“You’re a mystery to me sometimes, Sylv’”, Jake said a lot.
Jake was waiting for the bus and whistling a happy song to himself not even considering the ice cream cone that would take his life later in the day. Why would he? How could he, more like. He wasn’t a shaman or a magic man. He was a spot welder from Bolton with a sideline in Tom Jones impersonations.
It didn’t pay that well but neither did the spot welding gig. Most of that work was sent out to China or India these days. This meant that Jake picked odds and ends of work as and where and when he could. He’d even travelled to Blackburn and once to Huddersfield for a spot of welding.
The day he died, however, he was heading into town for a song belting session upstairs at The Gipsy’s Tent on Deansgate. He was hoping to pick up thirty quid plus beer and food for three hours hard work with a hen party in from Ainsworth.
The song he was singing to himself at the bus stop wasn’t a Tom Jones classic. It a cover of Little Richard’s Bama Lama Bama Loo from Tom’s 1965 LP, What’s New Pussycat? A cover of the Little Richard riff on his ownTutti Frutti. All very convoluted, but Jake adored Little Richard. He wished he looked like Little Richard in every way. His heart and soul yearned for the same swagger and lack of concern for the opinions of other people.
“What?”, Jake replied to a question he’d been asked by his occasional pianist, all time best friend and confidante, Sylvia Jardine. She was a Glaswegian by birth, like Jake in her early forties, unlike Jake looking very good on it.
“Are we going to get a bite first?”
“Of course we aren’t, Sylv’. Food is included, I told you that last week”, he started humming, tapping his feet too.
“But I’m hungry now and the food at the Gypsy’s is pure rank.”
“Even the sandwiches?”, he broke off the humming.
“Especially the sandwiches, pure rank. I fancy an ice cream anyway from that new shop that specialises in ice cream. I fancy a Tutti Fruitti”.
“Well strike me blind, that’s a coincidence, and in my book a coincidence is a sign. Ice cream it is.”
“Eh?” asked Sylvia hungrily.
“Never you mind.”
I have say that ice cream in Bolton in January is a strange choice of snack but then again, Sylvia was a strange kind of snacker. She’d been known to go for days without eating a thing, and then she’d nibble a pasty, or take a peck or three at an ice cream cone.
Her big meal of the month came on the 25th irrespective of what actual day of the week it was. Jake was always – or as always as possible – sat at the same table in her front room. The meal was always three beef sausages, boiled carrots, buttered cabbage, and milky mashed potato with onion gravy followed by sticky toffee pudding and double cream. And a cup of tea.
You would never have believed that she’d been one of the first female pilots in the RAF back in the day, but she fell out with the military. She wouldn’t even mention the armed forces nor hear anybody else mention them nor would she explain why exactly.
“You’re a mystery to me sometimes, Sylv’”, Jake said a lot.
No one can blame her part in Jake’s death. She never liked to talk about it. I’m not telling you now because a promise is a promise, and I’m not one to gossip.
