by Liz Nugent
I hadn’t yet spoken and Dad nudged me forward. ‘William here is the biggest fan in the family, aren’t you, son?’ I couldn’t think of anything to say to the guy whose poster hung on my bedroom wall and, following Mum’s stupid rules, I hadn’t brought my autograph book. ‘What’s your favourite song?’ asked Bono and he was actually talking to me. My mind went blank. I could only think of him calling Brian ‘buddy’ when Brian didn’t even own a single U2 album. Brian had two records, Bananarama and the Boomtown Rats. Dad poked me in the shoulder. ‘Go on, Willy, tell Mr Bono about the records you have.’ Willy. Mr Bono.
I made a gurgling sound and my voice, which had broken two months earlier, now for no apparent reason went full Michael Jackson. ‘I have all your records,’ I squawked.
‘Cool!’ said Bono.
‘Can I have your autograph too?’
‘Sure.’
He looked at me expectantly. I didn’t have any paper or a pencil. Dad saw my discomfort and took a letter and a biro out of his inside pocket. Bono signed the back of the letter and I looked gratefully at Dad.
‘I think he’s a bit star-struck,’ said Dad. A beautiful woman called to Bono from a stairwell. I think she was his wife, a gorgeous rock chick. I was going to marry someone like her one day. ‘Gotta go, enjoy the gig, man!’ said Bono, thrusting the bit of paper into my hands. At least he called me a man.
Dad shoved me in the direction of the billiards room and went off to find Mum. It immediately became apparent that this was the designated crèche for the day. It was full of children. All younger than me. Brian was playing Connect 4 with a small girl who looked about five. There was no way I was staying there. I told Brian I was going out into the crowd and to tell Mum and Dad I’d be back after Bob Dylan’s set.
‘I’ll come with you!’ said Brian, jumping up.
‘No fucking way,’ I said.
The little girl looked up. ‘You said a bad word.’
I walked away fast while Brian was still looking for his jacket, and the little girl clung on to his arm, not wanting to lose her new friend. Brian shook his head at me and sat down with her again. I went out through the vast hallway. Mum was laughing with the politician and Dad was looking at the paintings, pretending to be engrossed. Or maybe he was – history was his thing. Dad was definitely the oldest person at this concert. I slipped past them and out through the giant doors.
In front of the castle, I took the autograph out of my pocket. I turned over the page. Dad had given Bono a letter from his doctor with an appointment for the results of his prostate test. How disgusting. How could I show this to anyone? Worse, Bono had written Have a beautiful day, Willy! Bono and drawn a flower. It was a bit gay. I had told my dad a million times not to call me Willy, but he insisted it was a term of endearment. The boys at school who didn’t like me called me Willy. So I had an autograph signed to ‘Willy’, with a flower, on the back of a letter about my father’s arsehole. I crumpled it up and threw it on the ground. A security guard shouted at me: ‘Pick that up, you little scumbag!’ He came lumbering towards me and I ran and lost myself in the thronging masses.
One of the support bands, In Tua Nua, was already playing, fronted by a pretty blonde girl, but nobody who was cool liked girls fronting bands so I picked my way through the crowd, who were mostly sitting on the grass, smoking, drinking, kissing. The litter was already widespread and I was glad Dad wasn’t out here because he and the security guy would have been annoying everyone to pick up their rubbish.
I was on the lookout for Steve’s brother, Mark, but there were tens of thousands of people in this field. I had the small lemonade bottle in the pocket of my denim jacket. I took a few swigs and tried not to wince at the taste. I had four pounds in my pocket and eventually joined the queue for the beer tent. I could see there were some people younger than me getting served but some were being asked for ID. Dad had confiscated my fake ID a few weeks earlier and I hadn’t had time to replace it because Steve’s dad’s laminating machine had broken down from overuse. Steve had made a small fortune charging half the school a pound each to laminate a photocopied college ID.
The queue was half an hour long and most people were in groups. The lads behind me were about five years older than me and ignored me completely while the women in front of me were about fifteen years older. They were funny, even though they were ancient. They were real Dylan fans and took the piss out of me for being so young. When it came time to get served, one of them bought me a beer and saved me from the embarrassment of potential refusal. She wouldn’t even take the money from me. ‘Drink sensibly,’ she said, ‘you don’t want to get in trouble with your mammy.’ The three of them cackled and moved away.
The first band had finished by then and there was a lull on stage while the crew set up for Santana. I could see that groups of men were moving down towards the stage, but I hung back, trying to spot anyone I might know. I waved and said ‘Hi’ to two older girls who lived on our road, but they pretended not to see me and I felt like a dick.
The crowd roared as Santana took to the stage and I felt a rush of adrenaline. There was a surge forwards and I did well not to be trampled. I watched them for a while until they went into an endless guitar solo. I realized I was hungry so I queued at a van for chips. Another half an hour. I missed the end of Santana’s set. Nobody in this queue talked to me. The chips were the worst I’d ever tasted and cost £2 for a measly portion. I had only stuffed one handful into my mouth when a drunk girl knocked into me, spilling the rest of the chips on the ground. ‘Sorry!’ she yelped. Her eyes were unfocused and I reckoned she couldn’t be much older than me. She was averagely pretty. Nothing to write home about, but she was drunk and therefore she probably had beer – or access to it – and I might even get a grope. I grinned at her and she smiled back.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Stella.’ She stumbled a little and I reached out and held her around the waist, letting my hand slide down a little to her hip.
‘Ooops.’ She laughed. ‘I’m a bit pissed. Danny raided his mother’s secret vodka stash.’ I wondered who Danny was and felt bad that his mother was an alcoholic, but I didn’t have much time to feel sorry for him because the next thing I felt was a punch in the side of my head and then I was on the ground being kicked viciously in the stomach and ribs.
‘Take your fucking hands off my girlfriend, you dickhead!’ someone roared in my face.
Stella screamed, ‘Danny! Stop it! Danny!’ and a gap opened up in the crowd around us as they scattered to get clear of Danny’s fists and kicks. I raised my arms and knees instinctively to protect my head and groin, exposing my back and arse to Danny’s viciousness. The jabs stopped abruptly. I looked up through a veil of blood as Danny strode away through the crowd, followed by Stella clinging on to his shirt tail, wailing like a banshee. Several people came over and huddled around me. I struggled to breathe and wanted to vomit at the same time. An older woman tried to hug me into her bosom and somebody else threw a rug over me, while another person shouted, ‘Give him space!’ I felt dizzy and must have passed out.
I came to in the St John Ambulance First Aid tent. ‘Are you all right, sonny?’ said a man with a handlebar moustache in a uniform with a peaked cap, shining a small flashlight into my eyes. He would not have looked out of place in the First World War trenches, and for a moment I thought I might be hallucinating. ‘You took a heavy beating, so you did. I’m not sure we’ll be able to patch you up here. You’ll have to go up to Navan Hospital for X-rays.’
Everything hurt. I realized where I was, could hear the crowd outside, tried to ignore the vomiting patient on the trolley beside me.
‘What’s your name?’ said Handlebar.
I told him my name and showed him my Access All Areas pass, explaining that my parents and brother were in the VIP area in the castle. He quickly established that I was under sixteen, a minor. From outside I could hear UB40 singing ‘Red Red Wine’. The crowd was cheering and singing alon
g and this, I knew, was the best part of the concert so far. I could see through the flaps of the tent that I was to the left of the stage. I could see the entire crowd, 50,000 people it must have been, swaying and moving and grooving, and I almost felt like crying because I knew I wasn’t going to be part of it, that the day was over for me before I’d even seen Bob Dylan, that the blood on my face and the cutting pain when I breathed meant I was going to hospital. But Mum would be here soon.
UB40 left the stage as night fell and there was another lull, but the sound of excitement from the crowd was intense. They were waiting for the main man to appear. Through the gap in the tent door, I could feel the crackle of electric anticipation in the air.
A hefty guard came and took a statement. I described Danny as best I could, but I didn’t think they would have much success finding a young man with long hair dressed in denim since it was a fairly accurate description of at least 30,000 people, including me.
I heard the crowd roar and knew that Dylan had arrived on stage. I tried to sit up, but a stab of pain flattened me and I passed out again, briefly this time.
It must have been an hour before Dad arrived with Brian in tow. I was still in a lot of pain, though Handlebar had given me some pills that had at least taken the edge off.
When he saw me, Brian looked away. Dad was white-faced. ‘My God, what happened to you? We couldn’t find your mother. I think she’s backstage somewhere. Did you get into a fight? The medic says we have to go to hospital. Are you in pain?’ His face was full of concern and I loved my dad in that moment and hated my mother, who was no doubt flirting somewhere with someone younger than my dad.
I was stretchered on to an ambulance and Dad and Brian piled in with the paramedics. ‘What about Mum?’ I groaned. Dad looked grim. ‘I left messages with everyone there. She’ll find out where we are, eventually.’
When we got to the small hospital, I was X-rayed and found to have three cracked ribs, a bruised coccyx, extensive soft tissue damage to my stomach and a laceration over my left eye that needed four stitches. My chest was strapped and I was kept in overnight for observation. The hospital was busy. We discovered that two boys had drowned trying to swim across the River Boyne to get into the concert for free. I didn’t want to think about them, but I could hear the sobs of their relatives from the corridor.
There were other concert attendees there, some off their heads on drugs or alcohol, some who had gotten into fights. When I was back on a ward at eleven o’clock that night, Dad said that Mum had finally got in touch and he had spoken to her on the phone at the nurses’ station. She was going to stay the night at the castle and collect us all in the morning, as she couldn’t drink and drive. She sent her love and was relieved there was no major damage done.
Dad tried to be upbeat when he delivered Mum’s message, but I was annoyed she hadn’t found a way to get to the hospital to see me. Dad had called up a client who lived locally who offered him and Brian beds, but Brian insisted he wanted to stay with me. He found an armchair and pushed it between my bed and the bed of the acid-dropping hallucinator beside me. Dad, worn out and freaked out by the events of the day, didn’t argue and left Brian with me after seeking the agreement of the nurses.
As soon as Dad left, Brian started on me. ‘You really are a selfish pig, you know? Why couldn’t you just have stayed in the castle? Dad was worried sick. All the rock stars were coming and going through there. I got to meet them all.’
‘Where? In the crèche with the other kiddies?’
‘Yeah, and what’s wrong with that? They were nice, and we got hot dogs and burgers served to us, and Ali Campbell came in and someone took photos of us all and I got his autograph, and Bob Dylan’s too.’
‘You got Bob Dylan’s autograph?’
‘Yeah. I saw him going into the bathroom and waited till he came out.’ Brian pulled the autograph book out of his pocket and showed me an illegible scrawl.
‘You wrote that yourself.’
‘I didn’t!’
I knew he didn’t.
‘What was he like?’
‘Really old and a bit grumpy. He didn’t want to sign the autograph. I could tell.’
I flicked through the autograph book. He had the signature of all the stars who were there that day, including ones I didn’t even know were going to be there. All signed to him.
During the night, I had to go to the toilet. I climbed painfully out of bed and swiped his autograph book off the bedside table. In the toilet, I ripped out all the autographed pages, peed on them and flushed them down the pan. Then I threw the book into the special bin for incineration.
Brian was inconsolable the next day. He suspected that some other patient must have stolen his precious book. He was grumpy and uncomfortable after spending the night in the chair and we were both relieved to see Mum and Dad approach us on the ward, though Mum took her time getting to my bedside because she was signing autographs for some of the older nurses. She did not look her best and, after enquiring about my health, asked very few questions about what had happened. Dad was angry with her but tried to cover it up.
On the journey back in the car, Dad said we were never going to a concert or a big event together again, and I think that was a relief to everyone. Mum said nothing.
When we got home, Mum and I went to our beds and Brian went to fetch Luke from Auntie Peggy’s house. I recovered slowly and told my friends about the guy I’d beaten up, about how I’d been hanging out with UB40 and Bob Dylan. They easily got the truth out of Brian when, the following week, a photo of him appeared in a national newspaper alongside members of UB40, In Tua Nua and Santana. His face was turned to one side and the photographer had caught the crookedness of his nose. That was some consolation, at least. He made a liar of me and so I entertained my friends with stories of how Brian nearly wet his pants because he was scared to piss in front of a cow.
Unusually, Mum stayed in bed for nearly a week. She said she was under the weather but wouldn’t let Dad call a doctor and insisted he sleep on the sofa. Normally, when she was sick, she was a drama queen about it. She never had a sore throat, it was always strep throat, never a tummy bug but gastroenteritis, never a cold but a bad flu. Dad went to work every day and Luke and Brian rode their bikes around the neighbourhood. Mum and I ate tinned soup and toast and went back to bed. Six days after the concert, though, I heard her on the phone. I padded out of my room and listened to her whispering at the bottom of the stairs. I hovered on the landing and put my ear to the banisters, filling in the blanks of the one-sided conversation.
‘No, I wasn’t sober, but I didn’t want … I’d been chatting to him earlier, but I didn’t fancy him, Peggy … He forced me …’
Mum began to cry.
‘He pulled my skirt up. I have bruises everywhere …’
I was frozen to the spot. Between sobs, Mum was telling her sister what had happened.
‘You know me, I flirt with everyone. I don’t mean anything by it … That wasn’t the same thing at all, Peggy, that was a fling, and a short one, but I was involved that time. It was my choice … This was different, I thought he was our friend. We’ve been out to dinner parties in his house with his wife. I never wanted to … In a linen room, I think, he backed me in there and I couldn’t get past him … No, I didn’t. I should have, but if I had screamed, there would have been such a scene … I just froze. I didn’t know where Martin was. I was looking for William when he grabbed me.’
She had been looking for me.
‘Martin had disappeared. I didn’t know what had happened to William until an hour later … He didn’t say anything … I tried to get away, but he was holding my wrists above my head, he was too strong …’
I could tell by her voice that she was weeping.
‘After he was finished … you know, he just said “thanks for that”, like I’d given him a betting tip, and he left. I didn’t know what to do. I hid down in the kitchen with all the catering staff. A girl gave me a cup of
tea and then someone came and told me that William was in hospital, that Martin and Brian had gone with him in an ambulance, but I couldn’t move. I just sat there. And after a while I went out and the concert was all over. I went and sat in the car, but I didn’t want to go anywhere. I couldn’t even think about poor William. I just lay on the back seat and cried.’
I moved silently back to my room and put my head under the covers and tried to forget what I’d heard. It wasn’t my fault Mum had been raped. I wanted to kill the man who did that to her, but I was afraid to admit that I knew anything about it. If I told anyone, I’d have to think about it. Dad would blame Mum for flirting. Poor Mum.
11
2001
Luke was in New York that fateful and dreadful September. We hadn’t heard from him in a few weeks, but he was hopeless on email anyway and hadn’t quite got the hang of texting. We weren’t sure exactly what he was doing there. The last time I’d spoken to him on the phone in Mum’s house, he was really excited about an up-and-coming project. He said he was working with a hip-hop producer I’d never heard of who had apparently done some work with the Beastie Boys. Brian was supposed to be managing him, but I shouldn’t blame Brian for the fact that there was nothing to manage. Brian was also trying to hold down a job as a teacher in a school renowned for the violence of its students.
Luke’s street cred as a musician was in the toilet at this stage. His teenage fan base had outgrown him and nobody wanted his synth-heavy cheesy pop songs any more. He’d been doing private parties and a bit of daytime television but no tours and no big gigs. The stadium-filling days were behind him. He still made good money on royalties and airplay, and I reckoned he’d made at least a million at the height of his fame, so I didn’t feel too sorry for him. He had a mortgage-free house. Mentally, he’d been doing okay, he appeared to be taking his meds and was generally in control of his life. He could play a guitar well by now and his voice had improved over the years, so this new collaboration with Sharky D was supposed to be a great career move and would hopefully launch him in the US. Luke had been huge in Europe but had never broken through in the American market.
