The Kimota Anthology Read Free

sheet music, but I also have a pretty good memory. I’ve only got to play a new number through once, and I can generally log it up in the old beanbox and remember it for the future. And although I’d only had a brief glance at the forgery, I could still see the image of it imprinted on my retina. It was a standard 4/4 signature, but there was something about the chord combination that seemed curious. I closed my eyes, and tried to strum out a brief snatch of what I’d seen. There was a chord change here from E major to A minor which was easy enough. Sorry, maybe you don’t know what the hell I’m talking about. Now what can I liken that chord change to? Well, it’s used a lot by that film composer, John Barry. It’s the opening two chord-stabs from Goldfinger, and he uses it a lot in his other stuff. Unusual to start a Blues number with a dramatic “Stab’ like that . But, anyway, I kept on, swigging on the whisky bottle and trying to remember how it went on from there.
    Yeah, A minor to A, then G — then…
    Then I don’t remember a lot after that.
    What I do remember isn’t very pleasant at all.
    I remember the sounds of screaming, a feeling as if the whole world was tilting. When I try to think back about it, I only see “flashes’: like I’m seeing some kind of psychedelic film that makes no sense. I remember something made of glass breaking. Later, they found that my front window was broken and there was blood on the panes, so I suppose it must have been that. They found the guitar out there too, on the street. I seem to remember running through rain (although it wasn’t raining that night), and with the sounds of that hideous screaming all around me. I seem to see faces swimming out of mist, leering at me. But in retrospect those faces must have been passers-by on the street shrinking back in fear as I hurtled past them in the night.
    Then I remember the car, swerving around the corner with its headlights stabbing the night. I remember a shrieking of brakes that matched the terrified shrieking all around me. Then the impact. A horrible black gulf of pain that killed the screaming dead. A feeling of flying, and the knowledge that the screaming was not coming from all around me, but was actually coming from me.
    Then it was like I was kid again, at the dentists. Back then, when I had gas for an extraction, I would suffer the most terrible hallucinations. I reckon it must have been some reaction to the gas, because the experiences were always hideously painful. Jumbling black-white-and red shapes. Magnified sounds, like the crashing echoes of someone dropping a tray of cutlery. And the twisting and turning of those shapes, and the sounds of that crashing cutlery were all, in themselves, causing the most hideous, gouging pain. Distorted voices moaning obscenities. Waves of nausea creeping and swelling through the pain…
    And then I was awake again, fully expecting to be leaning forward to the unconvincing voice of a dentist telling me that everything was all right and would I please spit into the bowl. I tried to struggle up, but that hideous pain had transferred to my leg. I slumped back. I wasn’t ten years old, I was forty.
    I was in a hospital bed.
    Sweat soaked my face, and I could feel it in the small of my back. And oh God, had I pissed myself as I lay there?
    I lay there a while, breathing deep and trying to orientate myself.
    There had been an accident. I remembered the car with its blaring horn and its shrieking tyres. My leg seemed to be in some sort of splint under the covers. Yes, that was it — I’d been hit by a car. But what about all that other stuff? The screaming and the breaking of glass and the running through the streets — and something to do with music? No, that must all be part of the shock of the accident. If I just lay still for a while and took it easy, everything would come back to me gradually. Maybe I’d just left Gerry in the pub, and walked outside, full of whisky —