by Tony Parsons
‘Are we nearly there?’ Ray said.
Terry pulled the car up. ‘Something I’ve got to do first.’
They were outside a hotel. Ray rubbed his eyes and realised that it was the Hotel Blanc, the place that had almost been his first stop of the evening. It felt like a lifetime ago.
Ray watched Terry walk slowly towards the main doors, and saw him disappear into the lobby. Ray must have fallen asleep for a moment because the next thing he knew the fire alarm was ringing and Terry was coming out of the main doors.
Halfway to the car Terry paused, and waited, holding his right hand, which seemed to have been cut somehow. Soon the guests began to stream out of the hotel, blinking in shock in the dazzling daylight, like the living dead woken from some timeless slumber, unsure where to go, in their night clothes or half-dressed or in the kind of white towelling bathrobes that were scattered all over the floor of Terry’s bedsit.
Then there was Misty and Dag Wood, coming through the main doors, walking towards Terry, while he just stood there holding his hand, and trying to stop the blood.
Misty was in the white dress of the night before, but with a robe draped over her shoulders and carrying her biker’s boots. Dag was barefoot, naked from the waist up, the fly of his leather trousers unzipped, his face hollow with years of abuse but his body muscled and toned.
More than ever, Ray thought, Dag looked like the freshly deceased corpse of Charles Atlas.
And then Ray forgot about Terry and his girl troubles because there was a small woman in hotpants with hair like a black haystack coming quickly through the doors of the lobby, and behind her was a hawk-faced man in round wire glasses, taller than Ray had expected but unforgettable and unmistakable. A face that Ray felt he knew better than his own. The face of John Lennon.
Somehow the school satchel was still hanging from his shoulder. Somehow it still contained the clunking great tape recorder he had borrowed from Terry at the other end of the night. Somehow he was breathing the same air as John Lennon.
And somehow, despite being almost paralysed by exhaustion and fear and love, Ray got out of the car.
‘For you, Dag,’ Terry said, the words stalling in a mouth that was suddenly bone dry with nerves and anger and this terrible grief. He couldn’t even look at her. ‘From Skip.’
Terry held out his fist, palm down, and Dag’s corrugated features split in a reptilian smile. He seized Terry’s fist, for all the world as if they were old pals shaking hands, and Terry palmed him the pills.
Then he pulled his hand away. He couldn’t stand to touch the old bastard.
‘I’ll save these for the Rainbow,’ Dag said, referring to the gig in Finsbury Park later that night. It would be the highlight of his tour. ‘Thank the Skipper for me.’
Terry nodded, poker-faced and trying hard to keep it neutral. He still hadn’t looked at Misty. Then Dag was talking to her, casual as can be, making sure she was okay for tickets to the Rainbow, right under Terry’s nose.
‘Terry’s name will be on the door,’ she was saying. ‘Plus one.’
Dag yawned and stretched like an old tom cat, as if it had been a long night and he was ready to turn in. They were letting people back into the hotel by now, and Dag smiled farewell at the pair of them with a sickening kind of intimacy.
As if he fucking owns us, Terry thought.
They watched him go.
‘I’ve got this for you,’ Misty said, slipping the hotel bathrobe off her shoulders.
Terry shook his head. ‘I don’t collect those things any more.’ She looked surprised.
‘I mean, what’s so special about those things?’ Terry said, letting his eyes rest upon her now. Forcing himself to look at her. ‘Everybody’s used it, haven’t they?’
She looked exasperated. ‘Don’t freak out.’
‘I’m not freaking out.’
She rolled her tired eyes. ‘Nothing happened, okay?’ Words failed him. For about two seconds. ‘Fuck off, you slag,’ he said.
She flinched. ‘Terry – I didn’t have sex with him, okay?’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t believe you.’
The crowd was melting away. She noticed the Ford Capri for the first time.
‘Is that my father’s car?’
He looked at the car, expecting to see Ray. But his friend had gone.
‘You’re a fucking liar,’ he said, turning away. She grabbed his arm.
‘Look – he didn’t want to do anything, okay? And neither did I. Okay, Terry? We just talked all night.’ Misty got a dreamy look in her eyes. ‘Well, until he passed out.’
Terry turned his back on her. But he wasn’t walking away now. He wanted to hear it. He wanted to believe her. He wanted things to be the way they were.
Misty was babbling, name-dropping, still dizzy from the experience. ‘We talked about Byron, Jim Morrison, Nietzsche. It was fascinating, actually. He must have chaos within him, who would give birth to a dancing star. Dag has a mind the size of a planet.’
Terry snorted. ‘Yeah, and a knob the size of a donkey.’
She gave him that cool look. ‘Well, you would know more about that than I do.’ Then she smiled. ‘He said this thing, and I thought it was rather sad – he said, I prefer drugs to women.’
Terry stared at her. Dag had said exactly the same thing to him. And it was true – that’s what he was like. Dag Wood was from the old school. He would fuck anything and he would take anything. But he would much rather take everything than fuck everything. Perhaps it was because in his world drugs were harder to come by than women. Or maybe they just made him feel better.
Terry immediately knew two things beyond any doubt. Misty was telling the truth. And Dag Wood was doomed. Not the same way Billy Blitzen was doomed. Dag would probably live to be a hundred. But he was doomed all the same.
Terry almost felt sorry about giving him all those laxatives.
Everyone was so nice. That was the thing that shocked Ray. Once he had got over that first paralysing second when he knew he was going to actually open his mouth and talk to John Lennon, everyone seemed to go out of their way to make things easy for him.
At first it was just the pair of them, this magnificent, vilified couple, a man and a woman who’d showed Ray the way a marriage could be. Standing there, outside the Blanc, seeming almost shy as he stumbled towards them. In a daze, in a dream, strung out with exhaustion and excitement and the realisation that it was all true, it was really happening.
Ray said the name with a question mark – John? – as if they were old friends, as if Ray had known him all his life – and of course that’s exactly how it felt – and then he said his own name – Ray Keeley – and the name of his magazine – The Paper – and John, the man, John Lennon in the flesh, was saying how he knew The Paper from way back, when the group were just starting out – the group! Ray knew what group he was talking about! – and how they played The Paper’s annual poll-winners concert a few times before the madness forced them off the road.
And Yoko was smiling at him, and John was smiling, and Ray wasn’t quite sure what to do next, but then there was some assistant person, not someone from the record company but some permanent assistant there to smooth their way through the world, and she was tired and wary, but John was inviting Ray to come and have a cup of tea, and Ray thought – what a wonderful world.
This was his world, and this was his time, where a kid from a music paper could just walk up to the biggest rock star on the planet and then get to hang out with him for a while.
And Ray saw that it was still true – that sense of community that he had glimpsed in the playground where they sang the songs of the Beatles, that world of shared feelings. It was real. It wasn’t bullshit, it wasn’t hype. Everything he had heard in the music was true.
Walking through the lobby of the Hotel Blanc, Ray was aware of the dumbfounded stares – what must it be like? To be stared at in every room in the world? – and Yoko was asking him a question about the B-52’s, this ne
w American band that Ray knew nothing about, nothing at all. Terry could have given her chapter and verse, but it didn’t really matter because it wasn’t a contest, you didn’t have to pretend to be cool, or clever, Ray could just be himself. And as they rode the lift to the top floor – John and Yoko and Ray and the woman who was some kind of personal assistant – Ray felt a joy like nothing he had ever known rise up inside him, and it obliterated the nerves and the fear and the embarrassment that he couldn’t answer Yoko’s questions about the B-52’s. He had held out his hand and John Lennon had taken it. And Ray knew he had been right to believe in the music. He had been right to believe all along.
And then he was inside the hotel room – although it seemed more like a house, it was nothing like the thousand other hotel rooms that Ray had seen occupied by musicians. The room went on for ever. There was even a piano in it.
And then sitting on the sofa, facing John, warm and chuckling, happy to talk about music with this kid, this strange kid who had refused to cut his hair, Yoko sitting beside him, that great black haystack in her face, but that was okay, that was to be expected, and the permanent assistant was phoning down for some tea, and Ray could do this thing, because he had actually done it many times before, and it was what he lived for, the music was what he lived for, the best thing in his life, the only thing that had always made perfect sense.
And there it was – John Lennon’s voice – the talking voice no different from the singing voice – droll and wise and full of soul, kind and mocking and just the way it should be. They talked – how could Ray ever have imagined that there would be nothing to say? And after a while, just after the tea had been placed before them, John Lennon reached across and pressed the start button on Terry’s tape machine.
‘You should turn that thing on, Ray,’ John Lennon said. ‘I don’t want you to lose your job, man.’
There was a radio behind the counter of the café. Leon didn’t notice it until he was counting out the coins for his tea and bacon sandwich.
‘…swamped by people with a different culture,’ a strange new voice was saying. A woman’s voice, somehow transparently artificial and yet full of conviction. A voice that was fake and genuine, all at once. ‘We are not in politics to ignore people’s worries.’ Nagging, strident, wheedling. ‘We are in politics to deal with them.’
Leon’s jaw dropped. He stared at the radio and kept staring even when ‘Don’t Go Breaking My Heart’ replaced the woman’s voice.
‘Who’s that?’ Leon said, desperate to know.
Behind the counter was a fat man in a washed-out Silver Jubilee T-shirt. ‘Elton John and Kiki Dee,’ he said.
‘No, no – the woman. The woman who was talking. The one going on about being swamped.’
The man handed Leon his bacon sandwich. ‘Maggie Thatcher,’ he said. He looked at the radio with naked admiration. ‘About time we had someone to stand up for us,’ said the man in the Silver Jubilee T-shirt.
Leon gripped his bacon sandwich like someone in shock. He had not foreseen this. He had not seen this coming. The relevance of the major political parties had seemed to melt away in recent years and as he had sold his copies of Red Mist and attended anti-racist rallies and pogoed to the Clash, the woman who had led the Conservatives for the last eighteen months had barely registered on his radar. Why should she?
Leon had assumed that the government of the day was an irrelevance now and would be irrelevant for ever. He had imagined that the fight for the future would be decided on the streets.
But as he gripped his bacon sandwich, he suddenly saw an alternative future in a parallel universe, where a mainstream politician told the country – or a large part of the country – exactly what it wanted to hear about immigration, the unions, law and order, counting the pennies, keeping your net curtains clean.
No screaming skinheads and sieg Heils and Nazi fantasies. Nothing so crass. Just a different kind of mainstream, steamrolling everything in its path. And he knew with total certainty that Ruby’s father would happily vote for the owner of the voice that was both fake and genuine, a voice that seemed designed to speak for the nation. How had Leon failed to see it coming? How had he been so blind?
And then Leon suddenly had something else to worry about. Because Junior was entering the café, followed by his henchmen.
In the growing daylight, the Dagenham Dogs were a grotesque sight. The clumsy home-made nature of their face piercings, all those safety pins penetrating the flesh of nose, lip and cheek, the assorted stains of beer, blood and dirt on the front of their sleeveless T-shirts, their eye make-up a complete mess. In the harrowing light of dawn, the three-teardrop tattoo under Junior’s right eye looked as if it had been done by a monkey with a welding iron.
The café was packed with builders getting the goodness and grease of a full English breakfast under their belts before going to work. Hard men who would normally allow themselves a few smirks at the freaks who were walking the streets these days. But even the builders looked down at their fried eggs and red-top tabloids as the Dagenham Dogs passed by.
‘I don’t want any trouble,’ said the Maggie Thatcher fan behind the counter, and Leon thought that the man sounded like a bartender from a Western.
‘Outside,’ Junior told Leon.
He slowly got up from his chair, his bacon sandwich untouched, and followed them out of the café, with nobody daring to look at him, the condemned man.
In the street Junior faced Leon, Dogs to the left of him, Dogs to the right of him, a terrible fraternity of pierced ugly bastards.
Junior took Leon’s head in his hands, almost lovingly, and then seized his ears. Then he crashed his face into the windscreen of the nearest car. The shock was greater than the pain, although the pain seemed to double with every passing second. Something was torn on Leon’s forehead, and there was something warm and wet trickling in his eyebrows. As Leon’s head was yanked back up, he saw he had been bashed against the windscreen of a rather beautiful car. A gold Buick, all tail fins and chrome and black-and-white piebald upholstery. Like something from a Buddy Holly song, Leon thought, or a car that Elvis might have bought with his first royalty cheque from Sam Phillips. Leon’s head felt as though it had been kicked by a horse.
‘You lot make me laugh,’ Junior said, still gripping Leon’s ears. ‘All you middle-class wankers at The Paper. REBELS WITHOUT A COCK, is it? So I don’t have a cock, is that what you reckon?’
‘I was speaking metaphorically,’ Leon gasped. The pain, the incredible expanding pain, made it difficult to think straight.
Junior seemed unconvinced.
‘You think you can say what you like and there’s no comeback. You think you’re in some kind of student debating society. You think – ’
A high-pitched voice cut in from out of nowhere. ‘That your car, mate?’
Junior turned to look at the speaker, not relinquishing his grip on Leon’s ears. It was the biggest Ted that Leon had ever seen. Leon’s mouth dropped open, stunned with recognition. It was Titch himself, the giant among Teds.
Titch was surrounded by a dozen of his greasy-quiffed tribe, young Teds in their violent prime, all of them weighing up the Dagenham Dogs.
‘What?’ Junior said, his train of thought interrupted.
Titch had a surprisingly gentle voice. Like Elvis singing one of his devotional hymns, Leon thought. ‘There Will Be Peace in the Valley’, perhaps.
‘I said – is that your car, mate?’
Still very reasonable, but indicating the windscreen of the gold Buick. Leon’s head had left a smear of bloody grime on the glass.
Junior shook his head. ‘I got the bus,’ he said. ‘It’s not my car.’
The mountain of a Ted nodded, seemingly satisfied with the answer. Titch turned to look at his friends, sharing a chilled smile before once again facing Junior.
‘I know it’s not your car, you tattooed tit,’ Titch said. ‘BECAUSE IT’S MY FUCKING CAR!’
Then Titch swung a
meaty right hook and it sent Junior flying, and then sprawling. Like George Foreman smacking Joe Frazier, Leon thought, the blow that lifted Smokin’ Joe right off his feet in the hot Jamaican night. Junior let go of Leon’s ears.
Titch stared down at Junior’s prone form for a moment, as if examining something he had stepped in, and then brought down the sole of a size-thirteen brothel creeper. Junior howled, his eyes bulging.
The Teds were first to attack, sweeping into the Dogs with the practised fury of their warrior tribe and driving the Dogs back into the road, forcing a milk float to swerve and a crate of gold-top to fall off the back and shatter. But the Dogs quickly rallied, all those away matches on the terraces behind them, accustomed to scrapping on uneven ground, soon finding their footing on the spilt milk and broken glass beneath their boots.
Leon crawled away on his hands and knees, surrounded by flying DMs and brothel creepers, through the puddles of blood and milk and glass, with Mrs Thatcher’s bossy, ingratiating voice still ringing in his ears.
‘…swamped…swamped…swamped by people with a different culture…’
Up and on his feet, he jumped on the platform of a passing bus, the pole almost ripping his arm out of its socket. Ignoring the protests of the conductor he went upstairs, staring out of the rear window, dabbing at the cut above his eyebrow, looking back at the gang fight that had now sprawled right across the road receding behind him.
The Dogs had staged an impressive comeback, but the superior fighting ability of the Teds was proving decisive. Titch had two of the Dagenham Dogs by the scruff of the neck, and Leon watched him bang their heads together as if they were cymbals. Junior was crawling away, now with real tears on his face. He disappeared under a pack of Teds. Then the bus took a left on to Blackfriars Bridge and the fight was gone.
The bus crossed the river and Leon stared at the dome of St Paul’s without seeing it. He was pale-faced and shaking with an emotion that threatened to overwhelm him.
‘Swamped…swamped…swamped…we are not in politics to ignore people’s worries…we are in politics to deal with them.’