Baron's Court, All Change

by Terry Taylor

  “I hope you’re still not smoking them, anyway. If mum found out it would finish her.”

  “Don’t start having a go at me. I wish I’d never told you now.”

  “You wouldn’t have done if you hadn’t been so high. You looked absolutely stupid that night. If that’s what it does for you you can keep it. It can’t do you any good.”

  I was losing patience with this very square sister of mine. “It certainly doesn’t do me any harm. It’s a lot healthier than drinking, anyway.”

  “How can you call drugs healthy!”

  “They call them drugs just to give them a name. Aspirins are drugs but everyone takes them. Don’t you realise some drugs do a lot of good?”

  She always found an answer to everything. “Indian Hemp doesn’t.”

  I wouldn’t give up. “It certainly doesn’t do me or anyone else any harm.”

  Stubborn cow. “Why do they ban it then?”

  “Why did they ban alcohol in the prohibition days in the States? Look, understand this. I smoke Charge because it agrees with me. Everyone has their own stimulants, if it’s a cup of tea or a glass of whisky. I don’t like drink, so I smoke Charge. I don’t suffer from hangovers with it, I don’t get violent, and I’m not doing anyone any harm, including myself, from smoking it, so mind your own business!”

  She did, too. She sat there looking like a scolded child, without saying a word. She’s always been the same; argue like mad and then stop and sulk. But you’d like old Liz. You can’t help feeling sorry for her even when there’s no reason to. She draws sympathy out of everyone, even when she’s happy. I mean, you look at her and you say to yourself, “she’s a nice little girl, poor thing”. You can’t help it. Of course, you can’t get to the bottom of her at all. There seems to be a million things ticking away in that little head of hers; all sorts of things, and you feel like knocking on her forehead and saying: “Open up there — let’s have a peep inside,” but she won’t let you. I think she suffers with an inferiority complex like mad, but then don’t we all? I mean, the people that obviously do you take for granted, and the ones that seem as if they don’t, you swear blind they’re putting on an act to hide their complex.

  “You’d better tell me why you dragged me all the way down here to meet you. What’s it all about?” I asked Liz.

  She went even more serious than she usually is. Her eyes glanced away from me and I saw a thousand thoughts cross her mind. She moved uncomfortably on her seat and said: “I don’t know whether I want to now. I’ve thought it over and I can’t see any point in telling you. It wouldn’t make things any better.”

  “Come off it, Liz. Surely you haven’t brought me all this way for nothing? Anyway, it’ll do you good to talk about whatever it is.”

  “All right,” she said very quickly. “I’m pregnant!”

  This knocked me right out, it really did. My Salad Days sister, the one that was always preaching to me, was in the pudden club. I could hardly believe it. But then they always say that the quiet ones are the worst.

  “Does mum know about this?” I asked in my most sympathetic voice.

  “Of course she doesn’t — and promise you won’t tell her. Come on — promise.”

  “Of course I shan’t tell her if you don’t want me to. But all the same she’s got to know sooner or later. How far have you gone?”

  She blushed like mad. “Three months,” she said in a tiny voice.

  “You’ll be showing soon and then she’ll find out. Look, why don’t you tell her? You haven’t robbed a bank. You’ll feel better when mum knows.”

  “She’s not going to so don’t keep on,” she snapped back at me.

  “I don’t want to keep mentioning this but she’ll have to know sooner or later. I’ll tell her for you if you like.”

  “Oh no you won’t. I’ll handle this my own way. A friend of mine’s going to help me.”

  I didn’t get that last bit at first, then I tumbled. “What do you mean — help you? Now listen, Liz, you’ve got to be sensible about this. You can’t start doing things to yourself. It’s very dangerous, do you understand?”

  She started to get up from her chair. “I wish I hadn’t told you now,” she said. “Forget I ever told you. I’ll see you later.” She reached the door before I could even get up from behind the table. In my rush I knocked a cup and saucer flying which made a hell of a noise, and everyone looked around at me. I caught her up a couple of yards up the road but before I could get a word in she beat me to it. “Leave me alone, do you hear? I shouldn’t have told you in the first place. Just let me think.”

  I just didn’t know what to do for the best, so I let her cross the road and lose herself in the crowd.

  The Katz Kradle’s considered the best Jazz Club in this country, but I hate it. Although I go there week after week, I think it stinks. The music’s great, and they’ve spent hundreds of pounds on the decorations (I’m not kidding either, Jazz is big business), but it’s the members that spoil it. They behave themselves well enough, there’s never any punch-ups or anything like that, but they’re such drags it’s a shame. I’m sure half of them can’t tell the difference between a trumpet and a trombone, and go there for a change from the Palais. There are exceptions, of course, and some of the cats do go there to listen to the music, but we’re definitely in the minority. The others congregate at the Kradle just to show each other how sharp they dress, it’s a sort of weekly Easter Parade, and to make it with the delightful Jewish chicks that get there. There’s a war on between our battalion of music lovers and the great army of jive fiends at this club of ours. There’s never any trouble but it’s what those politician cats call a cold war. I wouldn’t mind if these morons admitted to the world that they don’t understand or appreciate our sounds, but they don’t. They crowd around the stand beating time to the music with their feet, making as much noise as the drummer, and when the soloist plays something they can understand, say, for instance, a couple of bars of Rule Britannia in the middle of Fine and Dandy, they go into ecstasy, but if he played something subtle instead, it would leave them cold. All right, so we don’t dress as sharp as they do, but instead of squandering our bread on drag, we invest it in LPs.

  The club is owned by a dapper little Jew by the name of Harry J. Waxman, who mixes freely with the members, and asks them how they’re enjoying the music, and tells them who he’s got blowing next week, but — as goes Phil Seaman’s great philosophical conclusion — he doesn’t know a crotchet from a hatchet. We’re forced to patronise his club because there’s nowhere else we can hear sounds like they are at the Kradle — for that we’re very grateful to Harry J.

  We get our kicks, though. If it’s not a friendly discussion it’s trying to lay a chick, and if it’s not that it’s probably having a good old smoke up in the carzy. And there’s always something happening at the death. One of the cats that has his own pad will give an impromptu party where we all get stoned and have a ball, and if we’re lucky we managed to lumber a dealer back with us and get him really block-up so that he starts to get generous and brings out a dirty great ounce as his contribution to the gaiety.

  As the Katz Kradle is such a big club, it took a time to sort the wheat from the chaff and find the cool school. The dim lighting didn’t help either, and I had to do a complete tour of the gaff before I found Dusty and the crew. It was very crowded but not too hot as Harry J. had invested a packet in air-conditioning gear. On the stand the musicians were all ligging around and looking bored as hell, while the drummer, who was sweating like mad and getting himself worked up into a right old state, was doing his solo. Bashing every drum and cymbal for all he was worth and making a bitch of a noise, while all the musical morons called members were shouting and clapping and making it sound more of a row than it really was. There were only a couple of cats with Dusty. Buttercup, a professional wrestler who doesn’t wrestle now because he’s not in his top physical condition owing to his drinking about ten pints of Merrydown a night
, and Popper, the sick man at Dusty’s party. Since then I’d found out that he was a junkie — so, I suppose, he had every right to be sick. As soon as Dusty spotted me he left them and pulled me over to the Coke bar and ordered two.

  “Why can’t they get a lush licence in the poxy place?” he said loud enough so everyone around the bar could hear him. “These kids spoil the whole scene.”

  He led me to one of the many corners in the club (there seem to be corners all over the place), and gulped down half of his drink in one go.

  “Why the dramatic correspondence, Mr Miller?” I asked.

  “I had to see you, man. Very important. Just to make sure you’d be here.” He gave me a typical Dusty Miller look: ‘I’m hustling, I’m nervous, but not scared, and everything I do is for a purpose.’

  The Radio-Luxembourg-type voice of the MC blared out from the loudspeakers that were all around the club. “Don’t forget Saturday night is rave night at the Katz Kradle. Not one, not two, but three swinging groups will be playing for you. Our two special guest stars will be Spud Tate and Hank O’Rawe, those two great tenor men, who will be featuring the exciting ‘Battle of the Tenors’. Don’t forget. Next Saturday at Harry J. Waxman’s Katz Kradle Club.”

  “You’ve heard about Danny, I suppose?” Dusty asked me.

  “Yeah, I met him about an hour ago. Bad luck, eh?” I answered.

  “Bad luck? It’s fucking disgusting!” He pushed his pair of thick-lensed spectacles that he wears closer to his eyes. “Man, this is nothing but a police state. They talk about Russia and their secret police, they talk about Germany and their bleeding Gestapo, but we’re no better off than any of them. The law is a business like any other, and the men who work in it want to get on just like a bank clerk does, and they know the only way to do it is to nick as many people as possible. They’ve got to make arrests to survive — it’s their bread and butter. And if there’s a bright young bogey who’s talented enough to be a bigger bastard than the average, they shove him into the narcotics squad. Danny’s plant isn’t the first time it’s happened and it won’t be the last. Do you realise that they can pull anyone from the street and whip him along to the station, search him and inform the poor unfortunate cunt that he’s got Hemp in his possession? They don’t even have to show it to him. And who’s the magistrate going to believe?”

  Dusty pulled a packet of cigarettes out of his dirty suede jacket and offered me one. He always said that suede jackets or shoes looked wrong unless they had a bit of dirt or grease on them. It gives them character, he says. His pasty white face that always wants a shave went back as he inhaled deeply on his cigarette, and his small, piercing eyes glared at me from behind those thick lenses.

  “Now to come to the point. I wanted to see you tonight for something really special, that — without sounding too dramatic — may alter your whole life,” he said, pushing the mop of black curly hair back from his forehead. “I want you to answer a few simple questions.”

  “Fire away,” I said.

  “Firstly, you’re going on some weird vacation with your Mater and Pater, I understand?”

  “Wrong first time. I’ve changed my mind.”

  “Good. Very good. Sensible boy. Now then, you did inform me a couple of weeks back that you’d saved a paltry sum of one pound a week from the fabulous earnings so kindly bestowed upon you by your employers — for this said holiday. The total accumulation of this, I believe, comes just past the fifty nicker mark.”

  I chimed in very sharpish. “Listen, Dusty Miller. You are definitely quite positively, not getting your dirty maulers anywhere near my hard-earned loot!”

  He gave me a shocked expression. “My dear boy, realise this. You are four years my junior, and also, I think, my friend. For these reasons I wouldn’t take liberties with you. I want to make it clear from the start that I don’t want you to part with your life savings unless you are a hundred per cent — I repeat — one hundred per cent crazy over this quite extraordinary clever idea of mine.”

  The army of dancers were getting dangerously close to us, and I could see that Dusty was getting ready to pounce on the first one that touched us. He was looking at them from the corner of his eye, and I could tell that he loathed the idea of all these squares prostituting our music. He got up suddenly from his chair and bawled at the nearest couple to us. The fellow was about my own age, with a college-boy hair-do that must have cost him at least half a note, “Do ya want all the fucking club to yourself?” he screamed at him. “Why don’t you go and do your jungle dances at the village hall in Clapton Pond where you come from!”

  “Where were we?” Dusty asked me. “Ah yes, your fifty quid. You realise of course, that now Danny is not on the scene any more there will be a lot of hungry mouths to feed? But who’s to feed them? There’s a bomb to be made by someone who knows Danny’s territory, and who knows it better than us? Yes, man, we’d make a great team...”

  “Just a minute,” I interrupted. “What d’y mean we’d make a great team?”

  “You and me, dig? Oh man, I can see it now. Money, chicks, as much Charge as we can smoke...”

  “... and the law! Six months each!”

  “Don’t be a cunt, man. We’re too sharp for all that. Danny trusted too many people — strangers at that. All kinds of faces he’d serve. Not to get greedy, that’s the secret of success. I tell you, man, we can’t miss!”

  “I suppose you want my holiday money to put up for the Charge?”

  “It’ll be the best fifty pounds you’ve ever spent. What an investment! It’ll double and treble before you realise you’ve spent it. And, my boy, the important thing is this: You can tell Mr Cage and Mr Pilkington and Mr Bloody Down and Company himself to put those hats exactly where they won’t go!”

  The musicians were really swinging now. Throwing out the last choruses right at us. Smashing it against the walls and the doors and the people. And behind it all a feeling of We-know-you-don’t-know-what-we-mean, but-we-do-and-that’s-the-important-thing. Bill Higginwell the tenor player was on the stand bending forward, knocking the hell out of The Girl Next Door.

  “The snag is,” I said to Dusty, “whoever makes the scene has to get in quick before the rest of the dealers come nuzzling in and take over Danny’s round. Where are we going to put our hands on enough Pot to start up business?”

  Dusty looked pleased with himself.

  “That’s my contribution to this little partnership. I know where I can buy a one pound weight — yes, sixteen wonderful high-making ounces — for the fantastically give-away price of fifty pounds!”

  “Thank you, Bill Higginwell!” the Radio Luxembourg voice boomed out.

  “All right, Dusty, we’ll do it!” I half shouted. “It’s my only chance to stay on the right side of Baron’s Court! Good-bye, bowler-hatted men and pram-pushing women! Farewell, Down and Company, farewell!”

  Half an hour later we were climbing the stairs of The Man’s house. He lived on the top floor. There was nothing but light and shade and it reminded me of a staircase that I’d seen scores of times in thriller films.

  He was younger than I expected him to be. A handsome Spade from Africa, about Dusty’s age, who reminded me of a gazelle the way he glided around the pad.

  “This is it, gentlemen,” he said while bringing out the Charge which was in a large plastic bag. He sounded like a compère introducing a variety act. “All the way from Africa. Real Congo. The best Gunja you’re likely to smoke for a very long time.”

  We sat down to taste for quality. Dusty took an amount of it from the middle (in case our newly found friend had planted some stoning stuff on the top only) and made us all a fair-sized spliff instead of the customary one you usually share.

  “If we like it we’ll buy it,” said Dusty, lighting his up.

  I did likewise.

  Nothing. There’s nothing happening to me. I know it. I can feel it. I can feel it? Has nothing got a feeling? I suppose it is making me feel nothing.

&
nbsp; Remember all things are important. You’ve got to get to know of their existence, and in time appreciate them. For they are everything. The thrill of being aware of them is wonderful, and when you get over that you can advance to even higher realms of feelings which are new and interesting and explorable.

  Everything is important. We mustn’t ignore anything. Everything can be and is interesting. Everything — cigarette packets — glasses — cats — clocks — wallpaper — everything.

  Time is something. It’s happening. But it’s happening slower than we realise. We want to fasten it up but it’s very slow really. “Come with me,” Time shouts. “Don’t hurry on with the rest but wait for me, it’ll be worth it. You’ll appreciate me much better — and you’ll discover that I exist!”

  Sitting is nice. To relax and feel your tiredness going through your arms and legs and head is all right. Not wearying mind you, but enjoyable. Pleasant peace. Peace is pleasant.

  Warmth in your chest and throat. A warmth that makes noise. The noise of electricity. Buzzzz...

  Oh people, whom I can talk to — where are you? I’m glad I met you because you can come in with me, too. Let’s be a team and think alike. Tell me of the things I can’t quite get into focus and I’ll alter my rangefinder and join you so that we can dig the scene together. For that favour I’ll turn you on to mine. My scene, like a Cinerama screen, unfolds before me. I’ve been used to village hall film shows, but now I see Cinerama...

  And all that Jazz.

  A few things had to be sorted out.

  Saturday had come before I knew what had happened. There was movement in life now. Mum and Dad had really been brought down because Liz had pulled out of the holiday rave as well. There was quite a bit of drama with mum doing her nut and crying and telling us she’d brought us up the best she could, given us everything we wanted, yes, even spoilt us, and the only way we could repay her was to back out of the holiday and spoil it all for them.