by Liza Cody
If you prevent yourself from blinking long enough, your eyes will start to sting and a tear will form. If you’re lucky it will swell and roll gently over your lower eyelid and down your cheek.
Robin says, ‘It’s all right, darling. Here, let me fill your glass. You’ll feel better in a minute.’
‘Sorry,’ mumbles Alec looking mortified. Even Grace is staring accusingly at him.
I’ve shared my deepest feelings with him. Yes I have. But I haven’t told him where I met Jack.
Meeting someone new is the best, the wildest time. The air crackles and hums with promise and I can be reborn. I can reinvent myself to become the perfect lover again. I’m a stranger in a foreign country – learning the language, discovering unfamiliar pleasures. I’m newborn every time. Breathless, restless, greedy.
Dumping an old love is like dumping an old identity. It isn’t only the old love you’re tired of: it’s also the old you – what you became after close proximity to the old love. I slough off my old skin and stretch out in a warm new one which is so thin and sensitive it tingles at the lightest touch.
I was with an American called Cy Fuentes. He came over to record because London was the place to be at the time. He was handsome, talented and jealous. We lived in a converted studio on Sydney Street. I was manifestly so uninterested in the domestic bit and he was so allergic to Bohemian squalor that he asked his sister, Gabriella, to come and keep house. Gabriella was responsible for my meeting Jack.
She was thrilled to be in London, thrilled to be on the music scene. English musicians were so cool. English boys were peachy and Gabriella couldn’t wait to gobble one up. She came across Jack while trawling the King’s Road one evening.
Normally, her taste was for clean-cut kids in mod uniform so she was afraid Jack would be as rude as he was scruffy. On top of that, she couldn’t trust her own taste in music. Cy was always making fun of her bubblegum boys. So she took me along for a second opinion.
‘Whaddya think, Birdie?’ she said. ‘I mean, if he got his hair styled and wore a suit?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘But he could be gorgeous.’
‘Shhh!’ I hissed. The hair on the back of my head seemed to shiver. Goose-bumps came up on my arms. Because sometimes you hear a voice which you know can never be imitated or stolen. And then there’s the rarest of all rarities – the unique voice with something to say. The real thing.
‘He’s got the cutest eyes,’ Gabriella jabbered. ‘Is he any good, do you think? He sounds kinda rough to me. I guess if he was any good he wouldn’t be playing in a dim little club like this.’
She wouldn’t shut up so I left her there and went home. I’d have to check him out when I was alone.
But the very next night Cy was playing at the Round House and at the end Gabriella brought Jack backstage to meet him. She wasn’t showing him off so much as establishing her own credentials. She was saying, ‘Look at me – my brother’s famous, he gets the prestigious gigs – I’m someone to know. If you’re nice to me maybe I’ll do you a bit of good, introduce you to the big league.’
Now Cy was one of those hypochondriac musicians who go on endlessly about their health. His speciality was muscular aches and pains.
When Jack came in, Cy was surrounded by admirers and I was giving him a very public massage. Because that was another thing about Cy: he wanted to appear like a boxer after a fight, with a towel around his shoulders and his trainer – or in this case his handmaiden – in attendance.
Cy was saying, ‘For fuck’s sake, girl – it’s where the Infraspinatus and the Teres major tuck under the deltoid – don’t you know anything?’
Performers can be a real pain in the arse. But there were at least three hopefuls in the admiring crowd who would have cheerfully flattened me to get their hands on Cy’s muscles.
I was in any case beginning to think Cy was too old for me. Too set in his ways. Too addicted to over-the-counter medicines. It was all becoming stifling and predictable. The world seemed full of older men who got their kicks from training young girls to be their own personal handmaidens.
That was the scene Gabriella dragged Jack into. She was saying, ‘Hey, Jack, meet my brother, Cy.’
And Cy was coming over all anatomical about a kink in his shoulder. And the admirers were trying to show everyone their tits.
I wiped my hands on a towel and said, ‘I was never any good at geography. Find your own Teres major.’
One of the admirers said, ‘Let me – I studied shiatsu in Wales.’
‘Go right ahead,’ I told her. ‘I was taught never to shiatsu on my own doorstep.’
No one laughed except Jack. I looked up and saw him sniggering behind Gabriella.
He said, ‘Hi. Didn’t I see you in the club a couple of nights ago? You walked out on me.’
Gabriella didn’t even bother to give me a name. She said, ‘This is my brother’s girlfriend.’
‘Not any more,’ I snapped. ‘Sorry Jack, I’m walking out on you again.’ And I grabbed my jacket and marched towards the door.
‘Honey!’ Cy protested, ‘come back. You know I think you’ve got great hands.’
But I kept on walking until I hit the street where an undignified little scene developed. Cy was half naked, trying to mollify me. Gabriella was saying snotty stuff like, ‘This isn’t the time for one of your sulks.’ The admirer was saying to Cy, ‘Take my coat – you’ll catch your death.’ About a dozen fans were clamouring for Cy’s autograph. And Jack was laughing his head off.
Eventually one of the admirer’s admirers passed a big fat joint around and things calmed down enough for all of us to climb into cars and go to a party in Hampstead.
But the damage was done. Golden, laughing Jack made Cy look like a crotchety old man. The air hummed when I looked at him, and the walls shook when he looked at me. He danced with me once that night, slipping his arm round my waist and pulling me on to his lean hard body as if he was trying me on for size. The heat was almost unbearable and I had to push him away before we melted and became glued together, belly to belly, thigh to thigh.
He said, ‘You’re not going home with him tonight.’
I said nothing, but I knew it was simply a statement of fact.
‘Because’, he said, ‘that would be a shame and a crime, and a horrible waste.’
So that’s how Jack stole me from under Cy’s nose. And that’s how I stole Jack from under Gabriella’s nose – depending on who’s telling what to whom.
The Tunisian brothel story is much better because it’s a direct steal from a tale about Messalina and it contains all the elements of hubris and come-uppance you could possibly want.
They say I took a bet with a famous whore as to which of us could service the more johns. Points were awarded for artistic merit and degree of difficulty. They say I was winning by a country mile when Jack turned up with his guitar. Then two things happened: I captivated him with my venerean artistry and he captivated me with his music. I pulled out of the contest and he paid my debt of dishonour to the famous whore.
They say this was where I caught the syphilis with which I infected Jack, driving him mad and causing his death and my own downfall at a single swipe. Yep, that’s how the story goes. Whores and heroes, venality and venery, pride and fall. Great ingredients, and if they’re still telling it about Messalina two thousand years later, what chance have I got?
At the time, running away with Jack was seen as a bad career move. He wasn’t rich and famous, like Cy. He didn’t have the trappings. People suddenly talked about me as if I were a groupie and as if there were a recognised career structure for groupies. How unbelievably stupid.
Of course, what emerged, what neither Jack nor I recognised in his tiny shared flat with mattresses on the floor was that, as soon as Jack got me, he acquired the trappings. We became the subject of in-house, music-biz gossip. He became something other than just another young rocker. We were polluted from the very beginning, so to speak.
But I was only eighteen and Jack was only twenty-three. Babies. We didn’t give a toss. When you don’t know if you’ll even last a single night together, when you don’t know if you’ll be having lunch with the one you went to bed with, how can you be accused of career moves? I could have blagged my way back into Cy’s favour if I’d been interested in trappings. I’d done it before and I’ve done it since. Having my cake and eating it too was my speciality.
The miracle to me was that, at twenty-three, Jack was the youngest man I’d been with. His skin was as tight and supple as mine. He was someone I could play with. We could roll around like puppies. We could invent and shout nonsense at each other. We could dress up in freaky costume and hit the streets. We could tell secrets and giggle at grownups. We never did anything the same way twice.
Unlike all the others, Jack didn’t have a ready-made world he wanted to slot me into. He didn’t have a rigid attitude to music and life any more than I did. We could make it up as we went along.
I was astonished. I hadn’t realised that even after leaving home and being kicked out of school I’d been hogtied. I’d been moulded and shaped to fit into the adult world. Even the so-called anarchists of rock’n’roll had some sort of master plan I was being groomed for.
Jack, at the beginning, was a true anarchist. If he didn’t like something he changed it. If he didn’t like what was expected of him he didn’t do it. On-stage, he didn’t play the entertainer. He sang what he wanted to sing in no particular order. He talked to the audience, fought with them sometimes. He quarrelled with the band. He changed songs in mid-flight leaving everyone else in disarray and scrambling to catch up. He wasn’t afraid to fuck up.
It was undisciplined. It was irresponsible. It was irresistible.
Oh, and oh he smelled so sweet. He didn’t smell like an adult. Even when his hair was unwashed, you could bury your face in it and swear he was a cat asleep in new grass. I didn’t want a shower after I’d been with Jack – I liked the smell of his skin on mine. It was the smell of innocence. Beginnings are beautiful.
Now look what we’re left with! Tonight, Grace comes into my room just as I’m turning out the light. She’s weeping and she can hardly breathe for snot and tears.
‘Oh Auntie Lin,’ she says.
I hold the duvet back so that she can slide into bed beside me the way she used to when she was smaller than me.
‘What’s he done?’ I say. Because no woman cries this way except for love. But Grace just cries and snuffles on my shoulder like an infant while I wait, getting wet and bored.
I wonder if Robin brought her kids up right. With our mother and father, howling achieved nothing but a slap and a period of isolation in our room. But Robin tried to make her kids’ childhood a time of excitement and pleasure; above all, a guilt-free zone. She said she was crippled by the feeling that she was, in every way, unsatisfactory. Which, I suppose, was the burden a whole generation of English kids had to bear. So she gave her own children applause and encouragement and the sense that they were as important and valuable as the adults. It wasn’t exactly that they could do no wrong, but wrong, once done, could easily be admitted to and just as easily forgiven. Which, as it turns out, is almost the same thing, because here is Grace who clearly feels it is OK to come howling to my room after midnight. Not only is it OK, but she’s confident that she will be welcomed and comforted. Even if the wrong she’s done is to me.
‘Don’t make him leave,’ she gasps at last.
‘Alec?’ I say. ‘Why?’ Because, for the time being, I don’t want her to know what I know; at least, not until I know what she knows.
‘Well, I knew he liked the music,’ she says, ‘and I knew he wanted to meet you. But I thought it was me. I thought he came here for me.’
See what a sense of self-worth does? It’s so much more of a bummer when you find out you aren’t as important as you thought you were. Poor little Grace. I break out the tissues and pass a handful to her.
‘Tell me about it,’ I say – comforting, neutral Auntie Lin.
‘You’ll never forgive me,’ she wails. She’s never been unforgiven in her life – she’s simply giving me notice that I must forgive her.
‘He left his laptop in my room,’ she says eventually. ‘He was writing a letter but he wouldn’t let me see it. I thought it might be to an old girlfriend. He swore there was no one else – but, Lin, he’s so special. Other women must want him too, mustn’t they?’
‘Sure,’ I say. That’s another subject I have first-class honours in. ‘So you read his letter, did you?’
‘He was different tonight,’ she tells me. ‘Not cold, but like he was thinking about something else. So when he went back to Jimmy’s room I started thinking, what if it’s someone else? But it wasn’t. It was you. He was writing a report about you.’
‘Oh.’ Extraordinary – at last the little sod has been careless with his security, but the wrong woman booted up the information.
‘He’s been following you,’ Grace says. ‘He’s been recording your conversations. And I thought he loved me.’
‘He isn’t following me because he loves me,’ I assure her.
‘No-o,’ she says. ‘But he’s fascinated with you.’
‘No he isn’t. He’s doing a job.’
‘Oh Lin,’ she cries, ‘I thought you’d be furious with me.’
‘Why, sweetie? Because someone made a patsy of you?’
‘Because I was indiscreet. I knew he wanted to meet you. I thought he was doing his doctorate on music journalism of the late sixties. That’s why he was so interested in you and Jack. I should have told you, but I just wanted to help him. But I’ve let you down,’ she says, weeping more comfortably. ‘Can you ever forgive me?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say.
She looks at me, shocked. I was supposed to tell her she was my little Grace and everything she does is peachy and not her fault.
‘How much damage is done?’ I ask instead.
She pulls herself away from my comforting-auntie arm, and for a moment I think she’s going to say, ‘I’ve apologised, what else do you want?’
But she’s better than that. She says, ‘How much damage can he do?’
‘Who was he writing to?’
‘Mr Sasson Freel,’ she says, ‘with a copy to a Mr B. Stears.’
‘Ah.’ I sigh. ‘He can do quite a lot of damage.’
She sags. ‘You’re going to send him away, I know you are.’
‘Well, what would you do, Grace?’
‘I ought to kick him out. I ought to wake him up right now and throw him out. But I can’t. I love him, Auntie Lin. I really do. And I don’t want him to know I messed around with his laptop.’
So yet another generation of my family betrays itself for Jack’s bright youth.
Part 3
The Movable Man And The Movie
‘He’s drunk, he tastes like candy, he’s so beautiful.
He’s so deep, like dirty water. God, he’s awful.’
Courtney Love
I
Peanuts and Promises
Alec Parry wasn’t a bad man – he liked dogs and he tolerated children – but he loved the stories of young men who started out in the mail room and went on to own the company. Which was a good thing because a post-graduate course in Media Studies opened the world of mail rooms to him.
He knew that the film and music business was a world where thousands of over-qualified young people applied for every menial job. The lucky ones were then brutally exploited by a system of internships where you worked like a dog for less than a living wage in the hope that, if you distinguished yourself, you’d be taken on as permanent staff.
Memo Movies was an independent music film company. It dealt in archive footage and classic videos, and every two or three years it made a film of its own based on the history of jazz, blues, rock or the development of trip-hop. These productions depended heavily on Memo Movies’ archive catalogue because, when
tracing the roots of any new movement in music, it’s illuminating to show the influences on it with film clips of music history. Memo Movies’ archive went back as far as an old film of Bessie Smith, made in 1927. It was a diamond mine for anyone interested in that sort of thing.
Before joining Memo Movies Alec had never heard of Bessie Smith or Son House or Bill Broonzy or Howlin’ Wolf or any of those legends who went back before the 60s. But he did like the music of the 60s and 70s – a fact he leant on in his interview. After joining, he made it his business to become as knowledgeable as he could about the seminal bands of that era. And he was surprised how far back into history his research took him. He hadn’t realised that even revolutionaries have a spiritual lineage, that they, too, inherit a tradition.
To do him credit, Alec made an honest stab at filling in the gaps in his knowledge. His motto might have been, ‘Blag your way in, become indispensable and then stick like glue.’
The problem was in sticking like glue. If history was anything to go by, when his six-month internship was up, Memo Movies would decide he was too expensive to take on full wages. They’d let him go and employ instead another monkey to whom they could pay the usual mixture of peanuts and promises. They would do this without appreciating Alec’s potential. He was hard-working, ambitious, smart, well-educated and resourceful, but he couldn’t prove it in a menial job. If he wanted to be recognised, he first needed to be noticed.
So Alec became the helpful young guy who made himself useful to anyone who had a permanent staff job. If a consignment of videos went missing, he’d stay on the phone and track it down. If the coffee machine or the copier broke down he was the one who badgered the repairman to have it fixed before the end of the day. If Production wanted to view material from Archives he took it personally to the editing suite and made sure he stayed long enough to try to find out what the project was about.