Stories We Could Tell

by Tony Parsons

  ‘Didn’t expect to see you again,’ he said to Terry, running the tip of his tongue over a Rizla.

  PJ had changed into his stripy pyjamas. That’s why they called him PJ. Get past the witching hour and PJ would put his jammies on, bring out the Old Holborn, and get ready for what he called a good old kip. ‘Thought you’d be flying all over the world with those drug-taking weirdos.’

  ‘That was last week,’ Terry said. ‘Are they up there?’

  A thin smile. ‘Where else they got to go?’

  Terry went inside the factory, and it was strange to be here after the best part of a year on The Paper. He looked around at the great expanse of the bottling plant, silent and still now, the conveyor belts snaking all over what looked like a giant aircraft hangar. He had thought he would never come back. But being here was oddly comforting.

  The place was in darkness, but one floor up he could see fluorescent lights blazing. The data-processing department never closed.

  Everybody else – in the bottling plant, in the offices – was given free gin at the stroke of six and told to bugger off home thirty minutes later. But the young people who attended to the needs of the factory’s monolithic computer worked around the clock, pulling twelve-hour shifts, eight at night to eight in the morning. And all of it done on a bellyful of gin.

  Computer operator – it had sounded modern and intellectual to Terry, but it was just manual work for kids who had left school with five O Levels and a certificate for swimming their width. Kids like Terry – restless, reluctant to work in a normal office, wanting the world to shut its mouth and leave them alone.

  Being a computer operator meant staying up all night changing giant spools of tapes, swapping disks as big as dustbin lids, and feeding payroll cheques, invoices and inventories into a metal printer the size of a car. The best thing about the job was that you were totally unsupervised. You could do what you liked in here.

  He sprinted up metallic steps to a tiny office littered with kitbags, half-eaten food and drinks, and there they were behind the glass, the white banks of the computer looming above the three of them. Peter, a good-looking boy with bad skin and long, lank brown hair, the one who was in a band, the music nut, his first friend at the factory.

  Kishor, the Pakistani lad who wanted to be a programmer but couldn’t find a firm who would give him a chance.

  And Sally Zhou – real name Zhou Ziyi – her face frowning as she stood with Kishor staring at a message that was chattering out of the teleprinter on the keyboard. He had forgotten how much he loved her face. How had he ever forgotten that?

  She looked up and saw him, shook her head and turned away, folding her arms across her small breasts. Then Peter was bounding out of the room, lank hair flying, laughing with disbelief.

  ‘I can’t believe it – what are you doing here? You should be – I don’t know – on the road with Springsteen or Thin Lizzy or something.’

  Kishor came out of the computer room, grinning shyly, and then Sally was there, reluctantly, her arms still folded across those breasts, looking like Terry had let her down once and was never going to get the chance to do it again.

  ‘You’ve been plucking your eyebrows,’ she observed coldly. ‘Looks ridiculous.’

  How did he let this girl go? And how could he have been so strong, and so stupid? ‘Hello, Sal,’ he said.

  ‘Girlfriend got the night off?’ she said. Her accent was classic British-born Chinese. Pure Cockney, but with a hint of Kowloon in some of the vowels.

  Terry shrugged, wanting to be cocky but feeling too sorry for himself. Like poor Rocky Balboa, misunderstood by the world.

  ‘What girlfriend?’ he said.

  ‘Maybe she dumped you,’ Sally ventured.

  ‘I’m right off women,’ Terry said.

  Peter laughed excitedly. ‘All those groupies! Mate, you must be worn out!’

  Sally smiled, her teeth shockingly white, her eyes like molten chocolate. ‘Yes, she dumped him,’ she said knowingly.

  ‘The things you must have seen!’ Peter said. He sat on the desk and clapped his hands. ‘Concerts in America! Exclusive playbacks in studios thick with dope! Backstage rows! On the tour bus, with the Cuervo Gold and pure Colombian being passed around! Groupies! Groupies! Groupies!’

  ‘Don’t be blooming disgusting,’ Sally said. She always was a bit of a prude, Terry remembered. At least in public.

  ‘Oh my goodness!’ Kishor said, blushing furiously, and Terry recalled how any talk of sex always embarrassed him. But Peter was dirty enough for all of them. He shuddered with delight, rubbing his hands together. ‘I want to hear all about it,’ he said.

  ‘Well,’ said Terry, ‘I saw a woman take a leak.’

  Peter smiled uncertainly.

  It had been during his first weeks on The Paper, when he was on the road with Lynyrd Skynyrd. He had been sent on the road by Kevin White as a punishment for taking speed in the office – or rather for letting one of the cleaners catch him at it. His first misdemeanour at The Paper. But he had liked the music – bar band boogie on an epic scale – and he had liked the musicians – a hard-drinking family of southern boys and girls. He still couldn’t believe the life he was leading and every day brought some new adventure.

  Terry had been in someone’s hotel room, one of those crowded, boozy hotel rooms that you get on the road, talking to one of the boys in the band in the doorway of the bathroom because there was nowhere else to stand.

  One of the backing singers – the short, good-looking one – had barged past them and pulled up her skirt, pulled down her pants and peed like she really needed to go. Terry’s jaw dropped, although he tried to act as if he had seen many women pee. And it probably wasn’t even her bathroom.

  Peter looked confused.

  ‘But…you must have met all the stars. But…you met – I don’t know. Mick Jagger. Keith. Rotten. Springsteen. The Clash. Debbie Harry. Debbie fucking Harry.’

  Terry conceded that he had indeed met all of these people. ‘But you feel that you sort of know them already, don’t you?’ he said. Peter looked blank – no, he didn’t know. ‘You’ve spent so long thinking about them, listening to them,’ Terry said. ‘So when you meet him, Jagger is sort of familiar. But I had never seen a woman pee before.’

  Peter punched Terry’s arm playfully, as if he was a big kidder.

  ‘Someone get this man a cup of tea,’ Peter said. He picked up a can of soft drink. ‘Or there’s some G and T left in there, if you want something stronger.’

  Terry smiled. That was what they always loaded up on before they came to work – gin and Tizer. Numbing themselves for the twelve-hour shift ahead. They wouldn’t understand that up at The Paper. They would never understand that this was another kind of work. It wasn’t fulfilling, or rewarding, or any of that middle-class stuff. You worked here to pay your way in the world, and that was the only reason you did it, and sometimes the tedium was so great that you needed to deaden a part of yourself just to get through the shift.

  It was hard staying awake until eight in the morning, especially when you knew that other people your age were out on the town, or tucked up in bed, and it was even harder with a bellyful of gin and Tizer.

  Terry remembered what else made it hard – the soporific jingles the radio played in those long hours before dawn. There was one jingle in particular that always made his eyes close and his head drop and his spirits sag, a jingle that sounded like it was sung by session singers who had just been buried under an avalanche of Valium.

  ‘Cap-it-ol…helps you make it through the night,’ went the jingle that always knocked them out. ‘Cap-it-ol…helps you make it through the night.’

  But tonight the radio was different. Tonight there was wall-to-wall Elvis. ‘King Creole’ was playing on a tinny transistor radio. Peter turned it up.

  ‘You hear about Elvis?’ Peter said.

  Terry shook his head.

  ‘Died in Memphis,’ Peter said. ‘Heart attack, they reck
on. Forty-two years old. Bloody tragic, mate. He started it all, you know.’

  Terry was shocked. Being invisible to the mourning Teds suddenly made sense. He had never imagined that Elvis Presley was dead. Elvis was one of those figures that had always been there at the back of your life, and you assumed they would be there for ever.

  When Terry had been growing up, Elvis had always been slightly corny, a bit of a rock-and-roll Shirley Bassey, all grand showbiz gestures and big empty ballads. But now, listening to ‘King Creole’ on Capitol Radio the night he died, he felt the raw greasy magic in the music. Terry felt an unexpected surge of grief. Tears sprung to his eyes and he quickly wiped them away. Maybe it was just the speed.

  ‘How’s Land of Mordor doing?’ Terry said. ‘Got any gigs lined up?’

  Land of Mordor was Peter’s band. Terry had seen them once at the factory’s Christmas disco. With their twenty-minute guitar solos and songs about elves, Land of Mordor had almost killed the party stone dead. Only food poisoning in the cocktail sausages could have been more of a downer.

  Peter looked gloomy. ‘Nobody wants prog rock any more,’ he said. ‘Look at the way they talk about Clapton. They want the new stuff.’ He looked at Terry’s spiked, dyed hair accusingly. ‘The kind of crap you like. You know – two-minute songs about riots and pensions.’ He brightened. ‘But if you could get us a review…’

  Terry pretended to be giving it serious thought. ‘I’ll have a word with the editor of the live pages,’ he lied.

  Kishor handed Terry a polystyrene cup of scalding brown liquid and he smiled gratefully, even though he knew it was undrinkable. He remembered how everything that came out of the vending machine looked exactly the same. And the boiling hot swill reminded him of other things – like half-filling a can of Tizer or Coke or Tab with gin as he argued with Peter about the merits of Harvest and Pink Floyd and Jimmy Page, and Kishor telling him about the things that were pushed through the letterbox of the newsagents run by his parents in the East End, and the nights spent with Sally curled up inside her sleeping bag in one of the empty offices, her body slender and warm against him while Peter and Kishor took their half of the shift. That’s what he remembered most of all. Gin-flavoured kisses and brown eyes shining and the feel of those slim limbs.

  ‘Here,’ she said, handing him the cup from the top of her thermos. A few leaves floated in perfumed water. ‘It’s not the kind you like. It’s not Brooke Bond PG Tips. It’s Chinese tea.’

  He set down the polystyrene cup and took Sally’s drink.

  ‘My favourite,’ he said, and she looked at him as though she didn’t believe a word of it.

  Then they all looked up as the keyboard thundered out a message. The tapes had stopped revolving. ‘Those payroll tapes need changing,’ Sally said. ‘Come on, Kishor.’

  They went back into the computer room. Terry had been waiting for them to go.

  ‘Got any stuff?’ he asked Peter.

  Peter smiled doubtfully. It was as if everything Terry said was not what he was expecting.

  ‘You don’t need me to give you stuff, man,’ he said. ‘Do you?’

  ‘I’m right out and I need a bit of a lift,’ Terry said. ‘A bit of speed. Some blues, black bombers, anything you got.’

  Terry knew that Peter bought the odd half-gram of amphetamine sulphate for six quid when Land of Mordor were rehearsing in his parents’ garage. But Peter clearly thought that Terry should be getting his gear from Keith Richards’ dealer. Or Keith Richards himself.

  ‘But…what about all those rock stars, all those bands you hang out with?’ Peter said. ‘There must be stuff all around them. I mean – sex and drugs and rock and roll, right? That’s what it’s all about, right?’

  ‘Cap-if-ol,’ sighed the radio. ‘Helps you make it through the night…’

  Terry felt his head drop. That fucking jingle! Beyond the glass, Sally and Kishor were spooling fresh tapes on to the great white slabs. He sighed wearily.

  ‘There’s a bit of a drought in my neck of the woods,’ Terry said. ‘Haven’t you got anything?’ Peter looked bashful.

  ‘All I’ve got is some Pro-Plus,’ he said apologetically. His face lit up. ‘But what we could do is, we could crush it up and snort it.’

  ‘Pro-Plus?’ Terry said, unable to disguise his distaste. ‘You can buy that in any chemist. You don’t think Keith Richards and Johnny Rotten score their stuff in Boots, do you?’

  Peter’s face was a mask. ‘I haven’t met Keith and Johnny. You tell me.’

  Terry took a long pull on the Tizer can. He tasted the sweet red sugar drink, and the mule-kick of the gin close behind it. Pro-Plus! How low can you go? He would be smoking banana skins next.

  But he said, ‘Come on then,’ and he helped his old friend to start crushing the little yellow pills to dust.

  Sally and Kishor came back into the office. She stared at them with disbelief. ‘Please don’t tell me you’re thinking of putting that stuff up your nose,’ she said.

  But Terry didn’t tell her anything, and he didn’t look at her, and he watched his old friend carefully pummel the Pro-Plus to yellow powder with the bottom of his thermos flask.

  ‘Ah, sex and drugs and rock and roll,’ Peter said wistfully. ‘Tell me all about it, Terry.’

  Ruby Potter.

  Her name sent Leon into a rapture where he saw fleeting visions of future possible lives.

  Ruby Potter. Ruby Peck Mrs Ruby Peck. Mrs Ruby Potter-Peck. Leon Potter-Peck. The Potter-Pecks. Look, there go the Potter-Pecks.

  But away from the swirling lights of the Goldmine and in the unforgiving glare of the doughnut shop, Leon learned that the most beautiful girl in the world already had a life of her own.

  ‘You can call him if you want,’ said her fat friend, picking a custard doughnut from the box on the table, and sending Leon’s heart tumbling. ‘There’s a phone booth at the end of the road. Go on – why don’t you call him?’

  ‘But I don’t want to call him,’ said Ruby, her lovely face fierce with defiance.

  Dunkin’ Donuts was lit like an interrogation room and, sitting at a Formica table that was bolted to the ground, Leon was forced to ask himself some tough questions.

  Like, who the fuck were they talking about? And what was this bastard to Ruby? And how, oh how could Leon have been so dumb to imagine that a girl like Ruby Potter could ever really be interested in a boy like him?

  But when he looked at her face, none of it mattered. Leon looked at Ruby, and she smiled at him over a chocolate doughnut, and the world made sense. The bad stuff slid away and he lived in the blissful moment.

  ‘Well, I don’t know why you don’t call him,’ Judy said, removing a dab of cream from her lips. ‘You know you want to.’

  Leon saw it as a good sign that Ruby had a friend with a weight problem. What a wonderful heart she must have, thought Leon, to have a fat friend. How sensitive and deep Ruby must be, to not care about something as trivial as physical appearance. Beautiful on the inside as well as the outside, he sighed, poking a finger into his jam doughnut and then sucking the raspberry goo.

  They didn’t ask him what he did. That was strange because in the world of his parents, and even at The Paper, it was the given icebreaker. And what do you do? But not to Ruby and Judy. They came from a different kind of working world. He found out she was a hairdresser only after she had made a long speech about the merits and drawbacks of Autumn Gold.

  ‘I write about music,’ he told them, hoping to impress. ‘In fact, I’m working tonight.’ Trying to sound important now. Do you have any idea how busy I am? ‘I’m meant to do this thing,’ Leon said. ‘Do you want to see a band? There’s this band I’m meant to see.’

  ‘A band?’ Ruby said, frowning, making Leni and the Riefenstahls sound like Joe Loss and his orchestra. He was hoping that she might come with him. He was hoping that they might make a night of it. But his career just seemed to perplex her. Going to see a band?

  ‘So can you get
tickets for Queen at Wembley?’ Judy said, suddenly more interested.

  Leon tried to hide his contempt. He failed. ‘Probably,’ he said. ‘But why would I want to do that?’

  ‘Because Freddie Mercury’s great,’ Judy shouted angrily, ‘you butt-fucking queer.’

  Ruby slammed down her doughnut. ‘Judy!’ There was a grace about her, Leon thought, and somehow it illuminated her perfect face. She had no doubt left school at fifteen, and never had any of what Leon’s father called his ‘advantages’. But Ruby Potter had more natural grace than anyone he had ever met.

  ‘Who have you met then?’ Judy said.

  Leon drew a breath. ‘Bob Marley. Patti Smith. Joe Strummer. Paul Weller. Pete Shelley. Phil Lynott. Johnny Thunders. The Sewer Rats.’

  ‘Have you met Abba?’ ‘No, I haven’t met Abba.’

  Judy turned away with a sneer. ‘He ain’t met nobody.’

  And then Leon saw them. Dagenham Dogs. Two of them, one on either side of the street. Shaven heads gleaming. Coming towards Dunkin’ Donuts, playfully tossing a dustbin lid at each other. Leon watched one of them catch the dustbin lid, stagger into the road, and hurl it back at his mate with full force. The dustbin lid went sailing over the head of the second Dog and clattered into the window right by their table.

  Judy was on her feet screaming abuse, and Ruby dropped her doughnut. The two Dogs guffawed with delight and approached the window, rubbing the front of their trousers and making obscene gestures. But by then Leon was under the table, on his hands and knees, watching Judy’s foot stamping with fury. He didn’t come out until he heard the Dogs retrieve their dustbin lid and go cackling off into the night.

  ‘Found it,’ he said, sheepishly coming back up. ‘My contact lens. It’s okay. Found my contact lens.’ The two girls watched Leon putting the imaginary contact lens into his eye. Then he blinked at them furiously. ‘That’s much better.’

  ‘Look, Ruby,’ said Judy.

  She was indicating a car full of neat, well-shaven youths that had pulled up outside. A stocky youth in a cap-sleeved T-shirt and Prince of Wales check trousers got out of the car and walked into Dunkin’ Donuts. Grinning broadly, he saw them and came over, sitting on the edge of their table.