Paul Is Undead: The British Zombie Invasion (5 page)

But I still had some goo left. Thus, the business with the arm.

PAUL M
C
CARTNEY:
Not too many people know this, but I was a right-hander before that day in John’s bedroom.

JOHN LENNON:
My thinking was,
better safe than sorry,
so why not take the leftover goo and spit it up into his arm socket?

It’s fair to say that by ’61, I’d become an expert at removing and reattaching limbs. But this was ’57, and it was my first time taking off anybody’s arm other than my own, and looking back on it, aesthetically speaking, I did a crap job, just dreadful. Part of it was indecision: I couldn’t figure out whether to yank off his arm at the elbow, by a joint, or in the middle of a muscle. After a minute or two of deliberation, I tore off Paul’s black jacket and went for an elbow tear. No idea why, really. Instinct, I suppose. Zombie nature, I guess. Who fookin’ knows? Anyhow, it turned out to be the ideal choice for my purposes, but really, it was dumb luck; I could’ve just as easily gone for the shoulder.

Paul started gushing like a bloody geyser—there was spatter on the ceiling that Aunt Mimi wasn’t too thrilled about—and I got kind of frazzled, so I didn’t do any tidying up at the tear point, and it ended up all zigzagged. If it’d been four years later, we’d have been looking at a straight rip and a barely noticeable reattachment line, but I was new at that sort of thing. (I should mention that just be
cause I figured out how to tear neatly doesn’t mean I always
did
tear neatly. Sometimes neatness doesn’t count. Sometimes sloppiness is called for.)

I laid Paul’s forearm and hand where I’d put the scone earlier, then wrapped my mouth around his elbow and blew the rest of the juices up into his arm. For good measure, I snaked my tongue around his humerus bone and past his biceps, all the way on up to his clavicle. After all, I had to make sure that none of those precious fluids dribbled out, because I didn’t want a brilliant musician like Paul to be a good zombie—I wanted him to be a fookin’
great
zombie.

I reattached his arm and licked it closed. Then I went over to the kitchen, tracked down a bottle of cooking sherry, threw down a big drink, which went straight into the hole in the roof of my mouth and into my brain, making me instantly rat-arsed, and I sat down at the table. I crossed my fingers and hoped for the best.

Ten or fifteen minutes later, I went back to my room, and there’s Paul, curled up in a little ball, snoring away, sucking his thumb, looking rested, content, and slightly grayish.

I felt his forehead. It was ice cold. Success. Paul McCartney was as undead as a fookin’ doornail.

PAUL M
C
CARTNEY:
John’s often claimed that he set up my guitar for left-handed purposes while I was down for the count, but I don’t believe that for a second, because I’m not entirely convinced he remembered I was right-handed in the first place.

JOHN LENNON:
How the fook was I supposed to remember if he was right- or left-handed? I’d only seen him play one fookin’ song, and it was right after a Quarrymen show, and after most gigs, my head
was in the clouds. Man, if Paul had an elephant trunk for a nose, I wouldn’t have noticed.

The fact is, I didn’t redo the guitar. Paulie did. And he did it the second after he opened his eyes. I could tell he didn’t have any clue what he was doin’ while he was doin’ it. His hands were working of their own accord, and they were workin’ blurry fast. It was a sight to behold. How he knew he’d become left-handed, I have no idea. The amazing thing was that he played even better as a lefty, so it turned out I’d made a solid decision.

PAUL M
C
CARTNEY:
John says that after I regained consciousness, we jammed on blues tunes for six or seven hours. That I can believe, because I remember when I woke up the next morning, both of my index fingers were lying under my pillow.

That’s the moment I realized I wasn’t alive anymore. And I wasn’t a damn bit happy about it.

L
ennon claims he doesn’t remember killing any of his Mendips neighbors, but he doesn’t remember not killing them, either. I don’t disbelieve him: being that he’s eaten, transformed, or mortally wounded several thousand people, it’s understandable he’d forget (or block out) a handful of capricious childhood murders.

But the stats don’t lie: of the eighty-eight people who lived within a one-block radius of Mendips, circa 1957, eighty-two of them are dead. And of the seventy-nine death certificates I managed to track down, sixty-three of them list the cause of death as “unknown,” and in four of those cases, the only identifiable part of the bodies uncovered were the victims’ teeth. That’s undoubtedly the work of a very, very potent zombie. John Lennon wasn’t the only zombie in the area, but he was certainly the strongest. You do the math.

Three years younger than his former neighbor John Lennon, Lawrence Carroll is one of the Menlove Avenue men who survived to tell some tales. A loyal Beatles fan and self-professed “nosy parker,” Lawrence grew up on the corner of Menlove and Vale Road, a mere stone’s throw from Mendips. His family moved to Brownlow Hill early that fateful fall, which likely explains why he was still amongst the living when I spoke with him at Bramley’s Cafe in Liverpool during May 2002.

LAWRENCE CARROLL:
I was kind of chunky and unathletic as a child, and I didn’t have too many friends, so I spent a lot of my time wandering around the neighborhood and
watching.
I was a lurker, I suppose you could say. I hid behind trees and bushes and cars, and liked to pretend I was a newspaper reporter, or a spy. I always took notes on a little pad of paper, but very rarely saw anything of interest. Aside from John Lennon’s periodic antics, the only thing that made an impression was the couple that I caught
in flagrante delicto
in the back of their silver AC Ace Bristol Roadster.

On July 8, 1957, a boy who I now know was Paul McCartney made his way down Menlove, to the Lennons’ house. He was trying to run, but he kept stumbling; it was like his legs couldn’t keep up with his upper body. It looked to me like the guitar case he was carrying was slowing him down, and I couldn’t figure out why he didn’t just drop it if he was in such a rush. It wasn’t like anybody on our block would’ve bothered stealing it. Anybody except John Lennon, of course.

Paul was moaning so loudly that Mrs. Leary, who lived three houses down from the Lennons, stuck her head out her window and told him to stop that infernal racket. Once she saw he was
undead, she slammed her window shut. I can’t blame her, as I was frightened myself. But a good newspaperman or an honest-to-goodness spy wouldn’t run away from a teenage zombie, so I held my ground. Granted, I was crouched down out of sight behind a thick bush, but at least I stayed.

Paul bashed his guitar case against the Lennons’ front door over and over again, and yelled, “You get out here, John Lennon! You get out here right now, y’know! You get out here and take your medicine!” And he yelled
loud.

JOHN LENNON:
Paulie hadn’t even been undead for twenty-four hours, so there’s no way he could’ve known his vocal cords were considerably stronger than they were the previous day. I leaned out my bedroom window and chucked one of my school textbooks at his head, then told him to shut his gob and that I’d be there after I put on a shirt.

I never went outside without a shirt back then. Some zombies grow a lot of chest hair, and I was one of them, and it was embarrassing. It never dawned on me to lop it off until my first girlfriend, Thelma Pickles, gave me a straight razor for my birthday. It grew back faster than the hair on my head, so I had to shave it once or twice a week … yet another reason being undead isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

PAUL M
C
CARTNEY:
When that textbook nailed me in the noggin, I felt rage, y’know. I’d never felt true rage before—maybe some very mild anger, or a bit of frustration—but I started seeing red, and then blue, and then purple, an’ that. Literally. If somebody came across my path right at that moment, it’s a guarantee I would’ve hurt them. Badly.

LAWRENCE CARROLL:
It felt like Paul’s piercing screams were emanating from a pinprick in the center of my brain. If automobile alarms existed back then, every car within five kilometers would’ve been buzzing or beeping like nobody’s business.

John finally came out the front door, and thank God, because what with all the commotion, the next-door neighbor’s schnauzer sounded like it was gonna have a heart attack. Paul let out a wordless roar, then smashed his guitar case against the side of John’s head. Then—and if I hadn’t seen it with my own two eyes, I’d never have believed it—John’s head flew about ten meters in the air and bounced off a lamppost. He was screaming
“Ahhhhhhhhhh
” the entire time, and when his scream mixed with Paul’s roar, it was deafening, but also, in a weird way, lovely. Imagine the vocal outro of “Twist and Shout” being played through ten thousand stereos, all turned up to ten, and you’ll have an idea of what sweet yet terrible sounds I experienced on that hot summer day. My left ear started to bleed, and I yelled, “Shut up, shut up, shut up!” but naturally, they couldn’t hear me over the sound of their own harmonized crowing.

John started running around like a chicken with his head cut off—or a zombie with his head cut off, I suppose. His mouth continued to shriek, so I suppose his vocal cords didn’t get severed, but I don’t know anything about undead science, so maybe zombies can’t have severed vocal cords. In any event, it looked to me like Paul was about to smash John with his guitar case again, but before he could even lift it up, the right arm of John’s headless body ripped off its own left arm and swung it wildly at Paul. Somehow, some way, headless John connected on the second swing, and Paul went down, and went down
hard.
John’s body felt around blindly on the ground until it found its head, then he ran inside, holding the head like it was a damned rugby ball. Paul was
facedown on the sidewalk, clutching what looked like a pair of sausages.

PAUL M
C
CARTNEY:
I was carrying my guitar in my left hand, and my two index fingers in my right, and I was holding on to those fingers for dear life. I can look back at it now and laugh, y’know, because reattaching fingers—especially index fingers—is about the easiest thing you can imagine.

JOHN LENNON:
I wanted to glue my head back on the same way I’d closed Paul’s wounds the previous day, but, as I immediately learned, when a Liverpool zombie’s head is detached from its body, it loses the ability to alter the size and shape of its tongue, until the extrinsic muscles fuse back into place. So after I went inside, I tracked down my aunt Mimi’s sewing kit and did some amateurish stitching, and voila, a working head for good ol’ Johnny, almost as good as new.

LAWRENCE CARROLL:
When John came back out about ten minutes later, Paul was sitting on the ground with his legs folded like he was meditating or something, staring at his guitar case. I knew for sure he was undead at that point, because had he been an average mortal, there’s no chance he would’ve survived getting smacked upside his head by a zombie arm that’d been swung at one hundred kilometers per hour.

John hunkered down beside him and draped his arm around Paul’s shoulders. I crawled out from behind the bush a bit so I could hear what they were saying. John was doing most of the talking, because Paul was sobbing so hard. John said, “Listen, mate, I barely know you, and you barely know me, and who knows if we’ll even like each other next week, let alone next year? But you’re a fookin’
great guitar player and singer, and I can sing and play a little bit too, and the worst thing that can happen now is we’ll be able to jam together for all of eternity. When we take over the world, you’ll thank me.”

I assumed at the time that when he mentioned taking over the world, he meant taking over the record charts.