Losing It

by Ross Gilfillan

  And then. Diesel saw it first, raising his chubby paw and pointing down the road like a sailor spying land. ‘There!’ he crowed, and we watched, sharing disbelief and mounting excitement as the familiar shiny shape of our very own black BMW cruised down the street and glided to a stop hard by the kerb. We tried to keep our cool; it was hard not to cheer. The idiotic jingle ‘For Lol’s a jolly good fellow!’ played in my head as the window wound down and Lol looked up at us. I took a moment to admire the layout of the controls on the dash and the deep leather of the passenger seat. The back seats were leather too, from what I could see – and now there were leather bags on them. I glanced back at the other guys. They were as excited as I was, crowding around the window for a better look at our latest and greatest acquisition. I could have hugged them. Clive was, in fact, hugging Faruk.

  It seemed that proper protocol was not to speak before Lol said something, which he did now, after some drumming of his fingers and more sniffing. ‘I’ve put the beast through its paces,’ he said. ‘Given it a good run, tested everything. And it’s all in top working order. All except the fag lighter, but who smokes, these days?’

  We smiled, all of us thinking that a dodgy cigarette lighter was a small price to pay for a car in such obviously pristine condition. ‘Don’t worry about that, Lol,’ Diesel said.

  Lol was fiddling with something on his lap. Then he brought out a long, fat cigarette with a twist of paper at its tip and asked if anybody, therefore, had a light? There was a moment of confusion, with three of us searching pockets for non-existent lighters, before Faruk pulled out a Zippo and gave Lol a light. Faruk carries everything, even stuff he doesn’t need.

  The end of Lol’s cigarette burned with a yellow flame then glowed like a red ember as he took a long pull. A deeply pungent scent filled the air. He inhaled deeply, held it for a moment and then turned his head and blew the smoke into our faces. ‘Thanks, fellas,’ he said and before the smoke had cleared, the BMW was once again heading off down the street, this time in the other direction. Our BMW, containing our £350, Diesel’s conman uncle and what I now identified as two travel bags, on the back seat. The next time any of us saw Lol and the BMW was on Crimewatch, after police raided a crack house in Aberystwyth.

  Which was how we ended up not with a fuck-off black BMW, but with a clapped out Ford Escort, that someone had part-exchanged with Faruk’s brother and which he was more than happy for us to take off his hands. Only Diesel had thought it was a good idea, telling us he had ideas for that car which would change it beyond our wildest imaginings. We just had to leave it to him and Faruk. He promised that with his genius for design and some parts from Clive’s garden, things would turn out all right yet. Well, they hadn’t.

  The girls are leaving the Casablanca now, carrying their kebabs and still enjoying a shared joke, probably still at our expense. Diesel’s watching them as he scratches his balls. ‘I’ve done my best,’ he’s saying, ‘but it hasn’t been good enough. Not for you. I’m telling you now, mate, you’re not the only one who’s disappointed tonight.’ And with that, he turns and goes back into the garage, where Faruk is demonstrating the stereo’s volume for the appreciation of the rest of the street. I hardly notice that Clive is at my side as I start to walk home. All I can think of is that there is no way in the world I’m going to let Rosalind Chandler see me in that car.

  CHAPTER 2

  It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll

  Rosalind Chandler.

  When I first saw her I felt – I don’t quite know how to say this – I felt I’d been plonked on a cloud and given a glimpse of Heaven. William Shakespeare, who is really famous with teachers, said, ‘No jewel is like Rosalind’, and I don’t think he ever said a truer thing, not even in Shakespeare in Love. When I saw Rosalind – I mean, really saw her – all my other anxieties (even that one) vanished as she turned and, from where she stood in the middle of the dance floor, lifted her heavy black lashes and looked directly at me, her gaze so intense that I totally missed the table as I put my drink down and poured a plastic pint-glass of Sunny Delite laced with Tesco’s vodka all over Andy Towse’s crotch. Not an auspicious start, you’ll agree.

  But to tell you how I first met Rosalind, I first have to tell you how I met the other three Horsemen of the Apocalypse, because they were all there at the school Prom and played their parts in the events of that momentous evening. We didn’t call ourselves The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse then. That was the name of our ill-fated band, which we later put together on the baseless assumption that at least one of us could sing. Back then we were plain old Brian, Clive and Faruk. I hadn’t met Diesel just then but I’d known Clive since he moved into the bungalow next door. Faruk was a classmate of mine. He and I had been thrown together by a mutual interest in old music, vinyl rock in particular, if that phrase means anything to you. Faruk had so many interests that there was bound to be one where we coincided.

  Collectors of music must have been around ever since Edison cut his first groove and before that they probably collected sheet music, but I was no longer collecting for the sake of the music. I was collecting for collecting’s sake. I mean, WTF? I had amassed fifteen thousand tracks on my old iPod, about twelve thousand of which I hadn’t heard more than once and a couple of thousand I hadn’t heard at all. And mostly, it was the same old rubbish that echoed between everyone else’s headphones. I suppose Faruk must have felt something similar, because we had both started experimenting with other stuff at about the same time. I’d always had an interest in indie but I was like someone who’d been smoking weed for too long and needed something stronger. All those boys with cool haircuts were just that, really. I was bored.

  Then it happened. Faruk showed me a YouTube clip of a band called Free playing at the Isle of Wight Festival in 1970.

  ‘Fuck me,’ I said. ‘What’s this shit?’

  Paul Rogers, all in black, is shaking a huge mane of hair and stomping his boots as All Right Now thunders across the laid-back crowds on a hot summer’s day, way back in hippie history. He grips two tape-bound mikes as he belts out the repetitive anthem while Paul Kossoff, a pretty boy with as much hair as Rogers, makes guitar playing look like an orgasmic experience.

  ‘That my friend,’ says Faruk, ‘is rock and roll.’

  ‘It’s blinding, whatever it is,’ I say. ‘Play it again.’

  Faruk was ahead of me. He’d dipped into all the obvious names from way back when, the Bad Companys, Creams and Led Zeps of heavy rock history. Then I came up with a handful of recordings from longer back and further away, some American stuff, and we started in on that. Me and Faruk getting into this together was like joining a secret society – no wonder we became such good mates. I don’t know if it was the music we liked so much as the secretive nature of the whole business. We listened to obscure online radio stations, did some deep delving on the net and ransacked the record bins in charity shops. Faruk raved about a vinyl copy of White Light, White Heat by the Velvet Underground, a band that had hung out with Andy Warhol, Brian. Warhol, he said, was an artist who had painted with soup and become famous for precisely fifteen minutes.

  He was mightily impressed with some of my finds, too, which included rarities by Jefferson Airplane, The Band, Big Brother and the Holding Company and a bunch of bootlegs of some people called The Grateful Dead. What I didn’t tell Faruk was that I had borrowed all of these from a box of records my granddad had left behind after his last visit. At the height of this mania, when we were spending most evenings at Faruk’s, because he had the turntable, and listening to Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band while we discussed Moby Grape’s performance at Monterey in 1967, my granddad (or GD, as he much prefers to be called) and nana, made one of their irregular visits, much to Dad’s annoyance. Nana has to attend the specialist unit at the hospital here so Dad can’t very well refuse them, but it’s clear there are unresolved issues between him and GD. The only one I know all about is the matter of the microbus. Dad hated having their rustin
g, psychedelically painted campervan parked outside our last house, in crappy old Eccleshall Crescent.

  Here, on the hallowed ground of Laurel Gardens, the old heap is an excruciating, blood-vessel-busting embarrassment. And you can see Dad hates the way his parents look, with GD still having long hair at 69 and wearing denim and tie-dyed tee shirts. But what he seems to hate Nana wearing isn’t her ankle length dresses or her colourful old kaftans. It’s her smile. She’s always smiling, unless she’s in pain, of course. Dad’s thinking that a woman so seriously ill has no right to smile. I love them both, but I’m only mentioning them now because it was GD who saw some of the records I’d been buying and told me to check out a record shop he knew on the other side of town.

  Alice and the Caterpillar is an independent record shop hidden away in a side street. The place is tiny, but decidedly atmospheric. Back then, the main room was really gloomy because of all the posters and leaflets obscuring the shop window –retro psychedelic artwork for ’60s festivals and recent flyers advertising local raves. There was a counter buried beneath piles of records and music papers but every other inch of space was taken up by boxes and boxes of LP sleeves. Not a single CD in sight. The place reeked of burning joss sticks and the dim light, the sitar music on the nineteenth-century stereo and the mild looking old man with long silver hair and John Lennon glasses made you question reality and glance at the door, to reassure yourself that the timegate back to the 21st century was still operational. A fat boy very much from our time was helping out, pulling inner sleeves containing the records from shelves behind the counter and slipping them into the covers that customers brought to the counter. Actually, now I think about it, we only saw one other customer.

  ‘Alright!’ he’d said cheerily as we entered, like he knew us. ‘Everything you want, all in them boxes there. White labels by the counter.’

  Faruk had disappeared, gone to look in the small adjoining room, which was even darker than the one I was in. I flicked through a pile of sleeves and was beginning to wonder why he’d dragged me across town to see this. Everything appeared to be 12 inch dance singles, hip hop and dubstep, mainly, and if you were a DJ or just solidly into that stuff, as I had been a year ago, then you’d have loved it there. But right then, I was more than a tad pissed off. We hadn’t ventured into one of Sheffield’s dodgier districts for this.

  ‘It’s all fucking dance,’ I said to myself as I skimmed through a box of records by the window. ‘Where’s the rest of it?’

  The old man looked up from his paper and smiled. ‘The good stuff’s all in the back,’ he whispered, flashing me a knowing look before he went back to his reading. He’d probably worked in a Soho porn shop before this. I found Faruk in the tiny back room, pulling out armfuls of albums and whistling at the prices. We’d never be able to afford any of it. They weren’t astronomically higher than CD prices, but to music lovers who’d never paid for their music, these prices were as far beyond our reach as the magazines on the top shelf at the newsagents had once been. It looked like we’d had a wasted trip and I was seriously pissed off. There was stuff I might have been doing on that Saturday, if GD hadn’t insisted on this pointless expedition. I’d planned to check out the new Chinese remedies shop on the high street, for one thing. Then I wondered if something might yet be salvaged from the day and asked the kid at the counter if they offered student discount.

  ‘What are you after?’

  ‘The 13th Floor Elevators,’ I said.

  The fat kid blew out his cheeks, like a hamster doing Maltesers.

  ‘That’s rubbish, that is,’ he said, finally. ‘I’m not selling you that crap.’

  I must have looked like I hadn’t quite heard him and I wasn’t sure I had. This must be some new kind of sales technique, I was thinking. Tell them they can’t have something and they’ll bite your hand off.

  ‘Look,’ the fat kid, said, casting a glance at the old man, who appeared to be asleep, his wire glasses hanging off his face. ‘It’s very simple. Everything in that room there is shit and everything in this room is sorted. Got it? I’m trying to do you a favour. That room’s for the old farts, mates of Magic Mick over there. Hippies who got themselves so ripped they think it’s still the ’60s. You’ll find everything you should be into right here.’

  Kids, these days.

  ‘I don’t think you understand how this works,’ I said, in my most reasonable tone. Some people need a little patience and the fat kid was clearly one of them. ‘I’m what’s called the customer, I decide what I want and then you sell it to me. With me so far?‘

  But the kid just blew out his cheeks again.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said, loudly addressing the man on the stool, his head drooping on his chest now, a little pool of saliva forming at the corner of his mouth. ‘Can you help me?’

  But the old man had begun to snore.

  ‘Don’t bother,’ the fat kid said. ‘He’s narcoleptic. Now, if you can’t afford the shit in the back and you don’t want anything from my side of the shop, you might as well piss off, yes?’

  Let me say here and now that I’m not a great one for confrontations of any kind. Bad service in a pizza place will still earn the chode who forgot my garlic bread and brought the wrong toppings a small tip. I make it a rule never to complain; things only seem to get worse when you do. But this fat kid had such an attitude problem that I was prepared to make an exception. Maybe it was the long drag across town, the wasted Saturday or just my time of the month. But I sort of lost it.

  I can’t remember what I said, it all came vomiting out. Fragments have resurfaced, though: my money’s as good as anyone else’s/you’re a music fascist/ overweight twat in an overpriced shop/ of course I have money/ what gives you the right to decide what I can listen to?/ wouldn’t know good music if it bit you in your fat arse/ I don’t care if I do wake him/ it’s not an insult, it’s a statement of fact/I am not a fucking hippy /I couldn’t wake him if I had the Ministry of Sound’s PA system/ I’ll buy what I want/ he’s not dead, is he?/ he looks dead/ what about the student discount?

  Just as I was coming to my senses and realising that calling a fat kid fat isn’t, well, phat, I heard Faruk saying something over my shoulder. It seemed like Faruk and the fat kid already knew each other. The fat kid said something and then Faruk said something else. I can’t remember what. I was too dazed, surprised and all right, ashamed of myself. Then the fat kid spoke. ‘Fuck me, Faruk, you got some funny friends these days. This one’s got a bigger gob on him than me!’

  And so, thanks to GD, I met Dennis Dalziel. Him and Faruk’d been close mates at juniors but they’d lost touch when they went to different upper schools, Diesel to Mafeking Street and Faruk to St Saviour’s. After that day at the record shop, Faruk and Diesel got all pally again and I found myself spending more time with Clive. Which was okay, because though it was now Faruk and Diesel and me and Clive, together we were The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, as we called ourselves when drunk – all except Faruk, of course. Now it only remains for me to tell you something about Clive and then I can introduce you, finally, to the heavenly Rosalind.

  CHAPTER 3

  Changing Man

  ‘It’s a f-f-flaming disgrace. Now there’s rolls of playground netting in the driveway. And lead flashing on the front lawn. I wonder which church roof that’s from? Somebody should f-f-flaming well report him to the council.’

  My father, Charles Johnson, is peering through the small window at the top of the stairs at the side of the house, the only place from which he can get an unobstructed view of our neigh-bours’ garden, or what’s left of it.

  ‘You did report him, dear.’ That’s my mum, standing a few steps below him, watching him the way a sparrow might watch a hawk. ‘In fact,’ she ventures, ‘I think you’ve reported him a number of times.’

  ‘I have reported that man,’ Dad says, ‘on twenty-two occasions for sixteen f-f-flagrant violations of local statutes. Six reports concerning a repeated inf-f-fringem
ent of the same bylaw.’

  ‘Was that the one about storing work materials in your garden?’

  ‘That’s not a garden, that’s Coventry after the blitz,’ Dad says. ‘Look at it. It’s like living next door to a camp of f-f-flaming gypsies.’

  ‘I expect he’ll tidy it all up one day,’ Mum says. She’s looking at the world through her rose-tinted varifocals again; she has to, living with Dad. ‘Then he’ll probably want to have a garden just like yours, Charlie.’

  ‘Charlie? Charlie?’ says Dad. ‘When in all these long years of our marriage have I ever encouraged you to call me Charlie? I hate Charlie. Charles, woman, the name is Charles.’

  Mum shuts up, Dad goes on complaining. I’m waiting to go downstairs so I can pop up town and investigate this new Chinese remedies shop on the high street but I can’t because Dad is there on the bit of landing where the stair turns, standing on a short set of steps so he can see out of the unfrosted top half of the window. I’m dealing with the idea of Clive’s dad having a garden like ours, where the lawn edges have been trimmed with the rigour of a military barber and every line is ruler-straight. There’s not a single weed in Dad’s flowerbeds and he must have used a spirit level to trim the hedge tops.