Chinaski

by Frances Vick

  Peter needed a drink after what that bitch had said to him, but didn’t want to be in his flat, alone with the phone that could ring, so he went to The Bristolian, a large imposing pub at the hub of a series of spidery lanes. Chinaski had played their first few gigs here, four years before.

  Inside it was so empty he could hear the rattle of his cigarette paper burning down, the faint wheeze as he inhaled. He almost recognised the girl serving behind the bar. She took one look at him and said, “I’ll get you a beer, it’s on us. We heard about Carl.” Looking up he saw that the girl – Nikki, Nikki, that was her name – looked wonderfully sympathetic. Kind. Peter felt like crying in gratitude.

  “How did you hear?” he managed.

  She gestured to the end of the bar and a familiar figure in shorts and a leather jacket. “Dom told us.”

  “How did he know?”

  “You know Dom. He always knows what’s happening.”

  The last two years had not been kind to Dom. Always creased, his face now was crushed, vampiric. His cheekbones shelved under his eye sockets and his tattooed tears ran into the wrinkles on his cheeks. He’d lost some more teeth and his hands vibrated with palsied shakes. Peter had to lean in to hear what he was saying.

  “The boy. The boy died then.”

  Peter nodded and drank, not knowing what to say. He should have called him somehow, found him, to tell him what had happened. He started to apologise, but Dom held up his hand, closed his eyes and leaked a few tears. Nikki immediately came over with two shots of whiskey, and Dom picked one up, pushing the other over to Peter. They touched glasses. Dom shuddered.

  “Poor boy,” he muttered.

  They sat quietly together. Nikki brought another few drinks over, and Peter made a feeble show of getting out his wallet. Dom gave his vehement wave again and said something indistinct that made Nikki smile and nod and Peter understood that he didn’t have to pay for anything. Huddling down, inches from the bar, Dom spoke in a choked mutter that was difficult to hear.

  “That boy will leave a gap. Already left a gap, I’ve seen it. I’m feeling it. Talk to Nikki and what’s his name, Landlord. Lawrence. They’re all tears.”

  “I’m sorry, Dom.”

  “I’ve known him for years. Years. Since he was small.”

  More pints came with whiskey chasers, and Dom rolled fresh cigarettes and muttered, “…dying like that, in secret, no note, accident? I saw it coming, but not the time. You?”

  “No. No-one did.”

  “Oh, someone must have. Someone always does. A boy like that. Loved like that. Someone will know. Ask his nan, they should do that.”

  How did Dom know all of this? How did he know where Carl was found? How did he know that there wasn’t a note? You could spend years with Dom, just thinking he was a crazy old man, and then he’d say something downright spooky, like this.

  “What do you think happened?” Peter was hesitant.

  Dom was silent for so long that Peter thought he mustn’t have heard. And then, that choked whisper, “I think he’d had enough. I think he saw what was coming.”

  “What was coming? What do you mean?”

  “After you get what you want you don’t want it,” Dom sang.

  “You mean the band? But we’d only just begun – I mean it’s what he always dreamed of, always wanted. I know that, it’s all he talked about.”

  Dom shoved out his bottom lip and raised his eyebrows. “People will want something from you.”

  “What will they want?”

  “They’ll want an explanation. Yes. People don’t just die. They’ll need a reason. You’d better be ready. I’m saying.”

  “I can’t give them that.”

  “They’ll take it boy, whether you have it to give or not. That’s what he’s set you up for. Better be ready.”

  Time passed. Every now and again the idea of going back home and making more phone calls crossed his mind, and he’d push it away with more beer. Why should he deal with it? Why couldn’t Carl’s family do it all? Or the label? Let Freida get it together to do it. Why him?

  Soon more people arrived who’d heard about Carl, and they hedged around Peter and Dom in small groups, not knowing how to approach them. At first Peter ignored them and they went away; but as the night wore on, emboldened with beer, they pulled up chairs to join them. So much sadness. So many sorrys. A lot of free drinks. Peter sagged under the weight of it all. Some girl was talking bug-eyed and loudly about hiring the upstairs room.

  “Like an Irish wake,” she yelled. “Like a celebration!”

  A celebration of what? thought Peter, maybe out loud.

  “A celebration of the boy. That’s what she means,” whispered Dom at his side.

  Over the next hour Peter was prompted, pummelled, into supporting this idea, until he felt himself getting carried away with it, as a way of discharging his duty to Carl. The idea spiralled around the now crowded pub, as Lawrence the landlord, Nikki and the various mourning drinkers jumped on the idea. It made them feel useful, a part of something. Only once did Peter wonder if this was a good thing, he knew that he was very drunk now. Maybe he should just go home. Maybe he shouldn’t be with these people. But instead he heard himself shouting over the opening bars of ‘Shattered’: “People are too fucking scared of feelings! Don’t you think? Really? People need to...just…FEEL? No?”

  “You’re a Pisces my friend,” hissed Dom at his elbow.

  And Peter was on the phone, trying to get hold of Chris Harris, Lawrence the Landlord was offering the top room free, Nikki was crying again, and Dom, nodding soberly, offered Peter a Tarot card. He took one, and it was Death.

  “It never means Death. It means Rebirth,” Dom said.

  “OF COURSE!” laughed Peter.

  The wake was to take place a week later. Peter woke up the next day suspecting he’d made a mistake, but by that time Lawrence had got flyers made up and there didn’t seem a way out of it.

  16

  Chris Harris

  Sean sat on the stiff leather sofa, trying not to slouch or drop his expensive new portfolio. His feet barely touched the floor and he had to push himself back up every few minutes with his toes. He only had a few hours before he had to catch his train back home and was getting worried about the time. How long had he been waiting now? Should he be pissed off? Was it a test to make him leave, or had they forgotten about him? Another involuntary slouch down the seat, and another toe spring back up. He sighed. The receptionist raised her eyebrows and smiled at him.

  “It’s lunchtime,” she said and made a little drinking motion, “it might be a while.” Half an hour later Chris Harris swung in through the glass doors, smelling of lager. He led Sean into his office and told him to sit down on a swivel chair at the desk.

  Sean had a lot of respect for Chris. He enjoyed the little cynical shards amongst the whimsy in his writing, and he knew him too, vaguely. Sean had photographed him with Nirvana and Chinaski at Reading, when Carl had been in full media assault mode and everyone had been falling at his feet. There had been a few times when he got the idea that Chris hadn’t really bought into the image that Carl was putting out – despite the effusive reviews he gave them. Backstage at Reading he’d seen him smirking at Carl’s more fanciful outbursts, and once, when Carl likened himself to Jim Morrison (to the obvious distress of the rest of the band – how fucking lame was Jim Morrison?), Chris had nodded sagely before laughing in his face. Sean couldn’t figure out if Carl really hadn’t noticed, or had chosen not to.

  Sean liked him because he found him puzzling, and Sean liked puzzles. The laugh in the face didn’t join neatly with the alliterative, ecstatic reviews. His tweeds, brogues, ashy pockets and dirty ties were more suited to an academic in an out-of-the-way university than a rock journalist. But even then, the tweeds, brogues and the rest of it…something didn’t ring true about that either. It was a costume, it wasn’t real. Chris Harris stuck out like a teacher at a school disco, and he wore his odd co
stume with a sleepy irony in his voice, so low you had to strain to hear it. But Sean heard it, which was why he wanted Chris to see the pictures first.

  Chris smiled tiredly, flicking through the portfolio, “What’s the idea?”

  “When I was still at college Carl asked me to follow him around for a few days and take pictures – sort of to document his day. He said it might be a good project for me.”

  “Was it?”

  “Well...my tutors didn’t like it, so it was kind of useless in that respect, but it was interesting. And it might be worth publishing now.”

  “Because he’s dead?” Chris said, and Sean’s heart lurched. He glanced at Chris, embarrassed, but he was calmly arranging the pictures on his desk and didn’t look angry. Sean thought he’d risk honesty.

  “Yes, because he’s dead. Though I think they’d have sold anyway.”

  “But not for as much?”

  “I don’t know. It seems like a good time to do it though, with the album coming out soon.”

  “Friends were you?”

  Sean felt reckless. “No. No. Well, at first. I quite liked him, but he was, or could be, a bit of a bullshitter. I kind of believed him at the beginning. But I was younger then,” he laughed nervously and Chris looked at him with no expression at all. “I mean, I think he had this idea of what he wanted to be like, appear like, and getting me to do these photos was a part of that. So I was ambivalent about it. But I mean, it was all practice. Experience. You know. He knew about all the stars who had had like a personal photographer with them, documenting their lives – like John Lennon and David Bowie. He saw some of those Peterson photos – that guy who worked for Sub Pop – those scene photographs he did. And he wanted me to kind of do the same thing, but under his direction.”

  “He wanted control?”

  “Yes.”

  Chris pulled down one side of his mouth and raised an eyebrow. “Talk me through them and we can get the text right. Start with this –” he handed over a photo of Carl asleep on a sofa with his arm around a girl.

  “This, he wanted some kind of ironic, like homage, to that video for Sweet Child o’ Mine, the one when they’re all waking up with groupies at the start? Carl wanted that kind of thing. So he showed up with a girl and he pretended to be asleep.”

  “Cheese.”

  “I know.”

  “We’ll use it though. Probably. What’s this?”

  “This is when German Joe came over to do tattoos. Carl met him somewhere – this big guy from Kreuzberg who said he’d worked with Neubaten and all those people. Test Department. He probably didn’t though. Carl found him in a pub somewhere and introduced him to everyone, and he wanted some tattoos and this guy was a tattooist –”

  “So everyone got the same tribal tattoo done with a dirty needle for free.”

  Sean felt stupid. “Yeah pretty much. I didn’t though.”

  Chris looked at the tattoo pictures. There was only one of Carl, looking to the left of the frame, laughing at something a friend was saying, a lit cigarette and a cup of coffee steaming on the arm of his chair. He held a blood spattered tissue in his hand and the needle burrowed into the flesh of his bicep. German Joe’s brutalist profile loomed at the top, furrowed in concentration.

  “That’s a useful one. The one with the girl I can use maybe. What’s this?”

  “Carl, I don’t know if you know, but he left home when he was really young – like 15 or something. I think it’s true. And he knew all these homeless guys from then, so we were walking through the centre and he spotted these guys who were always on the steps of the square. He knew a few of them, I think maybe they’d looked after him for a while when he was on the streets, so I took some photos. But Carl didn’t like them, didn’t want me to keep them. He didn’t think they reflected well on him.”

  Chris pawed through the photos. Grizzled men with inadvertent dreadlocks. A younger skinhead with a swallow tattooed on his neck. A woman in her thirties who looked as if she’d blacked out a decade before and never found her way home again. A bald man in a leather jacket and shorts. Carl was mostly self consciously posing, but in a few appeared to have forgotten the camera and was speaking vehemently to the skinhead, sharing a beer with the man in shorts.

  “We can take a few of them, quarter size with one bit of text. If I get the homelessness thing in, that’d work.” Chris circled three photos and pushed them aside. “Next, we have, what’s this? Oh, the band.”

  Drinking in The Bristolian. Peter sitting half in shadow, under orders not to move. Carl told to laugh, it made his cheekbones look good.

  “No,” said Chris.

  “No,” said Sean. “There are some better ones though – here.”

  Carl’s face lit up from the juke box. Carl, Peter and John at the bar, the photo of their backs and the reactions of the people next to them; one old man wrinkles his nose, a woman smiles wryly. A table filled with beer, cigarettes and elbows. Lydia, with heavily pencilled eyebrows, her dyed hair in dreadlocks aiming a mock punch at Carl; Peter sitting beatifically at the back with his eyes closed; John glaring intently at something outside the frame.

  “They’re...OK. Got any live shots?”

  “Yes, uh...hang on...here. Some of Reading, and some others.” Sean looked up and handed Chris a sheaf of photos, “There’s one of you here, and a few of Carl and Kurt Cobain, about the time Nirvana started working out the support for the US tour.” Sean kept his voice steady, but he knew that this was the selling point. “This one’s pretty cool.”

  Carl trying not to appear starstruck, sitting on a beer crate and smoking a cigarette while Kurt Cobain leans over to whisper in his ear. Another posed shot, Carl raising one eyebrow and clenching his jaw to make his cheekbones hollow, while Kurt Cobain grins maniacally.

  Chris Harris puffed out his cheeks and let the air out slowly.

  “Take the first definitely. It makes them look like friends. The second, it could be any fan with Kurt Cobain, doesn’t do Carl any good.”

  Sean blinked. “Doesn’t do Carl any good?”

  “No, he looks like a hanger on here and that’s not what we need.”

  “Well, Carl was a bit like that. He was genuinely speechless when he met that guy. He never stopped going on about it.”

  Chris Harris gave him that tired, ironic look. “Look, Carl died. A lot of people liked the band, and a lot of people thought that they were going to get better and do pretty great things. Some people thought that they were important.”

  “Did you?”

  “That’s not my point.” Chris began pacing the small office, like a professor at a tutorial. “Carl died when he was, what, 23?”

  “24, I think.”

  “24. OK. That’s still good. At 24 you don’t need to have been great, you just need the promise of being great in the future. If this had happened when he was, say, 27, then he’d have had time to disappoint, or impress more, but as it stands we only have what he did. And like I said, a lot of people thought that was good. But the potential is what sticks with people. The boy was potentially a new Kurt Cobain, and it’s the potential that will sell an album, a double spread in a magazine, all that stuff.”

  “But it wasn’t just Carl, there was the band too. I mean, that’s what I wanted to get across with the pictures. There’s loads more of the band, that Carl didn’t really want me to take. But I think they’re probably better than all this posing stuff that Carl did, it’s more honest, and gives a better sense of the band as a working entity –”

  Chris Harris spread his hands and showed his sleepy smile, “And who cares about that? Really? Do you think they’d be able to carry on without that guy? Here you’ve got a band that are not that good –”

  “But you liked –”

  “OK, but not too great in the grand scheme of things. Mildly derivative. The one thing they have going for them that might give them a head start over all the other bands out there peddling the same kind of stuff is a charismatic front-man.
And they don’t get more charismatic than a pretty boy who’s dead at 23, or 24 or whatever. That image is gold. And if you fuck with that, it’s at your own peril. Nobody wants a star who’s like themselves.”

  Sean opened his mouth and shut it again. Chris sat down again with a sigh and lit a cigarette without offering one to Sean. He patted a pen against the pictures of the rest of the band and swept them into the wastebasket. The remaining photos he spread on the desk – Carl and the girl; the tattooist; three homeless pictures; Kurt Cobain; Carl biting the skin around his fingernails waiting to go on stage; Carl held up on the hands of the ecstatic crowd, the mike lead wrapped around his bicep.

  “These are the ones I’ll take.”

  * * *

  Sean missed his train and spent the evening with Chris Harris, drinking the headliner’s rider at a gig at the university. He woke up on Chris’ sofa with a mouth like an ashtray and a promise of regular work. There was an event Chris was interested in covering, and Sean could be useful.

  17

  Post mortems

  Four days after Carl died, at the same time that Peter was watching Freida cry; the same time as Lydia was stumbling to the toilet, and Sean was making an appointment with Chris Harris, the post mortem began.

  Orderlies wheeled Carl’s body into the hospital mortuary and the pathologist’s assistant checked the name on the tag tied to one of the body bag handles, and noted the position of the body. He took some photographs, as well as nail and hair samples, before the orderlies heaved it out of the body bag, stripped, washed it and put it back onto the cart.