Stories We Could Tell

by Tony Parsons

  Nobody understood why he wouldn’t cut his hair. Nobody got it. Not even Terry. Not even Leon. They didn’t understand why all the violence of the new music appalled him.

  Ray thought – I can get all that at home.

  Terry walked east along the great artery that links the city’s entertainment area and its financial district, the fun and the money, his DMs tramping down New Oxford Street, High Holborn, Holborn – nothing open, everything closed, apart from the odd Dunkin’ Donuts and, somewhere to the south, the meat market where his father was working through the night.

  And every step of the way he thought about her.

  He should have seen it coming. Should have seen the end in the beginning. That guy crying in the rain outside Terry’s bedsit, he was a married man called Acid Pete. What kind of a girl has a married man crying in the rain? What kind of a girl knocks about with someone called Acid Pete?

  A girl like Misty, Terry thought. A wild girl. I should have seen the pink fake mink handcuffs and run a mile. The very first time I heard her recite some second-hand tosh about ‘exploring my sexuality’, I should have bailed out. I should have known there were too many miles on the clock when she said the doctor had told her to take a break from the pill before her ovaries exploded or something. I should have made my excuses as soon as I saw a copy of The Female Eunuch.

  The girls he had known didn’t mess with married men, especially married men with names like Acid Pete. The girls he had known read Cosmopolitan, if they read anything, not seminal feminist texts. And they started taking the Pill when they started going steady, then stopped when they got married – always a white wedding, always in church – unless they were still saving up for their first mortgage and the baby had to wait a while. They didn’t have to take a break from the Pill because they had been on it for so long.

  The girls he had known might let you explore their breasts if the night was full of Blue Nun and romance, but they certainly didn’t explore their sexuality. And, without an engagement ring on their third finger left hand, they weren’t too keen on you exploring it either. Regular sex was for steady boyfriends. A blow-job was like getting eight draws on Littlewood’s football pools, and when it happened, you had to break up with the girl immediately and tell all your friends. That was a drag, because you missed the girl, but witnessing the miracle of a blow-job was just too momentous to keep to yourself.

  A large part of Terry’s life felt as though it had been dedicated to trying to get a hand inside some girl’s bra in the back of some dad’s Ford Escort. It wasn’t like that with Misty.

  She had her own wheels. And, being a wild girl, she never wore one.

  He remembered the first time he spoke to her.

  He had joined The Paper as the blazing summer of 1976 drew to a close, but didn’t exchange a word with her until the end of the year when he was sitting under a twinkling Christmas tree at Heathrow, rereading The Subterraneans, when Misty entered the airport lounge. They were meant to be doing a job together.

  She was wearing one of her Alice in Wonderland dresses with a man’s jacket over the top, and even behind her mirrored aviator shades, you could see that she was crying. Really crying. Sobbing her heart out.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he said, closing his Kerouac and standing up. ‘I’m fine,’ she told him.

  She flopped down on the hard airport chair, crying even harder, and he sat beside her. She partially lifted the enormous sunglasses, dabbing at her eyes with a screwed-up piece of toilet paper. Terry had no idea what to say or do, so he went off and bought two plastic cups of boiling hot tea and offered one to her.

  ‘Never fuck a married man,’ she said, taking the tea. ‘They make a big fuss if you turn up at their home.’

  Terry tried to process this information.

  ‘I didn’t know if you took sugar or not,’ he said. ‘So I only put one in.’

  Misty took a sip of the brown liquid, flinching at the heat. ‘You’re sweet,’ she said. Then she wiped her nose with the back of her hand, sniffed loudly and seemed to brighten. ‘Any idea if our flight’s on time?’

  When Terry had joined The Paper, Misty had seemed as distant and glamorous as a pin-up.

  He saw her around the office, her cameras swinging from her neck, laughing with one of the older guys or talking to the photo editor as they looked at contact sheets of Generation X and Patti Smith and the Buzzcocks. She said hello to Ray if they bumped into each other, but stared right through Leon and Terry and avoided their office. One time Leon caught Terry watching her.

  ‘Way out of our league,’ Leon laughed, and Terry blushed and threw a wastepaper bin at him.

  Terry learned from Ray that she was the full-time assistant and part-time girlfriend of an older photographer, a stringer for The Paper, a minor Sixties legend called Acid Pete who had taken pictures of Cream at the Albert Hall, the Stones in Hyde Park and Hendrix at the Isle of Wight, just before the end.

  Acid Pete was a married man, and sometimes when he came by to see the photo editor his wife was in tow – Misty made herself scarce – one of those constantly smiling hippy chicks, the type who seemed both beatific and brainless. When Terry met Acid Pete in the office and shook his limp, hippy hand, Acid Pete seemed endlessly amused, impossibly experienced and as though he had taken just a few too many drugs.

  Terry was intimidated by Acid Pete. He had seen so much and taken so many great photographs, and even at an age when the Queen must be getting ready to send him a telegram – forty-one? forty-two? – he was still seeing – screwing, Acid Pete would have called it – the best-looking girl – chick, or possibly lady, Acid Pete would have called her – in the office. The only thing that made Acid Pete bearable for Terry was the knowledge that the older man’s glory days were gone.

  Acid Pete didn’t get on with the new music, didn’t dig what he called ‘the aggressive vibe’ in places like the Western World, and soon he was seen looking forlorn in the photographers’ pit of the Roundhouse, huddled inside his greatcoat, the buttons gone, and Misty was the one who was getting the assignments. Towards the end of the year, one of them was with Terry – flying up to Newcastle to join the Billy Blitzen tour, covering two dates in Newcastle and Glasgow for a centre spread.

  ‘Kerouac,’ she said, drinking her tea and clocking Terry’s copy of The Subterraneans. ‘He’s a real boy’s writer, isn’t he?’ Wet-eyed and smiling now. ‘I bet all the writers you like are boy’s writers.’

  Terry felt like one of those cartoon characters with a question mark hovering above his head. ‘What’s a boy’s writer?’

  ‘You know. A boy’s writer. Go on – talk me through it.’

  He had no idea what she was going on about. ‘Talk you through what?’

  She laughed happily. ‘Your life in books, silly.’

  So he did. Or at least the ones he could recall.

  ‘Well, I can remember my mum reading me Rupert the Bear for hours on end. And then there are the books at school that get to you. Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe and Kidnapped. And To Kill a Mockingbird and My Family and Other Animals and Travels With My Aunt. I loved My Family and Other Animals, I wanted to live on Corfu…And then you get a bit older and you start making your own reading list – I remember lan Fleming at eleven, all the Bond books. “The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning.” The first line in the first 007 book.’

  She smiled, took off her aviator shades, nodded. Her eyes were a shade of green he had never seen before. Maybe it was the tears.

  ‘And then this funny period,’ he said, ‘when you’re in your early teens and you’re reading what’s supposed to be trash – Harold Robbins, Airport, Valley of the Dolls – and the big bestsellers – Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Alive! – and you’re also getting into Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald and J. D. Salinger and Catch 22 and Lolita and Norman Mailer. And then you realise there are all these great journalists out there – Tom Wolfe and Hunter S
. Thompson and…’

  They called their flight. Terry felt a stab of disappointment. He enjoyed talking to her.

  ‘Well,’ she said, pressing his chest with her boarding card. ‘At least you like Rupert the Bear.’

  ‘I am going to nail that little picture snapper before she gets off the bus,’ said Billy Blitzen’s manager. ‘What’s her name? Foggy? Smoggy? Well, boys, I’m going to nail Foggy’s sweet little ass to the fucking carpet!

  The band all laughed, apart from Billy himself. They were at the sound check for the gig, and Misty hadn’t come along, had stayed at the Holiday Inn making heated calls to London. And Billy swung his guitar on his hip and led Terry to the side of the stage.

  ‘She with you, man?’ said Billy. ‘This Misty with you?’

  He was a sweet man. A good man. Terry’s favourite musician. Because of what he had done with the Lost Boys, and because he was still great on stage. But mostly because he was the only one who cared enough to ask Terry that simple question. But what could he say?

  ‘No, Billy,’ Terry said, attempting a smile. ‘Misty’s not with me.’

  Billy sighed. ‘Well, I guess that’s all right then.’

  Despite the Aerosmith and Kiss cassettes the band listened to on the bus, Billy Blitzen and the P45s conformed to the dress code of Max’s Kansas City and CBGBs – ties as thin as liquorice, drainpipes tighter than a coat of emulsion, second-hand suit jackets and fluffed-up Beatle cuts that could have been worn by the Byrds in 1966.

  But their manager was old school, a lawyer from LA in cowboy boots who had graduated from Harvard Business School and cocaine. He had been around for years and he knew how it worked.

  Now he raised his voice in the empty student hall, for Billy’s venues were getting smaller by the month, and the P45s laughed and clapped.

  ‘Nail her ass to the fucking carpet!’

  It was a great show that night – the longhaired students out of their minds on real ale as Billy mimed jamming a spike into his arm and the entire student union hall singing along to ‘Shoot Up, Everybody’.

  They went back to the bar of the Holiday Inn. The band and the manager and Terry and Misty and the few local kids of both sexes who always managed to tag along, offering drugs, sex or flattery.

  Terry didn’t talk to Misty. It was different on the road. They both had a job to do. And by the time he gave up, realising that she was not for him, the drugs were all gone, the bartender had started mixing the screwdrivers with orange cordial, and Misty was in a corner talking to the LA cowboy.

  Terry never found out what happened in the bar after he turned in. He didn’t want to know. But Misty knocked on his hotel room door just after midnight, unafraid but seeking refuge, and that was the start of it all for Terry Warboys and his cat-faced darling.

  That first night was the best night, at least for him. He would never forget the sight of her when he woke up just before dawn, sitting on a sota in her pop socks, smoking a black cigarette called a Sobranie. And they did it again, getting their hat trick, because there was something about the combination of the pop socks and the Sobranie that drove him wild.

  And then in dawn’s early light he found her standing above him, naked now, the pop socks gone, and holding the pink fake mink handcuffs.

  ‘Are you into submission?’ she said.

  Terry stared up at her with bleary eyes.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘What label are they on?’

  They took it from there.

  If he was going back to his bedsit, he needed to head north, find a night bus. But he couldn’t face the poky little flat and his lumpy mattress tonight. Not with the speed still in his veins, not with Misty in some hotel room, exploring her sexuality. Everything in his life made sleep unthinkable.

  I believed, he thought. Believed in her, believed in him. Listened to his records when no one was buying, when no one cared – loved Dag Wood before he was cool. Terry had believed, even when Bob Harris sneered, ‘Mock rock.’ Believed and was betrayed.

  And believed in her too, Terry thought. Believed in her most of all. Saw something in that face that made me want to give up on every other woman in the world. How fucking stupid can you get?

  He tramped on through the night, turning up the collar of his dead man’s jacket against the chill, and it was only when he veered left at London Wall that Terry realised where he was going.

  With the big white buildings and the statues of men on horses behind him now, he headed up the City Road, and suddenly he could feel the poverty among all those blocks of council flats, those ramshackle boxes that some dumb architect had thought was a clever idea ten or fifteen years ago, stretching off into the darkness all the way to the Angel.

  The blackness was broken by one colossal building. It stood there halfway up the City Road, every light blazing, the night air reeking of the product it made. The gin factory.

  Why had he come back here? To the place he had tried so hard to leave? He knew it had something to do with life becoming more complicated than he had ever imagined.

  A regular girl bored you, but a wild one made you miserable. One made you feel like a prisoner, and the other made you feel like you were nothing. One of them wanted to marry you, have babies, and keep you locked up for ever. And the other one wanted to fuck strangers.

  He wanted his old life back. The simplicity of it, the modest comforts. A girl who loved you and stuck by you, even if the price you paid was the prison of marriage.

  He had thought that this new life would set him free, and yet every day there were new rules to learn. Don’t be too heavy. Don’t be too macho. Don’t care too much.

  In the giant shadow of his old job, Terry punched a lamppost as hard as he could. Then he hopped around for a bit, sucking up the pain.

  He was going to have to stop doing that.

  Chapter Nine

  It was a different kind of club.

  ‘Members only,’ the man on the door told Ray.

  He was one of those teak-hard old Cockney geezers, blurred navy tattoos displayed under the short sleeves of his drip-dry brinylon shirt, and what was left of his hair brushed straight back.

  A bit like Henry Cooper, thought Ray. But he couldn’t imagine this one smiling his way through a Brut commercial with Kevin Keegan. Here was the anti-Henry. He looked as though he would fill your cakehole in as soon as look at you.

  Ray peered over his shoulder at the dingy, bamboo-clad bar. Loud, laughing people moved through clouds of cigarette smoke, the men in suits, the women in flared denim. Somewhere Matt Monro was singing.

  ‘I came here once with Paddy Clare,’ Ray explained. ‘Paddy, who writes the pop page in the Daily Dispatch?’

  The doorman looked exasperated. ‘Look, sonny, I don’t give a flying toss if you came here with Princess bleedin’ Margaret and all the fucking corgis. It’s members only. Got it?’

  Ray nodded, but he was reluctant to turn away. He touched his bare wrist anxiously. He didn’t own a watch. Hadn’t needed one until tonight. He had never really seen the purpose of a watch. To Ray, a watch was something belonging to his father’s world – like ties, and shined shoes, and the speeches of Winston Churchill. A watch meant work. And what did Ray know of that? The Paper wasn’t work. The Paper wasn’t a job. He could see his old man now, synchronising his Omega to the chimes of Big Ben coming out of a tinny transistor radio. But with the night running out, he began to see the reason for watches at last. How long before John caught the plane to Tokyo? How much time did he have?

  Touching his wrist again, Ray peered over the shoulder of the keeper of the door. This wasn’t his type of place – there didn’t appear to be anyone under the age of forty in the room, or anyone who wasn’t wearing a cheap suit stained with food and drink, but he didn’t know where else to go. All he knew was that the Empire Rooms never closed.

  Ray had once spent an alcoholic afternoon in there. He had been sent to cover an Art Garfunkel press conference as one of his firs
t jobs for The Paper and found himself sitting next to a sweating man in a crumpled three-piece suit. It was Paddy Clare, author of the Sounds Groovy! page in the Daily Dispatch.

  He smelled a bit – a strange brew of Guinness and fried food and Fleet Street sweat – but he was very friendly to Ray, this fifteen-year-old wearing a denim jacket with school shirt and trousers, and he politely wondered if the younger reporter would fill him in on the artist’s recent career.

  ‘So what’s this curly-haired cunt been doing since Simon and Garfunkel split up?’ was how Paddy put it.

  Ray took a breath and told him. He knew this stuff inside out. The career of someone like Art Garfunkel had been stored away without even trying. So he told Paddy about the two solo albums, the two giant hit singles – the exquisite ‘All I Know’ and the unconvincing ‘I Only Have Eyes for You’ – plus some very interesting work as an actor. Catch-22, Carnal Knowledge.

  ‘Also, he’s pitch perfect,’ Ray said, warming to his theme, ‘and he has a degree in mathematics and they say he is going to record the theme tune for that cartoon about rabbits – what’s it called?’

  Paddy Clare looked thoughtful. ‘Bugs Bunny?’ he suggested.

  Ray shook his head. ‘Watership Down.’

  Paddy Clare’s yellow teeth glinted with delight. ‘I owe you one, kid,’ he said, seeming genuinely grateful. But Paddy had a notepad with Art Garfunkel scribbled at the top of a blank page, and Ray couldn’t help noticing that nothing he said was considered worthy of writing down. Perhaps Paddy had a photographic memory.

  Then Art Garfunkel appeared, a tall, beaky, bookish-looking man surrounded by the usual record company flunkies and management, and Paddy Clare raised his chewed Biro, the mangled blue plastic gleaming with spit.

  ‘Art,’ he said, ‘is it true that you and Paul hate each other?’