The Rotters' Club

by Jonathan Coe

  He waited there self-consciously for a minute or two, until a blonde, slightly stocky woman in her twenties entered the building and swapped a cheerful greeting with the doorman, with whom she was clearly a favourite. Then she joined Doug beside the lifts and pushed one of the buttons, making him realize that he had failed to do this himself. Not a great start.

  “Where to?” she asked him, when they got inside.

  “Twenty-three, please.”

  “Same as me,” she said, smiling and allowing her eyes to settle on him for a moment.

  “NME?” Doug asked, hopefully.

  “Gosh, no. Horse and Hound. Not nearly so glamorous.” She had a piercing Home Counties accent. “Do you write for them, or something?”

  “Well, I . . . I’m a sort of out-of-town contributor, I suppose.”

  “What a hoot. I say—do you like punk rock?”

  “Some of it,” said Doug, stifling a grin at her enunciation of this phrase. “I haven’t heard that much. It hasn’t really hit Birmingham yet.”

  “Birmingham! Gosh, how priceless! Down on the King’s Road you see them all the time. Punk rockers, and so on. It’s frightfully exciting.”

  “Yes, it must be.”

  The conversation ground to a halt. When they left the lift at the twenty-third floor, they turned separate ways.

  Doug found the door to the NME offices open. When he entered the large, open-plan space the first thing he registered, apart from an impression of general disarray, was a heavy and uncompromising silence. He had expected bustling activity: smoking hacks crouched over their typewriters, banging out album reviews; harassed-looking secretaries shuttling press releases and promo copies from one desk to another. Instead, at first, he could see no one at all. A section of overhead strip lighting flickered erratically and a few pieces of paper flapped in the breeze generated by an ancient wall-mounted fan. It felt as though this place had not been inhabited for weeks. Then, at last, a distracted young man with long hair and horn-rimmed glasses wandered into view, his eyes fixed on a sheet of typewritten paper. Doug coughed as he went by and the man looked up, his eyes glazed with boredom.

  “Hello,” Doug said, nervously.

  “Hi.” And then, after an epoch: “Did you want something?”

  “I’m Doug. Doug Anderton.” When this name failed to produce the slightest flare of recognition, he added: “I phoned up earlier in the week and said I’d be coming down. From Birmingham.”

  “Right. Right.”

  “Is . . .” (Doug craned his neck around hopefully) “. . . is Nick here?”

  “Nick? Nick who?”

  “Nick Logan? The editor?”

  “Oh, Nick. No, Nick’s not in today.”

  “What about Neil?”

  The man looked around the office; or at least, looked a few degrees to the left, and then a few to the right, in a perfunctory way, before saying: “Haven’t seen Neil today. Don’t know where he’s got to.”

  Doug could feel all of his hopes slipping away. As if he was trapped in that elevator and plummeting down all the way from the twenty-third floor.

  “Was it you I spoke to on the phone?”

  If the man was trying to remember, he wasn’t trying very hard. “Where did you say you were from again?”

  “Birmingham. The name’s Doug.”

  “Maybe Richard spoke to you.” He called across the office. “Rich!”

  From behind a filing cabinet came a disembodied voice: “Yeah?”

  “Did you speak to Doug from Birmingham on the phone?”

  “No.”

  “He’s here now.”

  A short silence. “What does he want?”

  The man turned to Doug, asked, “What do you want?” and Doug was unable to think of a reply. He wanted a warm welcome, a slap on the back and a trip down to the pub for a celebratory round of drinks. It was increasingly obvious that he wasn’t going to get it.

  “Hang on,” said the disembodied voice, “is he the bloke from the school magazine?”

  Clutching at this lifeline, Doug almost shouted: “Yeah— that’s right.”

  “Hi.” A gangly, straw-haired man in his mid- to late-twenties, sporting a lopsided smile and what would come to be known a few years later as designer stubble, emerged from behind the cabinets and held out his hand.

  “Hello. I’m Doug. We spoke on the phone.”

  Richard shook his head. “Don’t think so. Maybe you spoke to Charles. Anyway, what can we do for you?”

  “Well, I was just . . . Just passing through, and . . .” Doug’s voice faded away, not because he couldn’t think of an answer (although he couldn’t), but because his attention had suddenly been drawn to a surreal detail. The office space was divided up into cubicles, and on top of one of the partitions someone had laid out a tangle of barbed wire and broken glass. Inside the cubicle itself, between the two desks, a noose was hanging from the ceiling and swaying very slightly from side to side in the moving currents of air.

  Richard followed his gaze and said: “Yeah, that’s Tony and Julie’s bunker.”

  “Tony Parsons?” said Doug, awestruck, and beginning to feel that he was finally getting close to the fountainhead.

  “They just put up that stuff to scare us. They’re like naughty kids. Take a seat, Doug.”

  They sat down, and Richard offered him a cigarette. Doug took what he hoped was a practised drag, wincing slightly at the acrid burn which still never failed to give him a jolt.

  “Great piece on Clapton,” Richard now ventured. “We really dug it.”

  “Thanks,” said Doug. “I just felt that he really deserved it, you know? Coming out in support of Powell, after all the things he’s lifted from black music himself . . . It was so out of order.”

  “Is that why you came down?”

  Doug looked blank, not understanding at first.

  “There’s a gig tonight,” Richard explained. “The Rock Against Racism people. Kind of a launch event, over in Forest Gate. Carol Grimes is playing.”

  “Oh, right. Yeah, I was . . . hoping I could get to that.” He assumed this was what Richard wanted to hear; it was hard to tell. Boldly, he added: “Maybe I could write about it.”

  “Maybe.” Richard didn’t sound too keen. “Trouble is, people here see it as kind of a Melody Maker thing. They got on to it first.”

  “Oh.”

  “Maybe you could do another gig for us. How long are you in town?”

  “Just tonight.”

  “Well . . .” He rummaged around on his desk, produced a list from somewhere and scanned it without enthusiasm. “I dunno . . . We’ve got Steeleye Span at The Marquee.”

  Doug shook his head. “Not really my thing.”

  “National Health at University College. Have you heard of them?”

  Doug hadn’t.

  “New band: sort of hippy, intellectual stuff. Most of them used to be in an outfit called Hatfield and the North.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Doug did remember this name, vaguely. Benjamin had been to see them once, at Barbarella’s, with Lois’s then boyfriend Malcolm. He had enthused about it at tiresome length for the next couple of days (until other things had driven it out of his mind). Doug hadn’t liked the sound of them at all. He craned over to get a look at the list himself, and something immediately caught his eye. “Wow—The Clash are playing tonight. Can I go to that?”

  Richard drew in his breath sharply. “Well . . . it doesn’t say anything here, but I’m sure Tony’ll be doing that one. You know, it’s kind of on his turf.” He thought for a few more moments. “Look—let’s give this Rock Against Racism thing a go. It might be worth five hundred words or something.”

  Doug broke into a smile which he quickly tried to check, not wishing his gratitude to show quite so nakedly. It was his first commission. His first venture into national journalism, at the age of sixteen. In his excitement, he never even noticed that no one had offered him anywhere to sleep for the night.

  Dou
g had left the NME offices with mixed feelings. True, he hadn’t got to meet Tony Parsons, or Julie Burchill, or Nick Logan, or Charles Shaar Murray; but he had left with a stack of free records under his arm. True, he would have liked these records to have been white label copies of “New Rose,” “Anarchy in the UK” and the first Eddie and the Hot Rods album; instead, Richard had given him “Money Money Money” by Abba, “Ring Out Solstice Bells” by Jethro Tull and “Morning Glory” by The Wurzels. And it was flattering, of course, to have been given a commission to cover something as important as the first Rock Against Racism gig; but it would have been even better if Doug had been able to find the venue.

  Apparently it was taking place in a pub called The Princess Alice in Forest Gate. Doug didn’t possess anything as practical as a London A–Z, so he was reduced to approaching strangers at Blackfriars tube and asking them how to get there. The first three people he asked ignored him completely. The fourth one denied that there was any such place as Forest Gate. Doug told him that it was somewhere in East London. The stranger shook his head and said that he must be talking about Forest Hill, which was in South London. Doug assured him that it was Forest Gate, but agreed it was sensible to assume that Forest Hill and Forest Gate might be next to each other. So the stranger told him how to get to Forest Hill. It was extremely complicated. This part of London wasn’t covered by the tube network: you had to go by bus, or British Rail, or both. The connections were difficult, and Doug spent more than forty minutes waiting at a stop in Camberwell while successive buses coasted by, crammed to the full with exhausted commuters going home for the weekend. When he did get on a bus, finally, it took him to the wrong place.

  It was eight o’clock when he reached Forest Hill. The first person he asked told him there was no such pub as The Princess Alice. Doug told him that it was in Forest Gate, which he had been assured was near by. The man told him that Forest Gate was in East London, across the river towards Romford, about ten miles away. Doug’s eyes widened in horror, and once again he felt that he was standing in the lift at King’s Reach Tower, plummeting down from the twenty-third floor. The man apologized— not that it was his fault, strictly speaking, that Forest Gate was in East London—and Doug consoled himself by going to the nearest pub, which was called The Man in the Moon, not The Princess Alice, and drinking two pints of lager. In a rare stroke of good fortune, the barman didn’t ask how old he was.

  So it was official, anyway: his trip to London was a fiasco. What could he salvage from it, in order to avoid humiliation when he got back to school on Monday morning and had to face the questioning of his friends?

  There was no chance of battling all the way over to Forest Gate at this time of night. He would have to phone the office in a few days and apologize to Richard, who hadn’t sounded too bothered about the review anyway. No doubt, from their perspective, it would be no great loss. Yes, there was still time to get back to Euston and catch a train to Birmingham, but that was too dreadful to contemplate. This was his weekend of escape, his great adventure. In an uncomfortable corner at the back of his mind lingered the thought that he still had nowhere to stay, but he dismissed it for now. There were bound to be youth hostels in London, or cheap hotels. He could find something. Meanwhile he took out his copy of the NME and looked again at the gig guide. The Clash were playing at Fulham Old Town Hall, wherever that was, with The Vibrators and Roogalator. He had ten pounds in his pocket. Surely it would cost less than that to get there by taxi?

  It was a fantastic night. You could lose yourself in this noise. Little problems like the fact that you had no money and nowhere to stay dissolved in the sea of chords and sweat and beer and feedback and pounding bodies throwing themselves manically up and down in a distant approximation to the rhythm of the music. Doug had never heard any of these songs before but in the months and years to come they would become his closest friends: “Deny,” “London’s Burning,” “Janie Jones.” He was transfixed by the sight and sound of Joe Strummer shouting, screaming, singing, howling into the microphone: the hair lank with sweat, the veins on his neck tautened and pulsing with blood. Doug surrendered to the noise and for an hour he pogoed like a madman in the dense, heaving heart of a crowd two hundred or more strong. The heat and the energy were overwhelming. When it was over he stumbled to the bar and jostled for place as the fans clamoured to slake their thirst. He was pushed and shoved and he pushed and shoved back with the best of them and he felt, for the first time that day, wonderfully and unexpectedly at home.

  Then, suddenly, there was a tap on his shoulder and he was staring at a face which should have been familiar, although he didn’t at first know why.

  “Hello! It’s you again!” said a voice which might have belonged to a BBC continuity announcer. “Gosh, isn’t this a hoot !”

  Then he remembered. It was the woman from the lift at King’s Reach Tower. He hadn’t recognized her in her leathers and T-shirt. Her blonde hair was slicked back and the sweat was causing her make-up to run and she no longer looked stocky or comical but achingly sexy.

  “Oh, hi!” he said.

  “Can I get you a drink?” She was nearer to the bar than him.

  “Thanks. Lager, please.”

  When they had forced their way out of the throng, she led him to a spare corner where two men of about her own age, neither of them dressed for the occasion, were leaning against a wall glancing warily around them, as if expecting (with some reason) to be attacked at any moment.

  “This is Jacko, and Fudge,” the woman said. “Boys, this is—”

  “Douglas,” he prompted, not quite knowing why he was using the full name.

  “And I’m Ffion.” She held out her hand. “Ffion ffoulkes. With four ‘f ’s.”

  “Four?” said Doug.

  “Two in each name.”

  He didn’t understand a word of this, but let it pass.

  “Douglas is a journalist for the NME,” she explained, proudly. “Are you going to write about this concert?”

  “No, not tonight. I’m just here as a punter.”

  “Well I thought the last lot were awfully good,” Ffion said. “My goodness, they gave it what for! My ears are ringing like nobody’s business.”

  Fudge said nothing and Jacko yawned.

  “Look, Fee, are we going to slope off soon? This racket’s brought on a stinking headache and all these proles are giving me the willies.”

  “We might catch something unspeakable,” Fudge added.

  “I’m a ‘prole’ myself, actually,” said Doug, his hackles rising.

  “Douglas is from Birmingham,” Ffion told her friends.

  “Oh, hard cheese,” said Jacko. “What rotten luck, old boy.”

  “I must say you’ve picked up our lingo frightfully well,” said Fudge, beaming. “I can understand you almost perfectly.”

  Doug, on the other hand, was having great difficulty understanding this peculiar pair, whose accents were even more alien than Ffion’s to his unpractised ear. It didn’t help that when he could decipher what they were saying, he had some trouble believing it.

  “I can’t see the point of a place like Birmingham, myself,” said Jacko. “Full of Pakis, isn’t it?”

  “Pakis and proles,” Fudge confirmed.

  Doug turned away from them wordlessly and said to Ffion, “Could we go and talk somewhere else? I think your friends are the stupidest pair of stuck-up wankers I’ve ever met.”

  Jacko seized him by the neck of his T-shirt and said, “Look here, pipsqueak. How would you like a bunch of fives smack in the middle of your oiky little face?”

  “Try it,” Doug answered. “But I think you should know I’ve got a flick-knife in my pocket.”

  Jacko released his grip slowly. His face was drained of what little colour it had once possessed when he turned to Ffion. “Come on, Fee. I said we’d meet McSquirter and the rest of the gang down at Parson’s.”

  “I’m staying here.”

  They stared at each other f
or a few angry seconds, then Jacko stamped his foot in fury and walked off.

  “You silly little tart,” said Fudge, following him.

  Ffion and Doug sipped their lager in silence for a while. She was smiling at him again.

  “Have you really got a knife?” she asked.

  “No, of course not.”

  She leaned over suddenly and gave him a fierce, open-mouthed kiss. It tasted of lager and lipstick.

  “You’re a sweetie,” she said. “What about some cocoa and rumpy-pumpy back at my place?”

  “OK,” said Doug, ninety per cent certain that he had interpreted this invitation correctly. “Can I stay the night?”

  “Of course you can.”

  Doug lost something important that night. Not his virginity, which had already been surrendered to a co-operative fifthformer from the girls’ school at the age of fourteen, in a tiny Left Bank hotel on one of Mr. Plumb’s invaluable weekend outings to Paris. What he yielded, instead, to the preposterously named Ffion ffoulkes was less easy to define, but in its way just as impossible to recover. It had to do with his sense of self, his sense of belonging, his loyalty to the place and the family he came from. In the space of a few hours, a lifelong allegiance was severed, and a newer, more tenuous one formed. That night, in short, he became enamoured of the upper classes.

  He became enamoured of where they lived. As he walked with Ffion through the icy rain of that October night, heading back towards the studio on the King’s Road her father had impulsively bought for her one weekend, he fell in love with Chelsea’s solemn Georgian terraces and reposeful, well-fed squares. Here, Doug could see, life was lived on a grand scale. Rednal seemed mean and wizened by comparison.

  He became enamoured of how they lived, too. He admired the cluttered Bohemianism of her flat, the careless way that beanbags and Afghan rugs jostled for attention with a full-length portrait, thick with oilpaint, of a bright-eyed woman in tweeds who Ffion later identified as her mother. She told Doug the name of the artist and could hardly believe that he’d never heard of him. He could hardly believe that she had paintings by famous artists on the wall of her flat. Everything that night seemed new and surprising, and Doug also became enamoured of the upper-class ways of eating, drinking, waking the neighbours up with deafening music, taking drugs and, of course, having sex, which he had never realized could be so boisterous, cheery, polymorphous or strenuous an experience.