Stories We Could Tell

by Tony Parsons

  ‘Oh, I’ve got no doubt that he wants to take a look at your portfolio, love.’ Then his voice softened. ‘Come on, Misty. I saw him in Berlin. Dag fucks anything that hasn’t got a knob. You think you’re special?’

  She looked stunned. ‘Well, don’t you?’

  He didn’t know what to say. Of course he thought she was special. He thought there was no one like her in the world. But wasn’t that obvious?

  ‘And why have I never met your parents?’ he said.

  It was all coming out now.

  ‘Oh, what’s that got to do with anything?’ she said. ‘You’re just an old-fashioned guy, Terry. You want me to stay home and – I don’t know – bake bread or knit socks or something. You want to hide me away from the world.’

  He wanted her to understand. ‘No, I don’t – I just want to protect you. I just want to stop bad things happening.’

  Misty tried to be reasonable. ‘Look, Terry – he’s a legend. We’re just…talking, that’s all. Really. We’re just spending some time together. Like the pair of you did in Berlin. What’s the difference? That I’m a woman? But why should that stop us? It might be 1955 in your head, but it’s 1977 in here. We’re just talking,’ she said, and he felt horrible to see her so unhappy. ‘And if not now – then when?’

  ‘I know him,’ Terry said simply. ‘You don’t.’

  ‘But I want to,’ she said, and they looked at each other with something close to loathing. A weight seemed to settle on Terry’s shoulders. They had never looked at each other like that before. ‘You’d like to chain me to a pushchair until my brain melts,’ Misty said. ‘Admit it!’

  Pushchairs? Melting brains? He had no idea what she was going on about. He stood there dumbfounded, lost for words, offering no defence, as if guilty of crimes that he now realised he had committed by accident. Then suddenly Dag was back, his JD and coke in one hand, draping his free arm around Terry’s shoulder.

  ‘Look at that,’ he chuckled, contemplating his glass and the thin frozen sliver floating on top of his drink. ‘They call that ice. Say, man, you got any of that crank left?’

  Terry stared warily at Dag. He still wasn’t completely sure what was happening. He seemed to be the only one who felt that everything had gone wrong. Maybe he was overreacting. Maybe this was how things were in the new world, and you had to live with it. He wished he had more experience of these things. He wished he had seen more. He wished he were older. Maybe everything was innocent after all. How could Terry know? He felt like he knew nothing.

  Misty acted as though hanging out with Dag was a cross between harmless fun and a kind of job interview, fascinating but also vital for her career prospects, while Dag acted as if nothing unusual or untoward had happened – as if draping your leather-clad legs across another man’s girlfriend and then whisking her off into the night and taking her into a fucking toilet in a hotel room and offering his own girlfriend as fair exchange – but was that really what had happened? – was socially acceptable.

  Christa approached their little party and slid her arm around Dag’s waist, smiling ‘Hi’ to Misty, who smiled ‘Hi’ back, and Dag’s big lizard lips placed a wet kiss on Christas ear. The tip of a fleshy tongue teased her lobe. Her smile never faltered. But, her hand in the car – that was surely a come on, wasn’t it? Or was she just being friendly?

  Terry gawped at them all, his face red, then fumbled for his speed, a fool who didn’t know what to do with his hands. Perhaps he was making a big deal out of nothing. Be cool. That’s it. He had to be cool. They would all have a line together and everything would be fine again, even better than Berlin because now Misty was with him.

  But the cellophane bag of speed was almost empty. Just a few flakes were left, hardly enough for one decent line. They must have taken more than he realised when they were under the stars, hiding from the Teds. Terry held the bag up apologetically.

  ‘That’s okay,’ Christa said, her accent more American than German. ‘I’ve got some good stuff up in the suite.’

  Dag’s huge blue eyes shone. ‘Not the Keith blow?’

  Christa nodded, and Dag kissed his fingers, a debauched-looking sommelier recommending the Chassagne-Montrachet, assuring Terry and Misty that they were in for an experience they would never forget.

  The two young people laughed nervously, like children on Christmas Eve who had just been told that Santa was stuck halfway down the chimney. And they smiled at each other, as if something had been restored between them, healed and mended, and the atmosphere was so cool, meaning relaxed, that when Dag urged Terry to go with Christa and collect the good stuff, he could hardly refuse to go, could he? Because they were all friends here.

  So Terry left Misty with Dag and found himself walking out of the party with Christa and catching the lift up to the very top of the hotel. She slipped the key in the lock, smiling her dazzling red and white smile.

  ‘This is it,’ she said.

  It wasn’t like any hotel room that Terry had ever seen. It was more like some rich man’s house. He wandered through all that space in a daze, shaking his head – what would his mum think? There was a huge living room with a grand piano and a bedroom with a four-poster and a spiral iron staircase leading up to somewhere else. Net curtains shifted in the wind by the open windows, and Terry stepped out on to the balcony, catching his breath in the chilled summer night air, the rain falling gently now, and it felt like the best of the city was spread out below him.

  He saw the lights of the West End, Marble Arch gleaming white and gold, the taillights and headlights of the traffic on Park Lane streaming past the big hotels and car showrooms all the way down to the Playboy Club where right now Bunnies would be dealing cards and spinning roulette wheels with their backs turned to the floor-to-ceiling windows one flight up, and from the street you would be able to see their fluffy rabbit tails shining. Terry smiled to himself, and let his eyes drift beyond all the noise and lights and promise to a great silent expanse of darkness that framed it all. Hyde Park. He breathed in, and it was like inhaling the air on a mountaintop.

  When he turned away from the window Christa was sitting on the sofa, naked below the waist apart from a pair of high heels, with her legs crossed. She must have removed her shoes, taken her businesswoman’s trousers off, and then put her shoes back on. That’s a lot of trouble to go to, Terry thought.

  She was opening a carefully folded paper packet that was the size of a book of stamps. He watched her use a razor blade to ease a small mound of white powder on to the large glass-topped coffee table.

  ‘Just a quick one,’ she said. ‘You’ve got time for a quick one, haven’t you?’

  She expertly hoovered up one long mound of cocaine into her perfect nose, and then another. She held out a short silver straw to Terry.

  ‘It doesn’t have to be a quick one, liebling,’ she said soothingly. ‘You can take as long as you want.’

  He watched her get up from the sofa and walk towards him, felt her place the silver straw in his palm, felt her lips on his mouth, her fingers in his hair, was aware of kissing her back, his hands on her rear, still holding the straw. And he felt himself start to want her, and then start to really want her.

  For a moment he thought – why not? Why not just take her now and then go back to the party? Who does it hurt? Then he abruptly pulled himself away, a drowning man fighting for his life, and he was on his way out of the room before he could think about it, her voice and his erection urging him to stay.

  ‘No, I’ve got to go,’ he said, unsure if he was talking to Christa or himself.

  She said his name again once, but didn’t try to stop him, not really, and then he was in the lift impatiently punching the button for the first floor, but when he got there it was all quiet, the party was over, or had moved on, and the door where he had signed for room service was closed with a Do Not Disturb sign outside. He had thought that was Dag’s room – wasn’t it? But the suite had to be Dag’s – didn’t it? He looked down the
corridor, but all the doors were closed, and the signs all said that nobody wanted to be disturbed. The anger began to boil up inside him. Where is she? Where’s my girl?

  He banged on the room they had been in, calling Misty’s name, ignoring the American voice inside that told him to go and fuck himself. Finally the drummer brother threw the door open, sighing and buck-naked and as intricately mapped with tattoos as a Japanese gangster, and he wearily told Terry to go home, man.

  ‘She’s not here, okay?’

  Over his shoulder Terry could see one of the dumpy vampires from the Western World kneeling on the floor, as if waiting to pray.

  ‘No, it’s not okay,’ Terry said. ‘It’s nowhere near okay.’

  ‘Well, that’s too fucking bad, sport,’ said the drummer, slamming the door in his face.

  Then Terry was moving down the corridor, calling Misty’s name again and again, his path impeded by the ruins of room-service deliveries left out for collection. He began banging his fist on door after door, until the ridge from his wrist to his little finger began to pulsate with pain, and voices beyond the locked doors were raised in threats and protest. At the end of the corridor Terry saw his face in a long wall mirror and was stopped in his tracks. He looked like some monkey-faced kid, pale from the speed and wet-eyed from losing his girl. Not a proper grown up. Nowhere near it. He didn’t want to be this way. Everything was out of control.

  So from the nearest trolley he picked up a champagne bucket and hurled it with full force at the mirror. It felt like the glass was still breaking when the two security guards came running up the stairs. Terry stood there hypnotised as the mirror fell away in long shards that shattered and splintered to sparkling pieces as they hit the floor with this tinkling sound that was almost musical. Then they had him.

  Then they were dragging him away.

  ‘Misty!’ he shouted, trying to dig in his heels. ‘Misty!’

  But there was no Misty, only people he didn’t recognise peeping from beyond doors that never risked releasing the safety chain.

  The hotel guards pulled Terry down the stairs and through the lobby, the late-night tourists staring at him as if he was a madman, and he felt the fight going out of him. And he heard the guards laughing at him.

  Then he was through the big glass doors and out into the night, dumped on the seat of his pants on the pavement, the security guards turning away as he called her name one last time, shouting up at the hotel rising above him, searching the windows for his Misty. But he saw only darkness and a few fleeting shadows up there. They could have been anyone.

  He slowly got up, knowing he wasn’t Bruce Lee, knowing he was weak, knowing he had lost her at the first hurdle, knowing the girl he loved was being fucked by some other man. Somewhere far away, the church bells were chiming midnight.

  On his feet now, the rain on his face, the loss of her pressed down on him like a physical weight. He had never felt like this before. He had never been brought so low by another human being. All that misery, jealousy and rage, all that dark stuff, all of it wrapped up in the shape of a nineteen-year-old girl.

  He shouted her name one last time, knowing it was useless, and it came out like a cry of pain. The love song of Terry Warboys.

  And as he stood there feeling all the places that he hurt, they came around the corner and the blood seemed to freeze in his veins.

  Teds.

  An entire pack of those terrifying, unmistakable silhouettes – the sharks’ fins of their greasy quiffs, the torsos abnormally long inside the drape coats, the skinny Max Wall legs and the feet enormous inside their rubber-soled brothel creepers. And at their head was the monstrous form of Titch, Frankenstein’s Teddy Boy, his limbs so large that the act of walking seemed to require a superhuman effort.

  It seemed to be an entire tribe of them – three generations, from pimply, pale-faced teens to the scary forty-year-olds with a quarter-century of manual labour behind them, all the way up to the granddads, the elders of the tribe, those pitiless old lions with missing teeth and thinning quiffs and silver shining through their Brylcreemed ducktails.

  Terry stood there awaiting his fate, unable to leg it, with no heart to scrap, knowing that anything he did was pointless. Resigned to being battered senseless, and not caring much with Misty in some new bed.

  And then something remarkable happened.

  The Teds walked by, they just walked on by, passing either side of Terry like a school of flesh-eating fish with no appetite. Titch himself passing close enough for Terry to smell his perfume of tobacco and brown ale and Brut splash-it-all-over cologne.

  But they didn’t touch him.

  They didn’t even look at him.

  They let him be.

  And as the Teds passed, the only sounds that Terry could hear were the drum beat of his heart, the soft tread of their brothel creepers on the wet pavement, and the muffled chokes of their sobbing, as the warrior tribe mourned their dead king.

  PART TWO:

  1977 - ANGELS ARE SO FEW

  Chapter Eight

  Terry stood in the middle of Oxford Street with the Ford Anglia hurtling towards him.

  Its lights were flashing and the driver was leaning on the horn. Terry took off his mohair jacket and brandished it like a bullfighter’s cape, crying a bit. Hemingway, he thought. Death in the Afternoon. She’ll miss me when I’m gone.

  Terry could see the driver’s face now, twisted with anger and fear, a girl by his side, a woman, long hair flicked up at the ends. The clean hippy look that you saw about ten million times a day. She had her hands to her face. She seemed to be screaming.

  ‘Come on then,’ Terry said, shaking his jacket as the Anglia came towards him. He felt himself stop breathing.

  The car swerved to avoid him, scraped against the side of the pavement and hurtled past in a blur of metal and noise and green and cream paint. A wing mirror caught Terry’s jacket and whipped it out of his hands. It fell off outside Ravel’s, and as Terry went to retrieve it he could hear the driver shouting abuse. But the Ford Anglia didn’t stop. They thought he was a nutter.

  Terry left his jacket where it lay and stared at the shoes in the window of Ravel’s. They all seemed to be some new colour that Terry had never heard of – this sort of bruised purple. Aubergine, they called it. Our aubergine range of Oxford heels now in stock. Terry shook his head. He felt like he didn’t understand anything any more. He felt like there was lots and lots of stuff going on that he just didn’t know about. He thought – what’s going to happen to me? Who’s going to love me? He punched the window as hard as he could. Then he punched it again.

  It must have been some kind of reinforced glass, because the blow did far more damage to Terry’s hand than he did to the window. He stood there like a lemon, inspecting his skinned and throbbing knuckles. Then he heard the bus.

  A big red double-decker, a number 73, was barrelling down Oxford Street on the wrong side of the road. That’s a bit off, Terry thought, collecting his mohair jacket and dusting it down. Then he brandished it in both fists, placed himself in the middle of Oxford Street and waited for his bus.

  The bus didn’t slow down, it didn’t sound its horn and it showed no sign of altering its course. Either the driver hadn’t seen Terry, or he just didn’t care if Terry got hit by a bus. Terry’s life was clearly nothing to the driver. He licked his lips. The bus was getting closer. And closer. Jesus, it was big. And closer still. And Terry didn’t want to die.

  Terry threw himself out of the way and landed on his belly and elbows with a grunt of pain as the bus careered by, swerving sick-eningly now, suddenly seeming top heavy as it bounced off the kerb on one side of the street and then the other with a screech of rubber and hubcap. Then it was up on two massive wheels, and then up on the other two massive wheels, holding that pose for what seemed the longest time before it keeled over, this great hulking red beast toppling over in slow motion, hitting the ground with a whoosh of air and cracked glass but still not stopping, st
ill moving but on its side now, screeching down Oxford Street with a sound of metal on concrete that seemed to split the night.

  Terry was on his knees, his breath coming in short, terrified gasps. What had he done? Oh God – don’t let them he hurt. Please– I’ll do anything. He slowly rose to his feet and took half a step towards the stricken double-decker. And then he saw them.

  Junior was the first to appear, his terrible shaved head popping out of the driver’s cab like it was a trap door, the tattoo of three teardrops looking like a black wound. Then another Dog appeared from the same opening – there must have been two of them at the wheel – and then Dogs were pouring out of the stricken bus like rats from a burning barn, crawling out of the long emergency window at the back, tumbling over the upended platform, kicking side windows out with their murderous boots. And as the police sirens wailed in the distance, they ran and hobbled down Wardour Street and Dean Street and Poland Street into the dark sanctuary of Soho.

  Terry sprinted east, away from police and Dagenham Dogs, and he didn’t stop running until he reached the British Museum, where, covered in sweat and lungs bursting, he held on to the railings with the giant white columns lit by moonlight like a vision of some lost civilisation.

  And as Terry stood there steeped in the mystery of the ages, he asked himself, as he would ask himself so many times in the years ahead – how the fucking hell do you steal a bus?

  The train rattled north, heading for home, and Ray could feel the spirit being sucked out of him. Home always did that to him. He pressed his face against the window as they passed the twin towers of Wembley, lit by moonlight. Nearly home.

  Ray always thought that home was like some dream of England that his father had on a bad day in Hong Kong. One of those bad days when you opened the wardrobe and found that the humidity had grown mildew on your clean shirt, or the crowds in Kowloon made the place seem like one great big screaming nuthouse, or there was some old man in a vest and flip flops gobbing on the pavement and scratching his crutch.