Chapter One
The Great Escape
There’s a few people I have to thank. My agent Leo Pold isn’t one of them. He was no help at all. Take, for example, that day in London when I left the hospital…
Escaped from the hospital might be a better way of putting it – although it was hardly a clean getaway. No, I’ll never forget the scene in the street outside the front door: me lying, knees up, across the back seat of the big old London cab, its engine running, its meter ticking, its door wide open, with Mr. Pindi, Nurse Daly and Chomsky the old dreadlocked Jamaican porter lined up on the kerbside looking in.
“This is silly,” said Pindi. He had commandeered my crutches.
“Senseless,” said Nurse Daly. She had a firm hold of my backpack.
“Suicidal,” Chomsky chimed in. He was standing behind a wheelchair whose non-human occupant was a two-foot high stack of thick manuscripts trussed up tight with twine.
The cab driver took no notice. He was perusing the tabloid spread across his steering wheel while, at the same time, idly surfing the FM channels on his radio: "Thundery downpours…” / “bus broken down on the Tottenham Court Road…” / “our man on the banks of the Seine where Chelsea are taking on Paris St. Germain this evening at the Parc des Princes…”
“Come along now Mr. Cobb,” Nurse Daly said, “Back to the ward. Let us get on with our work."
“My dear fellow,” Pindi said, “you are in no condition to go anywhere,”
“Listen to the man,” Chomsky said, “this shit’s crazy.”
Imagine Bob Marley – what he would look like were he alive today – well, that’s Chomsky. He was tapping the side of his thigh with a small ostentatiously gift-wrapped box - an item I’d got him to purchase for me that very morning in a nearby Boots. Perfume. Dolce e Gabbana. The 75 ml.
It had been three months since Pindi piled me on his table and went to work on me with his shiny saws and clamps, his hammers and his graspers, well into the night, and on again to daybreak, until he had me flat again along his slab, everything in line, in place, all stapled, pinned and screwed securely back together again.
“Time’s our man now,” he said, snapping off his bloody gloves and missing the bin.
The cabbie’s FM chopped and changed, chopped and changed. From celebrity gossip to beauty tips to test cricket and on again to hip-hop, reggae and honky-tonk before finally settling – as fate would have it – on The James Waterman Orchestra playing a Coldplay or U2 number. Hard to tell. Given the Waterman treatment they all sound pretty much the same - the kind of music you hear in the dentist’s chair in between blasts of the drill.
“We don’t have time for this Cobb,” Nurse Daly said, more crossly now. “We do have other patients, you know. Patients more appreciative of our efforts."
“The job is not yet half done,” Pindi said. “Two further months, at least, are needed of intensive physical therapy.”
With a tight, teeth-gritting grimace, I shifted my aching coccyx on the seat. “The only therapy I need," I groaned, “is the therapy of the ocean. The wild Atlantic, Mr. Pindi. Sea air. Solitude.”
Fifteen long minutes it took for the message to sink home – I was going and that was it.
"You are not a wise man," Pindi said with a subcontinental’s wag of the head. Then he broke ranks, came forward with my crutches and resignedly lobbed them, one by one, on to the floor of the cab. Then he leaned in the doorway and with his unkempt grey head and the smell of Polo mints hovering in the air above me he said (in the voice of a garage mechanic who, after a quick look over his shoulder for the boss, gives away a trade secret that’s going to save you a bundle, e.g. This new synthetic engine oil only ever needs changing every 15,000 miles) he said “Drink milk. Straight from the cow. And lots of it.”
Before he withdrew he surreptitiously stuffed a pill bottle into the pocket of my chocolate-brown windbreaker and said in a muffled tone, “Go easy with those.”
My backpack and the four bundles of manuscripts were stowed. The gift-wrapped box was placed in the palm of my hand. The door was slammed.
“Straight out to Heathrow,” Pindi shouted to the driver. “And mind the bumps.” He rapped the rooftop with his knuckles, two times and then a third. Then he popped a Polo and retook his place in the line.
Gentle as a hearse the cab began to move off and the three disapproving faces each in turn slid from the window frame, from my view, and were gone. It was only then that I exhaled the breath that I had been holding and I called out to the driver to “swing by Soho”. And his head turned, turned just enough to show one bloodshot protuberant eyeball that, when it swivelled down to fix me, was also glazed with disapproval.
I was heading for Leo’s office - Pold Representations Ltd. - with a stop first, round the corner, at the Far Star Bar where I knew that up on the top shelf between the Aberfeldy and the Cabo Wabo, was a bottle of Gunne's Number Four 85 proof Tennessee bourbon whiskey. Two good large ones, I knew, would get me up Leo's stairs.
