Naked

by Kevin Brooks

  ‘I like all sorts,’ he said. ‘The Stooges, Velvet Underground, New York Dolls … the Faces, Dr Feelgood.’ He looked at me. ‘Have you seen the Feelgoods? They played the Rainbow in January. It was fantastic. They’re an amazing band – really fast.’

  I smiled. ‘Fast?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘So, basically, you like stuff that’s loud and dirty and fast?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he grinned. ‘That’s pretty much it.’

  ‘And is that what your band’s like?’

  ‘Why don’t you come along and find out? We’re rehearsing tomorrow. You can have a listen to what we do, and if you like it …’ He paused, looking at me. ‘Well, like I said, we need a new bass player, and I think you’d be just right.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked, genuinely perplexed. ‘I mean, I could understand it if you were looking for someone to play keyboards –’

  ‘God, no,’ he said. ‘We don’t want any keyboards. We just need a bass player.’

  ‘But I’ve never even played a bass –’

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ he shrugged. ‘You’ll soon get the hang of it. It’s just like a guitar with a couple of strings missing.’ He smiled. ‘And, besides, it’s not as if we’re playing Debussy or anything.’

  ‘Yeah, but I still don’t get why you’re asking me … I mean, there must be other people –’

  ‘I don’t want other people,’ he said, his voice suddenly intense. ‘I’ve tried other people, but that’s all they are – other people. And that’s not good enough. I need special people, people who mean what they do.’ He stared intently at me. ‘There’s no point in doing anything unless you really mean it, Lili. Do you know what I mean?’

  ‘Yeah …’ I said quietly, slightly taken aback by his passion. ‘Yeah, I know what you mean.’

  He stared silently at me for a moment longer, his eyes burning into mine, then all at once he relaxed again and his face broke into a carefree smile. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I know it’s all a bit sudden, and it probably sounds kind of weird, but I just think you’d be perfect for the band, that’s all. You love music, that’s obvious. You can play. You’re kind of kooky … and you look really good.’ He grinned. ‘I mean, what more could anyone want in a bass player?’

  ‘Kooky?’ I said, raising an eyebrow.

  ‘Yeah …’

  ‘You think I’m kooky?’

  He smiled. ‘It’s a compliment.’

  I knew what he meant, and I was perfectly happy to take it as a compliment. Kookiness was fine with me. I had no problem with kookiness at all. But Curtis had also said that I looked really good, and that was causing me all kinds of problems. Firstly, because no one had ever told me that I looked really good before, so it was hard to believe that he meant it. And if he didn’t mean it … well, that would make him a pretty shitty person, wouldn’t it? But if he did mean it, that would mean that Curtis Ray – the Curtis Ray – had told me that I looked really good. And that was something else altogether.

  In fact, to tell you the truth, it made me feel so twistedly wonderful that I almost wished that he didn’t mean it.

  ‘So,’ he said to me. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘The band … playing bass. Do you want to give it a go?’

  I looked at him. ‘Do you mean it?’

  He nodded. ‘Like I said, there’s no point in doing anything unless you really mean it.’

  ‘Yeah, all right,’ I said. ‘I’ll give it a go.’

  He smiled broadly. ‘You won’t regret it.’

  As it turned out, he was both right and wrong about that … but I wasn’t to know that then. And neither was he.

  ‘This is where I live,’ he said, writing his address on a scrap of paper and passing it to me. ‘We’re rehearsing in my dad’s garage at the moment. It’s not ideal … but until we find somewhere better, it’s all we’ve got.’

  I looked at the scrap of paper. Curtis’s house was about a mile away from mine.

  ‘Get there for about two o’clock,’ he said. ‘OK?’

  ‘Tomorrow?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  I looked at him. ‘What’s the band called?’

  ‘Naked.’

  ‘Naked?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He smiled his smile. ‘We’re going to be massive.’

  3

  The next day, as I made my way through the streets of Hampstead towards Curtis’s house, I was feeling so mixed up and nervous about everything that I came very close to chickening out. I just had so many doubts about everything – what would the rest of the band think of me? what if I made a complete fool of myself? what if Curtis realized that he’d made a mistake and I wasn’t so ‘perfect for the band’ after all? And although I kept telling myself that how I looked and what I was wearing didn’t matter, I couldn’t help worrying that Curtis and the others just wouldn’t think I was cool enough. I’d done my best – inexpertly slapping on a ton of black eye-liner and too much of my mother’s red lipstick – but I’d never been too concerned about fashionable haircuts and clothes and make-up, and the simple truth was that I didn’t actually know what was cool and what wasn’t. I bought most of my clothes from jumble sales and charity shops, and – as far as I can remember – my hair at the time was a failed attempt at a Suzi Quatro-style layered cut, which might not have looked all that bad if I hadn’t recently attacked it myself with a pair of blunt scissors … an exercise that resulted in me resembling a slightly deranged medieval waif. Actually, come to think of it, if you imagine a sixteen-year-old girl wearing too much eye-liner and mismatched secondhand clothes, with a haircut that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a lunatic asylum … that’s probably as good a description of me as you’re going to get.

  Anyway, as I said, I was feeling pretty nervous that day, worrying about all kinds of things, and the closer I got to Curtis’s house the more tempting it was to just turn round and go back home. But as well as being racked with nerves, I was also – underneath it all – bursting with hope and excitement, and although the fear and anxiety were almost too much to bear, it was, in the end, the excitement that won the day. That’s what kept me going – the buzz, the thrill, the kick of it all. Yes, I was scared. And, yes, I knew that I might make a fool of myself. But this thing I was doing, whatever it proved to be …

  I wanted it.

  I wanted to do it.

  And I did.

  Curtis’s house was a reasonably large detached place in a reasonably nice part of Hampstead. It was nowhere near as big as my house, but then Curtis’s father wasn’t a film director like mine. Curtis’s father was a doctor. As was his mother. And although I didn’t know it at the time, they were both very straight-laced, very conservative, and they both found their son’s choice of lifestyle very disappointing.

  That afternoon though, when I got to Curtis’s house, I had no idea of the conflict between him and his parents. I didn’t know that they’d already banned him from using the garage as a rehearsal place, and that the only reason he’d arranged the rehearsal there today was that his father was away at a medical conference all weekend and his mother was spending the day with her parents in Maidstone. All I knew, as Curtis met me and took me into the garage and began introducing me to the others, was that my hands were shaking, my heart was trembling, and for a few terrible moments I was genuinely afraid that I was going to be sick. But, oddly enough, I also felt really good. Really alive. But scared to death and acutely self-conscious too. It was, I suppose, the kind of feeling you get when you’re riding a roller-coaster – an exhilarating mixture of sickness, fear, and blood-twisting excitement.

  ‘All right,’ said Curtis, closing the garage door. ‘Well … here we all are.’ He smiled at me. ‘Are you OK?’

  I nodded. ‘Yeah …’

  ‘Good.’ He ushered me over to the middle of the garage where the band’s equipment was set
up. ‘This is Kenny,’ he said, indicating a tallish boy with a bass guitar who was standing beside one of the speakers. ‘And this,’ Curtis said, turning to the other boy who was sitting at a drum kit, ‘this is Stan.’

  ‘Hi,’ I muttered self-consciously, limply waving my hand. ‘I’m Lili …’

  While Stan glanced briefly at me and gave me a silent nod of acknowledgement, Kenny barely even looked at me. He just gazed vaguely in my direction for a fraction of a second, then turned his back and began tuning his bass. I recognized both him and Stan from school. They were in the same year as Curtis, and I’d seen them hanging around with him a few times. They’d never really struck me as being the coolest kids around, and I’d always assumed that they hung around with Curtis because they wanted to be seen with him, not because they were really in with him or anything, so I was slightly surprised to find out that they were in the band. They just didn’t look like the kind of kids who played in a band.

  Stan’s real name was Phillip Smith, but – for reasons long forgotten – he’d always been known as Stan. He was a skinny kid, kind of gawky, with lank black hair and a long mournful face that never showed any emotion. He always gave the impression that he didn’t really care about anything, which – when I first met him – I thought was just an act. But after a while, when I’d got to know him a bit better, I came to realize that it wasn’t an act at all – he really didn’t care about anything. He just lived his life, played his drums, did whatever he wanted to do … and, as far as he was concerned, that was it. That was all he needed. Everything else – the rest of the world – simply didn’t concern him.

  And I always kind of admired Stan for that.

  Not that he would have cared what I thought, of course … nor would I ever have told him. In fact, Stan had such little regard for what other people thought that he only ever spoke when it was absolutely necessary. In all the time I knew him, I don’t think I ever heard him string more than a dozen words together. He was even quite reticent about counting the band in at the start of a song.

  ‘Can’t you do it?’ he’d say to Curtis.

  ‘All you’ve got to do is count to fucking four,’ Curtis would tell him, shaking his head in exasperation. ‘It’s not that hard.’

  ‘Yeah, I know …’

  ‘Well, just fucking do it then.’

  And he would. But then, for the next song, he’d just go ‘One, two …’ and start playing, or else he’d just bash his drumsticks together four times … and then Curtis would start arguing with him again.

  But the arguments never really led to anything. And that was only partly because Stan just couldn’t be bothered to argue. The main reason was that he was a hell of a good drummer, and Curtis was well aware that you can’t have a good band without a good drummer, and he didn’t want to risk losing Stan. So although he might argue with him every now and then, and he might sometimes get really pissed off with him, he’d never do anything to jeopardize Stan’s place in the band.

  When it came to Kenny though … well, that was different. As Curtis had already told me, he didn’t rate Kenny Slater as a bass player, and I was soon to find out that he didn’t actually rate Kenny at all. In fact, it turned out that Kenny was only in the band in the first place because he owned most of the equipment, all of which had been bought for him by his stinking rich parents, who – unlike Curtis’s mum and dad – were more than happy to help their only son in any way they could. They were also the kind of parents who like to shower their offspring with expensive toys just to show everyone how fabulously wealthy they are … which, again, I didn’t know at the time. But it wasn’t too difficult to guess. Kenny’s whole attitude was that of an over-indulged and unpleasant child whose brattish and sulky behaviour was only tolerated by other kids because he bought them sweets and let them play with his expensive toys.

  I could have been mistaken, of course, but my overriding impression of Kenny that day was not only that he didn’t like me, but that he didn’t really like Curtis or Stan either, and – on top of all that – he didn’t really want to be there. But there was no way that he was going to go home and leave the rest of them to play with his equipment.

  ‘All right,’ Curtis said to me, smiling as he slung a battered black guitar over his shoulder. ‘Are you ready to hear the best band in the world?’

  As I watched him walk over to the others and plug in his guitar, I couldn’t help thinking how perfect he looked. This was his world, his environment … this was what he was. His guitar seemed almost part of him, and when he turned up the volume and effortlessly played through a series of blues riffs, I immediately knew that the rumours I’d heard were true – he really was a genius on the guitar. It wasn’t that the riffs he was playing were particularly complicated or anything, it was simply the way he played them – with such natural ease and purity – and the raw beauty that he gave to the sound, and the way that the sound seemed to come not from the speakers, or even from the guitar, but from somewhere within Curtis himself …

  It was truly stunning.

  Satisfied with the sound of his guitar, he turned up the volume then and blasted out a chord, a big fat E major, and it was so incredibly loud that it literally shook the walls – and my stomach – it was all I could do to resist covering my ears with my hands. I looked over at Curtis and saw him smiling at me, and I realized that he was reminding me that E major was his favourite chord.

  I nodded at him, and smiled back.

  He held my gaze for a moment, then turned to Stan. ‘All right?’

  Stan nodded.

  Curtis looked at Kenny. ‘OK?’

  Kenny shrugged.

  Curtis went over and stood in front of a microphone stand. ‘This one’s our signature tune,’ he said into the mike, looking at me. ‘It’s called “Naked”.’

  He paused for a moment, closing his eyes, and then – bending over slightly, almost as if he was in pain – he opened up with a crash of chords that nearly knocked me off my feet. After a rapid four bars of guitar, the bass and drums came storming in, and I swear that the floor started shaking. It was a huge sound, and I knew then what Curtis had meant when he’d talked about music that was dirty and loud. And fast … God, they played so fast. It was breathtaking. Curtis was playing the guitar like a crazy man – hammering out the chords, bending and twisting all over the place, staggering backwards and reeling forwards – and when he lurched up to the microphone and started to sing, the sound that came out of his mouth was astonishing. It was so powerful, so loud, and raw, so basic and brutal … but at the same time, it was undeniably beautiful. Full of feeling, passionate and emotional …

  It was a sound that came from his heart.

  Apart from the chorus, when all three of them joined in on a guttural chant of ‘Naked! Naked!’, I couldn’t really make out many of the words, but from what I could hear, I got the feeling that the song was something to do with decadence and poetry and monstrous souls.

  I’d never heard anything like it before.

  It didn’t last very long – three minutes at the most – and as soon as they’d finished, Curtis shouted out, ‘“Monkeys”!’ and they launched into another song. This one was a bit slower, a bit emptier, and not quite so manic as ‘Naked’, but it still had the same level of intensity and darkness, and it felt like the kind of song that gets better and better the more times you hear it.

  The final song they played was something quite different. It was called ‘Heaven Hill’. It started off quietly, with Curtis singing sorrowfully over a single haunting guitar line, and gradually it built up into a swirling echo of bitter-sweet harmonies over a mesmerizing heartbeat of throbbing bass and drums. Again, I’d never heard anything like it before, and if someone had asked me what kind of music it was, I wouldn’t have known what to say.

  It was, quite simply, unforgettable.

  When the song ended, fading back to the original guitar line, Curtis turn
ed to Stan and Kenny, nodded his head, then wiped a sheen of sweat from his face and looked at me.

  ‘So,’ he said, smiling. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Fantastic,’ I told him. ‘Really … I loved it, especially the last one.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he agreed. ‘It still needs a bit of work on the middle bit … but we’ve nearly got it now.’ He removed his guitar, leaned it against the wall, and came over to me. ‘So you really think we’re all right then?’

  ‘Yeah, really.’

  He smiled again. ‘Do you want to have a go on the bass now?’

  I glanced over at Kenny, who was quietly picking out a few notes on his bass, and I wondered if he really had decided that he didn’t want to play bass any more, or if it was more a case of Curtis not wanting him to. He looked fairly sulky about something, but sulkiness seemed to be his default setting, so it was hard to tell what he was really feeling. And although Curtis had said that he was ‘pretty shit on the bass anyway’, he’d sounded pretty good to me. But then what did I know about playing the bass?

  And that was the problem – I didn’t know anything about it. And yet there I was, being asked if I wanted to take over from Kenny, who as far as I could tell was a perfectly competent – and perhaps even better than average – bass player.

  It wasn’t a particularly comfortable situation to be in.

  ‘Lili?’ Curtis said.

  ‘Yeah …’ I muttered, looking back at him. ‘Sorry, I was just …’ I lowered my voice. ‘Are you sure this is a good idea? I mean –’

  ‘Yeah, of course it’s a good idea,’ he said breezily. ‘Come on … just try it.’ He put his hand on my arm and guided me over to where Kenny was standing. ‘It’s dead easy,’ he said to me. ‘Kenny’s only been playing bass for a few months … haven’t you, Ken?’

  Kenny looked at him. ‘What?’

  ‘I was just telling Lili that it didn’t take you very long to learn the bass.’ Curtis grinned. ‘And now you’re shit-hot.’