuster. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang at the pictures. Mum’s chintz dressing gown. Gran and Granddad’s wood-chip wallpaper. The childish calls of ‘Coming ready or not . . .’

  Rhyl.

  Newport.

  Barry Island. Home.

  West goes to Notting Hill and Kensington, east leads to Hyde Park and Marble Arch, then Oxford Street, then beyond the High Street shopper’s paradise, Soho, where I spent so many nights in ’91, ’92 just wandering and gazing and wearing out the soles of my shoes.

  I was not so much awestruck then as anonymous. Glad to be anonymous. Glad to see that the city was what I had always suspected it to be: a Petri dish of human amoebae colliding but never connecting. Always bouncing off one another without apology, without true communication. The very ‘neon loneliness’ we wrote about.

  I wish I had retained at least some of that enthusiasm for discovery, but it has all gone now. Never to be replaced. I don’t have the energy for enthusiasm any more. I don’t have the energy for anything. Books, music, people, sex, money, but most of all – me. I no longer have the energy to be me. I can be what people want me to be, but I cannot be who I want me to be.

  Because I no longer know. Will probably never know.

  It’s cold and quiet and cars are slowly passing by, their lights a slow trail of burnt red in the night, and each of them contains a body or bodies, and I wonder who they are, and this view from Room 516 isn’t helping.

  No sleep and nervous, I want to wake up in a city that always sleeps.

  Soon I’ll need to make a decision.

  Before I leave Room 516 I will know what to do.

  Everything is cold and hard, as if weighted down by history and an unspoken sense of burden. The wooden benches sit on a wooden floor.

  Coughs and creaks. The shuffling of feet.

  It’s draughty and you’re wearing shorts so you shove your hands in your pockets to keep them warm.

  You spend hours staring at the pattern in which the floorboards were laid decades earlier by a team of carpenters from another age, a different era.

  You wonder if the carpenters were religious men, whether theirs was a Godly mission, or just another paid job.

  You drift off, your mind wandering and you stare at that floor, your eyes following the diagonal pattern of wooden boards, the varnish worn away by decades of feet shuffling from the front door to the altar and back again, or restlessly moving beneath the pews as the vicar delivers another long, nonsensical sermon.

  It’s as much a shack as a glorious stone church; more a corrugated prefab than a cathedral designed to evoke awe. The only thing this place evokes is chilblains.

  There’s no stained-glass window, no mysterious musks and scents being wafted through the air by sombre altar boys. None of the alluring rituals that the Catholics have.

  Just coughs and creaks. The shuffling of feet.

  So right here and now, on the cold hard bench on the scuffed floor amongst the coughs and the creaks of a Sunday morning, you vow to be in service to no man but yourself, and to never give up the one asset you were born with: your ability to think and act freely.

  I have yesterday’s newspapers spread out in front of me and I’m scanning the headlines.

  CLINTON TO LEND MEXICO

  TWENTY BILLION DOLLARS.

  SIX THOUSAND DEAD IN

  GREAT HANSHIN EARTHQUAKE:

  THOUSANDS MORE STILL MISSING.

  KUNG FU CANTONA!

  I wish I had a map right now. A map of London. A map of Britain. A map of the world.

  A map of my mind.

  I’ve had no sleep and I’m nervous, my stomach is in revolt.

  Soon I’ll need to make a decision. But I can’t think. Can’t think. Can’t think straight. Can’t think straight in Room 516.

  Room 516 The Embassy Hotel, Bayswater Road, London.

  Everything is predictable. I know how the story ends and it doesn’t end happily. It just ends like a big black punctuation mark. It just ends.

  Ends.

  I can’t think straight here in Room 516.

  Room 516 with the bedspread, the kettle, the locked minibar. The adjustable mirror and the little packets of soap.

  I can’t think straight. I’m reaching out into the darkness trying to grasp something tangible.

  Something tangible in Room 516.

  Room 516 The Embassy Hotel, Bayswater Road, London.

  Room 516 with the bedspread, the kettle, the locked minibar. The silent corridors. The window that won’t open. The window they’ve nailed shut.

  The TV is on but the sound is turned off as it casts strange formations on the walls. Formations like my thoughts – nebulous and foreboding. Washed out. Just beyond reach. Shape-shifting images that are flat and meaningless; which once had meaning but now are just shapes on the wall. Shapes on the wall of Room 516.

  I need to make a decision.

  Before I leave this room I will know what to do.

  In this sea of uncertainty though one fact remains concrete, steadfast and immovable: there is no way I am going to America today. No way.

  Not today. No way.

  Not today. Not ever.

  No way.

  America?

  No.

  Dawn breaks but I can’t see anything beautiful in it. It simply gets lighter, the traffic flow heavier. Another day of repetition lies ahead. Or maybe it won’t this time.

  Because I’m pacing now. Pacing the room. Pacing and thinking.

  Trying to think. Thinking about everything. Thinking about nothing.

  Thoughts piling up, none of them clear.

  I flop down onto the bed, onto the newspaper.

  I need to make a decision.

  Repeat after me . . .

  I need to make a decision. I’m going out of my mind. My fucking mind. Maybe it’s the pills?

  It’s not the pills. It’s anything but the pills.

  I’m not going to America.

  Repeat after me . . .

  Not going to America.

  I’m in no fit state.

  No fit state for America. No fit state for anything.

  No way. No today. Not ever again.

  America? No. America can wait. It can wait for ever.

  I don’t want these pills in me any more.

  I don’t want to be in me any more.

  Repeat after me . . .

  No more, no more, no more.

  I need to make a decision.

  So make it, then.

  I can’t.

  Why not?

  Because I’m scared.

  You’re always scared. That’s your problem. Always scared.

  Not always.

  Yes, always. Pussy faggot cop-out bastard.

  Don’t.

  Yes. Pussy faggot cop-out bastard. Talk about wasted potential. What a fucking let down. Spoilt pussy faggot cop-out bastard.

  Please . . .

  You need to make a decision.

  I know, I know . . .

  Time is running out.

  I can’t.

  You can. And you will. Because for the first time in your life you’ll stop being a pussy faggot cop-out bastard and you’ll take control. Understand?

  I . . .

  Understand?

  I . . .

  Here in Room 516 you will make a decision and you will stick to it and you will stand by it and you will see it through. Whatever the circumstances. Whatever the consequences. Because for once in your life you will stop being a spoilt pussy faggot cop-out bastard. Understand?

  . . .

  Understand, cocksucker?

  Yes. I understand.

  So do it. Make that decision.

  You stay at Gran’s a lot. Every Saturday night and sometimes in the week too.

  Gran’s is a bubble. A warm, clean bubble full of strange curios, like her collection of coloured glass vases, her
crystal decanter and the silverware that she takes out and religiously polishes once a month. The smell of the polish tickles your nostrils. Gran cooks you proper chips in a deep fat-fryer and you eat huge knickerbocker glories with a crumbled Flake on top.

  Granny always whistles the same song all day long: ‘Zip-a-Dee-Do-Dah’.

  You play Consequences and Ludo then you sit watching Saturday night TV together – you at her feet marvelling at her contorted toes and bunions like golf balls.

  You sleep in the spare room on a fold-out bed. You always pretend that the bed is the car in Starsky & Hutch. The landing light illuminates the glass panel above the door and in the darkness of the room it looks like a faraway space ship. You fall asleep thinking about Suzi Quatro.

  And downstairs you can hear Gran whistling.

  — Zip-a-dee-do-dah, zip-a-dee-day . . .

  Everyone seems to think that you are somehow ‘better’, as if a rest and nice bowl of fruit for breakfast is the cure-all for any ailment. They must do, otherwise why would they send you off to America to talk up the new album, in advance of the band making their most concerted effort to crack a country that remains completely indifferent to your band.

  It is because I’ve done such a good job of convincing them, that’s why. I have worn my mask of recovery well. I have assimilated those twelve steps and my new smile makes my face ache. Sobriety shines in my eyes.

  And it’s also because the new album is my baby. My ugly baby. My stillborn. But like an ugly stillborn baby I am duty-bound to somehow love it anyway.

  I certainly won’t be able to better it, lyrically. And it’s hard to see how the boys could ever write music that fits as perfectly as it does on The Holy Bible.

  The Holy Bible.

  My last will and testament.

  Anyway, who else is going to be able to explain the concept of an album whose basic prevailing themes are -broadly speaking – the Holocaust, child prostitution and anorexia?