And she is the reason I fall in love with Chrissie Hynde. Because Patti had many things, but what she didn’t have was a behind cased in tight leather trousers, one that’s ‘gonna make you . . . make you . . . make you notice’.
I’m watching Top of the Pops. (Again! Did my TV week really revolve around that half-hour every Thursday, those last two minutes of Tomorrow’s World seeming to last the length of the longest chemistry lesson ever, Led Zep’s ‘Whole Lotta Love’ announcing the start of a long weekend?) I’m watching and waiting for the one good record that must surely come. There is a band fronted by a woman who is neither blonde nor decorative, neither a dolly bird, a backing vocalist nor a dancer (1980: the available options for women in pop).
She is both playing and wearing her guitar. She could be Suzi Quatro’s older sister. The tune is sharp and soulful, an insistent rhythm neatly counterpointing a melody that always seems to want to veer off somewhere else. The woman is singing about the things that she’s got and how she’s going to use them. Which is fine: except that these things, the things that she’s got, are not the usual things that women who sing songs have got. She’s got ‘brass’ and ‘bottle’ and ‘intention’. And the way she’s going to use these things are not at all like the way you might expect her to use them either.
Chrissie Hynde didn’t seem to mind being a rock star, in fact she seemed quite comfortable with the fact. She wasn’t a capitalized-P Poet and she certainly didn’t seem intent on gobbing into your living room, dismantling international capitalism or annoying your parents. What she did seem to want was my attention, for me to join her in celebrating her glorious physicality.
When she says ‘Gonna use my arms’ does she consciously swallow the ‘m’ – inviting and threatening me with the knowledge that she knows where my sick soul can be found? And what about those ‘fingers’, the fricative first syllable savoured as though she is spitting you out at precisely the moment she’s inviting you in. I’m in love. It’s terrible – a bit like having stomach flu.
I buy the first Pretenders album and it becomes the soundtrack to my new discovery: heterosexuality. She swears. Not a bloody or a bugger, but a full-blown double whammy of ‘shitting bricks’ followed soon after by a ‘not me baby I’m too precious, fuck off’. I’d heard Patti Smith swear (she’d told me that she didn’t fuck much with the past, but she fucked plenty with the future), but that was poetry, and so didn’t count.
Chrissie Hynde’s swearing counted. As did the rest of her. Her arms, her legs, her fingers, her her her imagination . . .
He says that he missed me, the fortnight that I was away in Fleetwood, and that it’s unusual because he doesn’t usually miss people. It’s an occupational hazard – this not missing people, not getting too attached to an individual person, because you are meant to be attached to all people.
On the album cover she’s wearing a red leather jacket, with black lace peeking through the sleeves. On the back there’s an address where you can write to her, somewhere in Covent Garden, London. Beneath this: ‘To achieve maximum effect / PLAY THIS RECORD LOUD’.
The north-east, near Sutherland, though he lost the accent a long time ago. Yes, he still goes back. Not as much as he should. He’ll take me with him sometime. Think you’ll find it interesting.
Track two is simply called ‘The Phone Call’ and is utterly incomprehensible. It was something about ‘a message’ that she both did and didn’t want to receive, and that was causing her all sorts of problems. Me too. We didn’t have a phone, and I didn’t have a girl to phone even if we did. It dawns on me that the two things – girls and phones – might be connected: promises of intimacy.
He tells me that he read English at Cambridge. Not ‘did’ or even ‘studied’: ‘read’. He made it sound both leisurely and life-changing, as though there was nothing else that could be done: at Cambridge or anywhere.
This isn’t about fancying her. Or not just about fancying her. It is about hunger.
He needs his books arranging, sorting out alphabetically, by genre, by author. He’ll pay me the going rate, whatever that is.
‘I was a good time . . . I got pretty good’ she sings on ‘Tattooed Love Boys’. Not she ‘had’ a good time, but she ‘was’ a good time. I close my eyes. Open them. I write her name in capital letters.
He had been – still was, haha – a bit of a Teddy boy, had seen Chuck Berry way back when. Never got Presley though – funny that – too many theatrics maybe or was it God help us those bloody films? Elvis in Hawaii feigning romance with some dolly in a frilly skirt. Bogus. Not his idea of rock ’n’ roll. Pretenders? Never heard of them. Good name for a band though, all the right registers – The Platters, genuine heartache, reminded him for some reason of Oscar Wilde.
There’s an instrumental track which I want to skip but never do because it feels like being unfaithful to her: to Her.
Blackburn has a film club, not the local Odeon, but a society where people who are really into films go and discuss them, hire a projector and introduce them. Films that they never show on the telly or screen at the flicks, films by ‘auteurs’ (auteurs? what a word), stuff from Italy, the French New Wave, stuff you’d really like. (He’s thought about what I’d really like, and he’s right. I do really like it.)
In 1995 I read the following words by the music critic Simon Reynolds: ‘Her voice – a slurred, sensual alloy of neediness and nastiness, vulnerability and viciousness – is one of the first, and best, examples of a female equivalent to the classic rock ’n’ roll snarl / swagger. On songs like “The Wait” . . . she lets rip a strafing stream of syllables that’s a weird mix of speed-rap, jive-talk and baby-babble. It’s punk-scat. All hiccoughs, vocal tics, gasps and feral growls, weirdly poised between love and hate, oral sensuality and staccato, stabbing aggression.’ Good isn’t it? Exactly the right mix of descriptive swagger and analytic precision, the kind of music journalism I always wanted to write but never did. It would have been even better if I had read it in 1980, because if I’d read it in 1980 it would have prevented me from writing the Poem To Chrissie Hynde that I did write in 1980. It began: ‘I want to die beneath your ass’. Originally the line had been wanting to die beneath her ‘arse’, but that seemed wrong, vulgar somehow.
Next
‘There is nothing bad to fear; once you have crossed that threshold, all is well. Another world, and you do not have to speak.’
Franz Kafka Letter To My Father
And meanwhile my grandad died. Not quite suddenly, but neither after a long et cetera. The collective family wisdom was that he’d never been right ever since falling in the canal – a verdict which owes more to Alan Bennett than I (or surely he) would like, but which was probably close to the mark. The word ‘chill’ became the defining motif of his month-long illness: chilled to his bones, his very marrow, all the way through. Nobody mentioned the fact that the canal was probably full of semi-lethal toxic crap, the very same semi-lethal toxic crap with which he’d worked most of his working life.
It saddens me that my grandad’s death was bound up with an element of the vaudevillian, that he survived Dunkirk only to have his fate sealed by the greasy broth of the Leeds and Liverpool Canal. It saddens me even more that I’d been out of his life for the last few years, had opted for my hormonal adolescent angst over our sessions of crib and nonsense and laughter.
His last days had been spent in hospital – Queen’s Park, a place whispered with a reverential dread. It had been the workhouse in a previous life, its history seeping with the mixture of ill health and poverty.
Both my parents had been with him on his deathbed. I remember thinking that there was just one such bed – a Death Bed – and that the patient would be moved there just at the moment when they were about to die and that it would be awful when they were about to move you there because that’s when you knew you were going to die. The nurses wouldn’t tell you that they were moving you there; they probably had another name for it, a kind of nurse cod
ename, but that you’d know anyway, and that maybe if they stopped putting people on deathbeds then maybe people would stop dying.
Kath says that on this bed, even though he was fighting for breath, he was trying to take off the oxygen mask and tell them something. She was and remained convinced that he was trying to tell them that he had lent someone some money – a substantial amount – a long while ago. And: This is the person, This was the amount. When they cleared out his things a few days later, they found a couple of hundred pounds wrapped in bundles at the bottom of his wardrobe. As far as Kath was concerned this wasn’t what he had been trying to tell her, but it was proof that she was right. There had been money, and we would never see it.
I don’t go to the funeral. I’m deemed to be too upset. I’m grateful for the get-out, for not having to face all those crying grown-ups or my own guilt at having abandoned him. Kath tells me about her dad – my other grandad – and about how they ‘brought him home’, laid his body to rest in the front room of their old house. She would go in and sit with him, this body that both was and was not her father. She even kissed him on the cheek; his skin was waxy.
She is glad they don’t do that any more. It was morbid. They still draw all the curtains though, a mark of respect, and if any man was respected in Accrington, it was John Caveney. He and your dad didn’t get on, but he loved you. He loved your dad too in his own way, but it was difficult. The war and all that. And men, bloody-minded bloody men, stubborn to the bloody end. He adored your grandma, spoiled her, made her so she can’t do anything for herself. We’ll have to look after her now; keep an eye on her, make sure she’s eating properly. It’s what happens love, it’s just what happens. It’s sad, but it’s not the end of the world.
And my dad? My dad sheds not one tear. Jack Caveney – son of Sergeant-Major John Caveney – shakes everyone’s hand and says the usual ‘kind of yous’. He sees that everyone has a glass of something, all those aunties I never knew he had (did he know he had?), robust strong women with dim Irish ancestry. They ease themselves into funereal mode, shuffling forward as each takes their turn at passing on condolences, the wisdom of widows (collective noun: an invulnerability, a veil, a release): ‘The thing about him was . . .’ ‘. . . never one for . . .’ ‘I’ll say this about him . . .’
And when he sees that everyone’s glass is full, that his mother is not just holding up but positively flourishing amongst this sisterhood of bereaved old women, he puts his arm around my shoulders and we slip out.
We slip out and go to a snooker club called the Elite, a place which could not have been more inappropriately named. He racks up the balls, the overhead light capturing the dust mites and the scuffed green baize. And we play. We play for hours, our concentration given over to the reds and the blacks and the colours. The sounds of a snooker table should be used by an avant-garde composer – a John Cage or La Monte Young score made up of the thuds of a ball hitting the back of a pocket, the kiss-collision of the white opening up the pack, the clatter of the wooden rest returning to its cradle at the table’s side. I didn’t think that then. What I thought then was that my dad was cooler than I sometimes thought he was.
Next
‘Nothing unites two people so completely, especially if, like you and me, all they have is words.’
Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice
I became friends with a boy called John Mullen. I decided to stop laughing. I wished I had a stutter. He was that kind of friend. He lived a few streets over, on the street where the school bus stopped and on which there was a second-hand bookshop that sold a different kind of second-hand book. The shop was painted green and had a wire grille and cardboard over its glass-panelled front door. In one of its windows it displayed magazines – glossy martial-arts mags, body-building manuals, true-crime stuff. In the other were lurid paperbacks with women on the cover, women who were called things like ‘Hellcat Amazons’, ‘Divorce Bait’, or ‘Vegas Tramp’. The pictures were painted in brash Technicolor greens and reds, and yet there was a playfulness about them that spoke to even the bummiest of St Mary’s College bum boys. Do I remember or have I invented one called ‘Tomcat in Tights’ which showed a woman barely draped in red silk, sitting for a picture, whilst the painter sits or stands below her, gazing at the small of her back? And have I imagined that she wasn’t wearing tights and so the title didn’t make any sense, and wondering if it not making any sense could have been on purpose? They were chaotically priced these books, a 35c arguing with a 2/6 and both of them silenced by a sign saying that they were all 10p each.
The natural place for me to get my bus was at the top of my own street, but the promise of spending a few minutes with the cover of Her Candle Burns Hot was worth a five-minute walk. There, looking at Coffin For a Cutie or Pit Stop Nympho, wondering how come helpless women could also be threatening women, a sickly lad approached me and said: ‘Danish Dentists on the Job.’ Sorry? ‘“Danish Dentists on the Job”. It’s the title I’ve come up with for my own book. It fits the genre nicely don’t you think? It’s exotic – well, foreign – and it’s alliterative and it has the necessary double entendre, single entendre really. Hahaha. I’m John by the way, but I’m thinking of changing it to Conrad.’ If he had taken a pinch of snuff I wouldn’t have been surprised.
Do kids still become mates as quickly as I did with Johnny – Conrad – Mullen? I hope so. The deal was swift and solid: two straight bumboys with a shared understanding that life was sweet but organized in such a way as to be awful; that upper case Literature and lower case music would be the means to rectify this, and that we would be the tortured embodiment of both.
He was a few years older than me, already sitting his O levels when we met. This, I now realize, was a brave move in itself, teenagedom having its own strict codes of apartheid. He was formidably clever, the kind of lad who, according to Jock Roland’s wry assessment, ‘gave genius a bad name’. He wrote parodies of Hardy and Lawrence purely for his own (and my) amusement. He had read Chomsky by the age of sixteen and found problems with him by the age of seventeen. When asked to write a story from the point of view of the textile workers of the nineteenth century, he famously refused by saying that the textile workers of the nineteenth century were almost certainly illiterate and so it would be truer to their experience to write a ballad about the Chartists and perform it in assembly. Which he did.
He annoyed the music teacher by stating that music was not in fact a language all of its own (‘it couldn’t be, to describe it thus was to profoundly misunderstand the nature of language. And indeed of music’) and the English teacher by announcing that Shakespeare’s comedies were unfunny, and that explaining why they were funny didn’t make them so.
He was from Blackpool, had transferred to Blackburn around the time of his O levels. It explains I think why we became such good friends – some adolescent homing instinct that allowed his physical displacement to find a mirror in my own internal misfitery. We’re Sartre and Camus, we’re Laurel and Hardy, we’re Franz and Max.
I tell him about my romance with his hometown, about the pitch and putt and the pier. He tells me that this isn’t his Blackpool. His hometown – his Blackpool – is one of unemployment and petty rivalries between North side and South. He tells me that there’s a lot of drug problems and that he never really went to the seafront. He tells me that the locals hate the tourists, hate them because they depend on them, hate them because our leisure is their labour.
I’d only read about people like John Mullen, the semi-fantastical outsider-savant. It felt like I’d dreamed him into being. My bus rides to school are now tutorials in the books he is doing for A level – Hamlet (‘he really is fucking crazy, it isn’t just an act’), Blake, and Lawrence’s Women In Love. We walk from Blackburn bus station up the hill to school. The other lads (all of them, it seemed) call this trek ‘the Khyber Pass’ or Paki Alley. We don’t. We seem to have made an agreement to not call it that.
John seemed to have acquired a bo
dy rather than possess one. He walked both quickly and uncertainly, as though he’d borrowed someone else’s legs and wasn’t sure just how long he could keep them. His head had dropped onto his neck and someone had tapped his teeth into place with a small toffee hammer. His skin was the colour of putty. He was arrogant, brilliant and unpopular. Within weeks he was my best mate.
Kathleen is delighted at me having a new friend, although less so at him being a ‘neo-anarchist’ (a ‘neo’ what?). She resolves her ambivalence by feeding him, as though his strange opinions were more a symptom of hunger than political commitment, and that regular injections of potato pie would soon stabilize him into something more conventional. She was half-right. John’s home life had the kind of poverty that made my own look relatively comfortable. He was from a Catholic family, three brothers and a sister, a dad who tried to feed them all on a gasfitter’s wages. Having no room of his own, going round to John’s meant that we would always go out. Usually back to mine and to an avalanche of Kathleen’s politically-corrective cooking.
Jack’s uncertainties went deeper. He called him Ratzo Rizzo after Dustin Hoffman’s character in Midnight Cowboy, a reference to John’s eternal shabbiness and jangly walk. In John he saw a different kind of cleverness to that of his son. It was verging on that dreaded thing, a clever-clever-ness, which is a cleverness that is almost too clever by half. Here we were swimming in uncharted – potentially treacherous – waters. This wasn’t just knowing the capital of Peru or doing sums in your head. Neither was it a matter of noses in books or even heads in clouds. What we had here was the swallowing of maps. A lad who had swallowed the map (a ‘bloody’ usually made an appearance between the ‘the’ and the ‘map’) was a lad who had digested the world and therefore knew it all. It meant that knowledge had been translated into opinions and opinions into a worldview. It meant that all that thinking had gone to his head. I would watch Jack weigh up this new addition to our dinner table, see him balance being impressed by this sharp young man with being irritated at his certainties. Jack would argue with him for argument’s sake, going head to head on issues about which I knew he was in full agreement (like capital punishment). The moment would invariably arise when Jack would fall back on: ‘That’s just your opinion.’ To which John would give his infuriating response: ‘Whose opinions would you like me to have?’
The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness Page 7