by Tony Parsons
Nothing. Terry’s dad was still smiling proudly.
‘The Clash? The Jam? The Stranglers?’ He was struggling now, but he didn’t want to disappoint his dad. ‘I did one of the first pieces on the Sex Pistols – and I wrote something when they did that secret gig at the Screen on the Green…’
The name pressed a nerve. ‘The mob that called the Queen a moron?’ said one enormous porter. ‘They don’t want to come down here on a dark night. We like the Queen round here.’
The other men chuckled at that, and made enthusiastic predictions of a ‘good hiding’ for any of the Sex Pistols that dared set foot in Smithfield. But their interest had been piqued.
‘What about the birds in Abba? You meet them?’ Lewd laughter and rolled eyes, pieces of pie dropped and retrieved. ‘I wouldn’t mind doing something in-depth with that blonde tart!’
Terry had to concede that he hadn’t crossed paths with Abba.
‘What about the Beatles?’
‘Elton John and Kiki Dee?’
‘What about Disco Duck?’
Some of the more sophisticated music lovers chortled at that. ‘The song’s called “Disco Duck,” you daft cunt. The singer’s Rick Dees and His Cast of Idiots! Listen to him with his Disco Duck!’
Terry had to admit he hadn’t met any of them.
‘See,’ Terry’s dad said proudly. ‘All the stars. Travels all over the world, he does.’
His smile didn’t falter until they were outside the pub.
‘You don’t eat,’ the old man said. ‘You don’t sleep. And you’re skin and bone. What’s wrong with you? What’s going on?’
Terry said nothing, filling himself with the chilled night air, glad to be out of the pub and away from the smell of cooked meat.
His father picked up the handles of a two-wheeled cart, and began pulling it behind him. They walked back into the great freezing cavern of a market, where the old man rested his rickshaw.
‘Your mum liked that girl. Young Misty. Serious about her, are you?’
Terry looked away. ‘Not really.’ How could he tell the old man about Dag Wood? How could he tell him any of that?
His father shook his head, eyes blazing. He had never raised a hand to Terry in his life. But he had a way of looking at his son that hurt as much as any slap. ‘One of these days we’re going to find out what you do like, Tel,’ he said. Terry knew that the life he was leading was unimaginable to his father. But the old man was not stupid – he knew that whatever his son was doing, he couldn’t go on doing it for ever. Without being asked, Terry’s dad produced a worn-out wallet from his back pocket, and started peeling off the notes.
‘Twenty-five quid do it?’ This said without a hint of reproach. ‘It’s the best I can do until Friday.’
Terry hung his head. ‘Dad, I’m sorry – I’ll pay you back.’
Terry’s father stuffed the money into his son’s hand and dragged his cart over to a line of showers. WASH ALL TRUCKS HERE, said the sign.
‘I don’t care, I’d give you the shirt off my back,’ Terry’s father said. He began hosing down the rickshaw. Blood streamed in the gutter. ‘But you can’t even eat.’
‘Help you with that, Dad? Help you with that?’
But Terry’s old man shook his head, and continued hosing down what the porters in Smithfield called a truck, and he wouldn’t even look at his son.
* * *
Mrs Brown swung the canary yellow Lotus Elan left at Marble Arch and gunned it down Park Lane, hitting the brakes as they passed the Dorchester and then the Hilton. Ray scanned the big hotels for packs of photographers. But the only sign of life was a lonely doorman in a top hat. Ray nervously rubbed his bare wrist.
‘Do you want to try the Ritz?’ she said, hitting the floor. She was a good driver, and the Elan just flew, and when she put the pedal to the floor, Ray thought it felt like some new kind of drug.
‘Where’s the Ritz?’ he said.
She looked at him to see if he was joking. Then she said, ‘The Ritz is on Piccadilly, just round the corner from Park Lane, he might be there. Or the Savoy, down by the river. Or Claridges – that’s probably even more likely. They’re all pretty close.’
‘I know Claridges,’ Ray said. ‘I know that one.’
She chuckled. ‘Yeah, what did you do at Claridges? Have tea and buttered scones?’
‘No,’ Ray said. ‘I interviewed Bob Dylan.’
She raised her meticulously plucked eyebrows. She was impressed, he could see that. People were always impressed when they heard who he had met, although Ray couldn’t understand why. It wasn’t as though genius was contagious. And he had hardly got a coherent sentence out of Dylan – Ray had been sick with nerves, and Dylan had been monosyllabic. This beardy, middle-aged guy who clearly wanted to be somewhere else.
White had stuck it on the cover, because Acid Pete had a good concert shot, and because Dylan still warranted a cover. But it had been a crap piece. People thought they would be changed if they could just breathe the same air as the biggest stars. Ray knew it didn’t work out like that. John Lennon wasn’t going to save him. John Lennon wasn’t going to save anyone.
‘Well,’ she said. ‘If you interviewed Dylan, you shouldn’t have any problem with John Lennon.’
‘That was different,’ Ray said. ‘It was all set up for me. It’s not so easy when you have to do it alone.’ ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘You’re not alone.’
They smiled at each other. It was true. She had been a big help. If he had tramped around the five-star hotels by himself, John Lennon would have been at Heathrow before Ray had seen half of them. But as she expertly threw the Lotus around the empty West End streets, Ray felt a creeping despair. This was never going to work. Who was he kidding? He had never been a real journalist, just another kid who loved music.
‘Anyway,’ she said, when they had driven by the deserted entrance of the last hotel, ‘the Beatles were thugs pretending to be gentlemen, and the Stones were gentlemen pretending to be thugs.’ She got this funny smile, and looked at Ray sideways. ‘Did you know I had a thing with Brian? I was just a kid. Did my husband ever tell you that?’
‘Brian Jones?’ Ray said. He was dumbfounded. Beautiful Brian, playing his sitar. Beautiful Brian, floating dead in his swimming pool. He was a part of history. Now Ray was impressed. It was like hearing that she had slept with Napoleon.
‘Met him at that club where they started – the Station Hotel.’ She laughed softly at the memory. The Elan was flying the other way up Park Lane. She seemed to like this road. She could really get up some speed. ‘The Station Hotel, Kew Road, Richmond. Sunday nights. Back in 1963. I was – what? Fourteen! He had lots of girls, of course. My husband never mentioned it to you? It drove him crazy for years. The thought of me with Brian.’
Ray shook his head. ‘Your husband never mentioned you to me.’ He tried to soften the words. ‘I mean, all we ever really talked about was his band and how they were doing. He didn’t really talk about you.’
She laughed sourly.
‘Of course not. When the sexual jealousy wears off, a woman knows she’s on her way out. The next thing you know, they’re giving you sex aids for your birthday.’
She said these things and he didn’t know how to respond. He was aware that Mrs Brown wasn’t asking for his opinion. So Ray said nothing. Then she sighed, as if she had had enough for one night.
‘I can drop you home, if you like. Where do you live? Do you share a flat?’
Ray shook his head. ‘I might just wander about for a bit.’ She pulled a face. ‘Not in a squat, are you?’ Ray looked embarrassed. ‘I’m still living at my mum and dad’s place. At least, I was until I left home.’ ‘When was that?’ ‘About two hours ago.’
She laughed, and Ray realised how much he liked her. Under all that hardened frost, she was lovely. It all got mixed up for Ray – her kindness in helping him look for Lennon, the way her face lit up when she laughed, and the feeling of driving through London in th
e middle of the night in a yellow Lotus Elan. He didn’t want to be walking the streets alone.
‘Then I guess we are going to have to go back to my place,’ she said.
In the moonlight the squat reared above them like a derelict Xanadu. There had been wealth here once, years ago, but now the façade of the great white house was scarred with gaping black cracks. Lights flickered in the bare upper windows – candles, open fires, the fiery glow of a bar on an electric heater. A baby was crying.
‘Who lives here?’ Ruby said. ‘Dossers?’
‘They’re not dossers,’ Leon said, counting out his change to pay the taxi driver. ‘They’re homeless. Can you help me out here? I’m a bit short. Sorry.’
Ruby frowned at him.
‘Girls don’t pay. Boys pay.’ She sighed. ‘How’s fifty pence?’
There was a phrase he remembered from somewhere – something about new strategies needing to be devised to bring the wage of the female workforce in line with that of their male counterparts. But he couldn’t keep this girl in his life by parroting stuff he had read in books. After Evelyn ‘Champagne’ King, that wasn’t enough. So instead he said, ‘Fifty pence would be brilliant. I’ve got the tip.’
She pulled out her purse and counted out the rest of the fare. Leon found a Luncheon Voucher in the sticky bottom of a pocket in his Lewis Leather, and slapped it on the driver’s palm. The taxi driver shook his head.
‘Bleedin’ gypos,’ he said, and drove away.
Ruby was reading the graffiti. ‘Cats like plain crisps…No drugs in here…pull the other one.’
‘No, it’s true,’ Leon said. ‘The people who run this place don’t believe in drugs. People take drugs to make themselves free. And we think that – you know…’ He felt embarrassed talking to her this way. ‘We’re all free already, I guess.’
‘But you were taking drugs.’
‘That’s because I was with my friend. He thinks he needs them.’ He smiled at her in the moonlight. ‘And he sometimes leads me astray.’
She smiled back. ‘Easily led astray, are you?’
Leon took out his key. ‘Sometimes. How about you?’
She shook her head. ‘My dad would kill me.’ She looked up at the squat. ‘Steve would kill me.’
‘Then it’s lucky Steve’s not here, isn’t it?’
Ruby looked back at him, not smiling now. ‘Lucky for both of us.’
She held on to the back of his leather jacket as they negotiated their way across the planks. Leon let them into the darkened hallway and Ruby immediately smashed her shin against a bicycle.
‘Careful,’ Leon said. ‘There’s light upstairs. Sorry.’
Shadowy faces appeared on the first-floor landing, and then were gone. Leon and Ruby climbed the stairs. In the main room candlelight and bare bulbs lit a circle of young men sitting cross-legged on the floorboards. They glanced at Leon and Ruby, nodded, and went back to their council. Voices murmured in the tongues of northern Europe.
‘There are some people here who were in Paris,’ Leon said. ‘Paris in ‘68.’
‘I went to Calais once,’ Ruby said. ‘With the school.’
They moved through the house. There was almost no furniture. You could smell mildewed wood and unwashed bodies and something cooking.
‘It don’t half pong,’ Ruby whispered.
Faces peered out of the darkness, suspicious at first and then accepting and friendly, in a vague, unfocused sort of way. Leon felt Ruby relax. This wasn’t such a bad place to be. They passed through a small kitchen where a huge pot of soup was simmering on a grease-encrusted cooker. Unwashed cutlery and scraps of food were scattered around. A longhaired young woman was washing a naked baby in a plastic bowl in the sink.
They went into the unlit bedroom where his father had stood. There had been new arrivals. Rucksacks were spilling their contents and half a dozen sleeping bags covered the floor. Most of them were occupied. A couple were making grunty love, the floorboards creaking beneath them. Ruby took Leon’s arm and pulled him outside, giggling.
‘They don’t mind,’ Leon said.
‘I mind,’ she said.
She shook her head and led him back to the kitchen. The woman and her baby were gone. Ruby made him sit in the only chair. She looked around for a moment, located half a lemon, a bottle of bleach and a teacup celebrating the wedding of Princess Anne and Mark Phillips. Then she faced Leon. She was very serious. She had her professional mask on.
She pulled off his hat, helped him out of his Lewis Leather, and then finally pulled his old Thin Lizzy T-shirt over his head.
He made a movement towards her but she shook her head, no, that wasn’t what she wanted, at least not now, and got him to position his chair in front of the sink. He stared at himself in a cracked mirror.
Leon kept watching his reflection as Ruby washed his hair with cold water and hand soap, then squeezed the juice of half a lemon on it, and finally rinsed it with the Anne and Mark teacup containing a spoonful of bleach, more cold water and the remains of the lemon.
Leon watched his reflection as Ruby turned him into a blond, and he watched her face in the cracked mirror as she performed this magic.
For the first time in his life, Leon felt like he was possibly good looking, although he knew this had less to do with the changing colour of his hair than the feel of her fingers massaging his scalp, and her face considering his head with total concentration, and the warmth of her breath on the back of his neck.
He felt like she really cared about him, and his heart did somersaults.
Later, when the foreign voices in the big room had stopped, and the couple making grunty love were snoring, Leon and Ruby crawled into his sleeping bag.
Then Leon and Ruby made love as close to silence as they could, the only sounds their breathing and the bare floorboards beneath them and his delirious, babbled whisper.
‘I love you,’ he moaned, his eyes filling up at the terrible truth of it. Oh, I love you so much!’
Ruby giggled beneath him, and then sighed, and held him, and drove him wild.
Leon came a bucket.
How many nights without sleep?
Almost three, Terry thought, the darkness of Covent Garden all around. When morning came it would be three full nights without sleep.
He counted them off.
The last two nights in Berlin. One spent running round the backstreets of the city with Dag, watching him and the band borrow instruments from a beardy jazz quartet, banging out a ramshackle version of his greatest hits, Dag throwing himself around like a lunatic, at one point swinging from a lampshade and doing a belly flop on a table of middle-aged jazz fans.
And then the next night locked up in Dag’s hotel room, doing Christa’s coke, talking until the maid was banging on the door because she needed to service the room and it was time for Terry to wipe his nose, pack his bags and catch a cab to the airport.
And now this night, this dying night, with only hours before it was gone. That would be the three nights without sleep, the killer three nights in a row, and Terry knew too well what always happened on the third morning.
On the third morning you started seeing things.
It could be anything. After three nights without sleep, Terry had once seen a sparrow jiving. After a different three nights he had seen a crashed plane, a jumbo jet peeled open like a can of sardines, tilted on its side outside his bedsit. Mad stuff. Insane stuff. The jiving sparrow, the crashed plane – they weren’t there – Terry knew that, and he tried to hold on to that knowledge. But it was hard.
After three nights, the speed in your liver turned to mescaline – a hallucinogenic – and you saw visions and they seemed so real. You swallowed your terror, and you tried to tear your eyes away, because you couldn’t help believe in them. After three nights without going to bed, it seemed so real.
And as Terry saw the lights of the Western World coming out of the blackness, he wondered what slice of madness he would have to see tonigh
t.
In the hours since he had left the Western World, the club had gone berserk. Stark raving berserk.
It was as if all the psychosis and frustration and violence that had been storing up in the Vortex and the Marquee and the Roxy and the Red Cow and the Nashville and Dingwalls and the Hope & Anchor had descended on this hole in the ground in Covent Garden.
Terry fought his way downstairs and saw that there were Dagenham Dogs everywhere.
They had annexed the dance floor. Smashing into each other, lobbing cans and spit at the stage, shoving aside anyone who didn’t belong to their little tribe, taking over the place and loving it. Terry thought about Leon and hoped his friend was far away from here.
There was a Union Jack jacket right in the middle of the mayhem. Brainiac was out there with the Dogs, doing his mad piston dance, like a cross between a mascot and a punch bag, and Dogs twice his size pummelled into him, knocking him back and forth like a red, white and blue shuttlecock.
Brainiac saw Terry and grinned his dopey grin, as if they were all pals together, but Terry couldn’t manage to smile back.
He thought there was a good chance the Dogs were going to do the thing that they had threatened all year. They were finally going to go all the way and kill someone.
Terry pushed his way upstairs to the toilets. It was tough moving around this place tonight. No one gave way. Strangers scowled and snarled at him. There seemed to be more and more faces that he didn’t recognise, and he felt like fucking crying.
It’s just the speed, he thought. It’s just the three nights and the speed and the fear of what I will see.
He entered the men’s toilets. Dub reggae shuddered the splintered white tiles and fractured mirrors. The toilet was crowded with men and women and boys and girls taking drugs, selling drugs and applying dollops of make-up. Nobody was using the place for its intended purpose, but somehow it still managed to stink with the trapped excretions of a thousand and one nights.