The Alternative Hero

by Tim Thornton

More knocking.

  “Dan! Have you locked this?”

  “He closed it five minutes ago,” John the guard tells you. “Didn’t hear him lock it, but there you go, he must have.”

  “Have you got another key?”

  “No, I’m afraid they don’t give us the keys. The organisers will have a spare, but I’m not sure where you’ll find them right now.”

  “Can’t you radio them?” you shout, whacking the door with your fist.

  “No, we’re on different circuits. You see—”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake. Dan! Dan, can you hear me?”

  You hear a faint groaning.

  “Aw, fuck it, he’s bloody passed out.”

  You stomp along the length of the hut, seeing if you can climb through the window, but the gap is too small. You shout through it instead.

  “Dan, open the fucking door, you dick! We’re bloody playing in twenty minutes!”

  Silence.

  “Well, this is a right old mess, eh?” chuckles John, lighting a fag.

  “We could barge the door down,” you think aloud.

  “As I’ve got you here for a moment, Lance, I thought you might be interested to know … I was offered some cash a little while back.”

  “You were?”

  “Yeah. Fella came up about two hours ago, bloke in one of them striped shirts, offered me twenty quid to let him into your room.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, but I told him to stick it, y’see.”

  “John,” you assert, grasping him by both his shoulders. “You’ve got to tell me who this guy is! I need to know.”

  “I told him to stick it,” John continues, unflinching, “because I’m an honest man, you see, Lance.”

  “Good! Great! But—”

  “I’m honest, I work hard, and I don’t complain. But what I do ask …”

  “Yes?”

  “… is that I get treated with a little respect when I’m only doing my job properly.”

  You frown at him.

  “What are you saying, John?”

  “Nice young lady of yours, earlier … I bet she wouldn’t strike a man who was only doing his job properly.”

  “What … ?”

  “I was off work for two weeks after that … from stress … two weeks, with no pay, and I’ve got mouths to feed, Lance.”

  “John, I have no idea what you’re fucking talking about,” you shout, turning around and hammering on the door again. “Dan!”

  “Your blonde-haired tart at the Langley Park gig,” John goes on, his voice rising, “she laid into me when I stopped her entering the sound desk … She insulted me, called me names I won’t even mention, then did this.”

  He brandishes a Polaroid of himself with a beaten-up face. It looks pretty bad, but …

  “Fuck off, she could never do that to you!”

  “Kicked me when I was down, she did.”

  “Just shut your mouth, John … you’re talking shit!”

  “It’s amazing what someone can do when they’re that jealous … jealous of the good-looker on the video screen you were diddling. I bet that really stung her, knowing she looked like such a freak …”

  In that one nanosecond, you decide you can either punch him or break down the dressing room door. Wisely you choose the latter. Dan wakes up from his drunken snooze on the sofa and coughs.

  “Whassappenin’?”

  “Wake up, you idiot, and don’t lock that fucking door again.”

  You grab your acoustic guitar and two bottles of red wine, and storm straight out again.

  “You’ve just lost your fucking job, John,” you spit, as you pass. “Well done. I’m getting out of this fucking place.”

  But the only safe place left to go is the side of the main stage, now a hive of activity as The Boo Radleys’ gear is wheeled off and your own crew pushes the Magpies’ larger stage set into place. On the road in a strange city, this familiar, almost homely routine conducted by a group of people you trust can usually liven whatever sour spirits you’ve got yourself into, but not today. Today you’re no longer certain what planet you’re on. You settle yourself by the monitor desk, open the wine and tune your acoustic: a ritual you perform before every show, normally helping to keep your feet on the ground, but this evening you’re suspended a hundred feet in the air with acute vertigo. Bob Grant passes, evidently glad to see that you’re at least alive. Stan the roadie passes and tussles your hair. A minute later Doug does the same thing. A nice gesture, but right now you don’t understand what nice is.

  “All right, L?” asks Pete, the tubby monitor engineer, as he readies his equipment.

  “Yep,” you respond, swigging from one of the bottles. But of course, you’re not. You’re in a galaxy far, far away from all right, sinking back into your previous alcoholic fog.

  Gradually the others assemble. You abandoned anything as crap as a group hug weeks ago (in Berlin, actually, when Dan and Craig had a fight before the show), so the interband ceremony that precedes this largest of British comeback gigs is practically non existent. The front-of-house music gets louder (you managed to insist they play the Wilco album), the crowd gets wilder, then … hey. It’s showtime.

  “Ready?” grunts Martin.

  “Yeah,” you murmur.

  And that’s just about all you can clearly remember. You know the first song went okay and that you tried to be funny in the next one, but no one seemed to get the joke. You seem to recall singing an Oasis song, for a laugh, then trying to chuck out some of the audience, but the people you wanted to eject outnumbered those you wanted to stay, which was a little surprising. You drank some more, sang some more, then you spotted that idiot in the red tracksuit down the front and did the “wanker” signal at him. But it all seemed fairly cheerful; a couple of insults, but no more than a Thieving Magpies audience is used to. Then Dan and Martin started to take it all too seriously. What’s the matter with these people? Always fucking complaining. In those rare moments you sit down to think about it, it really pisses you off that you spent your whole career dragging them along by their manky ponytails, writing them some of the best songs they’d ever had the pleasure of playing—and, of course, made them a shitload of money—but they’ve never been grateful. And Martin, in the end, didn’t even need to admit to the others he wanted to leave the band; he just sat back, happily watching everything collapse as you took the heat. And all you were doing was trying to hold it together. Dan even announced over the microphone (over the bloody microphone!) that you were “being a cock tonight,” when all you were doing was defending them! Oh yeah, and you saw that knobhead security bloke, what’s-his-name … John … also down the front, probably not even working, folding his arms over his fucking beer belly and pointing at you. So you showed him. If Gloria could punch him, so could you. Fucker, I bet he deserved it that time, too. And then suddenly there were loads of people, all shouting, screaming, arguing, pulling you this way and that … everyone so serious. When all you were really doing was trying to be funny. That was it! But no one was laughing. You looked really hard, all around you, to see who was laughing. But no one was. And that’s when they took you away.

  SUGGESTED LISTENING: The Wonder Stuff, Hup (Polydor, 1989)

  No one likes a

  grown-up pop star

  I’ve got to hand it to this Lance Webster bloke. He may be a rubbish drinker, a former womaniser, occasionally arrogant, selfish and frequently nasty to his audiences, but he’s really jolly good at making Clive Beresford cry. That’s four times in twenty years now, a record unmatched by anyone, even my first girlfriend.

  Fortunately, unlike my performance in the toy museum, I do manage to control myself. We are in a major international airport, after all. It’s limited to a few tears leaking out and a couple of fulsome blows of my nose, and, to be fair, Webster is doing much the same. Then he scruffs up his hair, lets out a quick laugh and claps his hands.

  “Yes, yes,” he sighs. “All the clichés.
[Hollywood hero voice] ‘The day my world collapsed … I watched in terror, as my whole life caved in before my eyes.’ Fuck, man, I almost feel like a drink …”

  “Well …”

  “I said ‘almost,’ Clive. The sun is not over the yardarm.”

  In truth, the thought of a drink doesn’t thrill me either, after all that. I study my notes, which are largely unintelligible, but I’ve a feeling I’m not going to forget much of what he’s said.

  “You should get a Dictaphone,” he comments.

  “I’ve got one. I just can’t find a shop that sells the tapes.”

  “Tapes! Come on, Clive. Twenty-first century.”

  I stir some sugar into my coffee, starting to feel a bit vague from lack of food.

  “It’s good calling you Clive,” he notes. “I never really thought you looked like an Alan. Should have known it was all bullshit.”

  I start to apologise, then stop myself. We’re silent for a while. After years spent frantically trying to envisage Webster’s final few hours as a relevant rock star, hearing their true contents at last seems to have blown a few of my fuses. But either I’m being a bit thick or he’s left a lot unexplained, and further questions seem tricky to pose without appearing vulgar.

  “So,” I say, gingerly, “can I—”

  “Yep, you got fifteen minutes, journo-boy, might as well use it.”

  “How did you discover Persephone was lying?”

  He bites his lip and leans back, while I hope to buggery that I’ve got the right end of the stick. Mercifully, it seems I have.

  “It started to make sense over the next few weeks, I s’pose. I suddenly had lots of time to think, as you can imagine … No band, no girlfriend … no life, basically. I just sat in my flat ruminating, trying not to drink. Failing most of the time. But I kept going back to how Persephone told me the news … like I already knew Gloria was pregnant. I didn’t, though … she never said anything. But I knew Gloria so well … better than her own family did, probably … and I knew that, despite everything, she’d never ask them to tell me she’d lost a baby, not without first telling me there was one. So I made up my mind about that bit: Gloria never asked them to tell me a damn thing.”

  “Why d’you think she even telegrammed them at all? I thought she wanted to get away from them?”

  “Money,” he shrugs. “Not an awful lot of free health care for foreigners in Russia. She had no travel insurance, obviously. Fuck knows what she was thinking, going out there in her condition with no safety net. They wired some cash, sorted her out, then arranged for her to be flown to Tokyo, where a family friend lived. That’s where the baby was born. She’s bloody lucky her family are so rich. Otherwise she’d have probably died herself, let alone the baby.”

  I frown hard, my mind returning to that afternoon in Webster’s flat: the framed photo of the little boy, the only flash of colour or emotion in his otherwise blank canvas of an abode. The child would be older than that, surely? But of course, the photo could be from a few years ago.

  “So she left Russia for good?”

  “Yup.”

  “So …”

  “Yeah,” he nods, following my thoughts. “Alison whatsit never did spot her in that café. Must’ve been some other nutter.”

  “You read that?”

  “Course I did. I read everything.”

  He pours himself more coffee from the industrial-sized jug we ordered, exhaling heavily. I find it a little implausible, the idea of Lance Webster himself turning to a cheaply made fanzine called Things That Make Me Go Moo for information on the whereabouts of his closest friend—but then everything is starting to feel a little back to front today.

  “Fucking idiots, her family,” he spits, with vintage bile. “The irony was, I hadn’t even thought of trying to find Gloria up ’til that point … I hadn’t the time, with the tour and everything. But I started looking bloody hard after that, I tell you. Precisely the fucking opposite of what they hoped to achieve.”

  “Bastards,” I whisper. “Why did they hate you so much?”

  “Initially, because they’re a bunch of upper-class wankers. But as time went by their feelings became a little more … justified, shall we say.”

  “But this is what I don’t get,” I interrupt. “It was hardly your fault Gloria was so stubborn about the whole destiny thing. I mean, you guys were in love … It must have been bloody difficult for you …”

  “Not as hard as you’d imagine,” he counters. “Don’t forget, I had my own reasons for not wanting to be tied down to her. I was young, stupid and incredibly vain … Gloria was attractive, but she wouldn’t have exactly been a status symbol. Particularly not during the whole Bruise Unit thing, when I had people on my arm like Camilla McBriar and Sally Chester … Both ended up being models, which unfortunately meant a lot to me at the age of twenty-five. It wasn’t until the end, when Gloria really started to get sick, that I remembered I loved her. Sounds fucking crazy, I know, but what can I tell you? I was an idiot.”

  “So what did you do?”

  He puffs and places his head on the table for a second, each word of his confession clearly a considerable effort. I feel painfully guilty pressing him further, but I guess if he didn’t want to continue, he wouldn’t.

  “Well, I started trying to convince her we should just say fuck it, and be together. This would be … autumn of ninety-four, I think. Told her I was prepared to take the risk, and if the whole bloody cosmos came crashing down around us, or whatever she believed, then so be it. And you’ve got to understand … she really did believe it. Man, you should have seen what she started to do to herself when we tried to release that stupid song as an A-side …”

  I brace myself for some graphic description of unprecedented hideousness—which thankfully he doesn’t bother with.

  “Anyway, I said I’d make huge changes for her … give up the other women … even the band, if it came to it. Sod it, I’d made enough money, and The Social Traps recording sessions were … well, far from a paradise of creativity. But of course she didn’t buy it. So then we had this one stupid night when it finally went too far … and that was it. I don’t think I saw her again after that. A few months later she was gone.”

  My body shudders involuntarily. I remember my video footage of the 1995 Brit Awards, Gloria clearly seen lurking in the background. I glance furtively around the restaurant, not really sure what I’m expecting to see … Tony Gloster, perhaps, secreted in a distant booth, taking notes. All I see is a large man in an Arsenal top, irritably trying to persuade staff to give him a steak knife made of something other than plastic. The trials of air travel in the twenty-first century.

  I turn back to Webster, who is gazing forlornly at his mobile phone.

  “So,” I ask gently, “did you … um … did you find her, in the end?”

  “I didn’t. She wrote to me. Sometime around Christmas ninety-five. Didn’t mention the baby straightaway. She just said … she knew her family had been lying to me, but didn’t specify what about. I still didn’t even know where in the world she was, I had to send my letters via an intermediary for … oh, months. Then after about a year she started to mention she’d been ‘looking after a child.’”

  He shakes his head and stares into the middle distance, exhausted by the complexity of his own life. After a minute or so he shakes himself out of it, looks back at me and laughs.

  “Well, there you are. That’s the long answer to the question ‘Why was the Aylesbury gig so shit?’ Is that acceptable?”

  “Yeah,” I smile, still scribbling on my pad. “I think so.”

  “How close were you, then?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “To the stage. At the gig.”

  “Oh … right down the front, as usual.”

  “Did you feel like shooting me?”

  “Um … no. Alan was the angry one. I think it finally killed his career as an indie kid.”

  “Shit, really?”

  �
�Afraid so,” I reply, toying with the idea of showing him the “black” page from Alan’s scrapbook. “But I think I was a little more philosophical about it. I was completely off my face anyway. Plus … well, I was used to you being, um, a bit rude.”

  “Thank you!” he cries, jumping up and banging on the table. “I said this at the time to anyone who’d listen, but no one believed me, no one remembered! We used to be ridiculously rude to our audiences. Used to tell ’em to fuck off, called them cunts, everything! And they loved it!”

  “Totally,” I concur. “Which is why I was so perplexed by the reaction it got.”

  “Well, everything had got so bloody clean by ninety-five.”

  “That’s right. And ‘moshing’ beat ‘rucking.’”

  “You what?” he frowns.

  “When me and Alan started out, we ‘rucked’ to gigs. Now everyone ‘moshes,’ which used to be just a heavy-metal thing. Pisses me off.”

  “Ah, well … we used to call it ‘pogoing,’ so I can’t really help you with that one.”

  “But … the whole business of you being rude … I remember my first-ever Magpies gig—”

  “Which was?”

  “Brixton, spring ’89.”

  “Ah … the ‘What If Everyone Goes Mad?’ tour,” he smiles, looking a bit misty-eyed. “Not bad, if I remember. Had a row with Martin before the encore. Played the cover of ‘Bette Davis Eyes’ for the first time.”

  “That’s right. And you screamed at someone for chanting ‘You fat bastard.’”

  “Ha! Did I?”

  “Yeah,” I laugh. “Then gobbed at a stage diver.”

  “Ah, the gobbing thing. See? Good clean fun, all that. Never a word of complaint.”

  “I suppose we weren’t used to you punching security guards, though.”

  “No,” he concedes. “But it’s better than hurling bass guitars at them.”

  “Nicky Wire,” I respond, catching his reference.

  “Right,” he nods—then fixes me with a sudden glare. “Fucking hell, you’re full of shit, telling me you didn’t know anything about music.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Don’t fucking apologise.”