Stories We Could Tell

by Tony Parsons

  ‘So I worked up the nerve to walk in there,’ he said. ‘Didn’t know anything about making appointments. Spoke to White. He was great – asked me what music I liked, who I read – it really surprised him, how much I knew. Got a couple of albums to review – stuff nobody else wanted. That’s how I got in there. Because it was the only thing I really cared about.’

  ‘I still sort of feel the same way,’ Terry said. ‘It’s different, but it still gets to me. When I walk into the office in the morning I always wonder what’s going to happen today. Maybe I’ll talk to Skip and he’ll have found some great new band. Maybe there’s going to be Debbie Harry or Joe Strummer sitting on my desk. And I know Leon will be arguing with people, and White will be laying out the cover, and the older guys will be shouting for the dummy, and all those kids out there will be waiting for the new issue – maybe even coming up to town to get it a day early.’ ‘Like we did.’

  ‘Yeah. Like we did.’ Terry stopped, scratching his head. ‘Car’s somewhere over there,’ he said. ‘I’m sure it is.’ He looked at Ray. ‘What made you think of all that? Buying The Paper on a Wednesday?’

  Ray took a breath, let it go. ‘I might be leaving soon,’ he said. ‘I might be out.’

  Terry was stunned. ‘I can’t believe it.’ Somehow he had always assumed that the world would become how he wanted it to be, and then just stay that way for ever. He couldn’t imagine the offices of The Paper without his friend. And suddenly he understood the importance of Ray finding John Lennon. ‘White,’ he said. ‘That bastard.’

  ‘It’s not his fault,’ Ray said. ‘It’s not Dr Barnardos.’ They were at the car. Terry snapped open the boot. ‘Wow,’ Ray said, contemplating the Ford Capri. ‘Misty’s got a great car.’

  ‘It belongs to her old man,’ Terry said, embarrassed, for this was a time when you boasted about being on the dole or living in a tower block, not possessions or privilege. If you came from any kind of money, you kept quiet about it. ‘He just lets her use it sometimes, that’s all.’

  ‘Nice wheels though,’ Ray said. None of them had cars. They used the bus and tube, unless a record company or their expense account was paying for the ticket. Terry zipped open his kitbag and took out the tape recorder.

  ‘If I can find him, I reckon he’ll be easy to talk to,’ Ray said. ‘But I might puke up before I meet him. That’s okay, isn’t it?’

  Terry nodded, slamming the boot shut. ‘Yeah, I puked up before I met Bowie.’

  Ray thought about it. ‘It’s just – you don’t want them to think you’re a dickhead, do you?’

  That’s right.’ Terry locked the boot. ‘But of course your big problem, Ray, is that you are a dickhead.’

  ‘Yeah, well. Takes one to know one.’

  They laughed and Terry shoved Ray, and then he was serious. ‘They can’t get rid of you.’

  Ray shuffled his feet, hugging the tape recorder. ‘I don’t know why not,’ he said. He tried to make his hair fall in his face but it was far too wet. ‘Everything ends. It does. Sooner or later. This – all this – it has to end sometime. It’s a music paper, not the civil service. Sooner or later, everything comes to an end.’

  Terry looked at him and he thought that Ray wasn’t just talking about his job.

  ‘Yeah, maybe everything ends,’ Terry said. He could hear the buzz of traffic, the distant boom of a live band, the city calling them to their fates. He gave Ray a final push, not smiling now – encouraging him, telling him to get moving, but mostly just for friendship’s sake. ‘But not yet.’

  Leon’s senses felt heightened, alive, and awake to every detail on the top deck of the bus. He could smell cheap aftershave and beer breath and vomit and chips drenched in vinegar and, permeating all the other top-deck scents, the choking fog of cigarette smoke. He lit up a snout and sucked on it hungrily.

  Beneath him he saw the pubs with their red, white and blue Silver Jubilee bunting, shabby and frayed now after a few months in the elements, and he wondered if they would ever take it down. He narrowed his eyes against the smoke and the light, and began composing his review.

  He loathed Leni and the Riefenstahls with a passion – all that flirting with swastikas, all that art school pretension, all that po-faced bollocks done up as though it actually meant something. He knew he could write a great review. Which meant a great bad review, a hatchet job of distinction.

  Christ, he thought, if you must have Teutonic end-of-all-we-know nihilism then listen to Kraftwerk, or the Velvet Underground before Nico had to flee New York. At least the mad cow was the real thing. Yeah, get Nico references into the review, he thought, bury the bastards with unfavourable comparisons. Attempting to recreate the Weimar Republic when you are from the Home Counties. Oh yes, he could use that too. Maybe he should be writing some of this stuff down. White would love it – would see that he was the rising star.

  Leon wasn’t looking forward to seeing the band – or being surrounded by all their pea-brain fans in their Mister Byrite jackboots – but he was really looking forward to slagging them off.

  His plan was to write the review in his head on the bus, see the gig for a bit of local colour, then go back to The Paper in the early hours and knock out his review before they all started arriving in the morning. Then he saw something from the top deck of the bus and all his plans went out the window. Leon pressed his face against the glass, and although it steamed up with his breath, he could still make out the club shining through the mist and rain.

  The Goldmine. The name picked out in sickly yellow neon that resembled Birds Eye custard far more than any precious metal. It was a Leicester Square disco that they were queuing around the block to get into, all these suburban kids in their High Street flares.

  Leon stared with wonder at the strangeness of their clothes.

  The boys in trousers that held their crutch in a leech-like grip but then exploded around their ankles, shirts that were either plain short sleeves in this stretchy, clingy material, their young male nipples sticking through, or elaborate long sleeves with abundant collars – all of them open to the hairless chest with a St Christopher swinging around their neck, the patron saint of wankers in flared trousers, and the girls with those overdone mumsy haircuts, everything flicked up at the ends, every one of them a Charlie’s Angel, and wearing lots of white to look good under the lights. A riot of wide trousers and hairspray and flicked feather cuts. Leon had to laugh.

  Now that’s truly a world without meaning, he thought. Nihilism? Blankness? A rejection of all values? Leni and the Riefenstahls should take a look at this scene. This is real world-negating numbness – not some rock-and-roll approximation.

  But despite his reflex sneering, there was something about these boys and girls outside the Goldmine that touched him deeply, just as he always felt inexplicably moved when he was standing outside the Western World, trying to sell Red Mist. In the whole of battle-grey Britain, with its fading Silver Jubilee bunting in washed-out red, white and blue, it often felt like the only splash of true colour was the young.

  Leon began dropping copies of his fanzine out of the bus window. They fluttered to the street among the disco kids like propaganda leaflets being parachuted into an occupied nation. Leon felt a warm glow inside as he imagined these culturally malnourished youngsters reading his thoughts on the Lewisham riot, the new Tom Robinson single and the MPLA. But then something terrible happened. The disco kids completely ignored the copies of Red Mist that were falling all around them. They chatted and laughed among themselves and fumbled in their tight clothes for the entrance fee to the Goldmine. They walked all over Red Mist.

  Leon clattered down the stairs of the bus and jumped off into the traffic. Then he was among the disco kids, picking up the unwanted copies of his fanzine, cursing to himself about ungrateful bastards. He straightened up as he heard some sort of ruckus in the crowd. Voices raised in protest, muttered threats, a girl’s scream. Violence was very close. And then he saw them.

  More
Dagenham Dogs were passing by, on their way to the Western World. Twenty of them, maybe more, a private army of shaved heads and pierced faces, all of it clumsily done – the shaving, the piercing – and caked with dark, dried blood. They roughly shouldered through the disco kids, heaving them out of the way when they didn’t move fast enough, and asking anyone who protested if they wanted some.

  ‘You want some? You want some?’

  Leon didn’t want any. He knew if they saw him he’d be dead.

  He bolted into the lobby of the Goldmine, ignoring the protests of the girl at the door, ducking past a large black bouncer too slow to stop him, and down the wide, red-plush staircase. Leon stopped at the foot of the stairs, staring at the heaving dance floor as if he was an explorer who had stumbled upon some lost tribe. He had never seen anything like it.

  It was another kind of music in a different kind of basement.

  They were getting ready to leave without Terry.

  And then he comes back but it’s too late.

  Dag and his entire team of flunkies were piling into three cars lined up outside the Western World with their engines running. Misty was standing by an open door of the lead car while Dag, already reclining in the passenger seat, talked to her, the palms of his hands held upwards, as if he were praying, or selling something. She had the decency to look undecided.

  ‘Misty?’ Terry said, and she looked at him over the roof of the car.

  Then one of the brothers in the band intercepted Terry – the beefy, meathead drummer with bad tats all over his back – and gently took his arm, steering Terry towards the end car.

  ‘Don’t worry, man, we saved you a slot.’

  ‘I’m not worried,’ Terry said, shrugging him off, and then Misty was in front of him. He shook his head. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Dag’s inviting us back to his hotel.’ Dag- as if she was the one with the relationship, not Terry. ‘We’re going to hang out.’

  ‘It’s all cool, man,’ said the meathead drummer, suddenly there again, placing a large paw on Terry’s arm. Terry pushed him off, not so gently this time. And he looked at Misty with eyes that said, or tried to say – this is me. That face he loved so much broke into a smile, but there was something behind it that he had never seen before. She was holding something back. He could tell.

  ‘Why don’t I see you there?’ she said lightly. It wasn’t a question.

  Then before he knew what was happening Misty was climbing into the passenger seat of the lead car, easing herself on to Dag’s lap. Terry heard laughter and a squeal before the door closed and the car pulled away. He stood there sick to his stomach with a feeling that threatened to eat him alive.

  The drummer had drifted away to the second car.

  And then some other woman’s voice, calling his name. ‘Terry?’

  The back door of the last car was open. He saw a beautiful, smiling face, but couldn’t place it for a moment. Oh yes – Christa. From Berlin. Dag’s girlfriend or drug dealer or whatever. Black hair, white teeth, and skin that looked as though it had never been exposed to daylight.

  ‘You can come with me if you like,’ she said.

  The second car, containing the drummer and his bass-playing brother and their pick-ups, had already left. And that was good because Terry felt a murderous rage towards the drummer, who had conspired with Dag to separate him from his girl. Like some kind of pimp, Terry thought, visions of Bruce Lee on the rampage in his head. Kicking, smashing, destroying. Fucking bastards, he thought. Fucking bastards, the lot of you.

  But nobody had held a gun to Misty’s face, had they? No, whatever got held to Misty’s face tonight, Terry thought, it wouldn’t be a gun.

  So he got into the back seat of the final car. The woman – Christa – gave him the same easy, empty smile that she had given him in Berlin, as mechanical as a stewardess, a lovely smile that was strained from overuse, all its natural beauty drained away by faking it too many times.

  Dag’s manager, Warhol blond and fifty if he was a day, was in the passenger seat, next to a chauffeur with a peaked hat. Without turning round, the manager said something in German and Christa laughed. Terry didn’t like any of it – the old boy who knew more than he did, the language that he didn’t understand, the joke that he suspected was at his expense, and his girlfriend gone. That’s what he liked least of all.

  Then Terry felt expert fingers exploring the top of his thigh.

  And the car began to move.

  Chapter Seven

  There were no good places to come down, but the underground was the worst.

  The speed had left Ray with his nerve ends rattling, fighting off sweating claustrophobia and obsessively loading and unloading the cassette into Terry’s tape recorder.

  This wasn’t the time to be on the Piccadilly line.

  Again and again, he made sure the red record light flicked on as it should, ensuring that it would capture Lennon’s words when the time came. If it ever did. And he tried to batten down the mounting dread inside him, knowing it was only the other side of the drug. Speed always did this to him – showed him a great time and then threw him out the window.

  When the three of them had been looking up at the lights and the drama of the storm, the amphetamine sulphate had felt like molten joy running in Ray’s veins. But the euphoria wore off as time wore on, and now it had been replaced by a nagging, unnameable anxiety. He felt like crying. Everything seemed washed out and fucked up. Including him. Especially him.

  The tube train thundered west, crammed with office workers with loud voices, all Take Six suits and Glitter Band hair, still stinking of the Rat & Trumpet, and the noise and the smell and nearness of all those other lives made Ray’s head throb like a fresh bruise.

  The office workers were rolling to their mainline railway stations and the last train home. Ray still had a job to do. Concentrate, concentrate. What’s the plan, Ray? There was no plan. Licking lips as dry as the Gobi Desert, he suddenly knew he couldn’t interview John Lennon feeling as bad as this. Interview him? He couldn’t even find him.

  He had got on the tube with the vague notion of staking out the lobby of the Hotel Blanc and waiting for John to show. The Hotel Blanc, tucked just behind Marble Arch, was the obvious choice – visiting American musicians almost always stayed at the Blanc when they were in London. A thousand cowboy boots had ambled past the palm trees in its lobby, a hundred bands had enjoyed its aura of slightly decadent affluence, dozens of music writers from the NME, Sounds, Melody Maker and The Paper had turned up with their notepads, dreaming of good quotes and free cocaine. By the time he was seventeen, Ray knew the lobby of the Blanc better than he knew the sixth-form college that he was still technically attending. Yes, he liked the idea of going to the Blanc. It calmed him down. It felt almost cosy.

  But in his heart Ray already knew that going to the Blanc was hopeless. Just because Nils Lofgren and Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles stayed at the Blanc when they were in town, that didn’t mean John Lennon would be there. In fact, it almost certainly meant that John would be somewhere else. John went his own way. I have to be like John, Ray thought. I have to go my own way. This is a lesson I must learn…

  The tube train stuttered to a halt between stations, and the office workers jeered as an Asian voice came on the intercom to apologise for the delay. Stopping between stations when you were coming down – this was not good. This was the pits.

  In response to the Asian voice, some of the office workers started singing some Peter Sellers hit – ‘Oh, doctor, I’m in trouble.’ – Well, goodness gracious me.’ – while Ray fought to control his breathing, battling down feelings of panic. His left arm began to tingle and he felt his heart hammering like it would burst. A heart attack? Death was so close, it was always so close. They didn’t realise that – Terry and Leon and the rest of them at The Paper. Everything you love will die and rot. All of it. Maybe very soon. Ray thought he might die tonight and that threatened to tip the panic over to hysteria. B
ut he couldn’t lose it. Not down here, stuck between stations. Not here.

  He needed something to take the edge off the speed. He needed a different kind of drug. If he got off this train alive, the first thing he would do was score a nice mellow smoke. But he fumbled in his pockets and came out with only loose change and a Polo mint. Not enough to score. He fiddled with the tape recorder again, still enough speed in his veins to get caught up in the action, to become obsessed with it. That was the thing about speed, he thought. You lost yourself.

  ‘Testing, testing,’ he said as quietly as he could, pulling the tape recorder as close as a lover’s face, and the office workers saw him and mocked and scoffed, saying things like, ‘Do you read me?’ and ‘Come in, Houston,’ and ‘Beam me up, Scottie,’ and ‘Exterminate, exterminate.’ Ray saw the little red light responding to his voice, and he tried to concentrate on that, aware that he was panting like an exhausted dog.

  Then, as he watched the red light and tried to shut out the office workers, he suddenly knew what he wanted to do before he could talk to John.

  He wanted to go home. He wanted to get straight. He wanted to soften the come-down with what he had hidden in his old Doctor Who lunchbox.

  And most of all Ray wanted to see his brother, and to make sure that he was okay.

  It was easier to sneer on the outside.

  Down in the Goldmine, Leon was on their territory, and it made him pause, check himself, feel painfully aware that he was carrying a shoulder bag full of fanzines and wearing a funny hat. As he moved along the crowded bar he got a twinge of that old crippling self-consciousness that he’d had in front of mirrors when he was young, when you were just so burdened by how different you were to everyone else that you thought maybe you would never move again. He thought it was lucky that he was out of his mind on drugs.

  Everything in here was strange, new, different.

  The dancing. The moves that Leon was used to seeing hardly qualified as dancing at all. Just this piston-like movement, up and down for ever, letting off steam. But here in the Goldmine they had these intricate steps and secret, hard-earned moves – they could really dance, the way Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse could really dance. They made it look as though it was as natural as breathing. And Leon thought – why can’t I move like that?