Pearls

by Celia Brayfield

  Cathy smiled and wished him a pleasant good-morning.

  Chapter Twenty

  ‘Christ almighty – look at the state of that!’ A girl with no eyebrows, hair teased into vertical spikes and a black lightning-flash painted down her face walked across King’s Road in front of Rick’s willow-green Rolls Royce. She was wearing a tom black T-shirt, shiny, black rubber tights which coated her legs like liquid, and a small padlock in her right earlobe.

  ‘Get a move on, darlin’!’ Rick shouted out of the car window. The girl paused in the centre of the crossing and scraped her stilettos as if she had trodden in some dog shit.

  ‘Don’t wind her up, Rick, or we’ll never get there.’ They were already half an hour late for the awards ceremony and Monty knew that the strutting apparition in front of them was quite capable of spinning out the confrontation for another half-hour. ‘Give her a grin and let’s go,’ she urged Rick. ‘It’s that girl from the punk shop – she’ll piss about forever if she recognizes you.’

  She spoke too late. The girl had recognized the great Rick Brown of the Juice. He was old, rich and successful – everything that she despised. For the punks Rick was a symbol of exploitation. He had made his millions from kids like them, peddling songs about their anger, their pain and their yearnings. But once the royalties had started flowing, Rick and the Juice had sold out the great underclass of youth for whom they claimed to speak, and gone for all the trappings of privilege – the swanky cars, the country estates, the flashy women and the private jets. They had hired bodyguards and big dogs to keep away the kids who had put them at the top.

  By 1976, the fat years were finished for Britain. Industries were collapsing like mushrooms rotting in autumn fields, leaving stinking pools of unemployment and deprivation. Kids finished school and signed on the dole, knowing that the odds were that some of them would never be able to work in their lives. The future offered them nothing. They were angry.

  The punk girl looked with loathing at the gleaming Rolls Royce carrying people in evening clothes somewhere she could not follow. She raised a finger, gave them the stick-it-up-yer-ass sign, and glowered, deliberately blocking the road. Behind Rick’s Rolls a tail of cars began to form along the winding length of King’s Road. Just as their driver was opening his door to move the punk girl out of the way, a pair of uniformed policemen strolled up and hustled her out of the road.

  ‘Thanks, mate,’ Rick called to them.

  The elder of the two constables reached into his tunic pocket for his notebook, walked up to the car and leaned down to talk to Rick. ‘Any chance of an autograph, Rick? The old lady’s a real fan of yours.’

  Rick wrote his name swiftly with the proffered pen and they drove on. From the pavement, the punk girl again gestured obscenely.

  ‘Filthy scrubber. Who’d want to fuck a thing like that?’ Rick settled back in his seat and the car’s tinted window rolled smoothly shut.

  ‘She doesn’t want to get fucked – that’s the point. Why should a girl have to look attractive for men all the time?’ The speaker was Cindy Moon, a columnist with Hit Maker magazine, who was hosting the awards ceremony. Cindy was given to mouthing women’s lib clichés but her own appearance belied her words. Her tinted blond curls were spun into a cloud of gold candyfloss around her shoulders, and her green chiffon dress, tightly cinched at the waist with a gold belt, revealed every feature of her anatomy. She looked like a Barbie doll with added nipples.

  ‘Dunno why we’re going to this party, anyway. We aren’t nominated for anything, are we?’ Rick ran his fingers through his floppy brown hair with a petulant gesture.

  ‘Dennis says you’ve got to keep in the public eye,’ Monty reminded him.

  ‘And they want you to present the award for best new vocalist,’ added Cindy, crossing her thin white legs.

  ‘Oh, yeah. Who is it?’

  ‘Bruce Springsteen.’

  ‘Fucking hell – not that one-hit wonder? Still, I suppose it could have been worse, they could’ve given it to some bunch of punks.’

  ‘They will, next year.’ Cindy had been one of the first of the rock establishment to take the new punk bands seriously. Rick gave her an angry look. ‘You can’t fight it, Rick,’ she told him. ‘Things don’t stand still anywhere, least of all in this business. Hits turn into has-beens quicker than beer turns to piss. The kids who’re buying records now were spending their pocket money on penny sweets when you and the Juice had your first hits. They don’t want the same old sounds.’

  Monty saw a fresh opportunity to talk Rick into taking the band in a new direction. In the beginning, when he had been insecure, he had always taken her advice. When the pressure had been on them to make two albums a year, he had relied on Monty’s musical ability with a desperate gratitude. Then Dennis had got them a better deal with Excellent Records, and Rick’s attitude had changed. He seemed to resent her talent, and avoided asking for her help.

  Instead, he had fallen back into the safe, easy, rock’n’roll style he had given the band at the beginning. Monty realized that he felt threatened when he had to rely on her, but she wanted to record her own songs: she was bored with the Juice’s output now, and so were the kids, who bought fewer of their records every year. Rick refused to change the band’s style. Maybe, Monty thought, he’d listen to her if Cindy frightened him a little.

  ‘Were we nominated for anything, Cindy?’ she asked. ‘You were on the judging panel – what happened?’

  Cindy’s narrow, heavily-glossed lips pouted as she thought. She knew at once why Monty was asking. Monty and Rick had had so many screaming rows in public that everyone in London knew what the tensions in their relationship were. ‘You want me to tell you the truth?’

  ‘Of course, that’s why I’m asking.’

  ‘I don’t believe anyone ever mentioned the Juice. There’s so many new bands now …’ Cindy fell into a studied silence of embarrassment and stared at her long red fingernails. Monty looked covertly at Rick. He was staring out of the car’s dark window as if he were not listening.

  The awards ceremony at the Savoy was an ordeal. Monty and Rick were not seated together; Dennis still insisted that their relationship should not be stressed in public. Instead, Rick and the rest of the band went around like a street gang of brawling boys and Monty had to find her own level among the second league of friends, engineers, roadies, go-fers, publicists and liggers.

  From her table at the back of the hall she watched Rick in his old blue denim jacket standing with Cy, Pete and Nasher, reading the nominations for Best New Vocalist. Cy had discovered heroin in the first year of the Juice’s success. Now he looked a little more gaunt every year, and one or two of his teeth had dropped out. Pete was getting a distinct belly which bulged over the top of his jeans. Nasher hardly seemed to change, except his hair was thinning and he had taken to wearing a denim cap to disguise his bald spot. The Juice looked middle-aged.

  ‘Talk about the night of the living dead,’ sneered a boy sitting opposite her, as Rick mumbled the explanation about Bruce Springsteen being unable to accept his award in person. The boy had a round bullet head covered with black hair which was shaved to half an inch in length, and he wore a small silver ring through one of his nostrils.

  ‘I thought Rick Brown was dead,’ his companion drawled, peering at the stage through wraparound dark glasses an inch wide.

  ‘Be better for him if he was,’ the first speaker announced, turning his back on the presentation ceremony. ‘Did you see their last album didn’t even make the top thirty? Ageing savages, that’s what they are. Best argument for euthanasia I’ve seen for years. Excellent will be dumping them at the end of their contract, that’s for sure.’

  The man with dark glasses flicked them up and down like Groucho Marx as he looked at Monty. ‘What’s a place like this doing in a girl like you? Don’t I know you?’

  Monty gave him a withering stare from below half-lowered eyelids.

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ the stub
ble-headed boy told his friend. ‘She’s one of them. You sing with the Juice, don’t you?’

  ‘Yeah. I expect you saw me on TV when you were a baby.’ Monty offered her cigarettes to show she wasn’t offended by what they had said about the Juice.

  ‘That’s your old man we’re slagging off, innit?’ the crop-haired one challenged her.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘You don’t seem too excited about him, neither.’

  Monty shrugged. ‘Nothing’s exciting after seven years, is it?’

  ‘Dunno – I’ll tell you when I’m old. Didn’t someone tell me you wrote some of their songs?’

  ‘A lot of the early ones. I don’t write the stuff they’re doing now.’

  ‘Pity. They could do with some decent material, instead of doing all this plastic American crap. It’s bad enough having people waste good money on Eagles albums without getting all that garbage from over here as well.’

  ‘Tell me about it. I think Rick wants to be the next Frank Sinatra or something.’

  He blew thick plumes of smoke from his wide nostrils and looked at her directly. ‘What about you, what do you want to do? Given up writing songs, or what?’

  Monty shook her head, feeling the luxuriant, glistening mass of mahogany-tinted curls stir around her shoulders. Her black silk sweater embroidered with diamante slipped off her shoulder and she pulled it back casually.

  ‘I write stuff all the time,’ she told him.

  ‘Good for you,’ he rejoined with a wink.

  On stage, Cindy Moon was breathlessly thanking everyone involved in the ceremony and saying goodnight to the tv audience. The floor manager waved his arms, everyone applauded and at last the tv lights dimmed.

  Monty stood up to leave with the two young men, who were dressed entirely in black with straps bound around their trouser legs.

  ‘Tell you what,’ the short-haired one said to Monty as they left the overheated room, ‘when you get fed up with Frank Sinatra there, gimme a bell.’ He reached into the pocket of his studded leather jacket and gave her a card. ‘Sig Bear: Biffo Records’it said.

  ‘I think you got great tits, ’n’all,’ he shouted to her outside the Savoy, as he walked away with his friend. Monty put the card in her silver snakeskin evening purse and forgot about it. She’d had the same conversation a dozen times in the past three years.

  I wonder if Rick’s having a scene with Cindy, she thought, watching him put his arm around the slender figure in green chiffon and face the tv camera with a smile for an interview. The idea of Rick with another woman – yet another woman – barely moved Monty now. Apart from the orgiastic style of the Juice’s tours, Rick seemed to feel duty-bound to jump every woman who came near him. What worried Monty far more was the fact that, although she cared for Rick still, it was the vulnerable, hungry, insecure Rick she loved, not the arrogant monster he chose to become in public. Every now and then, when they were exhausted after one of their fights or wrecked at the end of a tour, they would find each other again, but then he would withdraw from her, turn into the taunting sadist he played on stage, and be lost to her. He did not want intimacy. It scared him.

  Monty had learned a lot about men in the past seven years. She had begun with tit-for-tat affairs to kill the pain of Rick’s unfaithfulness. Then she discovered that some men would come on to her to get at Rick; some – like Nasher – would make a pass out of sympathy for her; some – like Dennis – would attack out of pure, greedy lust and some – like Les Lightfoot, Excellent’s A & R man – would try to lay her because they thought they deserved her as a perk of the job.

  She had left Rick for three months, and gone to Marrakesh with the effete lead singer of a glam-rock band, but he treated her like another accessory to his pose of ineffable style. Rick, suddenly abject, had pleaded with her so passionately and abased himself so totally over the echoing Moroccan telephone line that she had gone back to him.

  Monty watched as a couple of girls came up and asked Rick for his autograph. They tossed their blond hair and swung their hips as he talked to them, turned-on just to be at the edge of a great star’s sexual aura. If only they knew, Monty thought, what he’s really like in bed. All the tenderness had gone; after seven years of non-stop promiscuity Rick fucked like a robot, giving no pleasure and probably getting none.

  Next day there was a meeting with Dennis, their manager, who came to the graceful, white stucco house near the river in Chelsea where Rick and Monty lived when they were in London. Of all of them, he had aged most dramatically. His face was deeply lined and fleshless, like a monkey’s, and his blond hair, now cut short, was almost white. With him came a fleshy young man in denims with long brown hair and an unshaven chin.

  ‘This is Keith – he’s going to direct our video,’ Dennis explained. ‘Excellent are gonna spend big money promoting the new album.’ He paused to take the gold toot-tube passed to him by Monty and snort a line of coke from the matching gold plate which was being passed around the table.

  ‘D’you think Excellent are going to offer us another contract when this one ends?’ Nasher was always the most practical member of the Juice.

  ‘Could be. Could be they just want to get back what they lost on the last album.’

  ‘What do you mean, they lost?’ Rick was roaming angrily around the room. ‘The album sold OK, didn’t it?’

  ‘It sold OK, Rick, but not great. And the tour was fucking expensive.’

  ‘Look, we don’t wanna stay with Excellent, do we?’ Rick leaned forward on the massive Odeon-style table of blond burrwalnut and looked from one person to another. ‘They’re old men, they’re finished. We wanna move on, right?’

  ‘I never wanted to sign a second deal with Excellent anyway.’ Cy gazed at the ceiling, his feet in their green boots propped against the mantelpiece. It was a beautiful, white alabaster mantelpiece, and Cy had already smashed off a corner with his habit of swinging up his legs and bringing his feet down against it with a careless crash. The eighteenth-century chandelier was also looking a little worse for wear. One afternoon Rick and Cy had passed the time shooting at the crystal drops with air pistols.

  ‘If you want my opinion, Excellent are looking to save themselves money by spending thirty thousand on a video and then making the tour much shorter – just a couple of big gigs here and in the States, no crazy sets or anything.’ Dennis closed one nostril and sniffed hard to encourage the last crystals of coke into his bloodstream. ‘We can make that work to our advantage. All we gotta do is something that’ll cause a bit of a sensation. That shouldn’t be too difficult, now should it?’

  Keith, the plump young director, spoke for the first time, clearing his throat nervously. ‘I’ve had a few ideas and I thought maybe we could talk them through a bit and then I’ll get a storyboard done and we can go into more detail.’

  ‘All right, Keith, tell us how you see us.’ There was a dangerous edge of sarcasm in Rick’s voice.

  ‘Well, it’s a very alienated sort of feel, so I thought we’d maybe try a sort of urban landscape, lots of litter, brick walls, graffiti, trash in the gutters, weird kind of lighting …’

  The Juice, to a man, looked uninspired. Keith cleared his throat again. ‘Or perhaps some bizarre sort of sci-fi scenario, with you all as extra-terrestrials walking through the city, seeing it in all its freakiness …’

  ‘The earthlings won’t understand,’ Nasher said, folding his arms.

  There was an awkward pause. What none of them cared to admit was that they were scared of doing a video. Videos were very new; only a few of the biggest stars, like Bowie and the Stones had done one – but Bowie was a performing artist anyway, and Jagger still looked young.

  Cy pulled his legs down the mantelpiece, scraping the fragile stone with his boots. ‘How about a Roman orgy?’ he suggested, running his pallid tongue over his sunken lips. ‘I could do with a few dancing girls and grapes and that.’

  ‘Ah – great – yes, a Roman orgy, mmmmmm …’ Keit
h fingered his stubble thoughtfully. Monty’s heart sank.

  They flew to Los Angeles to shoot the video, at the Bel-Air home of a TV talk-show host who was extremely proud of his classical-style pool. It was surrounded by white pillars, with a pediment at one end and a huge gold dolphin spouting water from its mouth at the other. The poolside area was covered in mosaics carefully copied from Pompeii, and a swing on gold ropes dangled over the semi-circular flight of steps leading down into the water.

  They started work at about 3 pm. It had taken the rest of the day to dress the set as Keith wanted it, with garlands of roses wound around the swing, rose petals scattered ankle-deep on the ground and gilt couches lined up at the poolside. He had the blue water tinted a glowing purple by the addition of some pink dye. There were ten dancers to shoot first, one with a python and one with a leopard on a gold chain. There was a cage full of doves. As the twilight approached, flaming torches were fixed to the walls and there was a long pause for re-lighting.

  Monty, Rick and the others sat watching with interest, occasionally dipping into the bowl of cocaine which Keith had thoughtfully ordered for them along with four bottles of Jack Daniels and some sandwiches.

  ‘I hope nobody comes near me with that snake,’ Nasher shuddered. ‘I hate fuckin’snakes.’

  ‘Nobody’s asked you to fuck it, Nasher,’ Rick told him. The feeble joke indicated how nervous Rick was. He got up and walked away; Monty followed, and he put his arm around her without speaking. They walked along the gravel path at the side of the house. It was the mellow end of the day and the scent of the new-mown lawn and blooming lavender mingled in the gentle air.

  They paused at the crest of a slope of manicured turf which led away to a group of palms. The focus of the vista was a floodlit statue of Diana with a fawn and from the distance it was impossible to tell that it was made of fibreglass.