Pearls

by Celia Brayfield

  ‘Nah – he can’t be, he’s had it too soft all his life. It makes no odds to him whether he makes it this year, next year, sometime or never, but it does to us because making it’s all there is for us, you know.’ He pulled his cigarettes from his shirtsleeve. He rolled his sleeves neatly about the elbow; like a soldier or a boy scout. He looked at her and tapped out two cigarettes from the crumpled packet.

  ‘You’re hungry too, aren’t you? It don’t make sense, but you are. Sometimes I think you’re hungrier than all of us.’

  He lit both cigarettes, threw the match away with too much energy and leaned over to put one cigarette between her lips. Then he tore it away again, threw both cigarettes aside and kissed her, almost biting her mouth with a desperate urgency that begged her not to reject him.

  At once the rush of passion renewed within her, and she wound her arms around him. Their eagerness made them clumsy as they struggled with their clothes and they were still partly dressed as he thrust into her with cries that sounded half like triumph, half like a whimpering animal.

  Afterwards, when the sky was dark and the stars bright, she stroked his hair as he rested his head between her breasts.

  ‘I wanted you for so long,’ he murmured. ‘You’re a great chick. But I thought you were in love with Simon.’

  ‘I thought I was in love with Simon, too. I was in love with him once, but it just faded away.’ Was that really love? Monty wondered as she watched the moon struggle out from the clouds.

  In the morning they slithered down the cliff to the beach and splashed naked in the waves. Then they left the island, hitchhiked back to London and moved Monty’s things into Rick’s room. Monty left Simon a letter saying goodbye, and felt like a miserable coward.

  Soon afterwards Simon called a band meeting in the Wetherby Arms and announced that he was quitting and returning to his job in his father’s firm. Monty came to the meeting, but she could not look at Simon, even when she wished him all the luck in the world. Simon accepted her loss fatalistically. He was slowly appreciating that for him, rebellion was useless and that he would, in the end, be forced to conform to the blueprint which his parents had drawn up for his life. Monty, he now realized, was still stubbornly determined to choose her own path; they had arrived at a parting of their destinies.

  Monty’s life changed dramatically as soon as she moved into the decrepit, grey house where Rick, Cy and Pete lived. The stucco was blistered and the window sills rotted. Inside, Rick’s room contained a bed, a table, and two chairs, one of which had no back. There was a gas fire which was connected to a meter, into which shilling coins had to be fed to heat the room.

  When the Juice had a gig, they were paid £25. That worked out at £5 each for Monty, Rick, Cy, Pete and Nasher, out of which Rick ran a kitty for petrol for the van. It was not enough to live on, but both Rick and Cy insisted that they were musicians and needed no other job. Every Thursday they went up to the Labour Exchange to sign on for the dole. Monty was paid by Swallow on Friday, which was fortunate, because neither of the boys had any money left by then. After a month, she got a job in a small French restaurant near the office, waiting on tables for one pound an evening and tips. With this, the three of them had just enough money to get through the week, assuming that she stole some food in the restaurant.

  One week when the restaurant was shut they went to the pub on Friday night and had 3s 6d between them on Saturday morning, and no food.

  ‘Party-time,’ said Rick. They went back to the pub at lunchtime. ‘We’re having a party at our place tonight – bring a bottle,’ he told everyone, not stopping at any table long enough to be obliged to buy a round of drinks.

  Towards 11 pm, people began to arrive, most of them already drunk. They brought bottles of beer, wine and whisky. Rick and Cy sat and strummed their guitars, and people drank. The people left and in the morning Rick collected thirty-four empty bottles which he took back to the shop on the corner. There was a deposit of tuppence on each bottle, and they then had enough to buy cornflakes, bread and jam.

  This life delighted Monty. Being poor to her was like living in a free zone. There were no expectations, no constraints, no rules except survival. She wore the same pair of jeans every day for a year and got a bigger kick out of doing so than out of all the fabulous dresses which Simon had bought her.

  To her surprise, she also felt more loved by Rick than she ever had by Simon. He brought her tea in bed in the morning, and carried shopping for her, and washed up after she cooked meals on the rancid little stove on the landing which the whole house shared. He was easy and relaxed around women, without the edginess inculcated for life by a single-sex boarding school.

  ‘Go away,’ she said sleepily one morning as his hands slithered tenderly around her body. ‘I’m not fit to fuck this morning – my period’s starting.’

  ‘That’s nice, I must say. I wake up feeling all randy and you’ve got the painters in.’

  She giggled. ‘Have you got a pain?’ he asked, closing his hand over her belly protectively.

  ‘No. It’s not that, it’ll just be a bloody mess, that’s all.’ He wriggled his erection hopefully against her.

  ‘Tell you what – how about if I take the sheets to the launderette? Can’t say fairer than that now, can I?’

  ‘All right, it’s a deal.’ Rich warm tingles were racing through her flesh. It was extremely messy and he took the sheets to the launderette just as he had promised, making tea for her first.

  Rick could hardly believe he had been so lucky as to attract this beautiful, sexy, fantasy creature from another world – because the upper classes were a different world to him. Occasionally Monty would take him to a party given by one of her rich friends, and he would absorb, with resentful amazement, the truth about the lifestyle to which she was accustomed. As a point of pride he refused the champagne, and was overly polite to everyone, at the same time swearing to himself that one day he too would have a big house in Chelsea, with servants and a sunken bath.

  ‘You do love me, don’t you?’ he said to Monty one night, as they walked home through Chelsea from another of these glittering interludes in their life of squalor.

  ‘Of course I do.’ Monty slipped her hand down the back of his jeans.

  ‘I never thought you would, you know. I thought you’d piss off after a weekend or two in that rathole.’

  ‘You don’t think much of me, do you?’

  ‘Yeah, I do, that’s the trouble. You could have anyone. You could have one of them poncy stockbrokers with pots of money, and drive around in a Mercedes.’

  ‘You’ll have a Mercedes, when we get our deal.’

  Rick kicked a tin can into the gutter. ‘When we get our deal. When pigs fly, you mean.’

  ‘We’ll get it. The band’s great now. Someone’s bound to sign us.’

  ‘Well, I don’t want a fuckin’Mercedes. I’ll have a Roller. Got more class.’

  They walked on, following the meandering tail of the King’s Road. A smell of frying fat from a fish and chip shop wafted towards them on the combination of brewery fumes, gasworks effluent and carbon monoxide which formed the atmosphere of Chelsea’s outer limits.

  ‘Got any money?’

  Monty felt in her handbag, then in the pockets of her jean jacket. ‘Five, six, seven – seven and six. What for?’

  ‘Get some chips, I’m starving.’

  ‘But Rick, we’ve just been to a party with enough salmon and champagne to sink a battleship. Didn’t you eat anything?’

  ‘No. I couldn’t.’ She didn’t ask him why, guessing at the peculiar inversion of pride that had made him refuse the food when he was hungry.

  ‘Get me some – salt, no vinegar,’ she yelled after him as he crossed the road.

  The Juice was a different band without Simon. Rick took control and they stopped playing the long, complex songs with enigmatic lyrics which Simon had preferred because they showed off his musicianship. Rick liked simple songs with a driving beat tha
t would get the crowd on its feet. He could barely read music, let alone write it, and he relied heavily on Monty.

  ‘Listen to this, love,’ he would say, playing a few chords on his guitar. ‘I had the next bit yesterday, but I can’t remember it.’ And she would pick up the cheap acoustic guitar which he seldom used and take the fragment of melody and turn it into a song with all the pulsating, direct power that Rick knew he wanted but could not create for himself.

  Words also came very easily to her. The poetry crammed into her head at school as a punishment had trained her mind superbly and, now the ability was needed, the words tumbled out, thrusting and lunging at her listeners’emotions.

  Rick was spellbound with admiration. ‘The things you know,’ he murmured, half-mocking, when she suddenly decided to transpose a song into a different key and made it sound completely different. She made him conscious that he was ill-equipped for his chosen world, capable of striking the pose of a musician but not of understanding his art.

  Monty felt as if the working class were not so much another world as another planet. Rick, Cy and Pete had language, folklore and beliefs which were completely alien to her. They even looked different from the solid, well-nourished, upper-class boys she had known before. They were sparrow-boned and skinny. Pete had a slight spinal deformity. Cy’s teeth leaned crazily like the tombstones in an old churchyard. All of them smoked heavily and coughed a great deal, especially in the winter. They ate junk food, and drank only at the pub; buying alcohol to drink at home, she discovered, was tantamount to admitting to alcoholism.

  While Rick kept his room as neat as a cabin on a ship, Cy’s lair was stacked to the ceiling with debris and covered in a thick layer of dust. His bed was a mattress on the floor. His favourite occupation was smashing things, and he was never happier than when he found an abandoned car to wreck or a derelict house to attack as if he could tear it apart with his bare hands.

  Next to destruction, Cy liked stealing. Every gig they played gave him the opportunity to steal something. Monty was embarrassed when he walked off with a piece of equipment belonging to another band.

  At home, Cy plundered the gas meters with artistry, slowing down the clocks so that they would not register the gas consumed, and making it possible to run the fires all day in winter with a single shilling put through the slot again and again. In supermarkets he stole food. He never paid his fare on the bus. He fiddled his dole money, and was outraged when the Labour Exchange official caught him and threatened to prosecute him.

  ‘It’s a fuckin’ rip-off,’ he yelled, kicking at a corrugated-iron fence around a building site. ‘They got no right to say they’ll get the law on me. I ain’t done nothing.’

  ‘Yes, you have. You cashed your dole cheques and claimed you’d lost them, so they’d give you the money again,’ Monty pointed out. ‘That’s fraud, you know it is.’

  ‘You can fuck off!’ Cy shouted. ‘Nobody ever ripped you off, did they? What the fuck do you know about it?’

  Monty walked on with Rick, leaving Cy pulling down the entire fence. ‘He’s mad,’ she said in wonder. ‘Why’s he so aggressive?’

  ‘You don’t understand.’ Rick pulled out his cigarettes and lit two of them, his hands cupped against the biting March wind. ‘All Cy knows is being ripped off, and being ripped off begins at home, like charity. If you’ve been ripped off all your life, well that’s all you know how to do, isn’t it? So you just go out and do it back.’

  Monty took a cigarette from him and inhaled, thinking. ‘People can know better. You can learn better. You don’t rip everyone off all the time, and you and Cy grew up on the same street.’

  He looked at her, uncertain. ‘You don’t know me, love.’ She did not react, so he continued, ‘Anyway, Cy’s got nothing. He’s got no way out. I’m his way out, because I can get on stage and act like a monkey and people will pay money to see me. That’s the only way out for all of us.’

  They waited at the bus stop, cuddled together to keep warm in the raw cold.

  Rick’s ticket to fortune and fame was his ability to make himself into another person on stage. Without his savage, raw-throated performance, the Juice were nothing but an average bunch of players. Rick was hardly a musician at all, a self-taught guitarist with a few laboriously acquired riffs which he played over and over again in different permutations. But the instant he ran on stage and pulled the microphone from its stand, he became a mad, mocking demon who dominated and excited the audience until they grovelled at his feet, screaming for more.

  One night after a gig they were packing up to leave when a man in a white suit, with a boyish face that looked prematurely aged and close-cropped blond hair, came over and spoke to Rick.

  ‘I’d like to buy you a drink,’ he said.

  ‘Thanks, mate.’ Rick finished coiling up his guitar lead and put it on top of an amplifier.

  ‘Large scotch for me.’ Cy sat down at a table at the edge of the half-empty room. Pete and Nasher, the drummer, followed him. Rick sat down last, pulling Monty beside him and putting his arm around her.

  ‘I’m Dennis, Dennis Pointer.’ The blond man shook hands with all of them and passed round his cigarettes. ‘Anyone managing you?’

  ‘We split with our manager.’ It was almost true, since Simon had acted as their manager; Rick allowed the newcomer to light his cigarette.

  ‘Got a deal yet?’

  ‘Not exactly.’ Rick shook his head.

  ‘I know you, don’t I?’ Nasher narrowed his eyes. ‘Didn’t you have something to do with some horrible bunch of hippies?’

  ‘You mean Yellow Nebula. Yeah, I managed them. Got them an outrageous deal with Virgin and they fucked off to the country to do all the acid they could carry and never came back.’ Dennis gave them a speculative look.

  ‘We wouldn’t do a thing like that to you.’ Rick grinned and blew smoke upwards. ‘Pity. Jimmy Booker was a good singer.’

  ‘I’m still handling Jimmy. But I like you lot – I’ve been following you round a few places.’

  ‘We’ll think about it,’ Rick told him. The truth was they didn’t need to think. They acted cool until the van was round the corner then Rick and Monty shrieked with joy, Nasher beat a tattoo on the wheel arch and Cy put his feet on the dashboard and drummed his heels. They were singing their third chorus of ‘She’ll Be Coming Round The Mountain’when a police car howled up behind them and they were cautioned for reckless driving.

  ‘Now I’ll tell you how to get a deal,’ Dennis lectured them all a month later, in a café around the corner from the offices of Excellent Records. ‘Don’t matter much what you sound like – that’s for us to know and keep to ourselves, right? Your music won’t cut any ice with that polecat you’re going to see. What you gotta do is grab his imagination. You’ve got to let him know that you’re the most filthy, steaming, obscene bunch of lads this side of Sodom and Gomorrah – got it?’

  ‘Nah. What do you want us to do?’ Cy screwed up his mouth in an obstinate line.

  ‘Act natural,’ Dennis advised him.

  The polecat’s name was Les Lightfoot; his office was at the end of a long corridor lined with gold discs in gold frames. He had a Julius Caesar haircut and very clean jeans.

  ‘Dennis has played me some of your stuff,’ Les began. ‘I like your sound. I think the kids’ll go for it.’

  Cy gave him his most malevolent stare. ‘You want to watch your mouth, mate. I could go for you, ‘n’all.’

  ‘Tell me about yourselves,’ Les invited them.

  Cy got up and walked slowly around him, swivelling his highbacked leather chair. ‘I don’t like you,’ he told him. ‘I’d consider killing you, if I thought you were alive.’

  The polecat swallowed uncomfortably. This was not the way it was supposed to be. The artists were supposed to be respectful and polite, and wear their best gear. This gargoyle with mouldy teeth had a four-inch rip in his jeans, through which the white flesh of his backside was clearly visible.

/>   Pete also stood up and walked to the back of the office, up to a handsome potted palm. He pulled out an aerosol can and sprayed red paint on the fronds. It dripped on to the white shag-pile carpet.

  ‘Looks like blood, don’t it?’ he remarked.

  Nasher appeared to be asleep. ‘Don’t mind him,’ Rick advised the executive amiably. ‘He’s a narcoleptic. Keeps dropping off. It’s a form of epilepsy, apparently.’

  ‘I hope he doesn’t do that on stage.’ Les Lightfoot loosened the knot in his satin tie.

  ‘It’s all right, we just keep on playing. Sometimes he has proper fits, of course. Then one of us has to jam one of his drum sticks between his teeth. Stop him biting his tongue.’

  Cy slowly unzipped his fly, and hauled out a semi-inflated pink balloon in the shape of a cock and balls. The balls were tinted an improbable purple. Cy picked a felt pen off the man’s desk and began to draw hairs on the balls.

  In desperation, the polecat turned to Monty and smiled.

  ‘And what’s your name, my dear?’ he asked.

  Monty had put on a collection of Victorian lace skirts and a camisole which, she knew, made her look gloriously hoydenish. She leaned forward, well aware that she was giving Les a clear view from her clavicle to her waist, down a tunnel of white lace frills.

  ‘My name’s Miranda,’ she said in her most languid upper-class drawl. ‘But actually people usually call me Monty.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you,’ the man said foolishly.

  Cy pulled out a switchblade knife and stabbed the inflatable penis with it.

  Two weeks later Dennis brought them their contracts. Then they had money, but not time to spend it, because Les Lightfoot wanted their first album as soon as possible, and for three months Monty lived in a tunnel between the recording studio and their room. She bought herself a Moog synthesizer but had no time to play with it. They were listening to the first number when Rick said, ‘I’ve been thinking – how about more girls’voices? This sounds OK for the little clubs, but it isn’t right for an album. It sounds thin.’