by Tony Parsons
Terry nodded, pulling out his Marlboros. He had no fucking idea what Skip meant. Rock stars died and then you loved them more than ever. Brian Jones. Jimi Hendrix. Jim Morrison. That’s the way it had always been. But he thought of Billy Blitzen, alone and strung-out in the Western World, and for the first time Terry glimpsed something beyond the eternal glory of rock-and-roll martyrdom. He saw the waste.
‘Thanks, man,’ Skip said as Terry offered him his last cigarette. Skip lit up, dragged deeply and then carefully set the Marlboro on its filter tip, immediately forgetting it. Terry stared at it hungrily. ‘Rock and roll is turning into museum culture now,’ said Skip. ‘Like jazz or painting. You know? The canon exists, and all we can do is stand back and admire it. When Miles Davis and Picasso have come and gone – or Elvis and Dylan – what more can you say?’
Terry picked up the album cover in front of Skip. ‘What about this lot? Television?’
‘A footnote,’ Skip sighed. ‘A glorious footnote, a magnificent footnote, but a footnote all the same. Who’s going to be on the cover next week?’
Terry scratched his head. ‘Elvis? Got to be Elvis.’
‘Young Elvis. Elvis in 1956. Elvis with the sap rising. White’s not going to put the Elvis of 1977 on the cover. No fringed jumpsuits. No Las Vegas glitz. No middle-age paunch. It’s going to be Elvis when he was a skinny kid with everything before him. It’s going to look like something great, but it will be just another nail in the coffin.’
Terry thought about it. ‘What coffin?’
‘The coffin with our music in it,’ Skip said. ‘The coffin of rock and roll.’ The Marlboro standing upright on the desk was glowing red. Skip picked it up and inhaled deeply, running his bony fingers through matted bird’s-nest hair. ‘Don’t get stuck in rock and roll, man,’ Skip told Terry. ‘People are starting to treat it like the civil service – a job for life. It was never meant to be a job for life.’ Skip smiled, glanced at Terry then looked away. ‘But I thought you were hanging out with Dag tonight.’
‘Ah,’ Terry said, attempting to laugh off his mangled heart. ‘That didn’t work out so good.’
Skip nodded thoughtfully. ‘Well, Dag can be hard to handle. He takes whatever he can get his hands on. Starts acting crazy.’
‘It wasn’t that,’ Terry said. ‘Nothing to do with taking stuff.’ He paused, studied the cover of Marquee Moon that was still in his hands. ‘Well, in a way. Misty – she sort of went off with him.’
Skip thought about it. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Okay, man. Dag and Misty. Wild.’
‘I thought he was my friend,’ Terry said, trying to laugh and finding it choke somewhere halfway up his throat. ‘In Berlin
‘He’s not your friend, man,’ Skip said, suddenly full of feeling. ‘Dag’s not your friend. Doesn’t matter how well you got along with him when you were on the road. Dag’s a rock star, man. You could know him for twenty years and he still wouldn’t be your friend. Not really. Not the way that Ray and Leon are your friends. Or even Billy. Because you give Dag one teeny-fucking-weeny bad review, and you would be out man, and you would never be allowed back in. You can be friendly with these guys – especially guys your own age, who start out when you do. Bit harder with someone like Dag, who’s been around the block a few times already, but you can still be friendly with him. You can be friendly with the guys your own age because when it all changes, and it stops being about loving music and starts being about other stuff, about egos and limos, and blow-jobs from skinny models, part of you still remembers when you were all just starting out and all you wanted to do was talk about music and meet girls and you couldn’t even get into the fucking Speakeasy. But sooner or later you have to decide if you’re a writer, man, or just a groupie who can type.’
Skip sounded bitter now, and Terry thought of the file on him in the photo library. There were photographs of all the writers on The Paper, pictures used to accompany their by-line mug shots mostly, but Skip Jones had a file all to himself. Terry had often pored over those pictures on his nights wandering the deserted office, because Skip was the reason he was here, Skip had lived the life he had dreamed of when he was a music-mad kid working in a gin factory, rushing out with his eighteen pence every Wednesday to buy The Paper a day early.
Pictures of Skip. There was Skip with Keith Richards in a sundrenched villa in the south of France. Skip with Iggy Pop in a destroyed hotel room in Detroit. Skip with Dag Wood in the dingy gloom of the dressing room at the Roundhouse. And here Skip was tonight – friend of the stars, the finest music writer of his generation, of any generation – killing time in a little review room, no place to rest his brilliant head, his famous friends all gone. Then Skip chuckled to himself as if it was all a bit of a joke after all.
‘Wild. Old Dag doesn’t change. Tried to fuck your girlfriend, did he?’
‘Well, I think he probably has by now,’ Terry said, his smile faltering, his spirits sinking at the thought of that enormous barnacle-encrusted todger being unleashed from Dag’s leather trousers and pointed at Misty. ‘More than once.’
‘I wouldn’t be so sure,’ Skip smiled, setting down his cigarette so that he could fish around in his pocket. ‘You never know with Dag if he is going to shoot you up or bugger you sideways or just fall asleep.’ His smile vanished. ‘But we have to be realistic, man. That chick has probably just had the best loving of her life.’
Terry’s spirits sank twenty floors. The best loving of her life? How could he compete with that?
Skip stared Terry right in the eye. It was only for a moment, and the eye contact jolted Terry, but it was real. He hadn’t imagined it. Skip Jones had looked him in the eye.
‘The question is,’ Skip said, ‘what are you going to do about it?’
Terry shuffled his feet. ‘Well, I don’t know. What can I do?’
Skip pulled out an assortment of pills, and began rifling through them. When he held out his hand to Terry, there were a dozen different-coloured capsules in his palm.
‘You give these to Dag,’ Skip said. ‘With my compliments.’
Terry stared at the pills. ‘What are they?’
‘You give these to Dag and it will be a while before he fucks your girlfriend again. Or anybody else’s.’
‘Ex-girlfriend,’ Terry scowled. ‘She’s not my girlfriend any more. Are you kidding? She’s nothing to me.’
But he took the pills from Skip Jones, and stuffed them in the pocket of his dead man’s mohair jacket, as if perhaps she was still something after all.
Leon dreamed of Bambi.
Strange, he had always thought, that the world considered the little deer to be Walt Disney at its most saccharine. To Leon, Bambi had always seemed like the first snuff movie.
He had been taken to see the film at the Swiss Cottage Odeon when he was five years old, and he had found it such a deeply traumatic experience that his mother had to lead him trembling and tearful to the lobby well before the final credits.
How could the other boys and girls just sit there chomping on their choc-ices? Bambi was a film where a child loses its mother, where a world bursts into flames and – the part that haunted Leon’s dreams as he lay tossing and turning and sweating inside his sleeping bag – that made tangible the horror of the moment when paradise is defiled.
He awoke with a gasp, already sitting up, and he realised immediately that it was all true. They were here at last. Bailiffs were kicking down the front door of the squat, the windows were caving in, there were men shouting, women screaming, the baby crying.
Man had entered the forest.
Ruby was still sleeping by his side, a thin arm thrown across his waist. Leon shook her, unzipped the bag and was on his feet, the bare floorboards like sandpaper beneath his toes, pulling on his clothes. The other couple in the room were already half-dressed and stuffing meagre belongings into rucksacks. It still looked dark outside, but the room was bright, lit by moonlight and the headlights of a dozen cars.
‘Get up now,’ he
said, ducking as a half-brick smashed through the window. There were voices in the street. Men shouting about dossers, stirring themselves for the fight, pumping themselves up. ‘They’re coming in.’
Except they were not coming in.
It was worse than that.
From downstairs Leon could hear nails being pounded into wood. Voices from inside the house being raised in anger. Curses and threats and cries of fear. He went to the window and saw burly shadows carrying thick planks of wood to the house.
‘The bastards,’ Leon said. ‘They’re sealing us in.’
He had known that one day the bailiffs would come, but he had always imagined it would be to throw them into the street. Many times Leon had envisaged the final battle for the squat to be a glorious siege – Leon standing shoulder to shoulder with veterans of the barricades of Paris in hand-to-hand combat with hired thugs and the boys in blue. Room to room fighting – like the battle for Stalingrad. Now he was faced with the choice of staying inside a boarded-up squat until the landlord decided they’d had enough, or legging it. If he had been alone, it would have been different. But he didn’t want anything bad ever to happen to Ruby.
He took her arm and they fled for the bedroom door, still pulling on their clothes. At the top of the stairs he glimpsed her long pale legs in a wash of moonlight and it made him catch his breath. He stopped her, and gave her a chance to pull on her dress. He even zipped her up, allowing his fingers to rest on her shoulder blades for just a moment. His hands were shaking. She patted him reassuringly and gave him a smile. Her hand was cool and still.
One floor below he could hear the sounds of scuffles and the staccato pounding of hammers. Most of the downstairs windows were already boarded up, and slashes of headlights came through the slats in the wood. But the front door was half-open and either side of it a scrum of heaving bodies fought for control. Leon and Ruby headed in the opposite direction, to the back of the house, where they had just started sealing the kitchen door.
Leon cursed them and threw himself at the door, shoulder first, and a plank flew away and caught a bailiff flush in the face. Then they were out into the garden and into the night, tripping over the step, obscenities being screamed behind them, something heavy thrown at their heads, maybe a hammer, but whistling past and lost in the grass. They were not followed, but Leon helped her over a dozen garden fences before they stopped, sprawling exhausted on a manicured lawn and panting for breath next to an ornamental pond and a garden gnome with a fishing pole. You could still hear the voices and the hammering and the fighting in the distance. It made him shudder. Squatting was all right when you were young and on your own. But what about later? What about when you found someone?
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t expect them to come tonight.’
‘Now you really are homeless,’ said Ruby, and it made him laugh, and his mouth was on her mouth again, and the dew was soaking his knees, and she was laughing too, his hands on her fabulous face, and he was mad for her, alive for her, for she was all that he ever wanted.
The first tube train was still hours away.
They held hands and started walking west down the Marylebone Road, with the early birds singing in Regent’s Park to their right, and the sky behind them just beginning to smudge with the dawn. He was going to walk her to her door. That was the plan, although they didn’t feel the need to discuss it much. Leon was going to make sure she got there. Home and dry. Safe and sound.
He wished he had money for a hotel. Wouldn’t it be great to have money for a hotel and just crawl into bed and stay there all day long? To kiss and cuddle and fuck until their strength was gone? Wouldn’t it be great to have some money for a change? Still, if he couldn’t get back into bed with her, at least he could take her home.
But a Ford Cortina full of boys pulled up alongside them just beyond the great dome of Madame Tussaud’s. Leon looked at them with distaste. They were the kind who were always threatening to kick his head in.
‘Darling, do you want a lift?’
‘Where you going, love? Acton? Ealing? Greenford?’
Ruby looked at Leon, almost apologetically. Greenford, yes. She was going to Greenford and back to her real life.
They were depressingly familiar – capped-sleeve T-shirts showing off pale, meaty biceps, hair still worn in sub-Rod Stewart feather cuts, short leather jackets that seemed one size too small. But they didn’t seem particularly drunk. And Leon couldn’t deny that they were going her way. He couldn’t deny that.
‘It’s okay,’ Ruby said, touching his arm. She sounded a little sad and very tired. ‘They’re not going to do anything to me. Just drive me home and ask me for my phone number. And I’ll give them a fake one. Okay, baby?’
He nodded, not risking words.
The sun peeped over the dome of Madame Tussauds. After the storms of the night before it was a shock to see the blinding light of an August dawn, to be reminded that it was still summer. Sunlight glinted on Leon’s newly blond locks. She touched his hair – proud of what she had done, and he had to smile. For the very first time in his life, he felt he looked just about okay. Maybe even more than okay.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘Sorry about – you know. Everything.’ ‘No, I had fun,’ she said. There was a real warmth and sweetness in her, Leon thought. She was beautiful, and she was tough, but it was that warmth and sweetness that had him hooked. She laughed, and Leon thought – the beautiful ones. They have it so easy. ‘It was…different,’ she smiled. The boys waited patiently in the car.
‘I had fun too,’ Leon said. He couldn’t describe what the night had meant to him – how he had been lost in her, and the music, and the sex. He couldn’t put that into words. For the first time in his life, words failed him.
‘And you’re a good dancer,’ she said.
‘Come on,’ he said.
‘Sure you are,’ she insisted. ‘You just need to – I don’t know. Relax a little.’
Then the sky was full of sound, and at first it seemed like another storm, but it was louder than any noise Leon had ever heard, louder than any storm, and it grew louder still until suddenly it was directly overhead and he looked up to see the new plane, the one that resembled a giant white bird, Concorde, just one year old and slim as a rocket and gleaming white and gold in the dawn, losing altitude as it prepared for landing west of the city, not far from her home. It was beautiful.
When he looked back, the Ford Cortina was pulling away and Ruby was waving from the rear window. He waved in return, knowing he had meant what he said in bed, what he had said in the middle of the heat and madness, when the words were meant to be just for the moment. Leon loved her.
He really loved her, it wasn’t just the sex talking. He loved her although he didn’t even know her. How did he manage that? How can you love someone who you don’t even know?
He was twenty years old, and it was easy.
Chapter Thirteen
‘You should leave him,’ Ray told her.
This wasn’t his way. His way was to be cool. Three years at The Paper had taught him that it was the only way to be. You were cool when you didn’t care, and you were cool when you did care. But this was different. He couldn’t be cool with her.
‘Your bloody husband,’ he said. ‘Mr Love Muscle.’
She smiled politely and he knew it was hopeless. Where would she go? With him? In a few hours he wouldn’t even have a job. He saw himself through her eyes – a dumb kid still living with his parents, smitten after one night of good sex. But you don’t walk away from the kind of life she had. Even Ray knew that much.
She looked from his face to the lightening sky, smiling slightly. ‘It doesn’t feel like there was a storm last night, does it?’ she said.
They were sitting in her Lotus Elan in Hyde Park, by the curve in the lake where the Serpentine meets the Long Water. The sun poured through the great trees and coated the water with a sheen of molten gold. On the far side of the Serpentine there was a small wooden jet
ty with blue-and-white boats clustered around it.
‘We should go rowing sometime,’ she said. ‘I haven’t been rowing for years.’
They watched twenty horses from the barracks of the Household Cavalry lazily clop down a wide sandy track, their riders in full uniform, gleaming breastplates and red Spartan cloaks, the white horsehair tails swishing on their white-and-gold helmets, and yet the soldiers were clearly off duty, carelessly yawning and rubbing the sleep from their eyes and talking among themselves. It was a good moment. But something in Ray seemed bound to spoil it.
‘I mean,’ he said, ‘if you’re really so unhappy, if you’re really as unhappy as you say, then why don’t you just get a divorce?’
‘Are you going to bang on about this?’ she said, not smiling now.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m going to bang on and on about it. I’m not even talking about you and me. I’m talking about saving yourself. Getting the fuck out of that loveless place.’
She was silent, still considering the lake, and for a while he didn’t know if she was thinking about getting divorced or going rowing. He wasn’t just frustrated with her. He was angry with himself. He was meant to be with John Lennon, not some married woman whose husband was too rich to leave.
‘It’s not so easy,’ she said finally. ‘You sort of get stuck with each other. I don’t know how to explain it.’ She stifled a yawn, and he could see she was very tired. She shook her head. ‘It’s hard to make the break. Hard to face all the changes. You’re scared of the unknown, I guess. Scared of being alone.’
He didn’t know what to say. Everything he knew about marriage he had learned from his parents. Which possibly meant that he knew nothing. He tried to imagine why his father and mother had once loved each other, and why it had changed. Impossible to ever really know, Ray thought, but although he had grown to hate his father, he could understand how his mother would have been attracted to the old man’s strength, his physical certainty, that manly bearing. Women seemed to love that crap.