Please

by Peter Wild

  One night, we found a dingy kneipe under an S-bahn bridge. ‘This city can be measured by its iron bridges,’ you said. ‘And its fire escapes,’ I added. The look you gave me: an intimate astonishment? Or should that be: admonishment? You swept the moment aside with a continental ‘QUATSCH!’ and vanished behind the heavy curtain hanging at the door.

  A group of Ishyvoo expats, posh Home Counties boys, were mincing round the place in velvet and tweed. ‘Human bluddy dressage!’ you exclaimed. They were instantly around you, toying with you, insisting on their artistic credentials. One of them piped up: ‘I always wanted a misfit for a muse!’ You played along as they tried to outwit each other with their dandy quips and quotations. But you trumped them each time until they got fed up–how dare this northern lass! And you, tiring of their rich-boy routines and your own smoking tournament, finally took me by the arm and, gathering your trinkets and shawls about you, you put out all the candles on the way to the door. Then you turned back and screamed at them: ‘CUNTS!’

  Outside, still shaking, you stopped me on the steps. Your fierce blue eyes under the kneipe’s lamp. Your bony fingers clamped my wrist, not taking my pulse but trying to stop it. ‘And for your information,’ you snarled, only your bad teeth showing, ‘I have replaced my…my…fascination with fire escapes. I am now interested in dead neon. This city’s full of unlit signs. The alphabet of mortality!’ And with that you vanished in the darkness flowing beneath the bridge.

  On the last day of my trip, things remained frosty between us. So much to say or to avoid saying. Silences every bit as awkward as those in an auditorium between movements of a concerto. On the train to the airport to see me off, you burst through our diffidence. You were thrilled to discover, at one of the stations, an entire wall of green tiles reminding you of the ones at the Briton’s. Yet when you spoke, the former mood was quickly reinstated. ‘When your world gets bigger,’ you said, avoiding my eyes despite my efforts, ‘it only means there are more doorways to stand in.’

  At the airport, we embraced. But it felt as though we were both only checking to see if the other was still standing.

  A few months later, I heard you had gone farther east. Perhaps to establish yourself as the girl from far away among more elegant, more treacherous femmes fatales? (Though I knew you’d be just as happy kicking your boots along broken pavements with old ladies in mohair bonnets.) Maybe you found a place there for your skittering spirit and those big rolling eyes of yours that roll up everything they see. And, maybe, having recorded the dead letters of Berlin–‘a meeting of treacle and smoke!’–you’d gone in search of other eras, other alphabets, other mortal signs?

  Talking of which, did I tell you? The ‘P’ has gone from the neon name of our pub. (But don’t read anything into that.) In any case, only the guns are still smoking!

  Jeane, we’re never going to get to the end of this conversation, are we? (Please have empty pint pots to hand.)

  In other words, we just have to carry on, don’t we? I mean, just like everyone else. We’re all living like stowaways now. And there’s no time like the present, Jeane, unless perhaps the past!

  Which means: you do the onions, I’ll do the mash.

  On second thoughts, I’ll put the kettle on, you keep singing.

  The Boy with the Thorn in His Side

  John Williams

  I have a son who is sixteen years old now. He listens to The Smiths rather more than I ever did. And hearing their records blast out of his computer speakers, I’m struck by how well they have lasted, how much better than any of their post-punk contemporaries. But I still can’t simply enjoy them the way Owen can. I think that’s because he can just hear the music while I am assaulted by memories. I feel lost in the hinterland of the songs. I feel like I know too well the world they come from.

  It’s hard, now, to remember the first six months of 1980 with anything approaching fondness. At best, I suppose, living though that time was a toughening process, a long cold bath for the soul. I’m talking about me here, not the country as a whole, though Mrs Thatch’s restructuring of our economy was having a pretty similar effect around the place. Certainly it was where I lived at the time, the small grey Protestant city of Cardiff. But you doubtless know all about Mrs Thatch, so let’s get on with telling you some more about me.

  I was living in a flat in Riverside at the time, just the other side of the river from the city centre. It was a first-floor flat with three rooms. For the past few months I’d shared it with two friends: Andrew, who I knew from the world of punk rock, and Blair, who I knew from the world of school. I took the middle bedroom. Blair took the back bedroom and Andrew slept in the living room. There was also a bathroom and a kitchen, of which I remember little. The street we lived in had a couple of chip shops at one end, and a warren of junk shops at the other end, which pretty much sorted out our basic needs. Actually most of our basic needs were sorted out by the mini-market next to the chip shop, a fabulously depressing place full of the kind of products people talk about with ‘ironic’ affection these days. Personally I find it hard to think of the likes of Findus Crispy Pancakes with wistful nostalgia: this was the kind of shit we actually lived on. Especially if Andrew did the shopping. Andrew was so shy he refused to buy anything that involved talking to the shop assistant. Everything had to come straight from the shelf or freezer cabinet.

  Andrew and myself were signing on, Blair was in his second year of university. Blair was pretty much a normal person who had friends and girlfriends and went to lectures and stuff. Me and Andrew weren’t very normal people. We were odd boys whose lives were full of music, thanks to a lack of anything else going on, who listened to John Peel and knew nobody who wasn’t in another Cardiff post-punk ensemble. Nevertheless the three of us formed a band along with another student called Jeff. We were the Puritan Guitars and we made a deliberately awful racket. We rehearsed in the back bedroom when the downstairs neighbours were out or, on occasion, when they were in, which led to a certain amount of bad feeling. After three months or so of this Blair had had enough, and moved out to share a flat with some other students. What were we to do? The handful of people we knew already had their own flats. The thought of getting a stranger in was terrifying. Finally Andrew came up with a solution. His cousin Pete would move in after Christmas.

  Pete was one of those people you heard about before actually meeting them. Apparently at school he’d played the saxophone, listened to free jazz and had ambitions to play in some kind of Henry Cow-like art-rock ensemble. Soon after leaving school, however, he’d decided against this plan, and renounced music altogether. He retired his saxophone and decided to get rid of his record collection. Not for Pete, though, the normal solution of trying to flog them to your friends or taking them down Mr Kelly’s second-hand stall in the market. Oh no, Pete decided that the thing to do with his collection of jazz and prog was to head down to the local primary school and give the records away to deserving-looking little girls. This was apparently easier said than done–not many ten-year-old girls show much interest in the works of Evan Parker.

  In other bulletins I’d learned that Pete used to read the classics of anarchist literature incessantly, but now he’d become a postman. I know it doesn’t follow, but what can I tell you, we were young.

  It was Pete’s job as a postie, as we most certainly didn’t refer to them back then, that would enable him to stop living with his mother and move to Cardiff. I was kind of looking forward to him moving in. At least he didn’t sound boring. And nor was he, at least not in an ordinary way. In person Pete was one of those people who are actually quite big but because they’re embarrassed about themselves in the world they hunch over and hide it. He had sandy hair, the wide eyes of a child and the giggling laugh of a madman. He didn’t say a lot. He got up very early to go to work, and went to bed similarly early to sleep. In between whiles he sat in his room and read. I asked him at first about the anarchism, did he still read Malatesta and Kropotkin and all that?
No, he told me, he only read the Bible now.

  After a while Andrew and myself pretty much left him to it. Every once in a while, maybe on a Friday, I would suggest going to the pub. Andrew didn’t drink, so that just left me and Pete walking round the corner to the Mitre. We’d buy a drink each and sit there saying very little indeed. Sometimes, if I had few extra quid derived from selling bits of my record collection to Mr Kelly, we might have a second drink. It would be consumed in silence, us sitting there like a pair of junior old men, and then we’d walk back to the flat. Pete would go to bed and I’d listen to John Peel with Andrew.

  It is hard to imagine now the significance that John Peel had for all us post-punk types, all the confused and lonely eighteen-year-olds in our charity shop and army surplus clothes, haunting the second-hand record stores of declining industrial towns. It let us know that we were not alone, that there were others out there. Every time you heard a session from Girls At Our Best from Leeds or Orange Juice from Glasgow it was a light in a window over the street, a beacon on a hill, a sign of life in the grey.

  We wrote to each other back then, all us boys in bands and fanzines, sending the word from Cardiff to Nottingham or Sunderland to Glasgow, news of our microscopic scenes. And when we weren’t writing to each other, we’d write to our bulletin boards, the letters pages of Sounds and the NME. We’d send jokes and complaints, messages from the regions. Some people, like my friend Colin B. Morton from neighbouring Newport, became regular names on the page. I read every word of the music press back then, of course. I knew the names of all the regular correspondents. Most regular of all, for a time, was one Stephen P. Morrissey from Manchester, whose particular thing was to work the New York Dolls into his letters.

  After six months this existence of signing on, subsisting on chips with curry sauce, writing letters and playing music that sounded like rubber bands and biscuit tins and skronky guitars topped off by some bloke complaining about this and that and everything, of living with Andrew and Pete, began to wear thin. In the middle of a gig one night I realised that this was just too miserable an existence to be borne, and when I discovered that there was a room about to go free at our guitarist’s student house I jumped at it. I even got a job working in an anarchist printer’s for twenty-three pounds a week. I silk-screened and Letrasetted and wrote radical newsletters, and made an effort to meet girls, and slowly, gradually, things changed in my life, and let’s skip forward three or four years to, I don’t know, 1984, I suppose, thereabouts at least.

  I was in college by then, Media Studies at the Polytechnic of Central London, and working part time in a record shop, and I hadn’t listened to Peelie, as we definitely never called him, for years. These days I favoured London pirate soul stations like Kiss FM and LWR. I didn’t write letters to the NME any more, I didn’t even buy it, not every week anyway, not religiously. I bought The Face instead, aspired to being cool, bought clothes from Katharine Hamnett, tried to look good.

  Anyway, one grey afternoon in this year that was probably 1984, I was back in Cardiff, visiting my parents presumably, and I was walking past Spillers Records in town when a voice called out to me. I turned round, clocked the sandy hair and the wide eyes. Pete. He was wearing a greatcoat. He looked like the kind of person that, if I was in London, I’d have made a point of avoiding eye contact with. He looked like the kind of person I was very keen to differentiate myself from.

  ‘John,’ he said, ‘I heard you on the radio.’

  I looked confused, said he couldn’t have. I hadn’t done anything to get me on the radio. He looked disappointed, said it was someone who sounded a lot like me. And he’d been expecting, you know, me to do something. I said, well, no I hadn’t exactly done anything, though I was in college now and things were going, you know, great. And anyway, what was he doing here?

  ‘I’ve come to see The Smiths,’ he said.

  ‘Really,’ I said, ‘but you don’t like that kind of thing.’

  Oh, but he did, he said. He loved The Smiths, he told me, and giggled the way he did, and said he’d walked here from him mother’s place in Abercarn, fifteen miles over the mountain.

  Ah, I said, and maybe oh. I knew of The Smiths, I guess they had an album out by this time and a few singles. I’d seen pictures of Morrissey and his carnations, heard one or two of the songs. I remember thinking that maybe, just maybe, if me and my boys had stuck at it, we might have ended up sounding a bit like that, a bit ironic and camp and triumphant in defeat, a bit northern (Cardiff then was really a northern city, dying Victorian grey: the first time I went anywhere that felt the same was the first time I went to Manchester. It’s nothing like the cities of the west of England: Bristol or Exeter or, God forbid, Swindon). We’d even talked about trying to make a record with Sandie Shaw, we went to see her in cabaret and asked her, but nothing came of it. And now Stephen P. Morrissey had beaten us to the punch, and us no longer even in the ring. I felt jealous and disdainful: they were kings of a world I’d left behind.

  We went for a coffee, there was plenty of time. Pete had walked so fast through the valleys and over the mountain that he’d arrived half a day early. Pete demurred a little, he had arrived with no money whatsoever, would be walking back through the night. So I demonstrated my London big-shot-ness, and said I’d pay for a cup of milky coffee.

  In the café it was like old times, when we used to go to the pub together. We sat with nothing to say: Mr Shy and Mr Ridiculously Shy. Eventually Pete started talking about the Bible and the ways in which we failed to understand the New Testament. After a while of this I had an idea as to what to do next.

  So we went round to Spike’s place. Spike was a guitar player and another old school mate of Andrew and Pete. He was reasonably pleased to see me, and looked to have that familiar mixture of alarm and fascination on seeing Pete. We had cups of tea and Pete started arguing religion with Spike, who by this time had swapped the faith of his childhood for a fervent belief in the Trotskyism of the WRP. They seemed to be enjoying the barney, and I took the chance to say that I had to get going. Spike said he’d have Pete to stay that night, save him walking over the mountain in the dark. I headed on out feeling like I’d got away with something, had slickly passed on the responsibility that was Pete.

  It was only later that I heard that Spike had been so freaked out by Pete’s Dostoyevskyan appearance and religious conviction that he and his then missus had not answered the door when Pete came round later that night, and Pete had indeed walked back over the mountain. I doubt that he minded. There was something not merely innocent but positively saintly about Pete back then. Something unworldly, born out of loneliness and awkwardness and a strange fierce intelligence. I’m sure I wasn’t alone in finding it frightening.

  And that saintliness was for the most part happy in solitude, but was still happy to have found a place on earth to commune that was not a dying chapel in a dying valley but a dance hall packed with congregants come to see a man with carnations in his back pocket and a hearing aid in his ear, one who gathered to him all the lost boys of my time, and for a moment made them proud in their aloneness and their shyness and their intelligence.

  But me, I’d crossed over and walked on the other side of the road. Thinking only this, that there but for the grace of God go I.

  Some Girls are Bigger than Others

  Jenn Ashworth

  Music is not an inspiration, it is a distraction. It is a noise spreading out behind cars and smoking the air like a second exhaust. It insists its way through open windows–advertising someone else’s party. It comes out of jukeboxes in pubs, smothering conversation, and it makes me hate the students who live next door.

  When I was writing a novel about a very overweight woman, embroiled in editing and Internet research about Fat Admirers, Feeders and BBWs, my best friend used to email me MP3s. Theme music. Tunes to write to. I don’t work like that–I need silence–but when I was stuck, and because he was my friend, I would listen to them. Two stand out: ‘F
at Bottomed Girls’ and ‘Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others’. This is the story inspired by the second, and dedicated to the friend who forced it on me.

  Christine serves tins of Del Monte fruit cocktail in tiny glass bowls after Sunday dinner. She pours Tip Top into the bowls, but slowly, so it doesn’t curdle the sugary water the fruit is sitting in. She always gives Garry the cherry, fishing it out of the tin first with her fingers.

  Even when Derek is here, Garry still gets the cherry. They don’t talk about it. They’ve never had a conversation about Garry possibly being a bit too old to have his sausage and mash made into a face on his plate: peas for hair, sliced carrot for eyes. Always getting the cherry.

  Garry thinks that when he is an old man, coming home for Sunday dinner with a tie and a brown suit, Christine will still give him tomato ketchup in the glass egg cup, the special yellow bowl that he collected tokens for, and dodder over to the table with the tin in her hand, swishing the cubed fruit about with her fingers and proffering the cherry on her palm.

  Derek never says anything about it. He doesn’t say anything now, but bends over his bowl, stirring the Tip Top around with his spoon until every last piece of fruit is covered. Garry eats slowly, saving the cherry for last, and wonders whether Derek has noticed, and if he has noticed, whether he is bothered.

  Derek eats like a machine. His elbow jabs the air and his mouth goes like a cement mixer. He grunts because he can’t chew and breathe at the same time. He rattles the spoon against the sides of the bowl. Gary doesn’t look at him, but looks at Christine, tipping her bowl to scoop up watery Tip Top as if it is soup, and smiling at Derek as he sucks and chews. They eat like this, the three of them, for a long time. Outside, the broken gate batters the fence and the long grass in the garden ripples with the wind.