Rotten in Denmark

by Jim Pollard

  ‘I thought Cal was your friend, Charlie?’ I probe like a journalist.

  ‘He had an ego the size of a planet.’

  ‘And don’t say it didn’t you any favours,’ says Jonathan slowly, not turning round.

  Charlie’s eyes are redder than the sky. ‘Name one drummer better than me. Name one.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s the point,’ I say.

  ‘That’s the whole point. I never needed him. We never did. Come on, Frankie, you know how many people I’ve played with, how many sessions, albums - not just yours. Jesus, Frank, look at your own success if you need convincing. We were all there. We all did it. Cal’s only superior talent was for dying young.’

  Finally Jonathan turns round. ‘No one’s denying you were there Charlie. I mean, we could hardly have failed to notice the bloody racket you made. But would you have been there if not for Cal? If it hadn’t been for him you’d be like that retard of a friend of yours, Terence: pumping petrol not schoolgirls.’

  ‘Jealous.’ Charlie pauses. ‘Cal thought we owed it all to him from our first gig to our first number one. Bullshit. Come on, Jonathan. Is that elephantine memory of yours playing tricks on you? All those things he used to say about you and your bass-playing.’

  ‘Don’t you know that was all part of the act...’ Jonathan trials off.

  ‘Double-plus bullshit.’ Charlie shakes his head. ‘Funny. I never thought he was dumb enough to top himself though. What did Kurt Cobain’s mum call it? The Idiot Club?’

  ‘He didn’t, did he. The inquest said so.’ Jonathan shakes his head and walks from the room.

  I pour Charlie and myself another drink each. Charlie starts laughing. ‘It’s a can of worms, Frank, history. Handle with care.’ I nod. For a moment there is silence as we drink. Then Jon reappears. In his hands he’s carrying the big wooden box that contains Phillip’s Subbuteo set.

  ‘Sub-fucking-butteo,’ says Charlie and he’s a grinning schoolkid again.

  We set it up on the floor and play all on to all with the third person reffing. I think this is called going with the flow. We argue about the rules, how long the halves should be and whether you can flick with the side of your finger. Candles surround the pitch as if this is some diabolic football tournament from hell. We’re having fun. Charlie is drunk. He’s playing his whisky glass at centre half. I try once more. ‘Do you remember Cal’s World Cup Subbuteo?’ Charlie gives me an old fashioned look and Jon a penalty.

  Jon lines up the kick like a snooker player or a golfer with a putt. He’s hoping that if he waits long enough Charlie will lose concentration or even conciousness. In the corner of Phillip’s box a familiar face catches my eye. It’s only a couple of millimetres across but it’s recognisably Cal. I pick the figure up and examine it, holding it by it’s semi-circular base and plastic green tail-rod.

  ‘Look at this,’ I say.

  It is one of a team of Subbuteo players in Tottenham Hotspur kit that I painted to look like my school friends. Cal’s the goalkeeper, of course - I snapped the legs off a little to get the right height. I show Charlie and Jon their respective figures. I painted the hair, matched the eye-colour and added a few distinguishing features like Jon’s yellow socks. The model of Simon Hawkins has a lump of plastic melted onto the stomach; Terry is playing in black plimsolls. They’ve never seen this team before. Nobody has because I thought it was stupid after I’d done it, sentimental. It must have been that long summer between the first and second year at Beech Park. I kept it though like we always do with sentimental things. To find it in Philip’s box stirs a feeling inside me which isn’t sentimental at all.

  Jon sets the team up, swapping it for his own and, while Charlie is still wondering what’s happening, slots home the penalty using the Subbuteo player modelled on himself.

  We each take it in turns to play with Frankie’s All Stars. And we each lose because the truncated plastic Cal is as much use between the goalposts as the real one was.

  ‘Do you remember that time we lost 23-0 on the marsh?’ Charlie asks me. ‘Carter was keeper, of course.’

  ‘Careful, Charlie,’ says Jon. ‘You don’t want to go raking up the past now, do you?’

  When it is late and the whiskey bottles are empty, my panicking father blunders into the living room. ‘Frankie, Frankie.’ The candles are still our only light. He is a frightened child awaking in the night. His pyjamas have ridden up his arms and legs. He stumbles, trips, clutches as if at straws and then falls with a deadweight down onto the floor crushing the Subbuteo figures and upsetting the candles. Claudia rushes in. At first she is concerned that the noise will disturb my real children.

  ‘What the Dickens?’ says Jon.

  I take my father to the hospital. He’s confused and in some pain. In casualty I am tempted as they punch my father’s details into the computer to tell them who I am but the words just won’t come out. We wait. The TV’s broken and lines shoot across the screen like heartbeats. We see the triage nurse. We wait some more. It’s late.

  In the tiny hours, as I sit beside his bed until the sleeping pills work and promise the nurse I’ll be back in the morning, I realise the truth. This has got to be my story, my recollection. I can’t look to Charlie and Jon for this one. This time I’m by myself. Outside the hospital my car has been wheelclamped.

  12

  My first guitar was an old acoustic that had once belonged to Cal’s father and which Cal had been messing about on ever since that first trip to America at the age of eleven. I inherited it when, for Cal’s sixteenth birthday, Mr. Carter bought his son a Fender Telecaster. It cost more than £200, a sum that had my father gasping - he’d just spent less than that on doing up the master bedroom.

  The Tele came from Ron’s Music in Ilford market and it took us virtually all day to drive there. On the way back Cal spent most of the journey trying to tune the thing and mastered it just as we pulled into Beech Park.

  I couldn’t play a note then and Cal’s monotonous twanging captivated me. It wasn’t the sound, not of his playing nor of his father’s occasional implorings to five minutes silence, but rather the appearance of both the guitar, jet black with gleaming chrome, and of Cal playing it. He appeared older, like a man with a purpose. There seemed more between us than a slice of shaped wood and six strings. I wanted some of it and as Cal’s best efforts at that time were limited to strumming a few chords and picking out the simplest of tunes, I wasn’t too far behind.

  That summer we went to the marsh once, perhaps twice. I find it hard to believe now but the fact is that my heart wasn’t in the football. I just wanted to play guitar. That was also the summer I packed away my cricket dice never to be seen again.

  I spent the summer at Cal’s house. The house seemed smaller than it had on that first fleeting farcical visit at the age of eleven. Now only enormous, it had umpteen bedrooms and rooms I’d never come across before in a house: a cloak room, a breakfast room, a shower room. The furniture had cosy suburban names: flock wallpaper, sculptured pile-carpet, integrated central heating.

  Cal’s bedroom was still very different from mine. It looked more modern than it had on my first visit. Some of those old cabinets had gone - though the massive wardrobe was still there - but I could guess from the number of cupboards and boxes that Cal was still a hoarder albeit a more private one. While at home my posters looked incongruous on flowered wallpaper in a room furnished with old sideboards and coffee-tables, Cal’s came alive against a backdrop of geometric patterns and pastel squiggles and stuff from a place called MFI.

  ‘MI5?’ I said, touching the white sheen finish of his desk. In fact, posters were practically all our rooms had in common. He had Che Guevara and one with a black and white shot of a soldier, wilting at the moment of death. The caption said Why? I had one of Steve Perryman and the two from Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon.

  I’d sit on the floor, back ag
ainst the wall and he’d sit on the bed. He had a continental quilt – the sign of a lazy housekeeper Auntie Anne would have said had she known. He’d play the new Telecaster through a ten watt practice amp and I’d strum the battered acoustic. I got very attached to that guitar over those few weeks. It was a big, chunky affair, a Country And Western instrument, with a tortoiseshell scratch-plate. The varnish had long since gone from the tan body leaving the wood’s grain softly exposed. The fretboard too was played raw and gently beveled. If you could play that old thing you could play anything.

  The Telecaster Deluxe was a new guitar, a new model. It had only been introduced in 1972, ‘a rare innovation in a classic design,’ the bloke in the shop had said. It had two pick-ups, a single-coil and a humbucker which made it very versatile apparently: the fatter, more rhythmic feel of the twin-coil humbucker and the searing treble of the thinner single-coil. This, he said, was ‘located as near as possible to the bridge for maximum top’. We weren’t quite sure what it was all about but there was a switch on the body where you could choose one pick-up or the other or both. Cal did this regularly, either by accident or design. By way of accompaniment, I strummed with vigour, frantic, loud and long, trying to keep up, trying to compete.

  Our first song was David Bowie’s ‘Jean Genie’ which we chose because, as an added bonus, it was also the riff to ‘Blockbuster’ by The Sweet. We performed it as a kind of hybrid. ‘Aah, ah. Aah, ah,’ I would go, impersonating the police siren. Cal would do his Bowie as Ziggy Stardust impression - an act made more difficult by the fact that we couldn’t make out more than a handful of the words. We thought the Jean Genie lived in a flat and ate nutty slack. Cal would also play occasional notes as if threatening a guitar solo but mainly we strummed away in perfect disharmony, our two chords, E and A.

  At first, we spent a lot of time watching Top Of The Pops, trying to pick up tips. Then Jonathan told us the programme was mimed. ‘What do we do now?’ I asked. ‘Carry on,’ Cal replied. ‘Carry on picking up tips on performance.’

  What we really needed to do was to see someone live. Not that there was much live music in Beech Park. There was only one ‘venue’, if you could call it that. So, one Friday night, we went down to The Roebuck public house where, according to a marker-penned notice in its frosted window, Dave Sidebottom Entertained. We coughed, smoothed back our hair, straightened our spines, stubbed out our fags and pushed the door marked ‘public’.

  The frosted windows were well-chosen: had you been able to see inside, you never would have gone in. There were three customers: each had a cap and a pint and was dressed from head to toe in assorted shades of brown. There was a dartboard on which the numbers were virtually illegible and to which three chewed-up plastic darts clung. The pinball machine was blessed with a single flashing light and emitted the occasional high octave squeak in a tiny tinny attempt to entice players. Everything seemed to be coated with a gossamer thin coating of nicotine, including the barman.

  ‘What’ll it be lads?’ he asked, wiping his hands on a bar towel.

  At that moment, with those words in our ears, we realised that this was the local we ought to have been looking for. Cal, at the age of sixteen, was still every pantomime director’s dream. A dwarf, perm any one of seven, Cal was your man. Tiny Tim? No problem. Babes In The Wood? At a push. And no chaperone required. He was still expecting a growth spurt. I’m sure he wasn’t expecting to get served. I looked at him, characteristically tentative me but his eyes darted along the bar taps like a marmoset across a curtain rail.

  ‘Two pints of special, please.’

  By the time Mr Sidebottom entertained we were well past following anything much, certainly not intricate fingering, which was just as well because Mr Sidebottom didn’t play a guitar anyway. He had a reedy, yellow organ of the type popular in school music departments. On this he accompanied himself in renderings of numbers made famous by Ray Conniff, Matt Munro and Val Doonican. He was rewarded with the intermittent applause of... well, me and Cal, in fact.

  The three regulars had finished their conversation and were supping in hazy self-contained contentment while the handful of couples now spread around the room seemed more interested in their crisps, nuts, fags and each other than Mr Sidebottom. He barely stopped between songs anyway and there was certainly no patter with the audience. Each number blended pretty much into the next: ‘Jumbalaya’, ‘Solitaire’, ‘Loving You Has Made Me Bananas’, all received the same jaunty treatment. Cal and I looked at each other and shrugged. ‘It’s all music,’ said Cal. ‘You can learn from them all, Bach to The Beatles.’

  ‘Woof, woof, John. Woof, woof, Paul.’ I said. ‘Mine’s a pint.’

  After a while the seaside sound of Dave Sidebottom was little more than a familiar aural backdrop, reassuring like a rumbling central heating system. Then, after eight or ten numbers, it stopped. There was a moment of silence and then a fearsome explosion of pulsating colours and bells from the pinball machine. A tall rake-like man had got a replay and the machine was making a real song and a dance about it - lighting every light, ringing every bell and playing a succession of tunes like a speeding stylophone. A couple of other people joined him around the machine and everybody looked over. The guy grinned awkwardly.

  When Dave Sidebottom started playing ‘Pinball Wizard’, he got his first response of the night. Eyes hopped around the pub, glances like moths, catching faces with a shadow of a grin. Slowly at first, unsure, and then louder and the whole pub was laughing, even the man at the machine who managed to lose all three replay balls in quick succession as a result. Dave Sidebottom enjoyed his moment and celebrated with a little ascending signature on the keyboard. ‘Anyone got any requests?’ he asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Cal. ‘Play the guitar. That song should be played on the guitar.’

  Dave Sidebottom’s jovial manner changed. A plump man with a deceptive turn of speed, he got up and walked out of the pub.

  ‘Hey, was it something that I said?’

  ‘He’ll be back’ said the barman, ‘I haven’t paid him yet.’

  The steady hum of chatter began to return. Rounds were bought and crisp bags opened. The pinball machine slumped back into its usual sombre stupor. By the time Mr Sidebottom returned, Cal and I had given up on the music and I was once again paying a visit to the bar. Under the entertainer’s arm was a battered old six-string that made mine/Cal’s/Cal’s dad’s acoustic look like a Martin or an Ovation. A yellow sticker on the body, slashed to ribbons by so many plectrum strokes said Keep Music Live.

  He was panting as if he had run back from the car. There was no guitar strap so he perched his bum on the edge of an unoccupied table, foot up on stool. He allowed the instrument to nestle against his stomach then stroked his beard thoughtfully. There was a pause and an E chord shape slowly picked to check the tuning. Then with a sharp chop across the strings he was into ‘Blue Suede Shoes’. The money and the show and the go cats go, they were all there, the eponymous footwear replaced with a grinning reference to his ‘old training shoes.’

  Dave Sidebottom waved a threadbare tennis pump on the end of tubby leg. His guitar style was simple but strident. He earned another clap and cheer. Later, as he put the kit away and we’d put another pint or two away, Cal went up to him. ‘Do you know the blues scale, Dave?’

  His ruddy face cracked a smile and he laughed from his stomach. ‘Is the pope a catholic,’ he said. ‘Is Eric Clapton God?’ We got a lock-in that night and Dave showed us scale after scale, majors, minors, some I now know the names of - pentatonic, the mixolydian mode and the whole tone - and others he probably made up. By the time we left we were heady. ‘Come back next week boys and I’ll show you some blues licks,’ he said.

  13

  Along with the rest of our crowd, I became an increasingly familiar guest at the Carters. Cal’s parents always seemed hospitable and pleased to see us. By the fifth year, it was, whenever it was too cold
for standing outside the station, our regular haunt. Mr. and Mrs. Carter had leather armchairs and a matching sofa that you could lose yourself in. They were big and black and perfect for sprawling youths. Then there was the state of the art hi-fi, the Rise And Shine orange juice and the bookshelves which actually had books on them.

  It was the spring before our O-levels and this particular evening, we seemed to have been lounging there for hours. I think the clocks must have gone forward because it was still light outside. There was palpable nervousness in the room with the impending examinations but we couldn’t admit that. Only Terry was particularly talkative and he wasn’t taking GCEs, only a few CSEs.

  ‘Continual assessment,’ he was saying, ‘that’s what it’s all about, lads. And I’m not just talking about your tests here, no sir, I’m talking about life. I’m talking about your sex life.’ This was sufficient to attract the attention of most of us. Only Jonathan was undisturbed. He and Terry were barely on grunting terms and Jon continued to examine the books on the teak shelves. ‘Continual assessment, lads, not a one-off (and I don’t mean a one off the wrist, Jonny). Like it’s all very well to do it seven times in one night but not a lot of use if that’s the only night. Know what I mean? You’re going to have one very disappointed female for a start to say nothing of the damage to the male psyche. Much better to be a thrice a night man on a regular basis, don’t you think? That’s continual assessment, you see. Life’s a marathon not a 100 yard dash with a couple of high hurdles.’

  ‘Yes,’ Charlie began slowly, ‘but marathon runners hit a wall, don’t they,’

  ‘A wall, sure,’ he raised a single finger. ‘One wall, but I...’