by Jim Pollard
‘You’re going skiing at Christmas,’ I said, commencing my own mime. He looked a little disappointed.
I was miming ‘Sitting On The Dock Of The Bay’. I’d heard it the night before on my transistor radio: a birthday present, red, six-inches square and tuned to Radio Luxembourg. I would listen in the dark, head under the bed clothes, tuning in, like thousands of kids across the country, to a different world.
I really loved ‘Sitting On The Dock’ because I knew my father would hate it. When he did hear it, he didn’t disappoint. Called it bloody jungle music. Me, when I finally saw a picture of Otis Redding in the New Rock Journal, I thought his black face and white smile were the most exciting thing I’d seen. After his death, as is the way with these things, the record was a big hit. A classic now. Not then.
I was attempting to mime the sitting part which, in the absence of a dock to actually park my arse on, was a challenge.
‘Crap. Crap. You enjoy having a crap,’ Jonathan yelled excitedly. He was speaking deliberately loudly. The kids nearby looked over and, to be honest, I probably did look exactly like someone using a French lavatory. My pointing and raising of my palm to my forehead as I scoured the imaginary horizon only made matters worse. Half the class dissolved into laughter; the rest began doing Max Wall-esque impersonations of me.
The furore was sufficient to stir Mr Crabbe from behind his crease-free copy of The Daily Telegraph. The simple folding of the newsprint, slowly like a starched sheet, silenced the laughter. A long angular digit beckoned me and Jonathan. Other kids backed off a pace almost pushing us in his direction.
‘Now, what…,’ Mr Crabbe paused, racking his brains. ‘What is your name, boy?’ he asked.
‘Dane, sir.’
Crabbe nodded as if I had just told him the most tedious thing he had ever heard.
‘Now, Dane,’ he said, savouring my name like the new word it was. ‘What is so much more interesting than the South African rugger tour?’ He ostentatiously completed the act of the folding of the newspaper as he waited for my reply.
‘Nothing, sir.’
He nodded again even more slowly and then rose from his seat. Mr Crabbe had a beard like a goat and National Health glasses.
‘A very amusing nothing nevertheless, boy. Waters?’
‘Dane was pretending to go to the toilet, Mr Crabbe.’
At this point, I could claim that my recall of the incident becomes happily hazy. These therapists on all those late-night phone-in programmes say we blank out the most unpleasant memories, bury them like dead dogs. I wonder if that’s right. I wonder if we don’t bury them like treasure, returning to them regularly as if they are an emotional nest-egg. Suffice to say, Mr Crabbe made me perform the whole unhappy stunt in front of the whole mirth-struck class and that it was the talk of the first form for days afterwards.
Crabbe agreed that my mime was more suggestive of a man in the throes of terminal constipation than of sea breezes and gently lapping waves. He made me repeat the name Otis Redding several times over, slowly and at volume, before acknowledging that he had understood me. Then he repeated the name several times himself. Otis Redding. To me the name was exotic, charged with emotion and excitement. He made it sound like another word for shit.
Jonathan was never my most favourite person after that. The only pleasure I derived from his hanging around with our crowd after school was from Terry Chambers’ merciless baiting of him:
You wanking yet, Jonny? Did mummy tuck you in last night with a little kiss? On your little cock? How’s your sister’s hymen Jonathan? You can’t glue it back together you know.
I had the impression that Cal let this go on for a little longer with Jonathan than with the rest of us. It was not that Cal was exactly our leader or that he exercised any authority over Terry as such only that when Cal changed the subject, it tended to remain changed. He could produce items of interest from his leather briefcase like white rabbits: the manufacturers pre-launch blurb for the Jaguar XJ6, a partially signed copy of the 1966 World Cup Final programme, an empty box that had once contained black silk stockings.
On this particular occasion, Jonathan was sitting in the gutter bouncing his tennis ball. It was May but for most of the day the sun had soared proudly as if it thought it were already August. Wilson. You could always still read the manufacturer’s name on Jonathan’s tennis balls. Wilson. Wilson. He bounced it with one hand then the other. Wilson. Wilson. His father had taken him to see the Harlem Globetrotters that week-end and typically everyone knew about it by registration on Monday morning.
Terry was reading extracts from The News Of The World. He read slowly not because we were savouring the detail but because that was the way he read. When I first went into the top class he was already there and the only kid I knew apart from Cal. I imagine that Terry had been initially placed in that form because he could finish a maths paper in five minutes. Numbers he could crunch like a beetle beneath a boot but the problem was he did the same with letters. Crunched them. Reversed them. Put them in the wrong order. By the fifth form he was just about in the CSE stream. It was sheer force of personality, raw energy and hard work that enabled him to remain friends with those he had met in that first fortnight and sheer force of personality that impelled him to want to read to us on a regular basis. Poor Terry, by the time he was an adult he was worn out.
As he laboured, Cal winked at me and tossed me a cigarette.
‘I owe him,’ he explained to the others. He didn’t.
Charlie was checking through his pockets for his own fags. Like me, he only ever bought packets of ten. His tie hung loosely around his neck, the tightly drawn knot level with the third button, the two ends tending in different directions. Charlie did up a button on his blazer. Although the sun was high there was an early evening breeze. Perhaps he was thinking about his walk home which was longer than for the rest of us. He lived past Cal getting on for Camberwell.
‘OK, Terry, that’s enough about the shagging vicars,’ he said, lighting up, ‘what about the 16 year old schoolboys?’
‘That’s the point,’ replied Terry, bitterly. ‘They never get any.’
He looked up from his father’s newspaper. His hair was lank and lifeless, but his eyes were like a hawk’s.
‘My dad fucked your mum on Sunday, Jon boy,’ he began, sing-song. ‘Must have been while your old fella was taking you to Wember-ley.’
Jonathan bounced the ball, first with his left hand and then with his right. Wilson. Wilson.
‘She was begging for it he reckoned. Desperate.’
Bounce, Wilson. Bounce, bounce.
‘Your dad should give her a good seeing to.’
Bounce, bounce, bounce.
‘Although perhaps not.’ Terry looked around at the rest of us. ‘She is a fucking crap shag after all.’
The tennis ball missed Terry’s left ear as it went passed but hit him on the back of the head as it rebounded from the station wall.
There was a pause then Terry laughed a snorting stunted laugh, a laugh through his nose. He looked at Jonathan who had turned away again. Terry picked up the ball and held it above his head, making as if to throw.
‘Dance,’ he said, ‘dance,’ as he had said many times before. The victim was supposed to hop around on the spot as if the ground beneath him were being peppered with lead. Terry was fond of these John Wayne games.
Jonathan simply sat. Terry threw the ball at him. Hard at his head. It missed and rattled against the old Victorian pillar box on the opposite side of the street - the one Terry always claimed said VD rather than VR. He reckoned it was for posting letters to the special clinic - ‘very common in Victorian times, VD,’ he used to claim. ‘Fucking epidemic.’
The ball bounced and then rolled back down the hill towards us. We watched it come to rest on the grate of a drain. Jonathan got up and walked over to where Terry was standi
ng. For a moment, he towered over him.
‘Lanky cunt,’ said Terry looking around the circle at Charlie, then at me, then at Cal. Jonathan removed Cal’s briefcase from the window sill and swung it back crashing it first lengthwise into Terry’s crutch and then sideways against his head.
‘Thanks,’ he muttered returning the case to Cal and starting up the hill. ‘And Frank,’ he said, turning to me. ‘I’m sorry about that stuff with Crabbe.’ I must have looked as blank as the others. He was looking straight at me, wide eyes brown. I don’t think I’d really noticed what colour his eyes were before. ‘That drama thing,’ he explained. ‘The Otis Redding…’
‘Fuck. Fuck you,’ shouted Terry as Jonathan receded into the distance. By then Jonathan and I had known each other for four years. The circumstances of our first dramatic encounter had never before been mentioned.
I was impressed. Not that he remembered it – God knows, I did and still do – nor even that he mentioned it – these things come out in the end – but that he mentioned it in front of the others. That was brave. Thinking back I think I was touched. It meant something anyway.
7
The thing about our apartment in Paris is that it’s Wendy’s. It’s small and reached by a lift that is only really big enough for two people if they like each other a lot or if one of them is Cal Carter but Cal never saw it. He never got to use the petite ascenseur. Wendy bought it shortly after he died. Cash-buyer.
I encouraged her. Told her that if she wanted it she could have it. You see, the macabre thing is that Cal and I had written out our wills just six weeks before he died. We knew what was in each other’s down to the last full-stop. We did it the first night of the abortive ‘world tour’ as we had come to call it. Jonathan’s idea.
‘Plane crashes, car crashes, poorly aimed vomit, it’s all been done before, boys,’ he explained. We were sitting in a dressing room that was actually big enough for all of us - band, roadies, a handful of fans, some bloke taking pictures - a sign that we had made it. I was reading the graffiti on the wall, not really listening to him, wondering whether the famous signatures I was looking at were authentic, wondering whether anyone would ever wonder that about mine. Marker pens of all colours and sizes, pen-knives and screwdrivers, biro and blood. Names, band names, obscenities and absurdities, lyrics and lies. I signed my name and then, in a different hand, Cal’s. For good measure I added Jonathan’s and Charlie’s too.
‘That stuff you put up your nose, Cal. These things happen. Best to be prepared.’ He looked to me and then to Cal, the songwriting team. ‘If anything happens to you boys, we don’t want to spend the next five years haggling over the use of the name and who owns the demo-tapes.’
Cal and I looked at each other and shrugged. When I looked back at the wall I couldn’t remember where I had written our names. They had disappeared. I looked around for someone to pass me a drink or a joint. A man I’d never seen before tossed me a bottle of beer. It spun through the air.
‘Well, Jonny,’ Cal began, shaking his long hair from his eyes, ‘we never chose you because of your bass-playing but…’
The two girls sitting at his feet giggled as he paused pregnantly.
‘You’re absolutely right,’ I cut in.
Jonathan was sitting on an overturned drum box slapping his unamplified Fender Precision bass. This technique was becoming popular in black funk and soul music but was a million miles from ours which was just as well. Jonathan slapped like a wet fish and Cal regularly told him so. Jonathan smiled and celebrated our consent with a finger-tripping run from Chic’s ‘Good Times’.
‘Don’t give up your day job,’ said Cal, looking up from the set-list he was writing in thick blue felt. ‘Oh, this is your day job.’ Laughs again from mystery faces. Jon snorted and left the room. I was looking around for somebody to talk to - often Wendy was backstage but there was no sign. I started to write on the wall again - really writing this time. Lyrics for a song.
After the gig - three encores in a screaming sea of sweat, swagger and sex - it became obvious that Jonathan’s suggestion was no sudden whim. We had been booked into one of those large, impersonal, could be anywhere hotels that are such a treat when you want to be anywhere but the stifling places you know. The bar was like an airport lounge. Cal compared the bedrooms to those in an American motel, a comparison only he was able to make. He noticed my shrug. ‘You’ll all see soon enough, boys. No sweat. When we do our States dates.’
Most of our dressing room entourage and several others beside had decamped to the bar. ‘We slayed them,’ said Charlie from beneath his hallmark sweat-stained baseball cap. Today, every theme park, every sports team, every brand of everything has its own baseball cap but then they were strictly Brooklyn. To cover his bald patch, Charlie wore one, a gift from Cal from Las Vegas, at our first gig and at every gig thereafter. His hairline turned him into a fashion pioneer. As we became more successful, he started wearing his caps backwards so that the photographers and TV cameras could see his face more easily.
Charlie rapped on the edge of the table with his drumsticks. Just a few months earlier he would have been concerned about who was watching and about whether he chipped the varnish. Now, on a post-performance high, he was taking notice of nobody. The girl sitting next to him began to accompany him, slapping her hands on her thighs.
‘Listen,’ said Jonathan. He adjusted his chair so that the three of us formed a discrete circle. Cal smiled at me. Jonathan caught the barman’s eye with the merest movement of his palm. ‘Have a look at these,’ he said.
One of Jonathan’s cronies stepped forward and handed him four identical forms. I recognised him as the man who had thrown me a beer. Jonathan seemed to acquire hangers-on like the rest of us acquired hangovers. But he didn’t appear to regard them as limpets or leeches; rather he was friendly to them. ‘Thanks,’ he said.
The man was wearing a suit, which was unusual, and sipping occasionally from a Jack Daniels, which wasn’t. No doubt the drink had been purchased on our tab. He stood and watched as The Go-Karts discussed their deaths and eventually our own drinks arrived.
‘It doesn’t have to be much,’ Jonathan was saying. ‘It just needs to be clear.’ I was losing concentration. I needed someone else to tell me we were genuises. That we had performed brilliantly. I fancied a fag, a full glass and fellatio. ‘We stick together, our next contract could make us all very rich indeed. We owe it to ourselves to ensure that,’ he coughed, ‘the preliminary paperwork is in order.’
Jonathan was right. Our next contract, had we had one, would have made us very rich indeed. It was also understandable that he was concerned about maximising our income. As the songwriters, Cal and I got half each of the fixed 61/4% copyright royalty as well as our quarter of the band’s artists royalty. But although our contract was a good one all things considered according to Cal and Jon who seemed to know about these things, this artists royalty was still relatively small because, of course, we were, at the time of signing, unknown. It meant our income - mine and Cal’s - was around three times that of Charlie and Jonathan.
One of the forms was already completed in Charlie’s name and witnessed, as ours would be, by two unfamiliar signatures. It included a form of words concerning the band and its assets that Jonathan suggested we all incorporate into ours. Charlie’s will then went on to leave all his private wealth to his mother.
‘What you do with yours, of course, is entirely up to you,’ said Jonathan as we read. ‘However,’ he continued, noticing the looks Cal and I were exchanging, ‘you might want to think twice about leaving it to other band members as that could confuse the personal and professional aspects of the will.’
‘Oh no,’ said Cal, rising and downing his whiskey in one, ‘we don’t want to confuse the personal and professional aspects do we?’ We both giggled.
‘Jon, you know this isn’t necessary.’ Cal continued and he was walking
towards the lift as Jonathan’s pal produced fountain pens for us all.
By the time we had all finished writing and signing, Cal was making steady progress through what was, even by his standards, a substantial bag of amphetamine sulphate and the rest of us had summoned the last bottle of Jack Daniels from the cellar.
I told all this to Wendy as, bruised and battered in the aftermath of Cal’s death, we meandered purposelessly up and down the narrow lanes of Ile Saint Louis, the smaller island in the Seine. We were searching for what our guide book assured us we would find there: ‘a flavour of the old Paris’.
‘Perhaps because I was drunk,’ I told her, ‘but I know every word of that will. You know how you get…,’ I was rambling, looking at Wendy, getting excited, hopping from the cobbled street back onto the pavement, searching for the right word. ‘You get focussed on something when you’re pissed. Can only see one thing. Well, I was seeing the wills open on the table and us sitting next to each other, me and Cal, and us writing, feint-lined paper and fountain pens and us, well… we were just schoolkids, Wendy. Just kids playing.’
Wendy had seemed to be only half listening but now she stopped and turned and looked at me. She took my hand.
‘He left you the price of that flat and a lot more besides,’ I said.
‘What about that one then?’ she said, pointing up at an apartment with its shutters painted to look like a window box forever in bloom. ‘Or that one, or that one…’
