The Family Remains(39)

I see that he is peering through the windows of the Magdala. Looking for someone.

And it is only then, with a kick to my gut so hard that I almost fall back into the doorway of the bar, that I realise I have found him.





Part Two





33




Samuel


The Times


Monday, 24 June 2019


The Metropolitan Police are investigating the discovery of human remains found by a mud-larker on the shores of the River Thames just under a week ago. They have been identified as those of Bridget Dunlop-Evers, also known as Birdie, who was reported missing by her family in 1996 when she was thirty-two years old. She had been a member of the band Original Version who enjoyed a handful of pop hits in the late 1980s. She left the band shortly after their last hit and has not been seen since. According to Miss Dunlop-Evers’ family, she had been briefly homeless, along with her boyfriend Justin Redding, who played percussion with the same band, but they might have found lodgings with a new friend who lived, according to Miss Dunlop-Evers, ‘in a large house’. Attempts to track down Miss Dunlop-Evers and Mr Redding when they were reported missing were unsuccessful and their fate has remained a mystery for nearly three decades. Anyone with any information regarding Dunlop-Evers’ and Redding’s whereabouts at the time of their disappearance is asked to contact the Metropolitan Police at their earliest convenience. Additionally, anyone with any information regarding the location of the house where the couple may have been living is also invited to make contact.



Accompanying the article is a photograph of Birdie taken during her time with the band. She is wearing a floral bandana around her neck and is holding a fiddle to her shoulder. Her hair is light brown, fine and very long, with a back-combed fringe. Her eyes are small and narrowed at the camera. Her mouth is hard and painted pink, and as predicted by the facial reconstruction artist, her chin is weak. The text underneath says: ‘Birdie Dunlop-Evers, whose remains have been found on the banks of the Thames.’

I click on the readers’ comments section underneath the article.

They are full of slightly harsh reminiscences of the summer in which their hit had been a number one for too long, when it appears everyone had heard the song too much. A few strike a more respectful note; some remember the story of her being missing in the mid-nineties. Some remember seeing the band playing live in the 1980s. One remembers meeting Birdie: ‘She was tiny. Kind of cool. She signed my hand. She smelled like that White Musk from the Body Shop that everyone used to wear. She was actually a very talented violinist, you know, classically trained. Such a great shame. Her poor family.’

I get to the end of the comments. It’s not being greeted as a big news story. It’s a footnote. An oddity. It’s just one big news story away from sliding out of the BBC’s top ten Most Read stories. It’s now or never in terms of it hitting the right people, the people who might know what happened to Birdie.

I stare at my phone, willing it to ring. It doesn’t. I go back to my browser and continue the research I’d been doing into Birdie Dunlop-Evers and her band, the Original Version. I have read the interviews with her former band members transcribed from the period after she was reported missing. It felt to me that she had only been brought into the band because of her musical prowess, not because of camaraderie or a bond of friendship. None of her bandmates back in ’96 seemed to have any idea where she might have been for the preceding two years. None of them seemed to care. They described her as cold and secretive, difficult and demanding. They described Justin as a hippy, a space cadet, as too nice for Birdie.

I flick through the small array of images of Birdie on the internet. She disappeared just before the internet was born so there isn’t much trace of her to be researched. There’s one photo that keeps recurring though. Birdie, in a velvet hat and a huge satin pussy bow, her chin held tight against the rest on her fiddle, her eyes flashing at the camera, her lips pursed. I’ve studied this photo in detail and have observed in the background a large red chair that looks like a throne, a wood-panelled wall with velvet shaded lights on it and the suggestion of the head of a stuffed beast of some description.

A thought occurs to me and I do a reverse Google search on the image to see where else it has been posted. It comes back with eighteen hits and I go through them in order. They are on nostalgia sites mainly. The Whatever Happened To sites. But then I click the ninth image and it takes me to a site that includes a link to a video on YouTube. It appears that the photo of Birdie playing the fiddle in front of a throne is in fact a still from one of their videos. The one for the song that was a huge hit. I wasn’t here in 1988. I was five years old in 1988, and still in Ghana. I wasn’t particularly aware of pop music. Not until we arrived in London when I was thirteen years old, by which point Original Version had come and gone and so I had never before seen the video to this song that seems to have bugged the life out of everyone in the UK that summer long, long ago. I make the screen large, and I press play.

The band are all dressed alike, in flounces and cloaks and velvet and make-up. They swagger down a set of mahogany stairs that curves towards a large hallway. In the hallway are two red velvet thrones. One of the band members jumps up into the throne and slams his sticks against a drum tied around his neck. The camera pans around the hallway and follows two more band members as they stamp into a room that looks like a private bar; a woman behind the bar hands them tumblers of some kind of alcohol, amber in colour. One of them jumps up on the bar and I see they are wearing knee-high boots with laces. The song is kind of snappy and fun. I can see why it was so popular, and the video is high-octane and exciting. The camera follows the two men out of the bar and into a room with oil paintings on the walls and a huge brass chandelier with what look like candles but are in fact lightbulbs in the shapes of candles. Then we are out again and back in the hallway and there is Birdie in her velvet layers and her hat and her red lips and violin and there … I pause the video. There is the precise moment that has been captured in the photograph.