by Kevin Brooks
So, basically, we ended up with a really crappy sound, which was good for Bluntslide—as it’d make them sound better—but really bad for us.
“Even the bloody monitors aren’t working properly,” Chris fumed, back in the dressing room. “I can hardly hear what I’m playing.”
“I can hear what I’m playing,” said Ronny, “but I can’t hear anyone else.”
“God!” spit Jason, throwing a beer can against the wall. “This is shit!’
I just sat there, sipping from a can of beer, looking around the dressing room. It really was a toilet. The sinks and cubicles and urinals had been taken out and a couple of benches and a table put in, but it still looked and smelled like a toilet. The walls were covered in graffiti, bare pipes sagged from the ceiling, and there was just one tiny window at the back, a small square of frosted glass in a mildewed frame.
As Jason and the others kept on drinking and smoking and moaning, I leaned back against the wall and let my mind drift back to the day before, when Dad had called me into his study to give me his decision.
“After careful consideration of the circumstances,” he’d told me in a solemn voice, “I’ve decided to let you attend your concert.”
Thanks, Dad, I thought to myself now, looking around the room again. Thanks a lot. And I started laughing.
Jason stopped ranting and stared at me. “What’s the matter with you?”
“Nothing,” I said, still laughing.
“Come on—what’s so funny?”
“This…us…everything…” I waved my hand around the dressing room. “The Big Time—we’ve finally made it…”
Ronny started chuckling along with me, but Jason and Chris didn’t get it, or didn’t want to get it. They just stood there staring at me. Jason kept licking his lips, flicking his tongue in and out like a lizard. His eyes were bulging so much I thought they were going to explode. He looked ridiculous. I couldn’t stop laughing. After a while, Jason gave up on me and turned his attention to Ronny. Ronny kept on laughing for a while, but he couldn’t keep it up under Jason’s glare, and before long his laugh had faded to an embarrassed mumble and he’d lowered his eyes to the floor.
“Idiot,” Jason muttered, turning his back on him. “God, this place is a shit hole. What’s the time?”
“Eight-thirty,” said Chris.
“Half an hour to go,” said Jason, shaking his head. “Christ, I need a proper drink.”
“The bar’s open,” Chris suggested.
Jason wiped his nose. “No—let’s get out of here. There’s a pub across the road. We might as well get pissed—the gig’s gonna be shit, anyway. Come on…”
He grabbed his jacket and strode off. Chris tagged along in his wake, leaving me and Ronny behind in the dressing room. I didn’t really know Ronny that well. He was always pretty quiet, keeping himself to himself, and he seemed quite happy to stay in the background. I liked him for that, but we’d never got around to talking very much.
“You all right?” I asked him.
“Yeah…”
“Don’t let Jason get to you,” I said.
Ronny shrugged his shoulders. “Jase is all right, really. He doesn’t mean anything. He just gets a bit worked up about things.”
“He wants to lay off the speed,” I said. “It doesn’t agree with him.”
“Not much does.”
I laughed. “If he keeps on flicking his tongue in and out, someone’s going to shoot him and turn him into a pair of shoes.”
Ronny grinned quietly.
We sat there for a while, not speaking, just looking around at the grubby walls, the stained ceiling, the empty beer cans scattered around the floor…and I thought to myself, If this is the dressing room, imagine what the toilets are like.
And I started laughing again.
Ronny looked at me.
I shook my head.
He said, “D’you want to go to the pub?”
“Might as well.”
And off we went.
It was only a short walk across the road, but the sudden shock of the cold night air was enough to set my head spinning. The rush of oxygen, the effect of the beer, the nerves, the adrenaline, the prospect of seeing Candy again…it all came together at once, filling my head with a raw and dizzying sickness that drained the blood from my legs.
Inside the pub, the atmosphere was hot and sweaty and choked with cigarette smoke. As I followed Ronny across the bar, looking for Jason and Chris, I thought I was going to throw up.
Ronny looked over his shoulder and shouted something at me.
“What?” I shouted back.
He nodded at the jukebox. “Nine Inch Nails.”
“What?” I yelled.
“Never mind.”
“I CAN’T HEAR YOU!”
“NEVER MIND!”
We found Jason and Chris at a table in the corner. Chris was just drinking Coke, but Jason had what looked like a triple vodka. And from the look on his face, it wasn’t his first. Or his second.
Ronny leaned into my ear and said, “We’ve only got about fifteen minutes—d’you want me to get you two or three?”
“Two or three what?”
“Whatever…” He slapped my shoulder. “Don’t worry—I’ll get you something.”
He went to the bar.
I sat down and glanced around, looking for Gina and Mike. Gina had said they might go somewhere for a drink first and this was the nearest pub…but I couldn’t see them anywhere. There was no sign of Candy, either. Not that I expected to see her. Then again, I didn’t really know what to expect.
“You fit?” Jason said to me.
I looked at him. His face was deathly white and covered in pale pink blotches. His eyes were all over the place.
“You all right?” I asked him.
“Yeah…I’m all right,” he slurred. “How about you? You ready to go…Joe?”
“I suppose.”
“You suppose?”
“Yeah.”
He laughed and took a long drink, staring wildly at me. I couldn’t be bothered with him like that, so I looked away, glancing over at a bunch of black guys standing next to Ronny at the bar. There were about six of them, all mean and hard, and they were giving Ronny some serious looks. He didn’t seem to be aware of them. Either that, or he was really good at hiding it. As I was watching, one of them turned his head and looked at me. I held his gaze for a moment, then quickly looked down at the floor. I might have been a bit out of it, but I was sober enough to recognize those eyes. They were the same eyes I’d seen in McDonald’s that time, when I’d dropped all my money on the floor—the frozen eyes that had made me sweat. I was sure of it. And I was pretty sure I recognized some of the others now. The hammered eyes, the razored heads, the hoods…they were the same guys Candy had spoken to when she’d retrieved my £1 coin from under their table.
What did that mean?
I was still thinking about it when Ronny came back and sat down next to me. “There you go,” he said, placing a drink on the table. He looked at Jason. “Sorry, Jase, did you want—”
“We’d better go,” Jason said, draining his glass. “Come on, drink up.”
I looked at the glass in front of me—a tall half pint of clear liquid. I picked it up and sniffed.
“What is it?” I asked Ronny.
“Just drink it,” Jason snapped, getting unsteadily to his feet. “Come on, let’s get back and get this done.”
Chris and Ronny got up from the table, and the three of them stood there, looking down at me, waiting for me to finish my drink.
“Are you coming or what?” said Jason.
I raised the glass to my mouth and drank it all down, almost gagging on the breathtaking burn of alcohol. Whatever it was, there was a lot of it, and I could already feel the numbing heat seeping into my veins…
“Christ,” muttered Jason, stabbing a glance at his watch. “Come on…let’s go.”
“You go on,” I choked. “I’m just
going to the toilet—I’ll catch you up in a minute.”
I didn’t really need to go to the toilet; I just needed time to be on my own for a while. We’d been buzzing and drinking and arguing ever since we’d left Heystone, and it was all getting a bit too much for me. To tell you the truth, I wasn’t really used to it. Not all at once, anyway. I’d had the odd drink before, and it wasn’t as if the adrenaline or the friction were anything new, but the nonstop combination of all three, together with the cold and the heat and the noise and the nerves, and the shock of recognizing the guys at the bar, and the ever-present clamp that Candy had on my heart…
It was all too much.
I stumbled into the restroom and threw up in a sink. Coughing, retching, spluttering…my stomach turning inside out…
“Christ’s sake,” muttered a man at the hand dryer.
“Sorry,” I said, my head still buried in the sink.
He shook his head in disgust, tutted loudly, then walked out.
I went into a cubicle and locked the door.
Breathe in, I told myself. Sit down. Breathe deeply. Relax.
I gazed around the cubicle. The walls were scrawled with graffiti—stupid dirty pictures, stupid dirty words, telephone numbers, dirty messages, threats, taunts, grim little peepholes stuffed with screwed-up wads of toilet paper…
Outside, the door swung open, letting in the muffled boom of the jukebox, and I heard the sound of footsteps slouching across the floor. The door slammed shut, the footsteps stopped, and I heard voices—black and hard.
“…he didn’t say. Just come here and wait, he said…ring him if we see her.”
“Why?”
“Dunno…she’s playing around, getting sweet…”
Feet shuffled, zips unzipped, and I heard the sound of loud peeing and extravagant sighs.
One of them farted.
The other one said, “You ask me, she’s scratching him out for a deal.”
“Yeah?”
“Boys up here, you know? The Westway…”
“They ain’t gonna want her if he finds out. He finds out, she ain’t worth nothing.”
Then the door opened again and some other people came in—male voices, talking loudly, laughing and swearing, hooting and hollering—and I couldn’t hear what the black guys were saying anymore. I kept on listening, just in case, but all I could hear was an echoed confusion of voices, shouts, hissing pipes, and the constant roar of the hand dryer. For all I knew, the black guys weren’t even out there anymore. And anyway, I told myself, whatever they were talking about, it’s not likely to have anything to do with you, is it? Just because you’ve seen them before, and they’re looking for a girl…I mean, for God’s sake…Candy’s not the only girl in the world, is she? What’s the matter with you?
I sat there for a while, thinking things over, trying to think reasonably, logically, soberly…and in the end I decided I was right—I was just being paranoid.
Candy wasn’t the only girl in the world…
And I wasn’t the only boy. It just felt that way.
Back in the dressing room, there was just enough time to strap on my bass and run through a tune-up with Jason and Chris, and then we were on. There was no curtain or anything, no dramatic entrance—we just walked out onto the stage and started plugging our guitars in. The houselights were still on, the DJ was still playing records, and the dance floor was empty. There were a few bored faces sitting around tables, talking and drinking, and I recognized a couple of kids at the back who’d made the long journey from Heystone to see us, but that was about it. I was hoping there were lots of people still in the bar and that as soon as we started playing, they’d all come rushing out.
But it didn’t look too promising.
I was still pretty excited, though. Plugging in, thumping the E string, cranking up the volume a couple of notches, looking around at the rest of the group. Ronny was cracking his snare drum, adjusting his seat, stomping the bass drum—domp, domp, domp. Chris was checking his pedals, stepping through the buttons—chunk, sssss, uurr-danggg—then putting his head down and chopping out some big dirty chords. And Jason…Jason was looking surprisingly good. Frazzled and weird, and kind of scary, but good. He’d taken his shirt off and slicked back his hair, and with his guitar slung carelessly around his back and his staring eyes fixed to the floor, he was prowling the stage and muttering to himself like some kind of madman.
I looked at Chris and Ronny, and I knew they were feeling the same as me—that something was about to happen. I don’t think any of us knew what it was, but we knew it was there. We could feel it all around us—the charge in the air, the power, the spark…the thrill of a ticking bomb.
And now it was about to go off.
The DJ was fading out the record, the houselights were going down, and the stage was dimming to darkness. Just for a moment, the room was silent and black.
Then the DJ said, “Ladies and gentlemen…The Katies.”
And all at once the stage erupted in a blaze of light, the drums kicked off with a whip-crack beat, and then we all piled in with a deafening blast of guitars.
God, it was good.
It was incredible.
I don’t know why or how, but everything just came together—the sound, the energy, the music, the lights…It all just fused to a gut-wrenching perfection. We’d never played so good. We were awesome. We were that good, I almost wished I was out there on the dance floor myself. The crowd were going mental. I mean, we were killing them, knocking them dead. They couldn’t get enough of us. It was unbelievable. The sound was suddenly flawless—raw and loud and clear—and the songs had never sounded better: tight and fast, full of power, fresh, electric, exciting. We were hot, and we knew it—me and Ronny thumping out the backbeat, solid as a rock; Chris ripping the hell out of his guitar; Jason singing and dancing and screaming like a god…
For the first three songs, I just kept my head down and played. It was hot under the lights, and I was soon drenched in sweat. It was flooding out of me, streaming from my skin, and as it poured out I could feel all the sickness and crap I’d been feeling before pouring out with it, until all that was left was the primitive thrill of the music, pumping away inside me. And that didn’t need any feelings or thoughts. I could sense the crowd without seeing them. I could feel them moving to the music, getting off on it, getting into it. I could hear the applause and the cheering. I was vaguely aware that the crowd was getting bigger all the time, but when I finally looked up, at the end of the third song, I was shocked to see that the club was nearly full. The dance floor was packed. All the tables were taken. People were coming in from the bar, trying to find somewhere to stand. Even the Bluntslide guys had come out to watch us.
It was amazing.
While Jason introduced the next song, I shielded my eyes from the lights and scanned the faces in the crowd. It was hard to pick out any details in the darkness, but I was pretty sure that Candy wasn’t there. I kept looking, though, and when I heard someone call out my name, I thought for a moment I’d found her. At a corner table, at the back, waving a hand…then I realized it was Gina. She was all dolled up for the night and I suppose the familiarity of her face confused me for a second…or maybe I was trying a bit too hard to see Candy? I don’t know. Anyway, when I realized it wasn’t Candy, my heart sank for a second, but then Gina smiled and whooped, and Mike—who was sitting beside her—grinned and raised his fist and the sinking feeling disappeared.
It was good to see them.
Not as good as seeing Candy…
But then, you can’t have everything, can you?
“You ready, Joe?” Jason said.
I nodded, wiping the sweat from my strings.
Jason lit a cigarette and turned back to the crowd. “OK,” he said into the microphone. “This one’s called…‘Girl on Fire.’”
I hit the opening rockabilly riff, thumping it out hard and fast, and then the drums and guitars came crashing in and we were off again, tearing th
e house down.
Half an hour later, when we came to the closing number, the atmosphere inside the club was almost too good to be true. The whole place was jam-packed, a seething mass of noise and sweat and dancing bodies, and no one wanted the show to stop, least of all us. But we didn’t have any choice. It was Bluntslide’s gig, not ours, and we’d agreed with them on a forty-five-minute set. Anything over that and they’d be seriously pissed off. Mind you, it didn’t really matter because we only had enough songs for forty-five minutes, anyway.
Up until then, we’d always played a Lou Reed number to close the set—a song called “Sweet Jane.” It’s a bit old-fashioned, but it’s got a really nice riff to it and we play it a lot faster than the original and we really mash it up at the end…so it’s a pretty good song to finish on.
That night, though, just as we were getting ready to start “Sweet Jane,” Jason called us all over to the drum kit and suggested we do something different.
“Like what?” said Chris. “We haven’t got anything else.”
“Yeah, we have,” Jason said, looking at me. “Joe’s song…the one we’ve been working on—‘Candy.’”
Chris shook his head. “No, it’s not ready yet…we’ve only played it a couple of times—”
“It’s perfect,” said Jason. “It’ll murder them…and it’s ours.” He looked at me again. “What do you think?”
“I don’t know. I suppose…”
He looked at Ronny. “You OK with it?”
Ronny nodded.
Chris said, “I’m not sure, Jase. Let’s stick with what we know…”
But Jason had already made up his mind. He said to me, “Give Chris the bass, you take the guitar part—OK?”
“Yeah…all right. What about the words? Can you remember them?”
He grinned at me. “I don’t have to. It’s your song—you sing it.” And with that he went back to the microphone, apologized for the delay, and started to introduce the song.