Stories We Could Tell

by Tony Parsons

  And then Robbie was pulling out the records that embarrassed Ray now – Band on the Run by Wings, Days of Future Passed by the Moody Blues and Chicago Transit Authority by Chicago. But nobody’s record collection could be cool all the time. And you never knew what you were going to grow out of, you never guessed that The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter by the Incredible String Band would one day wear right off while Tupelo Honey by Van Morrison would sound great for ever.

  He crouched by Robbie’s side, picked up a copy of the Easy Rider soundtrack, remembering when his mum had bought it for him. Then he looked at Robbie, kneeling by his side with a copy of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in his hands, and he realised that his brother was crying. ‘Don’t go,’ Robbie said.

  ‘Ah,’ Ray said, a consoling hand on the boy’s shoulder. ‘I have to go, Rob.’

  ‘But I’ll be all alone if you go.’

  Ray hugged his brother tight, both of them on their knees, the records all around them. ‘You’ll never be alone,’ he said. ‘Not now.’ They pulled apart. Robbie wiped his nose on the sleeve of his brinylon school shirt. ‘And you’ll come and join me. In London. When you’re big enough. Okay?’

  His brother nodded, trying to be brave, and Ray left the bedroom where he had been a boy, and walked down the hall past his big brother’s closed room. Already the house seemed too small to live a whole life in.

  His mother was waiting dry-eyed at the foot of the stairs. She handed him a small crumpled pack of something wrapped in kitchen foil.

  ‘Fish paste,’ she said, by way of explanation.

  ‘Thanks, Mum.’

  He could sense his father’s presence in the living room, shuffling about, that hard man always out of place surrounded by the knick-knacks his mother stuffed into every nook and cranny, the white Spanish bull and the Greetings from Frinton ashtray and a green-and-white model of Hong Kong’s Star Ferry. Ray thought about leaving without saying goodbye, but something made him push open the door, and there was the old man in the curiously stiff uniform of the Metropolitan Police.

  His father stuck out an enormous hand and Ray took it in the only way he knew how, like he might take a girl’s hand in the back row of the Odeon, and he saw his father flinch with a quiet contempt before he pulled his hand away. Ray realised that their attempts at civilised formality would somehow always be worse than their arguments.

  Then there came the noise from upstairs. This dirty, chugging riff on slide guitar, and then a singer who sounded as if he had been gargling with gravel. The old man’s face clouded with fury and disgust.

  ‘What the bloody hell is that racket?’

  ‘That’s the Faces, Dad,’ Ray laughed. He stared thoughtfully at the ceiling for a second. ‘Sounds like “That’s All You Need”. I’ll see you around.’

  The car was waiting for him on the street, and some children from the neighbourhood were gathered around it, boys and girls alike in flared denims, the hems of their jeans uniformly frayed by the adventure playground and filthy with muck from their bikes, all of them keeping a respectful distance from the yellow Lotus Elan, as if it had come down from some other planet.

  ‘Turn it down!’ Ray heard his father shout as she opened the passenger door for him, but Ronnie and Rod and the lads just seemed to get even louder.

  These were the last days of hitching.

  Lorry drivers and sales reps who had never heard of Jack Kerouac or On the Road would offer a lift to a young man with no money and his thumb in the air just for the company, or just to perform a good deed in a wicked world.

  So it was that Leon was picked up on the North Circular by an oil tanker heading all the way to Aberdeen, and the driver told him that the English were stealing Scottish oil, just as the thieving English bastards always stole what they wanted, they would nick the coins off a dead man’s eyes if you let them, and after driving all the way across the great sprawling expanse of north London, he dropped Leon off halfway up the Finchley Road, telling him to mind out for the traffic, and the thieving English bastards.

  Leon walked up the hill to Hampstead, through the leafy streets with their huge houses where he had grown up, through the Village and across the Heath, the grass burned yellow by two burning summers in a row, and all of London spread out below him.

  The squat would be gone by now. When the bailiffs had cleared the building, they would do what they always did. Rip out the plumbing and smash the toilets. There were other squats, thousands of them, but summer was almost gone and Leon knew that soon the squatters would be freezing their non-conforming arses off, wearing their greatcoats and Afghans inside their sleeping bags, too cold to think. Leon no longer had the heart for it.

  So he went to the place where a young man goes when there is nowhere left to go. Across the Heath, over the fence that surrounded the grounds of Kenwood, past the great white house, and then the Suburb, and the clean, quiet streets of home.

  He had thrown away his front-door key so he had to knock. His mother answered the door still in her dressing gown. His father was sitting at the big wooden breakfast table, surrounded by broadsheet newspapers, orange juice, coffee, bagels. Cream cheese and smoked salmon. Bach on the hi-fi – ‘Sheep May Safely Graze’. Leon could smell real coffee and toasted bread, and it almost made him swoon.

  ‘What happened to you?’ his mother said, taking it all in – the fading bruise from last weekend, the cut on his forehead from Junior, the black eye from the porter with HP sauce on his head.

  ‘He was at Lewisham,’ his father said proudly. ‘Bloody thugs!’

  ‘Let me put something on it,’ said his mother.

  Over Leon’s protests, his mother brought a pack of frozen Birds Eye peas and made him hold it against his wounds. His parents watched with a kind of affectionate amusement as Leon shovelled down bagels and lox with his spare hand. They didn’t remember him having such an appetite.

  ‘I haven’t been reading your column,’ Leon said, wiping crumbs from his mouth with the back of his hand. He gulped down some black coffee. He couldn’t remember the last time he had drunk coffee that hadn’t been the kind where you just add boiling water. ‘What’s your take on this Thatcher woman?’

  ‘Never happen,’ his father said emphatically. ‘In this country? With Benny Hill and Page 3 lovelies and mother-in-law jokes? The British will never vote for a woman.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said his mother. ‘I think it would be rather nice to have a woman Prime Minister.’

  ‘She’ll be burning her bra next,’ his father laughed.

  Leon’s parents were still laughing when he undressed and crawled into bed in his old room, out of his mind with exhaustion, the room dancing around him.

  It felt both cosy and ridiculous to be between these boyhood walls again, the embarrassing pictures of outgrown passions on the wall – Jaws and Jimmy Page and Jimmy Greaves – and a mad library where copies of Jonathan Livingstone Seagull and Das Kapital shared space with Anthony Buckeridge’s tales of two larky lads called Jennings and Darbishire at Linbury Court Preparatory School—Jennings Goes to School, Jennings and Darbishire, Thanks to Jennings and maybe thirty more – whatever happened to Jennings? Leon had loved Jennings, he had wanted to be Jennings – ’That shepherd’s pie we’ve just had was supersonic muck so it’s wizard, but this school jam’s ghastly so it’s ozard…being a new chap’s pretty ozard for a bit, but you’ll get used to it when you’ve been here as long as I have.’ Silly really, but it didn’t matter right at this moment, because – oh, Ruby – the sheets were soft and clean and his parents had taken him back without making him feel bad, without asking any questions, as if he had never been away, as if he had never thrown away his front-door key, and Leon knew it would be like that for as long as they lived, they would never turn him away, and also he could not feel too bad about sleeping under a Jaws duvet because he was so very tired, swamped

  swamped…swamped…swamped by tiredness, his eyes closing now – and he knew that sleep wo
uld come the moment he laid his head on the pillow. And it did.

  So Leon drifted away, a man in a boy’s bedroom, the St Christopher around his neck feeling cool against his skin, and many miles to go when he awoke.

  CODA:

  1977 - ANOTHER GIRL, ANOTHER PLANET

  Chapter Sixteen

  Terry liked belonging. He saw that now.

  Belonging to his paper, belonging to her. It was good. He was glad that he hadn’t been sacked. He was happy that they hadn’t broken up. Knowing he was getting married next month, knowing he was going to be a father next year – these things did not frighten him. They made him feel as though he belonged to this woman, and to this unborn child, and to this world.

  But sometimes The Paper felt like just another job, where someone older than you was always telling you what to do, not so very different from the gin factory, except there was less freedom to run wild. And sometimes Misty really got on his nerves.

  The two of them sat facing each other on the Inter-City 125 train, waiting for it to leave, and Misty was reading aloud from a paperback called The Flames of Love that she had just bought at W. H. Smiths. And Terry understood that the opposite of love is not hate. The opposite of love is irritation.

  ‘Listen to this bit,’ she said. ‘She came through the French windows and suddenly felt his strong, manly, dirty fingers in her taffeta. Miles the gardener was on his knees before her, imploring with his heavy-lidded eyes.’ Misty guffawed. ‘She gasped as he kissed the hem of her gown. “Valerie,” he said, “do you understand how big this thing is?”’

  A gaggle of businessmen staggered down the carriage, smelling of smoky bacon crisps and shorts bolted down at the railway bar. They eyed Misty hungrily. Terry glared at them. She didn’t notice. She was enjoying her Doris Hardman too much.

  ‘“No one – least of all that cad Sir Timothy – is man enough to do more than kiss your gilded slippers.”’ She was laughing so hard now that she struggled to get the words out. Misty shook her head, wide-eyed with disbelief. ‘Isn’t this just fabulous? Don’t you love it? I’m going to read everything by her, she’s so mad.’

  Terry smiled politely. It was funny – he could see that – but was it quite as funny as Misty was making out? Was she planning to read the whole book out loud? Was it going to be like this all the way to Sheffield? Was it going to be like this for the next fifty years?

  He could hardly stand to admit it, but it was suddenly all a little bit different. With Misty, and with The Paper too. He began leafing through the latest issue. It was a good issue. The kind of issue that would have had his heart beating faster when he was out there in reader-land, travelling up to the city to buy The Paper a day early with all the other true believers.

  Young Elvis on the cover in all his greasy pomp. Pages of tributes and memories and reflections from some of the older guys. Ray’s interview with Lennon. And the new guy tearing Dag Wood to bits for spending most of his gig at the Rainbow squatting behind the amps, his leather trousers down by his ankles, clutching his stomach and groaning.

  And – who would have thought it? – the diary mention of a band called Electric Baguette who wore Italian suits and played synthetic dance music and said they were bored with politics, they just wanted to make pop music and money. Brainiac had finally formed his band, and everybody seemed to think they were going to be the next hot thing. Funny how time slipped away – it was no longer the Sex Pistols that filled the sky for the new groups, but Chic. How quickly the new music – the new anything – became old hat. There was a rumour that Brainiac had even had his teeth fixed. But Terry closed The Paper, feeling curiously unmoved by all of it.

  Partly it was the ham-fisted, infantile quality of much of the writing – one of the older guys had compared Elvis to Jay Gatsby, ‘the hero of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s brilliant novel, The Great Gatsby.’ As if everyone needed to be told who Jay Gatsby was, and as if everyone needed to be told that the book was one of the greatest novels ever written. As if, Terry thought, we’re all just a bunch of dumb kids, waiting to be educated by our betters. There was nothing by Skip Jones in The Paper. For Terry, there was always something missing when Skip’s by-line wasn’t in there. He was happy that Skip was on the mend. But The Paper seemed almost ordinary without him.

  ‘His large hands were too powerful to resist,’ Misty giggled. ‘His mouth fastened on her rosebud lips like a vice.’ She looked up at Terry. ‘Now how can lips possibly be like a vice, you silly cow?’ She shrugged. ‘Oh well…She felt his desire rise up inside her – that’s a bit of a Freudian slip, his desire rising up inside her – then suddenly he swept her up in his rope-like muscles and carried her to the waiting four-poster. “Damn you, Valerie!” he cried hoarsely. “Why should we wait another year?” And she knew in her beating heart that her reticence was only inflaming him still further.’

  The real reason Terry felt a little blue today was because for the first time he could see an end to the whole music thing. He thought it was changing. But it was more than that. It was dying.

  One of his best friends had been kicked out, and the other one seemed suddenly to have a proper job, his future set in stone, the career of an adult. They had sent Ray off to New York to talk to Springsteen. His comeback was complete.

  But for Terry this life was coming to its natural end – as if it was really just his version of going to university, or doing national service. A few years and you were out. You went in a boy and you came out a man. All grown up. Or at least on your way to being grown up.

  You turned around and the bands were new, and a bit younger than you, and you didn’t like them quite as much as the bands you kicked around with at the start, the bands who were now struggling to record their second albums, or trying to crack America, or arguing among themselves, or overdoing the drugs. Suddenly, just to seem interested, you had to fake it a bit.

  And the faces in the clubs and at the gigs were changing too. Now every night he went out he was aware that he no longer knew everyone in the house. The familiar faces were thinning out.

  The day after the Western World disaster, Billy Blitzen had gone back to New York, deported by the Home Office for not having the correct work permit. Legend had it that Billy went home to Brooklyn with his guitar full of Iranian heroin, which he sold at a rock-bottom price to his kid brother, who had never even smoked a spliff before. Terry had no way of knowing it as he sat on that train with Misty, but Billy was just a few years away from a date with a disease that none of them had heard of yet.

  And whatever happened to all the other boys and girls that Terry had known back in the summer of 1976? Where had they all gone? To drugs and nervous breakdowns? To marriage and babies? To real jobs and early nights? He would never know.

  He knew he would miss the good stuff. He would miss coming down the stairs of some club into a world of noise, his spirits lifting with the music and the speed, the feeling of sweat inside his Oxfam jacket, and the overwhelming sensation of being a part of it all. But he couldn’t kid himself. The life he had known was drawing to an end.

  He tried to remember what Skip had said. He knew it was something about all art forms having their day. Like jazz had its day. Like painting had its day. Skip had said that there would probably never be another Miles Davis, and there would never be another Picasso. Skip had said that the music would never again be quite as good as the music they had loved, and so you were left with just another dying art form, and soon it would be ready for the museum.

  But if their music was dying, wouldn’t they die with it? It had been the heart of their world for as long as Terry could remember. Their music was more than a soundtrack – it was a life-support machine from childhood through adolescence and into what was passing for maturity. Perhaps they were all going to have to find other things to live for, and the music would be just something they came back to now and again, like the memory of someone you had lost.

  As he waited for the train to leave the station, Terry felt lu
cky that he had a woman he loved, a baby on the way, and a little family of his own. Things would be easier after the wedding, wouldn’t they?

  ‘She felt the love she had for him burning inside her. He was all she wanted and all she would ever need. Her young body trembled with a thrill that felt one step from sin. Soon she would be his wife and be his forever.’

  Terry walked down to the dining car to look for tea and bacon sandwiches. By the time he came back empty-handed, Misty had put down her book and was staring thoughtfully out of the window.

  ‘They’re on strike,’ Terry said. This bloody country. Somebody should do something.’

  But she wasn’t listening. She didn’t care about bacon sandwiches and strikes on British Rail.

  ‘What do you think is better?’ she said. To never change – to be the same person you always were as a kid – or to grow out of all that stuff and grow old gracefully?’

  ‘We’ll never be old,’ Terry smiled. They’ll have invented a cure for it by the time we get there.’

  She stuffed Doris Hardman into her bag, and then paused when she caught a glimpse of something. She pulled out her pair of pink fake mink handcuffs.

  ‘Remember these?’ she said, as if they would bring the fond memories flooding back. But all Terry remembered were silly games where he didn’t know the rules.

  He watched her snap one of the pink fake mink cuffs around her wrist and admire it, as if it were the finest bracelet in the window of Ratner’s. Then, with one of those aren’t-I-a-naughty-thing? looks on her face, she reached across the table separating them and snapped the other cuff around Terry’s wrist.

  ‘I remember,’ Terry said.

  Misty rippled with laughter. ‘I wonder if Doris Hardman would approve?’ she said. ‘Can you believe that millions of ordinary women fill their heads with that garbage?’