Playing the Bass with Three Left Hands

by Will Carruthers

  I suppose it is possible to interpret the fact that we were abusing solvents and odd industrial sprays as a sign that we weren’t responsible enough to have control over our lives. To a degree that is true. To another degree, we were victims of our environment, which was sometimes so shit that it seemed better to risk the unknown and the dangerous, especially if it made your feet go a bit cold in an entertaining way. At least we felt we were in control of the spray. We did not always feel the same way about some other parts of our lives.

  We did a lot of work on a machine called a brake press. When the foot pedal of this contraption was pressed, its two steel jaws would come together, accompanied by the hiss of hydraulics, a hum and a clunk, to produce a perfect fold in a carefully inserted strip of metal. Sometimes there would be thousands and thousands of the same strips of metal, all requiring exactly the same bend. The hypnotic mantra of the machine and the repetitive work would go on and on, sometimes for days, eating the countless crawling hours between tea breaks and the thirty minutes we got for lunch. The machine had no safety guards. Safety guards slowed down the work rate and, because we lived in competitive times, the guards had been disabled so that we could help the machine to bend metal more quickly. This lead to an interesting conundrum of human consciousness whereby, on the one hand, the person working the machine was completely hypnotised by the repetition and boredom of the work while, on the other hand, a simple slip or a mistimed foot could lead to a terrible situation in which bits of either hand could be suddenly removed without warning. Once, when I had been operating that machine alone for about two days, I started remembering dreams that I had never remembered. Dreams that were years old surfaced in my brain like phantoms from a life I had forgotten. It felt like recovering from amnesia. My mind would split, with one half taking care of the boring but necessary tasks essential for survival, while the other half of my brain desperately tried to keep the entertainment factor high enough so that I didn’t give up the ghost entirely and put my head between the metal jaws as a quick way out.

  Another time, when we had a job that needed to be finished really quickly, Wayne and I were working together at this machine. He was operating the brake press and I was sorting and loading the thin strips of aluminium for him. We weren’t chit-chatting or abusing any of the many aerosols on offer, and we had reached the point where we were hardly aware of anything beyond the beat and the noise of the job at hand and our own thoughts.

  Click, clank, whirr, chunk, click clack whirr, chunk, click clack whirr, chunk,

  click, clank, whirr, chunk, click clack whirr chunk, click clack whirr, chunk,

  click, clank, whirr, chunk, click clack whirr, chunk, click clack whirr, chunk.

  It was a constant and reassuring sound that had been playing for an hour when it was strangely interrupted. Wayne said, ‘Ouch,’ and the rhythm stopped so that there was only silence beyond the low growl and the hiss of the resting machine. He hadn’t said ouch very loudly. It was like he had just stubbed his toe or something.

  I looked up from the aluminium strips to see why Wayne had stopped work. He had gone very red and he was wearing a weird, almost embarrassed smile. He glanced down at his hands and I followed his eyes until I saw the two crushed ends of bone poking through the flesh. I glanced away from his hands towards the machine and there, cradled in its resting metal jaws, were the ends of Wayne’s two smallest fingers. They were crushed, mangled and broken, but they were still recognisable as fingertips. I looked back at Wayne’s face. He looked at me and a strange, nervous laugh came out of him. ‘What should I do?’ he said, and then he made that weird, almost laughing sound again, as though he wanted me to find it funny and then maybe it wouldn’t be real. For a couple of seconds I didn’t know what he should do either.

  ‘You better go to the office, mate,’ I said in a thin voice. ‘You’ll be all right.’

  He turned away and walked down to the office, past the long lines of machines and tools, and with every step he took he left behind a little trail of blood that made fresh dark stains on the dirty concrete floor. I didn’t know what to do, so I just stood there and waited with the machine and the two ruined fingertips. The boss came up from the office. He had a tissue in his hand, which he used to pick up the pieces of flesh that had once been Wayne’s fingers. There was no way anybody was going to be able to sew them back on. It hadn’t been a clean cut. There wasn’t much blood on the machine but he wiped it off anyway and then he asked me if I was all right to carry on with the job while he took Wayne to the hospital. I told him that I was able and then I started folding the little pieces of aluminium that I had previously stacked for my workmate. I worked very slowly. Much more slowly and carefully than I usually did. When Wayne and the boss walked past me on the way to the hospital, I noticed that Wayne wasn’t smiling any more and that his face had gone a kind of pale grey colour. I carried on putting ninety-degree bends in the aluminium strips until it was time to stop work.

  At five o’clock I washed my hands and walked round the corner to the George and Dragon on Albion Street. Inside it was noisy and smoky and the air was alive with clacking dominoes, laughter and relief, as the tin bashers and the jewellers, the watchmakers and the machine operators all gathered for a drink after work. There were a lot of metal workers in there. Birmingham had historically been a big metal-working city. The old tin bashers were lined up along the bar and I cast an eye along them. I looked at their hands, maybe for the first time. More than one of those hands, gripping those different pints along the bar, was not using a full fist of fingers. The more I looked at people’s hands, the more missing fingers I saw. The meat seller walked through the door with a carrier bag full of bacon and he started handing out the unmarked plastic packets to the people giving him money. I sat and smoked and wondered what the future might hold for me if I kept on earning a living on the machines and in the factories of Birmingham.

  After a couple of pints I got a taxi back to the pub I lived in. The Queen’s Head was an old coaching house on Garrison Street in Small Heath. It sat between three train lines, underneath electricity pylons, on a largely deserted patch of industrial wasteland at the back end of the Leyland factory. When all of the surrounding factories knocked off for the evening the pub sat alone as the only inhabited island in a sea of empty buildings and lifeless storage facilities. It was run by a fierce woman called Nancy McCann, who ran the place with an iron hand in a black velvet glove. It said ‘licensed proprietor Ann Dympna McCann’ over the door but inside she was the queen and the head, and everybody knew it. It was a lively place that rarely closed before 3 a.m. despite the fact that closing time by law was eleven. Nancy was a canny woman and if the police came round to knock on the curtained windows at midnight, she would let them in and give them free whiskey. More than once, I’d look out of my attic window before leaving for work and see the coppers sleeping peacefully in their squad car on the road outside. There was a full and well-used jukebox in the Queen’s Head that constantly played Irish folk songs and a few others too. It’d be playing ‘The Fields of Athenry’ or ‘Maggie’ or ‘American Pie’, and I would sit there drinking Guinness with the old men until I was too drunk to drink any more, or until I ran out of money.

  After I had drunk my fill I would go up to my room, play the guitar and listen to Jimi Hendrix on my old mono cassette player. I only had one tape. It was Electric Ladyland, and I listened to it every night as I was going to sleep for about a year, until I knew every note of every solo by heart.

  About two months later, when Wayne came back to work, he showed us the stumps of his fingers. One of the stumps looked exactly like ET, which we thought was pretty funny, because in the film ET points at space with his finger and says, ‘Home. Home.’

  Now, Wayne didn’t have a finger, but he had a stump that looked like ET’s face.

  He received about two grand in compensation for his accident, which seemed like a fortune to us at the time. He also got two months off work. Me and Ray u
sed to discuss which fingers we might be able to chop off for two grand and a couple of months’ paid leave. I decided that I could probably stand to lose the little finger on my right hand, and one day I even got as far as laying it on the bed of the machine while trying to convince Ray to press the pedal. We were only half joking about it.

  I would spend my weeks in Birmingham working at the factory, and on Friday night I would get the train back to Rugby and hang out with my mates.

  A Piece of Cake

  We made some small talk and then he glanced over his shoulder and said, ‘Here, man. Do you want some space cake?’

  I had managed to scrounge a couple of drags off a few joints at parties in the past, but I was by no means a hash smoker at this point, nor did I have much experience at all with illegal drugs.

  The idea of a space cake sounded great. It was a cake with space in it. How dangerous could it actually be? I reached into the prettily decorated cake tin that he was holding and took out a piece of cake. It looked like normal cake. ‘Thanks very much,’ I said. ‘What’s in it?’

  He laughed, and said, ‘Hash mainly.’

  I ate the cake, absent-mindedly, and looked out of the window. ‘Delicious!’ I said when I’d finished it.

  ‘Do you want another bit?’ he said, narrowly avoiding a slow-moving pensioner, as he offered the cake tin to me again.

  Of course I wanted another slice of cake. I liked cake and it would have been rude not to. ‘Thanks very much,’ I said and ate the second piece without a thought.

  There was some music playing on the car stereo. It sounded very familiar even though I had never heard it before. I listened to it for a while and tried to decide how something could sound both very old and very modern simultaneously. ‘What is this music?’ I shouted, over the top of it.

  ‘It’s the Velvet Underground,’ came the reply.

  ‘It’s good, isn’t it?’ I yelled back, unnecessarily.

  Then I went back to staring out of the window at the Warwickshire countryside, while ‘White Light/White Heat’ began to imprint itself into my softening brain and the speeding silver car roared along the quiet country lanes on the way to the party.

  It was a fairly standard teenage party. There was loud popular music and there was too much booze. I had drunk too much of it by the time the first space cake made its considerable presence felt. I suddenly felt very sick indeed and ran outside to throw up.

  I wobbled back inside and propped myself up by a wall. Somebody asked me if I was all right, which prompted another wave of nausea and more throwing up. I was not feeling very all right at all, so I made my way into an empty bedroom and fell asleep curled up in the corner of the room.

  At some point in the evening one of the girls who was throwing the party came over and shook me awake to see if I was OK. I repaid this concern by vomiting over her curtains as she watched in disbelief, then I went back to sleep again without an apology. I was not the life and soul of the party. I was discombobulated, disembodied, haunted by strange visions, and thoroughly crashed the fuck out, the two hash cakes having put me in a place that was far beyond the realms of normal sociability. The party carried on around me as I slept peacefully beside the unclean curtains. I woke up, sometime in the very early morning, with that horrible mixture of tiredness and physical discomfort that demands a solution even when you are in no fit state to provide for yourself. The night and the room had grown uncomfortably cold and I needed heat, so I stumbled around amongst the strewn and sleeping bodies until I found an electric blow heater.

  I lay down in the corridor with my head directly on the heater and went to sleep again. When I woke up, it was daylight. My head was so hot that it felt like it had been cooked and the rest of me was freezing cold. I stood up and tried to regain an equilibrium that proved to be difficult with the combination of the heavy remnants of the innocent-looking space cake and an overly hot head. I took a little walk around, stepping and stumbling over the sprawled bodies of unconscious teenagers in various states of entanglement as I tried to encourage my blood to flow into the parts of my body it had been neglecting. It looked like the party had been some sort of fun. There were books down the toilet, broken windows, half-finished bottles of booze, and pools of vomit all over the place. It seemed that I hadn’t been the only person who’d failed to be the perfect guest.

  I walked into the kitchen and saw Pete Kember looking like he’d had a good night’s sleep and a shower. He was sitting at the breakfast table, eating a bowl of Frosties, while two people snored under the table.

  ‘Morning!’ he said, sounding weirdly cheerful and looking abnormally together. Pete didn’t drink. ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘I think I cooked my head,’ I replied, genuinely thinking it might have been the case. ‘How you doing?’

  He just laughed and carried on eating his Frosties.

  This was my first adventure with Pete Kember. There were to be many more, but I didn’t know that then.

  The Trip

  We were sitting in a fairly nondescript room, in an end of terrace house in Rugby, staring intently at the wall. I had become utterly fascinated by the taste of a match I had recently struck and I was trying to figure out why the main centre of my consciousness seemed to be located somewhere above my right kneecap. I was intensely aware of the pulsing of my own heart as it pushed the blood through the arteries and veins of my body.

  The wall we were staring at seemed to be alive with vibrant shapes and shades that fell far beyond the commonly recognised spectrum of colour and ordinary reality. Primarily the wall was lit by the Optikinetiks projector which Pete Bain had borrowed for the purposes of the evening’s entertainment from his bandmates in Spacemen 3 but, strangely, there were other colours and lights on the wall and in the room which did not seem to be emanating from obviously external sources. We each had our own internal lightshow working in perfect organic synchrony with the music and the blobwheel, and which was being powered by the tea we had drunk an hour previously that had tasted like the earth itself.

  ‘We should go to the fair,’ somebody suggested. This seemed like a pleasing idea, so we all wobbled, laughing, to our feet, and prepared ourselves for the short walk across town to the old cattle market.

  Me, Pete Bain, Roscoe, Craig Wagstaff, Kate Radley and the other members of our funfair orientated gang, prepared ourselves for the unusually epic journey of actually leaving the house.

  After a short stroll that may, in truth, have been much longer or shorter than we thought it was, we drew near to our destination. The lights of the fair seemed much brighter than usual, and the stars were positively beaming as we approached the distant noise of this temporary feast for the senses. Giant painted clowns and mountains of pulsating neon pink candyfloss loomed on the horizon, as the clattering fairground rides and the laughter of the people riding them called to us like a siren’s song to sailors. We were wobbly and giggly and laughing at stuff that probably didn’t exist for other people, but we weren’t hurting anybody. Not even ourselves, really. We were merely thrill-seekers, looking to catch a ride on the big wheel and to catch a glimpse of the great beyond ‒ in that, we were just like everybody else at the funfair.

  After we had dizzied ourselves with the plunge and rise of the rollercoaster and scared ourselves stupid with the cartoon shocks of the ghost train, we decided to return to the safety of the house and the comforts of the blobwheel. Pete Bain and I were walking a little way ahead when we heard a commotion from the rear of our psychedelic caravan.

  ‘Look at that! Look at that,’ our friends in the rearguard squealed. ‘What the fuck is that? Is it a spaceship? It looks like a chicken. Look at it!’

  Pete Bain and I exchanged knowing glances. We couldn’t see anything and, given the circumstances, we thought it was unlikely that our friends could see what they were seeing either.

  We walked back towards them to try to see what they had seen.

  They were babbling in a fairly high state of excite
ment: ‘What do you reckon it was? That was fucking weird. You should have seen it. It was amazing. A big neon chicken, kind of zigzagging around in the sky.’

  ‘Seen a spaceship, have you?’ said Pete. ‘Yeah, right.’

  ‘I saw it too,’ said Kate. ‘It was really strange.’ She was visibly excited about it, even though she hadn’t drunk the tea, which actually was strange.

  When we returned to the house, unimpeded by more neon chickens or spacecraft, we settled into the ever-rotating colour wheel and the fabulously 3D music as we gradually made our way back through the night to something approaching consensus reality.

  I had started visiting this particular house of ill repute in Rugby before it had truly become a house of ill repute. After the pubs closed at the weekend, a gang of merrymakers would dutifully stumble down to the house to listen to loud music and smoke hashish. I had become friends with Pete Bain (who was the bassist for Spacemen 3) and he introduced me into the circle and vouched for the fact that I was OK. I had met him through various after-pub house parties in the town, where the older crowd would gatecrash and I would sometimes manage to hang around them long enough for someone to pass me a joint. Every weekend for about two months I would go down to Winfield Street after drinking more lager than I could stand, someone would pass me a joint and then I would go outside to throw up. After a while, I stopped throwing up, and learned to keep myself together. We liked to get wasted, but we were still on the right side of the fine line between fun and outright self-destruction.

  The people who gathered there, and who lived there, were a few years older than me. Roscoe (who was shortly to take over from Natty Brooker as the drummer for Spacemen 3), Pete Bain and Tim Morris (the original Spacemen 3 drummer) used to visit for these late-night smoking and music sessions.