Stories We Could Tell. Tony Parsons

were all there for the music.

      ‘This was a garden once,’ Misty said. She liked to lecture him. But he didn’t mind. He liked it when she told him things. ‘Did you know that, Tel? They grew fruit and flowers here. That’s where the name comes from. Covent Garden. It really was a garden.’

      ‘And now it’s a bombsite,’ he said. ‘Let’s go and see if Dag’s arrived yet.’

      ‘It must have been so beautiful,’ she said.

      Terry let loose a Kung Fu cry and jumped from the roof of the car. Before he hit the ground he lashed out at some imaginary enemy with the side of his foot, and chopped the air once-twice-three times.

      ‘Bruce Lee,’ he said proudly, and his girlfriend smiled at him in the darkness.

      Then they looked up as the sky cracked, the heavens opened and the rains came down.

      Within seconds they were both soaked. A jagged bolt of lightning snaked across the skyline. It was not the weather of summer. The sudden storm seemed to herald something momentous, some elemental force being unleashed, a change in the universe.

      Terry and Misty held hands, laughed out loud and turned their faces to the sky, delirious with life.

      And five thousand miles away, behind the gates of a great house in Memphis, Tennessee, a forty-two-year-old man was taking his dying breath.

       Chapter Five

      The noise – the incredible level of sound – that was what Terry noticed first. It roared out of the basement of the Western World, blasted through the open door where a large bald man in black stood guard, and seemed to rattle the night air, shaking the NHS fillings of the soaked and bedraggled queue waiting to be let inside. Someone was live on stage. And Terry was suddenly aware of the beat of his heart.