But in the band we never really talked about stuff much, what we were doing with our lives. I think we saw that as a sign of weakness. Not even back when we’d nearly finished our A-levels, and we were all thinking about what we were going to do next. The thing was, Thomas and me were actually doing OK with our coursework and it looked likely we could both easily get into university. Not Oxford or Cambridge or anything, but some jumped-up poly was well within our reach. Jase and Ben would be lucky to pass. Jase was never that academic, and Ben couldn’t be arsed. But me and Thomas, we had a chance. We also knew, though, that if we went away, that would be the end of the band. We’d heard about other local bands that tried to stay together even when members went to uni and only played in the summer and Christmas, but it never worked. They’d always start playing with other people at uni and that would be that. Long-distance bands are harder to maintain than long-distance relationships, I reckon.
We might have stayed at home to study, but the local uni didn’t do any courses we wanted to do. So we decided, individually, without really discussing it, that we were all going to get full-time jobs. Nothing too demanding, because that would interfere with the band, and we’d all live at home with our parents to keep our lives simple, but enough to support us while we worked towards our goal. My parents didn’t mind really, as long as I was capable of making a living. Sometimes I wish they’d pushed me a bit harder. Looking back, if we’d only defined a bit more clearly what our goal was, then maybe we would have stood a chance of getting there.
Jase was already working nearly full-time at his dad’s garage anyway, which is half the reason why his grades were so shit. Thomas finally gave up his beloved paper round. Me and him both signed up with an agency. They got me various admin jobs in offices. Dull stuff mostly, filing, data entry. Photocopying. But still, I got a bit of money coming in, and I started saving up for a new guitar. Took me a while, but I finally had enough for a pretty decent one. As good as Ben’s, at least. They got Thomas a job mending snack and drinks machines. It was only meant to be temporary, little did he know he’d still be doing it four years later.
Ben went on the dole, of course. Made no effort to find any work at all. Just sat on his arse for years while his parents waited on him hand and foot and picked up his shit after him. I mean, he literally did nothing, not a single household chore, and just sponged. In the end, the dole office told him he had to actually get a job or they’d take his benefit away. He’d been filling up that little book they give you with lies for absolutely bloody ages, about all these jobs he’d supposedly applied for, even made up interviews he’d gone on, but he hadn’t really done anything at all. Then when they were one week from taking his money away, he finally got a job on the bins. Pretty ironic that he’d end up picking up other people’s shit.
In time, I proved myself to the agency and they found me a permanent position in a bank, just fiddling behind a computer with stacks of application forms, trying to convert people’s illegible scrawl into usable information. And, Christ, it was dull. But it was all dull, really. Not just work, but the band, Caroline eventually, everything. It took Neil to make things come alive again.
The band. Four years in a nutshell. Once we’d finished at college, we decided we should play gigs somewhere other than the Falcon. We weren’t that great at persuading anyone to book us, so my sister Nicki, who I now had realised was actually a person and not just my older sister, said she’d be, well, our manager, I guess. She wanted to go into events management, so it was good practice for her. Something for the CV, anyway. And pretty soon we had a lot of gigs lined up. The problem was, without college, it was difficult to get people to come to them. Our friends would be there, and our girlfriends, and their friends, but we could never really fill a room, and sometimes landlords would get grumpy about that. Still, we always played well, and people enjoyed it, so usually we were all right. But we never built a following. The people who enjoyed one gig would never come to the next, even when they said they would and we gave them the details and everything. No matter how much and how well we played, we just could not get the people to come back again. And you need a following if anybody in the music industry’s going to pay attention to you, which they never did, however many demo tapes we sent out.
Another thing that went wrong, in retrospect, is that we got into the Eagles. Well, not just the Eagles, but that whole laid-back West Coast sound, Fleetwood Mac and that. Don’t know why really, just felt safe, comforting, like metal used to be. And by this point we could afford our own PA so we could do harmony vocals. Our songs got slower, we used acoustic guitars more, and we even started playing on stools. We actually bought some stools specially for the purpose.
The problem was that our friends weren’t into that West Coast stuff the way we were, and it was harder to win over the regulars of wherever we were playing. And looking back on it, the songs we came up with weren’t that great. They didn’t really go anywhere, and they didn’t have any proper hooks, so they just didn’t stick in the mind. I remember one was called ‘Epitome’. The problem was that Jase had only ever seen the word written down, so he wrote this chorus that went ‘You’re the epitome’, and had it rhyming with ‘And I never want to roam’. I think it was Jenny who pointed out that the ‘e’ wasn’t silent. It made me miss Neil right then. Neil would have known that, I thought, and he wouldn’t have been an arse about pointing it out like Jenny was, at least the Neil I used to know anyway.
Ah Jenny. We freed ourselves of Jenny in, I think, ’97. After breaking up with Thomas umpteen times, she finally ran off with a skiing instructor she’d met taking lessons on a slope at the sports centre in preparation for a holiday with her mum. Her parents had divorced a couple of years earlier and, Christ, did she go on about it. Hours and hours of Thomas’s time wasted listening to her whingeing about how it made her feel. But he needn’t have bothered because she ended up shagging the ski instructor and moving to be with him in a village about ten miles away. I’m pretty sure they had kids, and I think someone saw her once and she’d put on loads of weight. I’d like to see her get into her stupid stripy trousers now.
So Jenny was out of the picture, thank Christ. Unfortunately, she took half our audience with her. On the plus side, Jase finally stopped shagging everything in sight and got a proper girlfriend called Charlotte, or Charlie, for short. She brought along a few of her friends to every gig, but nowhere near the gang that Jenny could command. By this point Jase was making good money, probably a bit too much money, I was later to discover, and moved out of his parents’ house and got a flat with Charlie.
But generally things were just winding down. Slowly, so slowly, over four years, our audience got smaller. But we’d never stop and ask each other why. None of us could ever find the guts to stand up and say what we were doing was shit and we had to ditch it all and start again. None of us believed, quite enough, that we could do it. We never went out of our way to really make it happen. We didn’t have the courage to stop either, so we’d just carry on. It was as if we were in a trap. Or a nightmare from which we couldn’t wake up. And you know what, to be honest, if I had been in a car crash at that point, and lost a limb so that I couldn’t play any more, I think I’d have been secretly fucking delighted. I’m pretty sure the same was true of the rest of them.
Mind you, we weren’t the only band that was changing. When Britpop hit, or about six months after it hit, come to think of it, the Horned Gods finally ditched the leather jackets their dads had bought them, had their slightly long hair cut, all started wearing Fred Perry and mod target T-shirts, and changed their name to Union Jack, which is exactly what they hung as their backdrop when they played the Falcon. Made it look like a National Front rally. They were really terrible. That was the last we heard of them, thank fuck. As for us, we never went all the way with Britpop. We liked Oasis and Cast and Dodgy, the blokier side of it, but bands like Suede or Gene or Chessington's World of Dementia weren't our thing at all. Way too ambiguo
us. Much too Neil.
It's easy to understand why I felt I'd been saved when I got the phone call from Neil. Nicki took it. She'd come round on Sunday afternoon to do some washing. She had a flat now too with her boyfriend Mark. I liked Mark. At least he wasn't smashing up Metallica records with a sledgehammer. Nicki burst into my room without knocking, something she'd always done, causing no end of anxiety during my earlier masturbation years. ‘You’ll never guess who’s on the phone for you,’ she said.
‘No, who?’ For a terrible moment I thought it might be Hannah.
‘That weird friend you used to have – Neil.’
‘You’re fucking kidding me.’
‘No, I’m not, and mind your fucking language.’
I went down the stairs to the hall where the phone waited for me. I hadn’t seen Neil in nearly four years, not since we’d finished our A-levels. In fact, our English Literature exam must have been the last time I saw him. It’s funny, he actually calmed down a lot towards the end of that year. He became less argumentative, more sullen, practically silent. People said they’d seen him hanging about St Edmond’s, the posh bit of town that Louise lived in. He’d just be standing in the street looking at houses. Once or twice I saw him down the Falcon, but he always came on his own, and one time he turned up really drunk, as if he’d downed cans of Napalm or something, which wasn’t like him at all. It was just embarrassing; he was shouting incoherently and really bothering people. I think he fell backwards over a table more than once.
I don’t think he did that well in his A-levels. Apparently a lot of his coursework turned out weird, with rambling arguments that went nowhere, about loneliness being the only valid and authentic human experience. It wouldn’t have been so bad, but that was for a Geography assignment. I remember in the last year of English Lit his essays became odd and he was no longer the teacher’s darling. And he said practically nothing all year in lessons. The one thing he did say, which was really strange, was when the teacher asked if anybody had any questions at the end. Neil raised his hand and said, ‘What effect does isolation have on the individual?’
Everybody just went, ‘What?’
The teacher quickly moved on to something else.
I remember just before that last exam. We were all sitting waiting for the tutors to start the big clock, and tell us to turn our papers over to start. Neil was in the row to my left.
‘Good luck,’ I said.
‘Thanks,’ he mumbled.
‘What are you going to do after this?’
‘Art school,’ said Neil.
‘Really? Where?’
‘Anywhere that will take me,’ he replied.
‘Is that what you want to do then, be an artist?’
‘Evcrybody’s an artist, Chris.’
‘Yeah, but I mean, get paid for it and stuff.’
‘I guess. I don’t really think in those terms.’
‘You haven’t thought about making any more music?’
‘We’re making music now. We’re talking, breathing, moving. It’s all music. Silence is music too.’
‘If you say so. Anyway, good luck.’
‘Yeah,’ he said. Then added, ‘You too.’ It was the first nice thing I’d heard Neil say in nearly two years.
I was told by someone later that because his grades were so bad, the only offer he got was from this little place in the middle of the Welsh countryside. And as far as I knew, that was where he’d ended up.
I picked up the phone.
‘Hello?’ I said.
‘Hi, Chris, it’s Neil.’ He sounded chipper.
‘Wow, long time, no hear. How are you?’
‘Ah, I’m OK. Listen, it’s my degree show in a couple of weeks, and I was wondering if you’d like to come and have a look at it. I know you’d have to travel down a long way to Wales and everything …’
‘Ah, well, I’m glad you thought of me, but—’
‘You see, the thing is my mum died a couple of years ago, and there’s no one else who could come. And I want someone to see it. So I was wondering if you’d like to.’ He spoke fast. With nerves probably. Excitement too, though, I sensed. ‘The opening’s on a Friday, but you can come down on the Saturday if you like. You can still get in to see it then. That’s if you don’t work at weekends.’
‘No, it’s OK, I’ll take some time off work. Yeah, sure, I’ll be there.’
I said yes partly because his mad mum had died, obviously, but it certainly wasn’t convenient, seeing as I’d be spending bloody hours on a train just to walk around looking at student paintings and stuff. I don’t even look at proper paintings. But I knew I had to say yes, regardless of all that. Maybe I knew I’d lost something important, about four years ago, maybe five, and Neil was the only person who could find it for me. Or at least remind me of how to find it for myself.
‘Great,’ said Neil. ‘I’ll phone nearer the time with train times and stuff. I’ll meet you at the station, if the System allows it.’
What the hell did that mean? Little did I know it, but I’d just been thrown into the heart of the latest manifestation of Neil’s craziness. This would be like the screaming of the talent show, amplified a hundred times over.
5
I went by train because my car was in too bad nick to be trusted with such a long journey. We all had cars now, except Ben, of course – I had to pick him up every week to take him to band practice. The journey to Wales lasted fucking ages. I set off at half past eight in the morning or something, and I was still on it at four o’clock in the aftemoon. I had to change twice, once at Bristol, then again, until finally I was on this slow stopping service working its way through all these tiny Welsh villages with their crazy names. Can’t remember what they were called now, of course. Can’t even remember the name of the place where Neil was studying. It wasn’t much bigger than all the other places we stopped at. All those small towns. They could go on for ever. An eternity of them.
Finally, just as the blood was refusing to circulate round my body any more and I thought my left leg had fallen off, we pulled into the station. I got off the train, as did a bunch of other people. I presumed they were all going to the degree show too. Everybody dithered on the piss-smelling platform for a few seconds until somebody worked out where the exit was and we all followed like cattle. It was a bright sunny day. I was too hot in my jacket, but I had nowhere else to put it. I just had a small travelling bag where it would barely have fitted. We passed through the gate – there was no ticket hall – down some steps and into the car park. Neil was waiting for me.
‘Hi, Chris,’ he said, smiling. I nodded. I wasn’t sure what to do at first. I walked over and shook his hand. He looked more or less the same. Not angry, not depressed, but, I don’t know, strained, I guess. His eyes looked tired. He had an old leather satchel hanging from his shoulder. He was still wearing a black polo neck. It looked as tired as he was. I guessed it was the same one.
‘Hi, Neil,’ I said. ‘How’s it going?’
‘Very well at the moment,’ he said. ‘Of course, that could all change.’
The fact that pretty much the first thing he said to me was weird suggested that nothing had changed. I had a horrible sinking feeling and suddenly regretted coming.
‘Do you want to see the town?’ said Neil. “There’s nothing really here, though, other than the art school.’
‘Actually,’ I said, ‘is there somewhere we could get a drink? I’m pretty dehydrated.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Neil. ‘There used to be a drinks machine on the station, but they took it away because kids kept on pissing in it.’
‘To be honest, I was thinking of a pub.’
‘Oh, OK. Actually, what’s the time?’
I looked at my watch.
‘It’s just gone seventeen minutes past four.’
‘Right, we can go to a pub, but I can’t guarantee I can stay in it after four thirty.’
‘Ah, OK. Do you have to be somewhere?’
Neil clearly didn’t know where to find a pub. He just looked into the distance awkwardly trying to spot one. Fortunately I could see one myself. I pointed, and Neil looked relieved.
By the time we’d got our pints, it was already nearly four thirty.
‘You’d better drink up,’ I said, ‘if you’re going to make it out of here by half four.’
‘Well, I may have to leave my pint here if I do,’ he said. ‘There’s no way round it really, if the System says I have to.’
‘What system? I don’t follow.’
‘Here, I’ll show you.’
He reached into his satchel and took out a ring binder and a calculator. He typed something in, and smiled slightly.
‘It’s OK,’ he said, ‘it was an even number.’ He opened up the binder and quickly but neatly wrote something down.
‘That’s good, I guess.’
‘Well, yes, it is. If it were an odd number then I’d have to find the corresponding activity and go out and do it.’
‘Would you really?’
‘Yes. That’s the System. I generate a number at random between one and two hundred on the calculator. If it’s an even number, I can carry on with whatever I’m doing. But if it’s an odd number I’ve got to consult the table. Look.’ He tapped on the calculator again. ‘Now, I’ve just got ninety-one, which is an odd number. So if that had been the number I got just a minute ago, then I’d have had to look at the table.’ He riffled through the binder until he found the page he was looking for. It looked like some sort of chart he’d coloured in with pencils. He ran his finger along one line of it. ‘OK, ninety-one is … go swimming.’
Flying Saucer Rock & Roll Page 21
