“You reckon he’d chip in for the beer?” Colin asked.
“Dunno, maybe. It’s not like he’s got anything else to spend his money on, is it? Leave it with me, I’ll sort Greg out. You order the beer and figure out some way of getting it through the door.” She prodded the Tic-Tac-Toe board and pushed herself to her feet. “My game,” she said, and walked away. “That’s a biscuit you owe me,” she called out over her shoulder.
Colin looked down at his entoPAD. He composed a message to Biffo Ratbastard, telling him the gig was at State Retirement Home SY-379 at seven pm on the evening of Thatcher Day.
Now all he had to do was figure out how to get both the band, and the beer, past The Gestapo and whichever workfare assistant was working that day.
* * *
“Yeah?” Biffo Ratbastard said, peering at a bald, wrinkled face filling the screen of his entoPAD. The man’s wide, staring, blood-shot eyes darted around, as if he could see straight through Biffo and was taking in his surroundings. A deep, Z-shaped scar like the mark of Zorro ran down the left side of his face, starting just below his eye and ending at the corner of his mouth.
“Is that Biffo Ratbastard?” the man asked.
“Yeah?”
“Someone said you was looking for a drummer.”
“Yeah, I am. You got your own kit then?”
“Yeah. I haven’t got no transport though, so you’d have to pick me up.”
“No problem,” Biffo said, “I’m still mobile. You been playing long?”
The man smiled, revealing a row of crooked yellow teeth. “What, you don’t recognise me?”
Biffo tried to remember the name of the caller entoFACE had prompted him with just before he accepted the connection. Simon something-or-other, but it hadn’t been a name he recognised.
“What’s your name, mate?” Biffo asked.
“You’d probably know me as Fungal Matters.”
Biffo leaned forward in his chair and moved the entoPAD closer to his face to get a better look. Fungal Matters! Now there was a name Biffo hadn’t heard for a long time. Fungal had drummed with some of the top punk bands of the early twenty-first century, but had disappeared without trace in 2020. There had been a lot of online speculation about what had happened to him; some said he had gone to live in a tepee in the woods and survived on a diet of wild squirrels, while others said he was working as a car mechanic in Barnsley. Some even said he had become a property tycoon in New York, investing heavily in wind-farms and student accommodation.
Biffo tried to picture the man as he would have looked twenty-five years ago, when he was in his early fifties, a couple of years before his disappearance. Sick Bastard had headlined a punk festival in Brighton, with Fungal’s band at the time Underclass Strike Back supporting. They had shared an after-gig joint together to wind down in the venue’s dressing room before making their separate ways.
Fungal had aged badly. His trademark green and red double-mohican was gone, replaced with liver-spots and pock-marks covering his entire head. His eyes were hollow, sunk deep into his face, and never ceased their endless wandering. His nose was crooked, and looked like it had been broken several times. A long, white goatee beard was braided into five individual strands, with red and black alternating beads threaded onto each strand. They hung from his chin like crusty stalactites and clicked together when he moved his head.
“You still there?” Fungal asked.
“Yeah mate,” Biffo said, nodding. He took out his electronic cigarette and popped it in his mouth, sat back in his chair. “Fungal Matters, fucking hell. It’s been a fucking long time, mate. Where have you been hiding?”
“Hiding?”
“Yeah, mate. You just seemed to fucking vanish one day. Where did you go?”
“Nowhere, why?”
Biffo took a deep drag on his electronic cigarette and sighed as he exhaled. “Mate, you were one of the big fucking mysteries of the day. Every fucker and his dog had a theory about what happened to you.”
“Well all they had to do was ask me,” Fungal said with a shrug.
Biffo smiled and shook his head. “Fucking hell. So you kept up with the drumming then?”
“Yeah. Well, no, not really. But I took it up again a few years ago and I’ve still got my old kit.”
“Do you know any of our songs?”
“Sick Bastard? Yeah, of course I fucking do. I listen to them all the time on entoTUNES.”
Biffo’s eyes widened. “Really? Wow, that’s great, Fungal. So are you free on Thatcher Day? I know it’s a bit short notice.”
“Yeah, I’m free all the time. You’d need to pick me up though. I’ve got no transport.”
“Where are you living these days?”
“Scunthorpe.”
“Shouldn’t be a problem. Give me your address and I’ll come down mid-week with the rest of the band, we can have a bit of a practice jam.”
* * *
Biffo climbed out of his electric transit van and walked through a metal gate leading to a dilapidated-looking mid-terrace house. Net curtains twitched in the window of the house next door. Biffo heard the van door slam, then Mike Hock joined him at the door with a bass guitar slung over his shoulder. Biffo rapped on the door with his knuckles. A dog inside the house barked once, and the door opened a few minutes later.
“Yeah?” Fungal Matters said, looking out. His eyes swivelled in all directions. The dog, a black Labrador, stood by his side. A harness around the dog’s neck led to a plastic handle, which Fungal held in one hand.
“It’s us, mate,” Biffo said. He tapped his chest. “Sick Bastard. We’ve come down for a practice session.”
“Oh right,” Fungal said, smiling. “Come in, then. My drums are through here.”
Fungal stood to one side and gestured at a room to one side of the hallway. The dog sniffed Biffo’s hand. Biffo bent down and patted the dog’s head, then squeezed past Fungal and entered the room. It was dark and gloomy, the curtains drawn. A table with one chair stood in one corner of the room, a large black leather settee lined the wall under the window. Fungal’s drums stood in the opposite corner to the table, a small wooden stool behind them. There were no posters or photographs on the walls, no ornaments on display anywhere in the room. The faded, skull-patterned wallpaper looked like it had hung there for decades, and cobwebs hung down from the yellowed ceiling.
“Take a seat, I’ll go get some beers,” Fungal said from the hallway.
Biffo sat down on the leather settee and Mike propped his bass guitar up against the table.
“I’ll go get my practice amp from the van,” Mike said. Biffo tossed him the keys and Mike caught them in one hand before leaving.
Fungal returned clutching four glass beer bottles by their stems, with a bottle opener hooked over his thumb. He put the bottles down on the table and released the dog’s harness. The dog bounded onto the settee and lay down next to Biffo. It watched him with its head resting on its front paws. Fungal felt along the stem of a beer bottle with one hand and placed the bottle opener over it. The bottle opened with a hiss and he held it out in one hand.
“Cheers mate,” Biffo said. He leaned forward and took the bottle. He looked at the label and took a sip while Fungal opened another bottle. “Good choice in beer, mate. Who’s the other one for?”
“Oh,” Fungal said, “is there not three of you? I thought you said you were bringing the rest of the band down for a practice.”
Mike returned with his practice amp and placed it down in the centre of the room. He plugged it into a wall socket and looked at the beer bottles on the table. He picked one up and opened it. “Just the fucking job, cheers,” he said, and took a long drink.
“I were going to,” Biffo said, looking up at Fungal, “but I couldn’t spring old Snitchy from the Gulag they’ve got him in. They said I need to fill a form in at least three days in advance if I want to take him out anywhere. Fucking health and safety or some such bollocks, they said. Fucking daft if you
ask me, but I’ll get it sorted in time for the gig on Thatcher Day. Meanwhile I’ve got him on my entoPAD, I’ll hook it up to Mike’s amp and he can play through that. It’s the best I could do, really.”
“Oh, okay,” Fungal said. “You do that while I warm up.”
Fungal took a bottle of beer from the table and made his way to the drum kit in the corner of the room. Half-way there he stubbed his toe against Mike’s practice amp and cried out in surprise.
“What’s that?”
He raised his hands and waved them in the air before him, as if he were searching for an invisible barrier he had stumbled into.
“It’s my amp,” Mike said. He walked up to Fungal and waved his hand in front of the man’s face. “You can’t see, can you?”
“No,” Fungal said. “That’s why I need to know where everything is.” He skirted around Mike’s amp and resumed walking to his drum kit, suddenly more cautious.
“What happened to your sight, mate?” Biffo asked.
“Cataracts.”
“Cataracts? I thought they could be cured?”
“Yeah well, they can if you can afford the fucking treatment. I tried to get a loan to pay for it but they said I was a bad payment risk and turned me down. Apparently royalty payments from entoCORP aren’t classed as regular income.”
“Fucking cunts,” Biffo said. He shook his head. “That’s fucking terrible.”
“It’s not so bad,” Fungal said. He sat down on the stool behind his drum kit and picked up his sticks. “You get used to it after a while, and I’ve got Gristle over there to help me get about.”
The dog’s ears pricked up on hearing its name, and it looked over at Fungal. Fungal tapped his drum sticks together and beat them against each of his drums in turn. He started slow, then built up speed, ending with a drum-roll and a clash of cymbals.
Biffo stood up with a grunt. “Might as well get fucking started then,” he said. He propped his entoPAD up against a beer bottle on top of Mike’s practice amp and plugged a cable into its headphone socket. “You ready, Snitchy?”
On the entoPAD screen, dressed in black and red pyjamas, Steve Snitch sat in an armchair. On his knee lay a pink, leopard-pattern guitar, the fretboard propped up against an arm of the chair. Steve raised a gnarled thumb and said “Yeah.” His voice came from the practice amp.
“Cheers Snitchy,” Biffo said. He raised a beer bottle to the entoPAD screen in a toast.
“Fuck off, you cunt,” Steve said, smiling. “I hope it fucking chokes you.”
Mike strapped on his bass guitar and plugged it into the amp. He strummed along with Steve Snitch while he twiddled volume controls on top of the amp to get a good balance, slightly favouring his own bass over Steve’s lead guitar.
Biffo sat down next to Fungal’s dog. “Right then, let’s fucking do this. We’ll try State Pension first, yeah?” He looked at Mike, who nodded. Steve, on the entoPAD screen, raised his thumb again. “One, two, three, four –” Biffo shouted.
A cacophonous sound erupted from the small practice amp. The dog barked and ran from the room. Biffo waited for his cue and snarled the opening lines.
“We don’t give a fuck about your years of austerity, we just want to fucking party. You sit there in your Westminster bubble, well here’s some old cunts who’ll give you some trouble.”
Listening to the band play sent a cold shiver down Biffo’s spine. They sounded good, he thought, and took another sip of beer while he waited for his next cue. Fungal’s drumming was a bit off, he was a lot slower than Biffo would like and he skipped a few of the more intricate beats that were Peter Vile’s speciality. Mike Hock’s bass was a bit rusty too, but Steve Snitch’s guitar work was spot on. The others would get there in the end, Biffo was sure of it. A few solid hours of practice and they would all be ready for the gig on Thatcher Day.
* * *
On the morning of Thatcher Day, Colin Baxter woke with a dawn chorus of chirping birds and the early morning sun streaming through the open dormitory window. He sat up in bed and stretched, slid back the bedcover and directed his feet into his Sex Pistols slippers. He hobbled from bed to bed, rousing the occupants with a gentle poke from his walking stick.
“Wake up, you lazy bastards, it’s Thatcher Day.”
“Fuck off,” Frank Sterner mumbled. He rolled over and pulled the covers over his head.
“Come on you cunts, wake up,” Colin said. “It’s the best fucking day of the year, and I don’t want to waste a second of it. We need to get the decorations up in the lounge, then we can start the party proper.” Colin stood in the middle of the dormitory, looking at each bed in turn. Nobody roused. “Fucking hell, you lazy bastards,” he said, shaking his head.
Colin walked back to his bed and picked up his entoPAD from the bedside table. He swiped the screen to wake the device up, then went into its configuration settings to switch sound output to the built in speakers. He set the volume to maximum, opened entoTUNES, and scrolled down to find the song he wanted.
Sick Bastard’s Ding Dong the Bitch is Fucking Dead, a re-working of an old song from The Wizard of Oz, blasted out from the entoPAD’s speakers. Old men all around Colin groaned and complained at the sudden noise. One swore. Another sat up and threw a pillow at Colin. Colin smiled and set the song on repeat, not prepared to give anyone a chance to drift off back to sleep.
After a few plays of Ding Dong the Bitch is Fucking Dead, the dormitory door slammed open and the retirement home manager glared in at Colin. His eyes were red and puffy, his hair a mess. He wore a silk dressing gown with a dragon printed on it, and his feet were bare.
“Turn that noise off and get back into bed, Baxter!” he shouted from the doorway.
Colin turned his back on the man and shouted along with the song’s chorus. The loud music, in combination with the noise both he and the manager were making, started to have its desired effect. Men sat up in bed and scratched themselves, looked around bleary-eyed and yawned. Some reached out for false teeth or spectacles from their bedside tables. Only Dave Turner, oblivious to everything without his hearing aid, snored on.
The manager stamped over to Colin and snatched the entoPAD from his hand. “I said turn that noise off!” He prodded the screen angrily, and tossed the device onto Colin’s bed.
“Oi you cunt, I were listening to that,” Colin yelled.
The manager shrugged. “Yeah well you’re not now. People are trying to sleep, so you’d better get back into bed and join them or else.”
“Happy Thatcher Day to you too,” Colin said with a sneer. He turned away and reached for his entoPAD, to check it wasn’t damaged.
The manager laughed, humourlessly. “What is it with you people and Thatcher? She’s been dead and gone thirty years now, and it’s even longer since she was in power. So don’t you think it’s time you got over it?”
Colin wheeled back to the manager and raised his walking stick. He shook it. “You what? That fucking bitch destroyed Yorkshire. I don’t care how long it’s been, I’ll never forgive her for that.”
“Destroyed Yorkshire my arse,” the manager said. He grabbed the end of Colin’s walking stick and used it to push him back against the bed. “That’s not what they taught us in history. It was that Scargill and his militants wanting to hold the country to ransom. Thatcher just gave them a slap to put them in their place.” Colin tried to wrestle back his walking stick, but the manager held it tight. “They were just commies,” the manager continued, “and they got what they deserved. Anyway, I don’t care and this isn’t up for discussion. You either get back into bed right now or there isn’t going to be a Thatcher Day for any of you. Your choice.”
Colin glared at the manager and tried again to wrestle his walking stick free. As Colin tugged at one end, the manager pushed at the other. Colin fell down hard to a sitting position on the bed and cried out at a stabbing pain in his knee. The walking stick slipped from his fingers. He clutched his knee and turned to the manager, ready to call h
im a cunt for what he had just done.
The manager held Colin’s walking stick above his head, ready to strike at any moment.
Colin cried out in alarm. He raised his hands to cover his face. He trembled in anticipation of the punishment to come. He heard someone gasp, someone else implore the manager not to do it, but he didn’t dare look to see who it was. After a short pause, when no blow came, Colin spread his fingers and peeked through them. The walking stick wavered in the air before him, the manager still glaring down at him.
“You’ve got ten seconds to get back in that bed,” the manager said. Colin lay down and pulled the bedcover over his head. “Wise choice.” Colin jumped when he heard the walking stick clatter down by the side of the bed. “Same goes for the rest of you. If I hear any more noise from any of you before breakfast, that’s it. No Thatcher Day for any of you.” The door slammed.
“You all right, Colin?” Frank Sterner whispered.
Colin pushed back the bed cover and reached for his entoPAD. “Yeah. Fucking cunt. He’s got a big surprise coming if he thinks he can do us out of our Thatcher Day party this year.”
“You’d best not wind him up too much, you know what he can be like sometimes.”
Colin propped himself up against a pillow and prodded the Silver Punkers Community Forum icon on his entoPAD. The Thatcher Day 30 thread he was following had an additional nine hundred and sixty-one new posts since he had looked the previous night. He settled down to read them while everyone else drifted off back to sleep.
* * *
Breakfast was the usual watery porridge the residents were served every morning, and Colin slurped it up from a red plastic bowl while The Ruts played quietly in the background. He drank the porridge fast, eager to make a start on the Thatcher Day decorations. He put down the bowl and wiped dribbles from his chin with the palm of his hand, then wiped his hand down the side of his Exploited T-shirt.
Punk and Skinhead Novels Box Set Page 29
