A song for leonard, p.1
A Song for Leonard, page 1
Contents
Description
Dedication
01/1978
02/1996
03/1996
04/1978
05/1996
06/1996
07/1996
08/1978
09/1996
10/1978
11/1996
12/1978
13/1996
14/1978
15/1978
16/1996
17/1978
18/1996
19/1978
20/1996
21/1978
22/1996
23/1978
24/1996
25/1996
26/1996
27/1996
28/1996
29/1978
30/1996
31/1996
32/1978
33/1996
34/1996
35/1978
36/1978
37/1996
38/1996
39/1978
40/1996
41/1996
42/1978
43/1996
44/1996
45/1996
46/1996
47/1996
48/1996
49/1996
50/1996
51/1997
APPENDIX: THE SONGBOOK
About the Author
United States Copyright Office
Registration Number PAu 3-794-546
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the copyright owner. All song lyrics are the copyright of the author and may not be reproduced or performed in any manner without the consent of the author.
‘A Song for Leonard’ is a work of fiction. All characters and events represented are the product of the author’s imagination. The screenplay version of this story, ‘Bedeviled: A Song for Leonard Cohen’, won the
Empire Award for Drama at the 2017 New York Screenplay Contest.
Also by the author:
‘AGENDA 2060 Book 1: The Future as It Happens’– 2021
‘The Seed of Corruption’ – 2022
ISBN 978-0-473-63843-6 (Paperback)
ISBN 978-0-473-63847-4 (EPUB)
ISBN 978-0-473-63849-8 (PDF)
ISBN 978-0-473-63848-1 (Kindle)
ISBN 978-0-473-63845-0 (Hardcover)
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A Song for Leonard describes events that took place
in New York City in 1978 and 1996. The language,
social attitudes, and morals attributed to the characters
—particularly in respect to race, sex, and religion—
reflect those of the times. Readers may find
some of the behavior offensive when judged against current
social mores. Nevertheless, they reflect the author’s
deliberate intent to depict the period in which the story is set.
For Charlotte S
with love
My little town blues
They are melting away
I gonna make a brand-new start of it
In old New York
– from the song “New York, New York”
by John Kander and Fred Ebb
01/1978
How long is three minutes when every second commands your attention, and every one of them ends up being relived over and over, until it has become a pattern in your DNA?
My first impression was that she was either coming from or going to a party. There was an element of theatricality about her, which was down to her eccentric choice of clothes: a plain black dress in a knitted fabric that was too small for her, even though she was slim, the contour of the dress obscured by a brightly colored waistcoat that was, by contrast, too big. They could have been clothes grabbed spontaneously from a theatrical wardrobe, or else they were not her own. Her hair was black and straight, chopped unevenly so that the longest parts traced her jawline down to her chin, and the shortest parts had the punk quality that only blunt kitchen scissors could impart.
Her feet were bare.
All this I discovered in one brief glance in her direction at the sound of her voice behind me.
Her face was expressionless. We were less than a meter apart, alone on the street under artificial lights that stripped the color from her skin. In daylight, that skin might have been milk white, but under the sodium street lamps, the milk had been skimmed, giving it a pale blue opacity like Ming porcelain.
Looking closer, I was struck by how light on flesh she was, the bones of her forehead, cheeks, and nose quite pronounced in a handsome rather than pretty way that bordered on androgynous, with eye sockets the size of dessert spoons, framed by penciled black eyebrows and the purple bruising of acute iron deficiency. The eyes themselves were dull and withdrawn.
“What did you say?” I asked pleasantly.
Her lips barely moved. “Give me fifty dollars.”
It wasn’t the voice of a Jersey girl, or a stray from Brooklyn. It was the voice of a girl from New England, where you would expect her to have been taught to say “please,” so what she said was made all the more surprising by the way she said it.
If, like me, you come to believe that all behavior is driven by biological imperatives, then you will understand why my response was initially uncomplicated. In the years since then, I have had many reasons for reexamining my actions that night, but the starting point always remains the same. She was a girl in her early twenties, dressed for a party, and I was a thirty-something man. My instinct was to check her out. So, I chuckled with fake amusement at the baldness of her question and looked away, as if in search of a Candid Camera.
Why didn’t I, as many have suggested to me since, just reach into my pocket for whatever money was there, hand it to her without a word, and walk quickly away? “Don’t even wait for her to count it’-“ was the advice Michael gave as soon as he heard about it. “And if my pockets were empty?” I asked. “Fuck it, this is New York—just run!”
It is exactly the advice that I would now give to someone else in the same circumstances.
It was hardly a full second before I looked back at her. In that time, the dull, flat disinterest in her eyes had been transformed into piercing lucidity.
“Why would I do that?” I asked, deliberately inflecting the English accent I had found so useful in placing distance between myself and others since coming to New York.
She didn’t answer, but slowly lifted her left hand, in which she was holding a small clutch purse. Without taking her eyes from mine, she appeared to proffer the purse towards me, then drew it back to her chest. I leaned closer. It was a well-worn, cheap bag covered in silver sequins, now mostly missing, with a short wrist strap and a white plastic clasp. With her right hand, she undid the plastic clasp and tilted the bag towards me. What I saw when I looked down was not what I expected to see, and for that reason, I was not sure that I had truly seen it. I lowered my head closer, then stepped back sharply. The bag contained a small black gun.
I remember the moment as completely silent. There are no street sounds in my memory, no scuffing of shoes or inhalation of air. My sole focus was on her right hand as she reached inside the bag and took hold of the gun.
I realized in hindsight that I had clearly seen the lesions on her inner arm, and the chewed and torn quick of her broken fingernails, but all that came back to me later. In that moment, all I could take in was the primary focus of my fear: the gun.
When I moved my tongue to speak, it stuck to the roof of my mouth, and the short expletive that was forced out of me collapsed into a dry croak. I want to believe that I was making an instinctive attempt to “tend and befriend,” and that is what caused me to try and speak. What I’ve learned since is that fight and flight can collide, leading to momentary inaction. I have never been certain what it was that I said, but I know I froze.
Once the gun was in her hand, we both looked up, and I’m sure that what she saw in me was someone who had chosen to disappear, playing dead like a scared rabbit, for why else would she have decided to smile? Lips that seemed etched in ink spread outwards beneath a strongly molded nose that might have been shaped by a sculptor. But these lips parted wide to reveal the mouth of Medusa—Medusa, who made herself so ugly that all who saw her were turned to stone.
I reeled back at the blackened stumps of teeth, smashed, jagged, and suppurating—teeth snapped in half and barely visible in swollen gums yellowed by disease and pain. It was a smile that would haunt me. And though I can still feel and hear the explosion as if it had just happened, will I ever know what really happened next?
02/1996
It was almost exactly eighteen years before Charles Bateman returned to New York, a city he had run away from, and he expected things to have changed considerably. In fact, he was counting on it.
There’d been a couple of Wall Street crashes in that time, and now there was a collapse in tech stocks, but overall, the previ
The opinion of the Manhattan leasing agent Charles had been dealing with on the phone from London over the last few weeks was that “Cash is king”—perhaps not the sagest pronouncement, but one with which Charles was happy to agree, not only because it was so obviously true, but because it was exactly what he had said when reassuring himself that he was doing the right thing by selling his assets.
No, for Charles Bateman, things appeared to be pretty good—particularly to outsiders. He had money, he had his health, he had freedom, and at forty-nine, he still had youth on his side. So, as he joined the queue advancing towards the immigration booth at JFK following an early-morning arrival from London, he felt a stirring of anticipation, a trickle of adrenaline finding its way into his bloodstream, alerting him to the fact that he was consciously leaping into the unknown. There were only two things he knew for certain as of that morning: he had a one-semester tenure with a guest lectureship at NYU, and a six-month lease on a Manhattan loft, which, if he had imagined it correctly from as far away as London, was the epitome of chic for someone who viewed himself as more naturally a bohemian than a staid academic. What he didn’t have was any sense of a future beyond that, and while it was not an uncommon feature of the times, in Charles’s case, it was something from which he had suffered for most of the last decade. He couldn’t imagine the future until he had finally come to terms with the past.
“So, you come on business or vacation?” the female immigration officer asked, looking at the lengthening lines and sighing deeply. She palmed his passport and entry form like a bored card player, glancing at him as she did so through early-morning eyes that spoke of a hard shift just finishing, or a long day ahead.
“Vacation, at the moment.” He smiled pleasantly.
“Well, if that’s what you put down, that’s what it’s gotta be.” She slid the passport face down into a scanner and read his entry form with the care of a slow learner. “Says you got a J-1 visa. Thought you said you was on vacation?”
“Well, the university is on vacation. Guess I was being literal,” he replied brightly.
“You’re an architect, it says on your passport. Visa says ‘professor.’ Which is it?”
“Both. I lecture in architecture.”
“Have you been in the United States in the last twelve months?”
“No.”
“Last two years?”
“No. I haven’t been here for eighteen years—since 1978, to be exact.”
“Well, you’re going to find some changes, then.” She grinned.
“I hope so.” He grinned back.
Removing his passport from the scanner, she looked up at the screen in front of her. Then she pursed her lips, looked down at the open passport, and began to read whatever was written on the screen again—this time with elaborate care. The seconds ticked by.
Beside her left hand was a telephone. She picked it up, transferred it to her right hand, and then, with some effort, stood up with her back to him so he couldn’t see her expression or hear what she was saying. The call was brief. Returning the phone to its handset, she walked to the back of the booth, looking towards the baggage hall.
Two men—one uniformed security and heavily armed, one gray-suited and tightly buttoned up—walked briskly towards them. The man in the gray suit stopped and talked to the immigration officer, leaning in, speaking quietly. He took the passport and entry form, looking up quickly at Charles before closing the passport and reaching out to touch her lightly on the shoulder. The security guard stood back as the suited man then entered the lane between the immigration booths.
“Mr. Bateman, you’ll need to come with me, please.” There was no hostility. His voice was low but businesslike.
“Why? Is there a problem?”
“Just come with me please, sir.”
“But I’d like to know why. Is there a problem with my visa?”
“Your visa is fine. Please step out of the line, sir, so people are not held up.”
The security guard moved forward and took Charles firmly by the elbow. There was still no hostility. They crossed the arrivals hall and entered a door with a frosted glass pane and a stenciled sign that said Strictly No Admittance.
A table and four hard chairs. Against the wall, a plain desk with a computer screen. The security guard released his grip, and the man in the gray suit walked around the table, pulled out a chair, and stood with his hands gripping its back, leaning on it.
“I’m going to ask you to put your briefcase on the table and then empty the contents of your pockets.”
“What is this about?” Charles demanded.
“Put everything on the table, please, sir,” the security guard instructed, “and then spread your legs and raise your arms.”
The search was perfunctory. Like everyone else on his plane, he’d already been searched before he boarded. His pockets contained nothing. The laptop in his briefcase was taken out and put on the table. The remaining contents sparked no interest.
“Have I been chosen at random, or are you searching me for a specific reason?” Charles demanded. “If you don’t mind my saying so, a little bit of communication wouldn’t go amiss here.” He straightened his back and loosened his shoulders. It was never a bad thing to be the tallest man in the room, even if he wasn’t the one in charge. “If I knew what you were looking for…”
The gray suit opened his laptop.
“That’s already been inspected. Twice!” Charles snapped.
Gray suit switched it on. “Your name has brought up a border alert.”
“A what? Why?”
The laptop was swiveled around to face him. “Enter your password, please, Mr. Bateman.”
“Tell me what you’re looking for.”
Gray suit impassively checked the buttons of his jacket. All three were neatly done up. “For verification of your identity. I take it this is your laptop?”
Charles entered his password and turned the machine away from him again. The silence that ensued was accentuated by the tapping of the laptop keys. Words like privacy and rights had no need to be spoken; they were written large on Charles’s face as he waited for the silence to be broken.
After what seemed an eternity, gray suit turned off the laptop and closed the lid, replacing it in the briefcase. “Any reason you know why that should be?” he asked politely.
“Why I should be on a border alert? None at all. I don’t even know what that means! Is this something to do with security? Has someone used my identity…?”
Gray suit crossed to the computer on the side desk and inserted Charles’s passport into a built-in scanner. A list of names flashed up on the screen, and he scrolled down to one line that was highlighted and double-clicked on it.
“This alert has been posted by the Department of Justice. It says there’s an outstanding warrant.”
Charles crossed the room and looked over his shoulder. “A warrant for what?”
“Let’s read what it says… ‘Notify the office of New York chief medical examiner and the New York district attorney’s office. US Customs and Border Protection officers are to verify subject’s residential address and retain passport until alert is taken down. Issued…’ Hell, this is nearly eighteen years ago! Have you ever been charged with anything?”
“No, nothing. What the devil does it mean?”
“It means I have to retain your passport and verify your address in New York, that’s what it means. Is this the address you’ve given on your entry card?”
“Yes, but this is insane!”
