The Thrill of It All

by Joseph O'Connor

  ‘I’m a little tired, yes,’ I said, cunningly. I had seen that Shay had entered the room clad only in ill-fitting underpants and was silently urging me on. Jimmy did not look at him but continued to regard me as I rubbed an eye and pretended to yawn.

  ‘Sure lie down, would you not? Will I pull off the young master’s wellingtons? Would he like a cup of tea in the bath?’

  ‘I’d prefer cocoa. Or maybe a coffee?’

  The finger that had comfortingly stroked a runt pygmy marmoset’s belly was extended in my direction, shaking. ‘I’ll coffee you, Mister Bucko. You see if I don’t. An essay on Blake’s imagery. And they call that fukken work. And you wonder why the English laugh at us.’

  ‘I don’t,’ I said.

  ‘Oh they laugh at us in England. They are breaking their shites laughing. And why wouldn’t they laugh? An essay on Blake’s imagery.’ I will spare the reader the Second Movement of his Wagnerian denunciation, but blasphemies were many and sacrilegious oaths plentiful, as were impracticable suggestions of a picturesque nature touching the late William Blake (1757–1827) – surely a strong candidate for High Queen of Daisydom – as well as myself, the college authorities and my associates. Jimmy’s own imagery was vivid and pungent, if sometimes contortedly expressed. It was clear that he didn’t feel a grounding in the literature of the English-speaking archipelago would have many practical applications in the marketplace. In this, of course, he was not entirely wrong. ‘Damn the essays on Blake’s imagery I ever wrote in my day, I’ll tell you that, Your Majesty.’

  ‘I’ll read it to you if you like? Want to pull up a chair?’

  ‘Oh terrible smart, aren’t you. Prince Fucky the Ninth. And you arsing your way through the world like a – like a –’

  ‘Daisy?’ I suggested.

  At this point, perhaps mercifully, Mum entered the kitchen, looking weary and glancing conspicuously away from my brother’s investigations of his southerly person, to say there was an individual calling himself ‘Bongo’ on the phone in the blessèd hall – ‘blessèd’ was the nearest she ever came to a curse-word – and he had recently departed a group with a name of almost libellous unpleasantness and he was only one of a profusion of drummers to have telephoned that night and for the love of the Living God and Our Holy Virgin Mother could I not make it stop and where had I been till this hour?

  ‘In the library, writing an essay,’ I slurred. ‘On Blake’s imagery.’

  ‘I know what library you were in,’ Jimmy said coldly. ‘A library called Sheerin’s pub.’

  ‘I have never been in Sheerin’s pub in my life,’ I responded, lying in the sake of the cause.

  ‘A library with a “discotheque” going on in the basement. And an abortionist handing out contraceptives to schoolgirls.’

  ‘I don’t go to discotheques. Whatever those are.’

  ‘My hairy sainted aunt you don’t. You forget I have friends.’

  It was easy enough to forget, since he didn’t have any friends at all, but Jimmy in supervisory mode liked to conjure up the spectre of himself as commander of a legion of zoo-keeping spies that was tracking you through the sulphurous alleys and opium dens of Luton and noting your every judder. ‘You were seen,’ he would say, as he did on this occasion, and the more ardently you replied that you could not have been seen, unless perhaps by some unfortunate wretch suffering the delusional effects of paranoid schizophrenia, the more he would assure you that you had been.

  ‘You were seen.’

  ‘By whom?’

  ‘Never you mind by whom.’

  It was cruel making him say ‘whom’, a word no Irish person ever uses unless giving an impersonation of a gobshite. I made him say it a few more times but then I felt I should stop because Shay’s attempts not to laugh by stuffing a tea towel into his mouth were beginning to frighten me a little. Jimmy whipped around and glared at him, like an owl in a mood. Then slowly he revolved the orb of his head back towards me. It was by now a hellacious shade of red that no English adjective could describe. Ensanguined and fierce, it was redness itself. I felt I was being observed by a huge Japanese flag on to which some vandal had crayoned a scowl.

  ‘Go up and get the bible, Alice,’ he commanded my mum.

  ‘I will in my hat,’ she said.

  ‘I am going up that fukken stairs. And I’ll be back with the bible. I swear to the living Jayzus, I will get that bible, God forgive me. Are you telling me you will put your filthy paw on it and swear before Almighty God that you were not in a pub this evening?’

  ‘I won’t swear on the bible, no.’

  ‘Hah!’ he exclaimed. The dog woke up, startled, and began doing to itself what my brother’s then girlfriend reportedly refused to do to my brother. Mum looked a little uneasy as she toed it.

  ‘I have quit the Catholic Church and become a Quaker,’ I told Jimmy, a bit of a tongue-twister when you’re sloshed out of your tits and trying not to look at an auto-fellating greyhound whose showbiz possibilities are occurring to you. ‘My people do not take oaths.’

  ‘I’ll Quaker you in a minute. With the tip of my boot. Do you know your trouble, Fellow-my-Buck?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, to disconcert him. But it didn’t work.

  ‘Idleness. And ingratitude. Oh go on, that’s right, laugh. You’re good and able to swig Guinness and talk shite by the yard, I’ll give you that. You and your brother there. Shay Guevara himself. A nice pair of intellectuals I’m after raising in this gin-shop. Laurel and fukken Hardy, only you wouldn’t know who was who.’

  ‘Whom,’ my brother interjected.

  ‘If there was doctorates in bollocksology and scratching yourself in bed, the two of you’d be professors by now. Pair of loafing, idle thicks. You couldn’t find your arses in a dark room.’

  ‘Jimmy, love,’ said Mum, in mildest admonition. ‘Don’t be too hard on the boys.’

  The remark, though gently spoken, stirred a poker in his coals. Jimmy adored and respected his wife as the personification of all goodness, his and everyone’s moral better by a distance of furlongs, and to receive her disapproval would always send him scats, as it did on this occasion. The eruption of Mount Goulding was close, one felt. He blamed me for his shaming but continued what had caused it, bad words raining on the corner of the room in which I tried not to snot myself with laughter. I was the daisyest fukken daisy in the bunch, he assured me, ‘a daffodil’, ‘away with the fairies’.

  Please call me a violet, I was silently beseeching. I wanted to hear him say ‘voilet’.

  ‘I’m vay shorry, Shimmy,’ was the best I could manage. ‘Vay vay shorry indeed.’ A sudden charade of penitence could make him pause and rev the engines. But he opted to accelerate at the speed bump.

  ‘Oh, he’s teddibly sorry. Oh, lardee-dar-dar. He’s teddibly, fraightfully soddy.’ It was his practice when angry to falsely imitate my accent as though it belonged to one of the actors in the televisualisation of Brideshead Revisited, a programme that both enraged and beguiled him. By now I was quacking back hot tears of mirth, low honks bursting forth from my nose, as he flailed me with a florilegium of fucks.

  Well, there followed his lament on the recession then besetting the kingdom, but how none of her people should be worried. Their days of tribulation were numbered, thanks be to God, for the international bond markets would rejoice at the tidings that my brother and I, when eventually we deigned to enter the workforce, would go armed with a knowledge of poetry. Lesser nations had committed the grave error of educating their young persons in skills that might prove of some remote use. Pity the poor Germans with their clattering factories. How they must be envying us nowadays. ‘Hallay fukken looyah. A degree in readin pomes.’ He shook his head in what he must have thought was a gesture of abject astonishment, like a lawyer resting his open-and-shut case.

  Kindly woman, my mum remarked on the excellence of the college library staying open until midnight on a Monday and could she poach me an egg on toast.

  ‘Wou
ld you not get him a fukken lobster and a drop of champagne, no? I can send the fukken butler out for chips.’

  ‘Jimmy, please.’

  ‘It’s you I blame! You should have reddened their arses. Look at him. Fukken daisy can barely stand up. Streeling into my house stocious from some pub full of whures.’

  ‘He was writing an essay on Blake’s imagery,’ she continued placidly. ‘And that’s a very nice thing to be doing.’

  ‘I know damn well what essay he was writing,’ Jimmy said. ‘An essay on the imagery of MY HOLE!’

  ‘That would certainly make an interesting theme,’ I said.

  ‘Especially for a sociologist,’ my brother added, crucially.

  Moments later, smoke. And goodnight.

  Six

  WE SAW DRUMMERS of passable ability and some who could barely hit a skin. The former tended to glaze over when they heard Fran’s songs, the latter to try outbanging the competition. But loudness was not what we were after. Some candidates wore wire-rimmed glasses and listened hard when you spoke, which slightly put you off them, for some reason. A creepy grinner in his mid forties, clearly a sex-case, pitched up in a leather jacket like a pervy Fonz. Rhythm was ‘rooted in the body’, he kept saying to Trez. We all had ‘cycles’, women especially. We suggested he cycle on home.

  You’d have reckoned in a burg only thirty miles from the world capital of rock and roll that recruiting a drummer would be easy enough, like unearthing a welder on an oil rig. Admittedly, the remuneration was unexciting, i.e. nothing, but this was the early 1980s. We had nothing ourselves. If anyone wanted a quarter of it, we were happy to agree. But sometimes, talks broke down.

  It proved a difficulty that our advert exaggerated, not to say lied, about the group having gigs lined up. I’d warned that this was foolish but lost the vote two–one. Only a fool wouldn’t have suspected Fran of a certain creativity when it came to the truth, but I was surprised that Trez acquiesced in it. Her reasoning was that the gigs would surely follow once a drummer came on board. Fran didn’t bother with reasoning.

  We saw thrashers, smashers, belters, welters, thudders and twelve-cymbal jazz-boys. Groovers, whompers, rinky-dink stompers, a chappie who banged on a box. Flailers with Taekwondo sweatbands engirding sodden brows. Metallers with biceps of oak. Knockers-on-woodblocks, glockenspielers in docs, cowbell-abusers galore. A young woman – how we would have loved a young woman on drums – who found three-four time a challenge. Bless her, she bashed the hi-hat like granny at the seaside playing Whac-a-Mole on her way to the bingo. Folksters with bodhráns. Flunters with gongs. A stoner on washboard and thimbles (I swear to Keith Moon), recently released from prison in Wales. All we wanted was a kid of our own age with the essentials and a look. But it was like asking Jesus to disco. They’d turn up to impress, talking paradiddles and flams, in their bleached 501s and ironed NYU tank-tops, wanting to give you their ideas about the nature of rhythm, as though anyone ever danced to an idea. Sweeping fingers across a chime-tree, they’d ask you to listen, really think. You found yourself thinking of hitting them. Others had been to the hairdresser in a lamentable attempt to look like quiffed Larry Mullan, handsome drummer with U2, or that outfit’s bemulleted vocalist.

  Umcha, umcha, umcha, UM. Thus, my dreams resounded. Badda-badda bum bum, opening figure of Ann Peebles’s ‘I Can’t Stand the Rain’, was one pattern we’d asked candidates to keep playing while we tried jamming. One morning at the breakfast table Jimmy happened to idly rap it out with his fingertips. It was the closest I ever came to parricide.

  These were difficult days. Busking as a trio was not without its challenges, particularly because Trez was adamantly committed to her studies and insisted our public appearances be timetabled around them. Also, she liked you to play in tune and bothersome things like that. Ah the straitjacket of the classically trained. Any monies we gained from flouting the Vagrancy and Solicitation Act (1853) went immediately to hire the little audition room on Cumberland Street in the town, and I found the effort of feeding this monkey exhausting. Weeks cranked by. Luton’s Ringo eluded us. The dread spectre that would never be a rock band began to possess me. Doomed to be acoustic, drummerless, undanceable, our future was as Bedfordshire’s answer to Peter, Paul and Mary. With two Marys. That wasn’t a good place to be in the early 1980s when Stewart Copeland of the Police was pounding his way to American number ones while peroxide-headed Sting, looking like a pouty fugitive from A Clockwork Orange, skanked and thwacked and thunked on the bass, saying mine is a band with a drummer. An eternity shorn of rhythm would be my desolate fate. I’d be filed under Easy Listening.

  Pattern. Periodicity. Call it what you will. The percussion of the world never stops. Without it, music is pretty, a distraction, nothing more. The sea without its tides would be a puddle. The void from which our species oozed will always be a void, and our way of defeating it is to clap. Some Neanderthal smeared in wode eyed the lightshow of the stars and smacked his belly in halting four-four. In the snap of a finger, the jitterbug arrived and the apes learned to walk on the moon. All of which is touching. But we couldn’t find a drummer. It was what Fran termed ‘a pain in the oysters’.

  In the end, Trez stepped in, as she might have done from the outset. My diary records an absurdist conversation that took place in the Trap on the night of Wednesday 2nd March 1983. Funds being low, we were sharing one pint, not a unit of capacity that is easily trisected in any context involving youth, human nature and alcohol. The beer tasted soapy. We’d no cigarettes. The feeling between us was fractious.

  ‘My brother plays drums.’

  ‘Your brother, Trez?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘This in’t the fukken Osmonds,’ Fran clarified.

  ‘Your brother plays drums?’

  ‘Rob, that’s what I said. Do you have to repeat it? Sweet Jesus.’

  ‘He repeats your every word because he’s into you.’

  ‘He isn’t.’

  ‘He’s smitten.’

  ‘No he isn’t.’

  ‘Ask him, why don’t you?’

  ‘Leave him alone.’

  ‘He’d like to be your cello.’

  ‘I said leave him alone.’

  ‘Purring betwixt your thighs.’

  ‘Your brother plays drums, Trez ? Why didn’t you tell us?’

  ‘Because he works, Rob.’

  ‘He what?’

  ‘He works for my uncle Jack.’

  ‘He plays drums for your uncle Jack?’

  ‘No he doesn’t! He works.’

  ‘So, he works for your uncle.’

  ‘Jesus, that’s what I said.’

  ‘What’s he do? For your uncle?’

  ‘He works,’ Fran said.

  ‘I . . .’

  ‘My uncle repairs washing machines. My brother helps him out. Stop drinking my share, Fran, you mouldy fukken scab. And he also plays drums. It’s his hobby.’

  ‘His hobby’s playing drums?’

  ‘Merciful Christ.’

  ‘So you’re saying . . . he’d like to be in the group?’

  ‘He wouldn’t like to be in the group. Because he works. For my uncle. A fact I have mentioned four hundred bleeding times. But he also plays drums. And he’s good.’

  ‘What’s he into?’ Fran asked her.

  ‘Musically?’

  ‘No sexually. Of course fukken musically. You never fukken listen. It’s beyond me why acne-boy fancies you.’

  ‘Sod off, Fran, okay?’

  ‘Well, she’s deaf. It’s annoying.’

  ‘From you? I don’t listen? Hypocritical flunt.’

  ‘What kind of washing machines?’

  ‘Shut your hole, Rob. Okay?’

  ‘Anyone any money for a pint?’

  ‘No.’

  FROM INTERVIEW WITH SEÁN SHERLOCK,

  NOVEMBER 2012, CONDUCTED BY MOLLY

  GOULDING-O’KEEFFE, ROBBIE’S DAUGHTER

  See, where your auntie Trez and me was brought u
p, that’s what you heard. That part of south London, there’s people from everywhere. West Indians, Ghanaians, Nigerians, Congolese. Like, our neighbours in the flat upstairs was a family from Guyana. Steel bands and stuff. Same in school. There was black kids and white together, couple of Irish, Pakistani. You didn’t think about it or nothing, [it] was your parish, that’s all. I mean, yeah, you’d have your National Front selling papers down the High Street now and again, but they was dumb as a box of rocks. They’d be all ‘Keep Britain British’ but you didn’t pay them no mind. There’s an arsehole in every town. That’s the law.

  Old neighbour of ours, Ernie Ballantyne, had a second-hand record stall up Lewisham market. He’d let me help on a Saturday. So there was always records around. The old teddy-boy stuff, then your glam, your country, jazz, the pop stuff, rocksteady. Ern didn’t care, he’d sell anything. He was into the old Gracie Fields, the wartime songs. ‘White Cliffs of Dover’, all that. He knew Ian Dury a bit, you know, of the Blockheads. Dury’s dad drove a London bus and so did Ernie for a while. And he knew the blokes from Squeeze because they come from Deptford down the road. Nice man, Ernie. Brung me to my first ever gig. 19th February 1975. Chuck Berry at the Lewisham Odeon. And he’d take me down the wrestling, Kendo Nagasaki, Giant Haystacks, all that. First time I’s ever in a pub was with Ernie, the Bridge House, Canning Town, to see Dr Feelgood. Another one I remember was the Greyhound in Chadwell Heath, outfit called the Spinning Wheel was on. I think he felt sorry for me and Trez because we hadn’t no dad. And I liked helping him out on the stall.

  But the ska done me in. Dunno why. Just clicked with it. The Skatalites and Desmond Dekker. Prince Buster. The Dragonaires. Bluebeat stuff. Delroy Wilson, all that. I dunno, I liked the sunniness of it. The way a kid will. The English ska was more down, you know, gritty, in your face. I liked the Jamaican stuff better . . . ‘Hard Man Fe Dead’ . . . ‘Oh Carolina’. . . ‘Monkey Man’. . . And to me, there’s music just in people talking. So I’m glad I’s born in London. That’s a choir, right there. Get the Tube from Whitechapel over to Acton Town, you’ll hear every language in the world. Know what I mean? To me, that’s give a sweetness to London like nowhere else around. Like, I love New York and LA, but it ain’t London, never will be. The place you come up is special.