‘Totally fuckan magic,’ Tully said.
Tibbs had wandered off to shake Derek Hatton’s hand. He said the world was full of tossers but when he came back ten minutes later he said Hatton was a tosser, too. We felt maybe the handshake hadn’t gone well. In the meantime, space had opened up for Limbo. I felt the entire hall responded to him. He drained the cups and got cigs off everybody. He had spoken much nonsense and staggered about and he was now at rest, sitting at our feet, a twelve-skinner between his fingers. The festival was patchy and there were little islands in the day when you could sit around. The Fall left the stage in a blaze of signature disgust and expletives, at which point Limbo, still sitting, offered the group of us a theory that the blue light in Halloween is surely the colour of heaven.
‘Nah,’ Tully said. ‘Heaven be black. Everybody knows that. Ask Clogs.’
‘Gratified to be consulted,’ Clogs said, reaching down and taking the joint and staring into the middle distance. ‘Yes. The colour of paradise, or the matter of God’s decor. It’s a useful topic any day of the week. Especially today. I make no reference to the Bible, a self-help book for thanatophobes—’
‘Que?’ said Limbo.
‘People frightened of death. I gain little from them, and draw your attention to science fiction, particularly to the work of Philip K. Dick, who believed such astral utopias to be red, or maybe turquoise.’
‘Red!’ I said, turning to Tully.
‘Randy baboon,’ he said. I’ll spare the details, but we next discussed what the paints in the Dulux colour range would be called if we were in charge.
What we had that day was our story. We didn’t have the other bit, the future, and we had no way of knowing what that would be like. Perhaps it would change our memory of all this, or perhaps it would draw from it, nobody knew. But I’m sure I felt the story of that hall and how we reached it would never vanish.
‘What does the E stand for in Mark E. Smith?’ Tibbs asked.
‘England, I presume,’ said Clogs.
*
It felt hot in the early evening. Proper heatwave hot, inside the hall. There were black-and-white banners overhead saying ‘Festival of the Tenth Summer’, and they began to drip condensation, as if all those summers had come at once. The teenage tribes of Britain became close as the evening arrived. Everyone was leaning towards the stage, emotional and ready for the arrival of something we couldn’t exactly place. And up in the seating area they waved their arms and I felt the magic of association. It was like a wave of empathy and trepidation all at once and I wanted those people to be cared for.
Then I definitely saw her. Angie. A few minutes before six o’clock, standing at the outer rim of the hall, I could see her waving down at me from a bank of seats. She radiated alertness, with a smile as strong as the feeling in the hall. She waved again and blew me a kiss, holding up a huge paper cup. I made my way closer. I had a standing ticket and the barrier to the seats was now too well-policed. But she ran down and stroked my face and kissed me. I just beamed at her and said nothing. ‘Make sure you come to the Hacienda,’ she shouted with a hand curved round her mouth.
‘I wouldn’t miss it for the world,’ I replied.
‘Bingo!’ she shouted and ran back up.
Then the Smiths came on.
Aubrey Beardsley in white jeans: Morrissey in his prime. The singer wafted into view and sold his drowsy reticence like a drug. The band was at its height, romantic and wronged and fierce and sublime, with haircuts like agendas. Morrissey came brandishing a licence, a whole manner of permission, as if a new kind of belonging could be made from feeling left out, like nobody knew you as he did. Time takes nothing away from it, those thousands of heartened teenagers taking the roof off and giving out to a gawky frontman from Stretford. Tully found me and pushed me down to the stage. Over the speakers the sound was scratchy, but every word and every guitar lick felt like a statement only they could make, and only we could hear, those songs rolling from the stage to irrigate our lives. ‘That’s what it’s all about,’ Tully shouted and he kissed my cheek as we sang.
I could see Limbo at the very front, whirling out of his skin, holding up a smoke and shouting about panic on the streets of Carlisle. Then he was near us and wagging his finger in time to the music, a wonderful look on his face, singing about a vicar, about Joan of Arc, and throwing plastic tumblers into the air. Our hair was soaking wet. The Ayrshire boys appeared from all corners of the hall, and we hugged and the music soared and it seemed like a huge animation of the things that mattered to us then. Tibbs and Hogg, Limbo and Tully and Clogs. The full brass of being. Who knew what time incubated or what life would demonstrate; we were there, beyond navigation, floating through the air. We beamed to the rafters and jumped shoulder to shoulder. And the words we sang were daft and romantic and ripe and British, custom-built for the clear-eyed young.
The singer threw a spotted shirt from the stage and a group of lads tore it to ribbons and waved the bits like trophies.
‘He’s bigger than Jesus,’ Tully said.
‘You reckon?’
‘A bit funnier.’
‘Definitely funnier,’ I said.
They say you know nothing at eighteen. But there are things you know at eighteen that you will never know again. Morrissey would lose his youth, and not just his youth, but the gusto that took him across the stage with a banner saying ‘The Queen Is Dead’ is a thing of permanence. We didn’t know it at the time, but it was also, for all of us, a tender goodbye, and we would never be those people again. ‘Check Limbo,’ Tully said in my ear, and I looked to the edge of the stage where the boy himself was spread over a speaker, climbing. Nobody at that age needs more than what Limbo McCafferty had in abundance. He had vitality. He had the spirit of resistance in that single moment. And as the final encore bristled and rose to perfect confusion, Limbo appeared on the stage, going past crewmen and bouncers to take up residence by the drums, dancing and smiling for eternity, the crowd cheering him on and spiriting the light in his direction.
12
In a chip shop in Chepstow Street, Dr Clogs gave the punters a lecture on the chief properties of vinegar while Limbo fondled the Daily Express. Tully was going through the bands we’d just seen, telling us which were great. He reviewed the whole gig while we waited for deep-fried essentials and concluded that New Order ruled the cosmos. ‘I expect a knighthood for getting you in without a ticket,’ he said to me.
‘I know, mate. You could charm the birds from the trees.’
‘All in a good cause,’ he said.
Outside the chippy, Hogg was talking about German bands. It wasn’t much of a crowd-pleaser, but one girl, not local, asked him if he’d heard of the architect Mies van der Rohe, so they started snogging. You know how it goes: from shy and undateable to swaggering and post-coital, in seconds. Hogg was soon holding her hand as if their intimacy was a matter of domestic wisdom and harmony distilled through the years. They were still talking about architecture when Dr Clogs appeared like a dark aura from the shop and was captured by the sight of the young Hogg in love. He listened, then threw a chip. ‘This at last is the perfect union,’ he said. ‘Gropius and gropes?’
‘This is Annika,’ Hogg said.
‘She’s got blue hair,’ Clogs said. ‘Blue as Lincoln’s heaven. Which is to say, blue as Limbo’s heaven. But limbo, the place, comes before heaven, or instead, if you can’t get in. If you know what I mean.’ He appeared for a moment to be delving into his poke of chips for crumbs of sense, then he glanced up again. ‘And she’s got plastic earrings. I suppose they’re all the rage above the clouds.’
‘She’s from Cologne.’
‘Of course she is,’ Clogs said.
‘She’s studying transport engineering at Salford.’
‘Lovely.’
We sat with our backs to the lighted window, our hair still damp from the gig. It was about eleven o’clock and Tibbs was asleep, lying with his head on his bag and mumbling to hims
elf. Airless night. Sauce on the chips. ‘We better finish up,’ I said. ‘We’ve got to get to the Hacienda. We’re missing stuff.’
‘Hold your horses,’ Tully said. ‘Tibbs is having a nap.’
Dr Clogs still leered at the obnoxious lovers. The German girl meshed her fingers with Hogg’s and retreated behind him, head on his shoulder. ‘I think there are a few things you should know about your modern lover,’ Clogs said.
‘Is he speaking with us?’ she asked.
‘Ignore him.’
‘Mr Hogg once had a demi-wave.’ The doctor said it and threw a chip into the air and stepped backwards to catch it in his mouth.
‘I fuckan did not, Clogs, ya prick.’ We all cracked up at that. If comedy is the science of specifics, there was genius in the word ‘demi-wave’. ‘Say that again and I’ll fuckan lamp you.’
‘He was Robot Dave,’ Clogs said. ‘He believed in tomorrow. We all did. But David took it to extremes. He liked Japan.’
‘Shut your fuckan face, Bobby. I mean it.’
‘The band, I mean.’ Clogs was enjoying himself. ‘In those days he expressed his futurism mainly via the medium of lipstick and eyeshadow. Especially lipstick. And eyeshadow. And painted fingernails. Blouses. I believe he once turned up at school wearing a Pierrot doll costume – pompoms for buttons, that kind of thing. They say he was going through a ballet phase. There was a black teardrop on his cheek. What can I tell you? He made Steve Strange look like Charles Bronson. Took pounders off the corner boys, but not to worry. He was an individual. He may have been the first New Romantic robot in the whole of Ayrshire. Not a well-contested field, I admit—’
A can of Coke and a poke of chips came flying. Hogg quickly followed, throwing a lousy punch at Clogs before pushing him over. Tibbs opened his eyes for a second, just long enough to see the fists. ‘Wallop the bam,’ he muttered.
‘I say,’ shouted Clogs from the rolling centre of his own scrap, ‘Duran Duran has gone mental! Get back, you cad!’
‘Fuckan hair like Elvis,’ Hogg said. ‘Cross-eyed, greasy, fuckan loser.’ The doctor got up from the ground and wiped his hands. He was happy. ‘Ugly fuckan computer geek ponce,’ Hogg continued. ‘MC5-loving, muso dick … I hated Japan and I never once had a fuckan black teardrop.’
‘True,’ Tully said from our spot by the window. ‘It was more grey.’
‘Fuck off, the lot of you. I mean it.’ And Hogg staggered back, reaching for the girlfriend and her deeper knowledge of him.
‘Fade to grey,’ Clogs said.
Hogg and his missus stropped off down the street. Tully shook Tibbs awake.
‘We’re off, Tyrone.’
‘Praise Marx and pass the joint,’ said Tibbs.
*
We pleaded our case to the Hacienda bouncers. From the outside, the club was an old brown tenement with manky windows, but in our heads it was the gateway to a new world. By now, Limbo was a walking Chernobyl. But one of the bouncers was Scottish and we got summoned past the cordon. We had to chip in for Limbo. He’d used the last of his cash to buy some dodgy ticket off a guy in G-Mex.
‘What ticket?’ I asked him.
‘To Salford and beyond,’ was all he said.
Once you were past the cashier, before you went into the club itself, there was a cardboard cut-out of Tony Wilson saying ‘Welcome’. Tibbs kissed it and we pushed back a curtain of clear rubber. And there it was: the Hacienda, engine-room of the new self, where nothing was taken for granted. With its metal pillars, black and yellow chevrons, it resembled the packing area of a minor industrial plant, yet there was a romantic quality to it, an uncanny rightness. I stood for a moment watching two girls in cascading bangles dancing to the Durutti Column, and Tibbs handed me a Rolling Rock.
There was an upstairs area and Tully went for a walk up there. I had a scout around the ground-floor bar and looked among the crowd.
No sign of Angie.
‘If The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists was a club,’ Tully said, back from upstairs, ‘it would look like this. A place for the working man to forget himself.’
‘No, remember himself,’ Tibbs said.
Clogs and Limbo got acquainted with a Rasta in a sheepskin coat. He had a laminated menu, so we bought sensimilla and were soon introduced to everybody as ‘the Scotch’. Tully and I sat quietly on a metal bench while Clogs progressed from a few Ayrshire stabs at the importance of smoking grass to a full-blown denunciation of Babylon, with multiple references to the sacramental properties of ganja, to which Clogs was soon referring, with a mild Jamaican twang, as ‘the herb’. Under the lights of the nightclub I could see a few specks of yellow paint on the front of Limbo’s boots.
Nag, Nag, Nag …
The pulse in that place was like nowhere else. The beat of it and the taste of the vodka and my head was dialling into the tune …
‘I dunno, work tomorrow,’ Tully said. He quoted other things, and Albert Finney came floating in front of me, confused with the girl from Mona Lisa. I think it was the first time I had ever heard loud guitars mingled with dance stuff.
We were soon on the floor. It was different from all the places I had known. ‘You all right, wee man?’ Tully said.
Somebody threw a handful of glitter in the air.
Another Rasta gave me a slug of his beer. Somebody gave me a kiss.
The lights and memory intermingled with all those people up in the balcony smiling down and somewhere in the music Grace Jones sang and a spiky guitar sounded and holy Jesus I was high and never happier and – over there … my friends’ faces on the other side and Tyrone holding up a glass and what’s happening and the beat pumping. All the people and all the times and every single thought catching the light and the beat saying yes and the people saying yes and time vanishing—
‘I’ve divorced my mum and dad.’
‘Don’t be daft,’ he said. ‘They’ll be back …’
‘I’m not having them back. It’s the solo life …’
Somebody passed another joint and I drew deeply and kept the smoke back and then spewed it out in one long puff of enjoyment. On the dancefloor, Angie came past with a huge slice of melon and offered it to me and I took a bite, and I never saw her again. It wasn’t a problem and the music was so—
‘Jeezo,’ I said. ‘I’m out of breath here.’
‘Take me back to dear old Blighty …’
Limbo appeared. ‘I went up to the DJ and asked him to play my favourite song.’ The song was ‘Candyskin’ by the Fire Engines.
‘Are they going to play it?’
‘He told me to piss off to Jilly’s, they don’t do requests.’
I had to take my time: it was all rushing. I wandered off and sat on my own, just having a breather. I don’t know how long. Eventually, Tully came. His eyes were huge. ‘This is the best night of my life,’ he said, slugging his beer and leaning into me. ‘The best weekend of my life. I’m glad we’re all here together. Noodles?’
‘A million per cent,’ I said.
‘Candyskin’ came on. And somewhere in heaven, in the comical blue or red or turquoise up there, it plays on. Tully clasped me round the neck and tried to speak over the music. ‘I’m going to do it. I’m getting out. The world’s changing.’
‘All the way, Tully.’
‘Aye. All the way.’
13
We found it hard to accept the night was over. Maybe it never was. After the club, we walked through the streets and sang in the squares and we found a last drink at a bar called New York, fast by the Rochdale Canal. The bouncer said it was a gay bar and Limbo told him every man should be just gay enough. Inside, it was last orders. We each had a martini because Tully said that’s what you drank in New York. (He never made it there.) A drag queen was finishing on a tiny stage but she let Tully take the mic and sing Roy Orbison’s ‘In Dreams’. All things considered, he did well.
On leaving, I waved to the drag queen. ‘Au revoir, Edith Piaf.’
‘Nighty n
ight,’ she said. ‘Cheeky Bastards United.’
Tibbs went sleepwalking down Portland Street. In the end he slid down inside a bus shelter on Peter Street with his stuff behind his head, not twenty yards from the site of the famous massacre. Clogs slumped down beside him. ‘Massacres come in many forms,’ he said, ‘and I fear the grapeshot of booze and cannabis have done their worst.’
‘I’m not sleeping in a bus stop,’ Limbo said.
‘Of course not,’ Clogs said, turning his jacket around to make a blanket and leaning his head on an already snoring Tibbs.
‘Shut it, Bobby. I’ve got asthma. I don’t feel well.’
‘Nothing to do with the five thousand pints of cider you drank,’ Tully said, crushing his last cigarette into the Perspex.
‘For fuck’s sake,’ Limbo said. ‘There was a draw left in that. Just as well I stashed a cheeky few tabs for the night shift.’
He pulled out a packet of Kensitas Club.
‘All hail the new asthma,’ Clogs said.
There was a brown building on the other side of the road. It suddenly loomed like an apparition, a sort of oasis in the stunted night. It said ‘St George’s House’ and the patron saint was high on the building, in an alcove, with his shield and sword. Closer to street level there was a small neon sign that said ‘YMCA’.
‘Not for me,’ Clogs said, alerted to the opportunity. ‘I’m in the lap of luxury here and I’ll look after County Tyrone. He’s passed out.’
It took only a few seconds to cross the road. The guy at the desk was drunker than we were and he said three people in the room was fine. Two beds for nine quid. Limbo and I were skint but Tully paid in pound coins and we were soon ascending in an old caged lift. I dropped my bag in the room and Limbo lay down and fell asleep. I pulled up the sash window. ‘Got to get the boy some air,’ I said, tucking a blanket around him.
‘Too right,’ Tully said. ‘Old Lincoln.’
‘The Liberator,’ I said. ‘He drank up the whole saloon.’
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