Pearls

by Celia Brayfield

  Their producer agreed. ‘Monty’s voice is terrific, but I think three girls would be better.’

  Next day a black girl and a white girl joined them. ‘I’m P. J., this is Maggie,’ the black girl said. She had enormous eyes and hair cropped flat against her skull. Maggie was squat and messy-looking, with clotted black mascara and a thick Scottish accent.

  They were right, Monty thought, as she listened to the playback in the studio; three girls sounded better. It did not occur to her that her status in the group had been eroded, and her individual voice replaced by a mere sound.

  Eight songs were recorded one after the other. They represented the best of the Juice’s repertoire, but the producer told them they needed at least three more to fill the album. Rick suggested another Chuck Berry standard, which was easily done, but then no one could agree on the final two songs. Les Lightfoot himself came down to the studio and listened to some of the material which the band had often performed, but he at once vetoed its inclusion on the record.

  ‘Old hat stuff,’ he announced. ‘I’m sorry, boys, you’ll have to come up with something new or the deal’s off.’

  The pressure acted like inspiration on Monty. The same night, as soon as she was alone with Rick, she burrowed into a box of papers and books which she had brought from Simon’s apartment and found the little notebook in which she used to write down the songs she composed for fun.

  ‘Maybe we can use some of these.’ She seized the old acoustic guitar and began picking out a tune and humming the words.

  Rick looked doubtful. ‘I dunno – it’s a pretty song, all right, but it’s not our sort of a song, is it?’

  Monty continued to play, developing the melody and changing the words until at last Rick came over and sat on the bed beside her, singing with her and making his own changes. Then they thought of a new idea, and Monty quickly put the outline of it down on paper.

  Suddenly it was mid-day, and they stopped for an hour to go to the corner café for tea and bacon sandwiches. By the end of the day the first song was perfect, and Rick called the others to hear it. Everyone was happy with the new song, and they worked on the second one in the studio, with everyone throwing in contributions.

  The producer nodded with satisfaction. ‘This is the test,’ he said to Monty while the boys were running through the final version by themselves. ‘The band that gets to the top and stays there is the band that can get its own material together, and be good, and be consistent, and be professional. And there’s not a lot of bands like that about.’

  By the time they had finished recording the album, all Monty and Rick wanted to do was sleep, but Dennis, their manager, had other plans.

  ‘The real work’s only starting,’ he told them. ‘You’ll be doing interviews soon, and we gotta get some photographs done.’ Dennis’s girlfriend was an assistant on a young fashion magazine, and she took Monty on a very serious shopping expedition. They came back with antique lace knickerbockers, French blue-jean jackets embroidered with coloured glass beads and gloriously sexy, high-heeled sandals of red and silver snakeskin. Merely wearing them made Monty feel excited and apprehensive. She hennaed her hair to a luscious mahogany and had it cut into layers of silky curls.

  The interviews started and Rick came into his own. Shrewdly appreciating that his role on the world’s stage was to outrage the spectators, he insulted reporters with complete abandon, turning up drunk, stoned, or very late – but never blowing out a press call completely. The Juice was offered one TV show in Newcastle, courtesy of Nasher’s link with the area, and Rick and Cy wrecked the set. The New Musical Express called them the ‘The Terrible Twins of Rock’, and Dennis squeezed Rick’s shoulder with satisfaction.

  ‘By George,’ he said, ‘I think he’s got it.’

  ‘So now what?’ Rick asked him, sitting on Dennis’s desk. Dennis had an office now, one room with a telephone at the top of a listing staircase in Soho.

  ‘Excellent ought to give you a tour,’ Dennis offered his cigarettes. ‘But they’re waiting to see how much airplay the album gets. Don’t worry, I got a few tricks up my sleeve.’

  The tricks, they all knew, were two key disc jockeys for whom Dennis was a convenient supplier of cheap drugs and expensive women. ‘Freshly Squeezed’, the Juice’s first album, entered the charts at number 63. The next week it rose to number 37, because Dennis hired a small army of kids from Swallow’s agency to buy it at some of the stores whose sales figured in the charts. At 37, the album automatically went on to the playlists of all the radio stations, and Dennis’s influence took it into the top 10.

  Excellent Records hastily sent the Juice on a four-week tour of Britain on which they supported the label’s biggest name, a psychedelic band called Crimson Lake. Halfway through the itinerary Dennis was called to London for a meeting with the record company, and returned smiling.

  ‘After this, we’re going to the States,’ he told them. ‘We’ve cracked it.’

  By the time they played their final three nights in London, Rick and Monty were lightheaded with exhaustion and Cy had done so much speed that nothing he said made any sense at all, even to Rick.

  ‘I can’t handle this,’ Rick said suddenly. They were sitting in their room at night. The house seemed cold and neglected, and after a month in hotel rooms the squalor was oppressive. ‘One minute I was hustling for a break, the next I’m being treated like I can walk on water. And I don’t even know what day of the week it is. Thank God I’ve got you, love. You’re the only thing that’s keeping me sane.’

  The album’s cover showed an oil-streaked man’s hand with ragged fingernails squeezing a satin-covered woman’s buttock. Its distinctive black-and-white design was soon repeated endlessly in the windows of music stores.

  By the time the album was number 3 in the charts, Rick had given so many interviews nothing he said seemed real any more. ‘Every time they ask me where I come from, and I tell’em Croydon, and Cy’s mum and my mum worked in the same lightbulb factory, it’s like you made it up for me to say, even though it’s true,’ he told Dennis.

  ‘There’s some girl from Rolling Stone coming at half past two,’ the publicist told him, uncaring.

  ‘But we’re going to America today, aren’t we?’ Monty was becoming wary of Rick after an interview, especially an interview with a girl. He was always hyped-up, arrogant and aggressive, as if his demonic stage personality had temporarily taken control.

  ‘I’ve ordered a limo to take Rick to the airport and she’ll ride out with him,’ the publicist countered. ‘Sign these, will you?’

  Rick looked at the photographs with distaste. ‘Why don’t you buy a rubber stamp?’

  ‘You’re out of date, mate. You sign the print and then we just duplicate the whole thing. Hurry up, the car’s waiting.’

  In the limousine on the way to the airport, the girl from Rolling Stone pulled down all the blinds and took off all her clothes and set about giving Rick a blow job. He wasn’t surprised. This sort of thing was happening all the time, the girls seemed to think it was expected and who was he to complain?

  There were girls loitering in their hotels, girls hanging around the Excellent offices, girls finagling to get backstage at their gigs. Within a matter of weeks it had become the ambition of every groupie who considered herself worthy of the name to lay Rick Brown of the Juice, and Monty was astonished at their shameless ingenuity. One of them had even dressed herself up in an imitation of Monty’s ruffles and denim and tricked a doorman into believing she was the real Monty and giving her a backstage pass.

  In America, the girls who tried the interview scam claimed they worked for the BBC; they were much more persistent. Even the stupid ones, instead of hanging around the hotel lobby, gave head to the nearest bellhop, who would then let them into Rick’s room. There they waited until they got bored and tried Cy’s room instead.

  Rick slept with Monty, but few people outside the band realized this.

  ‘Don’t tell ’em you
live together, for Chrissake,’ Les Lightfoot told him. ‘We’re promoting you as the bad boys par excellence – none of that lovey-dovey crap. Keep the old lady out of sight, please.’

  Cy threw a television set off the twenty-second floor balcony of the Hilton in Daytona, Florida. In Memphis, he drove a hired Cadillac into the hotel swimming pool. Somewhere in Wisconsin a chambermaid claimed that he had raped her. The Juice were banned in Kansas.

  Cy’s room was always where the orgy was, and the mystique took root so fast they seldom needed to do anything more than open the door to a procession of bedraggled girls who wanted only to be able to say that they had laid Rick Brown of the Juice. After them came the small-town jocks, the two-bit rock writers, the passers-by and the hangers-on.

  In Dallas, a pair of identical twins took over the scene and immediately sold their story to the National Enquirer. Cy read it with relish. ‘Right dirty slags they were,’ he approved. ‘Fucked’em both flat, and they couldn’t get enough. Wanted to do it all again with some spade chick. I told’em it was all beyond me. I got’em fuckin’ each other’s brains out with one of them dildo things. Incredible what some chicks’ll do, innit?’

  None of them wanted to lay Nasher, who passed blameless evenings trying to phone his wife. Pete picked up a stunning blonde in Pasadena and dropped out of the action.

  Monty did not realize that Rick was keeping Cy company with the endless flow of groupies until he leaned over the breakfast trolley in Los Angeles and sleepily scratched his brown curls. Two tiny grey insects, holding each others grippers like square-dancers, fell into his orange juice.

  ‘Ugh,’ Monty fished them out with a teaspoon. Rick got up and washed the creatures down the lavatory, muttering something about the hotel being dirty. She did not find out what the insects were until she told P. J. about them.

  ‘Crabs! Yeeuch! Men are so disgusting. Hope that’s all he’s got. You’d better see a doctor.’

  The doctor, who was well known on the West Coast as a music business insider, gave Monty a blood test as well. ‘You’ve got the clap,’ he told her as if he were telling her the time. ‘Better let me take a look at your boyfriend.’

  They went home full of penicillin, with orders not to drink alcohol. Cy had downed his first defiant bottle of scotch by the time they were flying over the North Pole.

  On the way back to London they agreed that they could not face returning to their rotting house.

  ‘I reckon we should put up at the Savoy,’ Rick announced. ‘We can afford it, can’t we, Dennis?’

  ‘It’s not my business how you spend your money. Sure, check into the Savoy and we’ll start looking for proper homes next week.’ Dennis looked more wrinkled and colourless than ever. They all looked tired and drawn after their weeks on tour, and Monty felt bloated from living on booze, coffee, drugs and hamburgers. She didn’t care for the fact that her breasts had enlarged, which Maggie confidently informed her was the inescapable result of singing every night.

  In the peach-and-chrome Art Deco calm of the Savoy, Monty let Rick recover for a day and then went on the attack, determined to detach him from Cy and the groupie scene.

  ‘Never, ever, again,’ she told him, her voice low and hissing with anger. ‘Never. No way. That tour was the most disgusting, humiliating experience of my life. How could you put me through all that, Rick? How could you come and get in my bed when you’d been down the corridor with Cy doing all those revolting things with those revolting groupies?’

  He looked small, wretched and ashamed. ‘I’m sorry, love, I never realized you’d be hurt.’

  ‘Like hell. What was I supposed to do, join in?’

  Rick squirmed unhappily. ‘You don’t understand.’

  ‘I never do understand, do I? Whenever you and Cy want to wreck everything somehow my understanding just isn’t up to the occasion.’

  ‘Look – it’s what rock’n’roll is all about, being a big bad boy. Dope and sex groupies, and all that – we’ve got to have’em for all the kids who’ll never get the chance.’

  ‘Bullshit. You’re having them because you want them. It hurts me, it’s insulting, and I don’t like it.’

  ‘Well, if you don’t like it, you know what you can do about it, don’t you?’ Rick pulled the bathrobe round himself with a defensive gesture. ‘I ain’t waited all my life to make it to have some jealous chick spoil it all. Go on, fuck off.’

  Monty shrugged and walked away. She did not care about his reaction as much as she had expected to; she knew Rick would concede. She was the only stability he had. Without her to reassure him, support him, write his songs and lay down the ground rules of his life, he would simply fall apart in the crazy new world they had entered. She ought to feel sorry for him but two months of continuous exhaustion had left her small capacity for feeling. She got dressed and went for a walk along the Thames Embankment.

  When she got back, Rick was dressed, washed, shaved and contrite.

  ‘I’m sorry, darling. I was a right pig.’ He put his arms round her. ‘I didn’t realize how much you’d be hurt, honest, I didn’t. Don’t go, Monty. I need you, you know.’ She saw tears glistening in his eyelashes. ‘We mustn’t let this happen again,’ he said, holding her to him with all his strength. ‘We mustn’t let all the crap come between us.’

  They kissed with real emotion for the first time since they had signed their contracts, and made love like dying people, slow and naked.

  They were into the second post-coital cigarette when Rick said, ‘Dennis phoned today.’

  ‘Mmn?’

  ‘Just as well he did. I’d forgotten about the next album.’

  ‘What next album?’

  ‘We signed a three-year deal for an album every six months.’

  Monty cleared the bliss out of her mind and thought about what he was saying. ‘That means we’ll have to start recording in a month – shit!’

  ‘Yeah. That’s what I thought.’

  ‘We’d better write some songs.’

  Rick and Monty sat down, took up a guitar and tried to write new songs, but while Monty began to pick through the bits and pieces of melodies in the bottom of her mind and find words for the half-digested impressions of the last year, Rick kept getting up and walking around the room in agitation, making futile suggestions and getting angry with himself.

  ‘My mind’s a blank, I can’t think of nothing,’ he admitted at last.

  ‘I’ve got enough to work on here. Why don’t you take a break, go and find us somewhere to live?’ Monty suggested.

  Every two hours room service brought her black coffee, while Rick and Dennis drove round London looking at places to live. Dennis saw an apartment he liked on Knightsbridge and they tried to persuade Monty to come to see it.

  ‘I can’t, I’ve got to finish this song,’ she said. People had stopped looking at them in the Savoy Grill now, and the waiter brought her a grilled sole and a green salad every evening without being asked. She was trying to lose weight. The pictures from the American tour had not flattered any part of her body.

  ‘Let’s see.’ Rick took the notepad she used to write lyrics and looked at what she had written. It was a song about a man trying to call his wife, inspired by Nasher’s hopeless battles with the transatlantic telephone cables.

  ‘I can’t sing this,’ he complained, ‘it’s crap. All this I-miss-you stuff.’

  ‘No, it’s good. You’ll like it when you hear it,’ she promised him.

  ‘No, I won’t – why don’t you come up with some good old rockers, eh?’

  ‘You never like anything I do until it’s on top of the Hot One Hundred.’ Monty meant the single from ‘Freshly Squeezed’, which was storming up the American charts.

  ‘Oh well, I suppose we can always shove in a few old Chuck Berry numbers to pad it out.’ Rick slashed his steak with disdain. He had ordered tournedos Rossini, feeling that this grand name must mean an equally grand slab of meat. The neat little medallion sitting on a circle
of soggy toast on his plate looked like some kind of trick played on a jumped-up nobody by a snobbish hotel.

  Monty paid no attention to him. Her head was seething with ideas. She finished seven songs in a fortnight, and reworked three of the band’s old numbers with some dutiful help from Rick. He had decided to buy a beautiful house in Chelsea very close to Cathy’s old home, and was now talking about getting a place in the country and keeping a few horses.

  By the time the Juice went into the studios to record their second album, Monty understood what Rosanna Emanuel’s mother had said about her talent being something from which she could not escape. Music had claimed her as its willing slave.

  Chapter Seventeen

  When Hussain Shahzdeh was nine years old, his father gave him a hammer and pulled up a brocade fauteuil on which he could stand to reach the vast gilt-framed mirror over the marble fireplace of their apartment on the Avenue Foch.

  ‘No Nazi will admire his face in my mirror,’ his father said. ‘Give it a good whack, my boy.’

  Father and son went from room to room, smashing the mirrors as they went. The floors, already dusty and bare of their carpets, were soon covered with silver fragments.

  ‘Whatever are you doing with the boy – have you lost your mind?’

  His mother fluttered in like an angry dove and swept him into her arms. He was tall for his age and sturdy. She was small and delicate, and Hussain felt himself to be almost as tall as she was. Her black fox wrap was as richly glossy as her immaculately styled black hair. She moved in a cloud of Mitsouko fragrance.

  ‘Now listen, my darling child, this is very serious.’ She held his hands in hers. ‘We are going on a long journey, and it will be very dangerous. You may be hungry and cold. There will be no more servants, no amusements, no luxury, at least for a while. You mustn’t mind, my darling. I know you won’t mind. You’ll be a brave soldier, you always are.’ She kissed him and hugged him.

  ‘Will there be school?’ he asked, seeing some possibilities in the situation.