by Tony Parsons
Shaking because he had just narrowly escaped a good hiding.
And because he had just seen the future.
Chapter Fourteen
There was no real traffic.
A young man at the wheel of a Ford Capri could get up a real head of steam as he headed south to the river – barrelling down the long sweep of Regent Street, taking a sharp left round Eros at Piccadilly Circus, then down Haymarket, and almost one long straight run all the way to the Embankment.
‘Can you slow down a bit?’ Misty said.
Terry swerved to miss a Lotus Elan. ‘Had enough excitement for one night?’
He increased his speed, zipping through a red light. There was a rage inside him. In a way it would have been a lot easier if Misty and Dag had been fucking their brains out. Then it would have been simple. Then it would have been over.
But what do you do when your girlfriend has spent the night talking about Nietzsche, Byron and the first Doors album with another man? Terry didn’t know quite what to do. Increasingly, he felt that way – life was more complicated than he had ever imagined, and he was struggling to keep up.
‘Will you slow down,’ she said, with that cold edge of steel that she could always summon up at will. ‘This is not even your car.’
‘What’s your old man going to do? Sue me?’
‘Terry,’ she said. Oh, Terry.’ A long sigh. ‘You really don’t get it, do you?’ So she said it very slowly, as if she was light years ahead of him. ‘I’m having a baby.’
He stared at her, wondering if this was a joke, or a trick, or a lie, but she was looking straight ahead through the windscreen of her daddy’s car, and in an instant it all made sense.
He remembered the pills on the first night. The pills she could no longer take, and he remembered their cavalier attitude to contraception, the blithe disregard of a pair of rutting youngsters.
They had briefly contemplated condoms, but packets of three seemed so ridiculously Fifties that they had ended up laughing at the very idea. Condoms went out with banana rations, Billy Fury and the hula-hoop.
They had been banging away for months, and because nothing happened they had believed that it never would. And then it did. And now it had. A baby He hadn’t even thought about it. The possibility had never crossed his mind. It seemed like the stuff of some other, grown-up life. A baby.
She screamed just then and Terry turned his head in time to see a police car stopping to let an old lady in a Morris Minor out of a side road. He slammed on the brakes, and then practically stood on them, almost rising out of the seat, and the cop car was hurtling towards them in a rush of shrieking rubber and Misty shouting. Terry held his breath, waiting for the mangling of metal and glass, tears in his eyes.
A baby, he thought. A little baby.
The crash never came. The Ford Capri screamed to a halt inches from the bumper of the law. The tyres howling, the two cops already turning in their seats to see what kind of maniac had almost driven up their backsides.
Terry sat the wheel, gasping for breath, trying to take it all in – a baby – and watching the policemen get out of their car and start walking towards him. He knew he was going to be stopped and searched. And he knew there was no time to hide the drugs he was carrying. He looked at Misty and laughed. A baby. A cop stuck his head in Terry’s window. There was an old one and a young one, just like at the airport.
They made him get out of the car. Then they breathalysed him, telling him to blow harder, to blow properly. It was neutral. Then they made him empty his pockets, and one of them read his driving licence while the other patted him down. The cellophane bag of amphetamine sulphate was in the ticket pocket of his dead man’s jacket. And they missed it.
‘Sir,’ said the younger one, ‘may I ask why you are driving like such a fucking cunt?’
Terry shook his head. The world seemed to have changed. He couldn’t put it into words, but it seemed like the world had changed for ever. Or at least his little part of it.
‘I just found out I’m going to be a dad,’ he said. He let the words settle, fill the space between them. The cops looked at each other. ‘I took my eyes off the road – took my eyes off the road for a few seconds there.’
The two cops dipped their heads to take a look at Misty, all demure and blonde in the passenger seat, and then they looked back at Terry.
‘She’s a lovely lass,’ said the older cop, holding out his hand. ‘Congratulations.’
The younger cop slapped Terry on the back. ‘I remember when my missus told me about our first,’ he laughed, as the old cop crushed Terry’s fingers. ‘I nearly choked on me Rice Krispies.’
Then both of the policemen were smiling and laughing and patting Terry on the back, and they went off feeling slightly better about the world, or maybe young people. As if, Terry thought, they had just learned that the younger generation were really no different to all those who had gone before, despite their strange hair and clothes from Oxfam. And maybe they were right.
But Terry watched Misty’s impassive face with a sinking feeling, as something occurred to him for the first time. What if she didn’t want this baby?
They parked up on a side street and sat by Cleopatra’s Needle, watching the boats on the river, the tower block containing The Paper the tallest building on the skyline.
‘We’re young,’ she said. ‘Young to have a baby.’
‘That’s true,’ he said. There was no bad feeling between them now. There was only this bond, this incredible bond between them, as though they were more than lovers, and more than friends. As though they could never be this close to anyone else.
‘It’s a big responsibility,’ she said.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘It’s a huge responsibility. A baby. Jesus.’
Misty bristled. ‘And I’m not going to be one of those mothers who stays home making jam or whatever the fuck they do all day.’
He laughed with genuine amusement. ‘That’s for sure.’
Misty relaxed. ‘But it doesn’t have to change anything,’ she said, excited now, and it allowed Terry to be excited too. ‘And what a great experience – to bring another human life into the world.’
They were laughing together now. ‘Imagine what it will look like, Misty. A little bit of you, and a little bit of me. All mixed up.’
Then she was suddenly all serious again. ‘I don’t want to get rid of it, Terry. I don’t want an abortion. Of course I’m pro a woman’s right to choose and everything, but I just don’t want to get rid of it.’
He shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, ‘no, that would be awful.’ He already loved their baby.
Then they were both quiet for a while. Something magical had settled on the day, and they sat there by the river, feeling it, trying to understand what it all meant. Their baby.
‘It doesn’t have to change anything at all,’ Misty said, trying to work out how things would be. ‘We can take it with us. When we work. When we go to gigs.’
Terry thought about it, furrowing his brow. Concentrating. Trying to be a responsible dad. ‘Maybe we should put some cotton wool in its little ears. To protect them while they’re still, you know, growing.’
Misty nodded thoughtfully. That’s a really good idea. Cotton wool for its ears.’ She laughed, and her face seemed to light up. ‘What if it’s a girl?’
Terry laughed too, and he took Misty’s hands and kissed them. ‘What if it’s a boy?’
Then they were both silent for the longest while, letting it all sink in, watching the boats on the river without really seeing them, and feeling the heat of the sun as it came up on their adult lives.
Leon held the second bacon sandwich in his hands, savouring the moment.
Against all odds, he had somehow contrived to meet the girl of his dreams, review the band of his nightmares, and avoid the kicking of a lifetime.
Not a bad night, all in all.
After fleeing the battle between the Teddy Boys and the Dagenham Dogs, he had jump
ed off the bus at London Wall in the heart of the financial district, which was already filling up with men in suits and their young female helpers. Leon walked among them, thinking – what was it that Engels said about the relationship of men and women in the nuclear family? Something about man being the bourgeois and his wife the proletariat. Well, Friedrich, my old mate, Leon thought, it’s exactly the same in the City of London.
Unable to face eating a bacon sandwich so close to the heart of capitalism, Leon walked east to Charterhouse Street and the Smithfield meat market, deciding that he would prefer to eat his breakfast in a café full of real workers, not a bunch of chinless paper pushers sipping their weak tea and nibbling their cheese-and-Branston toasties.
Terry had taken him here once, when he was trying to borrow money from his father, and Leon had been much taken by the place.
Almost in the shadow of the Bank of England and the Stock Exchange, a market of sweating, shouting men toiled through the night with animal carcasses as big as they were, and then went off to sink pints of beer and nosh enormous fry-ups in the countless greasy spoons and smoky pubs surrounding Smithfield before staggering off home to collapse in bed. That’s the place to be, Leon thought, trying not to touch the bloody scab on his forehead.
The market was winding down now, and the small café Leon chose was full of porters in filthy white coats tucking into plates piled high with fried eggs, bacon, beans, sausages and toast.
Good, honest working men at the end of their labours, Leon thought warmly – real people! – although of course he deplored the way they leered over young women displaying their pert young breasts in the tabloid newspapers. He paused with the sandwich halfway to his lips, as his eyes drifted to the paper of the man next to him, and the girlish smile above the womanly body of Mandy, sixteen, from Kent. It made him remember the heartbreaking springiness of Ruby’s body inside the sleeping bag, and he felt himself stir with love and longing.
He wondered if he would see her at the weekend.
He wondered if he would ever see her again.
He wondered if he could compete with Steve.
Leon put the bacon sandwich back on its plate and murmured an apology as he reached across an elderly porter for the HP sauce. He pulled back the top layer of bread on his sandwich and considered the bacon, fried to a crispy brown, nestling on butter that had already melted into the thick slice of Mother’s Pride. His tummy rumbled, ravenous after the exertions of the night, and his mouth flooded with saliva and hunger.
Then he shook the sauce bottle as hard as he possibly could and – as the top was merely resting rather than screwed on – a projectile of thick brown sauce shot into the air like something hurled into space out of Cape Canaveral. It came down on the table directly behind Leon and from the shocked intake of breath all around the café, he knew the landing place wasn’t good news.
Leon turned to see a meat porter with violence in his eyes and HP sauce on his shaven head. He was as broad as he was wide and the muscles in his arms were thick and knotted from a quarter-century of heavy lifting.
Leon could see the muscles in his arms quite clearly because, as the man rose from his seat, making no attempt to wipe away the HP sauce that was dripping into his eyes, he was rolling up the sleeves of his blood-splattered white coat.
And that was when Leon Peck stopped worrying quite so much about the workers.
Terry’s father was an old man now.
Terry watched him coming down the street from the window of their front room, coming home from the night shift, and he looked like he was dragging the weight of the years behind him.
Worn out by work, worn out with worry about his son, worn out by the unforgiving toll of the years. An old man at forty or fifty or whatever he was.
Terry’s mum smiled at her son as they heard the key in the lock. She indicated that they should all be very quiet, all three of them. And then the old man was standing in the doorway, still in his white coat and his French Foreign Legion hat, blinking at his wife and his son and his son’s girlfriend, young Misty.
‘Guess what?’ Terry’s mum said, as if she had been saving this up for a long time. ‘Guess what, Granddad?’
Yes, his father looked ancient these days. But when he heard the news and it had started to sink in, that kind, exhausted face lit up with a smile, and it was a smile that Terry knew would last the old man for years.
The editor’s office was crowded but the only sound was the metallic limp of a spool on Terry’s tape recorder and the singsong voice of John Lennon.
‘I’ve been through a lot of trips – macrobiotics, Maharishi, the Bible…all them gurus tell you is – Remember this moment now. You Are Here.’
The editor swooned. It was the kind of moment that Kevin White lived for. Everybody would go crazy when they heard this stuff. The Fleet Street boys would be banging at the door.
‘The break-up of the band…the death of Brian, the selling-out of Paul…Ringo makes the best solo records…’
Kevin White thumbed through Ray’s handwritten notes, shaking his head, a slow smile spreading across his face. Lennon kept talking. He was the great talker. And he seemed to have this need to get it all out, to get it all down, to confess to everything. He was the great confessor, talking about the whole mad trip as if for the first time, as if for the last time.
‘We were pretty greasy…outside of Liverpool, when we went down south in our leather outfits, the dance-hall promoters didn’t really like us…they thought we looked like a gang of thugs. So it got to be like Epstein said, “Look, if you wear a suit…” And everybody wanted a good suit, you know, Ray? A nice, sharp, black suit, man…We liked the leather and the jeans, but we wanted a good suit to wear off-stage. “Yeah, man, I’ll have a suit.” Brian was our salesman, our front. You’ll notice that another quirk of life is – I may have read this somewhere-that self-made men usually have someone with education to front for them, to deal with all the other people with education…You want another tea? You sure?’
‘You know what you’ve got here, don’t you, Ray?’ White said. A world exclusive.’
Ray nodded, smiling weakly. He was suddenly spent. He felt like he could sleep for a thousand years. He wished he were curled up under clean white sheets with her – with Mrs Brown, although he no longer thought of her as Mrs Brown. Now she was Liz – her parents had been to see Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet on their first date – because now she was no longer just some other man’s wife, because that was her name. Liz. It was a good name for her.
And then there was Yoko.
‘I’m not somebody who wants to burn the Mona Lisa. That’s the great difference between some revolutionaries and me. They think you have to burn the Establishment. I’m not. I’m saying make the Mona Lisa into something like a shirt. Change the value
of it.’
‘Turn the Mona Lisa into a shirt,’ White chuckled. ‘I love it.’
Was it a good interview? Ray couldn’t tell. Turning the Mona Lisa into a shirt – that was just mindless babble, wasn’t it? That was plain nutty. But it had happened. That was the important thing. And in the end it had all been so easy. And everyone had been so nice. And with hindsight it seemed perfectly natural to walk up to the biggest rock star in the world, introduce yourself, and then sit down and have a talk. That world of shared feelings – John Lennon believed in it too.
Ray Keeley had approached John Lennon with love in his eyes – a supplicant, a fan, a true believer. How could his hero refuse him? And Lennon was kind. He was more kind than he had to be.
‘It can’t be the cover,’ said one of the older guys, unable to keep the resentment out of his voice.
Kevin White had been treating Ray like the prodigal son ever since he turned up with his Lennon interview, but the older guys seemed curiously put out, as though Ray had got something over them.
The editor nodded. ‘Any other week it would be the cover,’ White said, almost apologetically. ‘This week – well, t
here’s only one cover.’
‘I was thinking Elvis in ‘56,’ said one of the older guys, tapping a pencil on his pad. ‘One of the classic Alfred Wertheimer shots. The Memphis Flash in all his pomp. Headline – REMEMBER HIM THIS WAY. Italicise the “This”’.
White nodded thoughtfully.
‘Yesterday Elvis was a fat embarrassment who went on twenty years too long,’ he said. ‘Never the same after he joined the army, blah blah blah. Today he’s a rock-and-roll martyr, a cultural god, immortal. And taken from us far too soon.’
‘That’s cruel,’ Ray said.
‘That’s showbiz,’ sneered one of the older guys. The tape played on.
‘Our gimmick is that we’re a living Romeo and Juliet. And you know, the great thing about us influencing in this way, is that everybody’s a couple. We’re all living in pairs. And if all the couples in the world identify with us and our ideas go through them, what percentage of the population is that?’
‘Er…’
Ray flinched at the sound of his own awkward voice.
‘You know what you’ve got here, don’t you?’ White said to him, laying a loving hand on the tape recorder. “A job for life. A job for life. You’re the writer who interviewed John Lennon in the middle of the Summer of Hate.” White smiled proudly at Ray, as if he had never stopped believing in him. ‘You’re going to be getting free records when you’re forty. Think about it.’
Ray could sense every eye in the room on him, and he could feel their envy. It was what they all wanted – it was what he had wanted at the start of the night. The promise that the circus would never leave town without him. Perhaps it was just nervous exhaustion, but he didn’t feel as happy as he’d thought he would.
Free records at forty…Why did the idea depress him?
This was the only job that he had ever wanted, because it had never felt like a job. And yet the prospect of growing middle-aged within these walls filled him with dread. Maybe it was that he needed to sleep now, needed it urgently. Or perhaps it was because his generation, and the one that came before, had made such a big fucking deal about being young that the thought of growing old was unthinkable. Even if you still got free records when you were forty.