Rotten in Denmark

by Jim Pollard

  ‘Old enough?’ I asked.

  ‘Old enough for what? To be in a pub or to be on the end of your knob?’

  We weren’t standing in the playground now or outside the railway station with Terry and his pornographic repartee. I felt myself redden.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Cal continued. ‘You young folk are so osculatory orientated.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘To osculate - to kiss. I thought we came for a guitar lesson.’

  We drank and listened and didn’t say much and I tried to keep half an ear on the girls’ conversation. It wasn’t difficult. It was loud and of the type that would have appealed to Terry. It was even more exciting than barre chord fingering techniques. They were drinking Bacardi and coke and Vodka and orange and this and that, leaving lipstick on the rims of their glasses to match their cigarette ends. Voices were raised time and again, arms and hands and eyebrows. There were four of them.

  Suddenly I had a pain in my side which turned out to be Cal poking me in the ribs. I turned and he was rising, beckoning me. As I looked up and across the room, Dave nodded. It was clear that he had said something to us. It was clear that he intended us to join him on the ‘stage’. Cal was ahead of me taking steps. Dave extended a chubby arm of welcome and Cal took the guitar. I looked at both of them - Cal, Dave, Cal again - and then at the custard keyboard, my eyes flitting from one to the other to the next, my brain cottoning on.

  ‘What do I do?’ I hissed from the corner of my mouth.

  ‘Oh, don’t you play,’ said Dave as if amazed that there was anyone in the world unable to play the keyboard. He fished behind his music stand. ‘Here,’ he said, and gave me a tambourine.

  And so it came to pass that Cal Carter and Frankie Dane gave their first public performance. Dring, dring, dring, dadada, dring, dring, dring, dadada. The opening chords of ‘Blockbuster’. Cal stared at me. There was a steely look in his eyes for which expectation is not an adequate description. He stepped away from the microphone, inclining his head away from it and towards me. Dring, dring, dring, dadada, dring, dring, dring. He had no intention of singing anything. He was waiting for me. I started to play the tambourine and then, with a gulp, with a breath as big as a barrage balloon, I began to impersonate a police siren. ‘Aah, ah. Aah, ah.’

  I opened my eyes and looked around. We were getting away with it. They were amused. We were getting a laugh. I was getting a laugh. The girls joined in, caterwauling, ‘ah, ah. Ah, ah.’ And then Cal was singing. ‘Does anyone know the way?’ I did the high-pitched vocal in a witch’s falsetto: ‘we just haven’t got a clue what to do’ and got another laugh. I was enjoying myself. Steve Priest, eat your heart out.

  We did great. I was impressed that Cal knew all the words and struck by his voice, the confidence in it. He was professional and competent while I was playful and amateurish. ‘Thanks, lads,’ said Dave. ‘Give em a big hand ladiesngennelmen’.

  As we walked back to our stools at the bar, one of the girls flashed past me on the way to the toilet. ‘You’re funny,’ she said just loudly enough for me to hear.

  Cal snatched up his beer and downed the rest of it. ‘What’s up?’ I asked.

  ‘Hey’ he said to the landlord, waving his glass expectantly and then he turned to me. ‘What are you doing coming on like Eric Morecambe? Do you think we’re a fucking comedy act.’

  ‘We’re not any sort of act, Cal.’

  ‘Too right we’re not.’

  ‘Come on, I didn’t even know we were going to do it. What was I supposed to do with a tambourine in my hand?’ It hurt but I wasn’t going to let Cal deflate me. ‘Perhaps you’d have preferred a spoons solo?’

  ‘You have to take it seriously, Frankie.’

  The girl was coming back again. ‘What do you do for an encore?’ she asked.

  ‘What do you do?’ I said to her trail of scent, a little louder than I intended.

  She turned round. Black skirt and bangles. Both of us a little impressed and a lot surprised by my cheek. ‘That’s for me to know,’ she smiled and for a second, across the bar, across the tables and chairs, she let our eyes lock before spinning round again.

  Cal was lighting up, inhaling slowly. ‘This is all about your bubbling under teenage libido is it?’ He was almost laughing at me. ‘Frankie, that doesn’t matter fuck you know.’

  ‘It was fun.’ I was shrugging. What could I say?

  ‘You’d sabotage us. Make us both look prats on an outside chance of a long-shot shag with a long-nosed slapper. Fucking hellfire. It’s not as if it’s difficult.’ He stopped. ‘Look, have another drink.’

  He ordered one from the hovering barman, for me but not himself, got up and marched towards the toilet.

  By the time Dave came over at the end of the show a few numbers later, Cal still wasn’t back so I learned about single string lead technique, about vibrato, slides, hammer ons and string bending alone. I concentrated hard because I didn’t want to think about anything else. I felt suddenly sober. Dave was a good teacher, encouraging, his explanations peppered with references to particular songs and musicians. Sitting over in the corner of the bar, we played for half an hour or so and when I eventually lifted my eyes from the strings, the pub was empty. No Cal and barely anyone else. One of the girls came back into the pub. Not the one I’d been talking to but a plainer one, blonde with acne. She looked at me and then at the barman. ‘You seen Jenny?’

  I guessed Jenny must be the one I’d exchanged two sentences with. ‘No, I haven’t.’

  ‘She’s probably safely tucked up in bed by now, love, which is where you should be,’ said the landlord.

  ‘Yeah, you might be right there,’ said the blonde. The same turn as Jenny on a similarly pointed heel.

  ‘And where’s your pal?’ Dave remarked.

  I shrugged. ‘See you next week,’ I said.

  Outside, I looked up and down the street. I was half expecting to find him leaning against a lamppost smoking. Nothing. It crossed my mind that he could have got himself another pint and taken it into the beer garden. The gate opened with a creak. Cal and Jenny were on a bench in the beer garden. It was dark but there was a decent moon illuminating their whiteness like a taunt. Her torso. Her tits. The belt around his waist was undone. There were hands and hair and a slow sigh. In the grass, illuminated by the moonlight, a silver bangle. I watched Cal jerk into her for just as long as it took me to register what was happening. I think she saw me and Cal would have read the reaction of her body like a book. I walked home and the next morning I reported to his house for guitar practice as usual. We never said anything about it. We never needed to.

  The day before we went back to school - that extra Monday they used to tack on sometimes - Cal thought that something special was called for. While he was rummaging around downstairs, I picked up the Telecaster. It was my first chance to try out the licks Dave Sidebottom had shown me. As usual, after the acoustic, my fingers felt fluid and free. It was possible to bend notes through two, three semi-tones. On my heavy old thing, I could barely manage one. I played every riff, scale and chord I could remember.

  When Cal returned, I was feeling my way ponderously through a Chuck Berry lick. I’d spent three hours the previous night listening over and over again to the same thirty second passage. Picking up the needle and putting it back. Picking up the needle and putting it back. Searching for the timing and feel as much as the notes. Cal watched me. In his hand he appeared to be rolling a cigarette. ‘You’re becoming a proper little Jeff Beck, aren’t you?’

  ‘Hardly,’ I said.

  He sat down on the bed and picked up his Beck-Ola album. He’d chosen his comparison pointedly - Beck not Clapton or Page. All three were in the sixties blues band The Yardbirds at some time or another. Beck was the best but also the least successful. Even if I practiced forever, I could never play like Jeff Beck and I knew that even the
n. ‘I was only playing it,’ I muttered.

  Cal was working with the LP balanced across his knees looking like my mother with a knitting pattern, his concentration equally intense. On top of the album was an open cigarette paper. He had in his hand a brown lump which he allowed the flame from his cigarette lighter to caress gently. It looked as if he was setting light to an Oxo cube. A thick sweet smell rose and filled the room. With his fingernail he chipped tiny charred pieces from the lump into his half-rolled cigarette where they sat up in the tobacco like freshly-grated pepper. He completed this chunky tube of temptation with the tiniest of movements of his tongue.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I asked but I knew the answer.

  He lit the spliff without answering, inhaled, held his breath like a little brother with a tantrum and then released a great cloud of grey-blue smoke. We both coughed.

  ‘Excellent,’ he said. I expected him to pass the thing to me but instead he simply repeated the process, holding it all inside for longer this time, swallowing. Tears filled his eyes.

  I held out my hand. His muscles, relaxed after the release, tightened again. ‘You play the guitar,’ he said and braced himself for another puff.

  The spliff was on his lips as I snatched it away. ‘Come on,’ I said. I sat next to him, replicating in larger form his easy body position against the cushioned headboard. I was consciously copying him, taking the same king-sized toke and following it up with the same king-sized cough. My lungs were burning, the heat gently pulsing through my body and then hitting my brain with the sudden touch of an angel.

  ‘I think the expression is ‘far-out’,’ said Cal.

  We were laughing like kids. ‘Where did you get this?’ I asked.

  He laughed again, raising an unsteady hand. I think he went to touch the side of his nose but succeeded only in poking himself in the eye. Everything was fine and we passed the joint back and forth - old men sharing a cigarette over the brazier, the silent giving and the taking. As we got better we could do it without coughing and then we could do it to each other: inhaling deeply and then exhaling direct into the other’s mouth. That was a hit and a half.

  On the floor, the record sleeve. On the record sleeve, the lighter, the Rizlas, the Old Holborn and a partly crumbled cube. Cal got up, moving in their general direction. The guitar sat proudly on his armchair. ‘It’s yours,’ said Cal. ‘You play. It yours.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You have to feel the blues. You have to suffer. What’s ever happened to us - middle-class white boys?’ He looked at me. ‘Well, me, what’s happened to me? What we really need is a little bit of tragedy.’

  I laughed again.

  We smoked another two joints before my mother telephoned to see where the bloody hell I’d got to. The voice didn’t sound like hers. My head danced, my feet dozed. The guitar wanted to wave goodbye. I ran my fingers across the top part of its neck in a tender parting gesture, the notes rolling and fading like ripples on a pond. ‘I mean it,’ said Cal. ‘You play it. It’s yours.’

  I looked at him for a long heartbeat. ‘Are you sure?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Okay,’ I said, picking it up. ‘I’ll just store it up here then.’ I climbed onto the chair, swaying a little, and placed the guitar on the top of the wardrobe behind Cal’s suitcase. The suitcase was labelled: California, The Sunshine State. Just as I knew that I would never be Jeff Beck, I knew that there was no way Cal would ever reach that guitar. Even if he stood on two chairs.

  ‘See you in school, then,’ I said.

  16

  And then the examinations started. The smart lads were not a single unit anymore. We were taking different subjects and were in and out of school at different times. The radiator in the vestibule by which we stood at break and lunch times was lonely now or in the company of different, younger children to whom it meant nothing. Generally we passed on the stairs or outside the tuck shop exchanging words of encouragement, moans of suicidal despair and crisps and cigarettes. Rarely were we all in the same examination hall.

  In fact, I saw more of Charlie than of Cal. Although Cal and I were taking several common subjects, Charlie and I were both taking Art and there were umpteen Art exams. Unlike other exams you could talk during them. We were well into the fourth hour before I paid any attention to what Charlie was actually painting.

  For my pictures, I had taken advantage of our frequent museum visits to produce a series of charcoal studies of the walrus. I was working the best up into finished water-colours. Charlie must have also been busy at home. He was working on a massive canvas in acrylics and was over half way through his second tube of matt black when I turned away from my own pale delicacy with its sultry pastel shades and gentle washes, and looked over his shoulder. The texture of his work, by contrast with mine, was thick and imposing. He was layering the paint on with a plastic knife producing uneven circles and harsh horizontals.

  ‘I like abstract,’ I said.

  ‘It’s not abstract,’ he replied, keeping his eyes on the spreading blade. ‘It’s a drum kit.’

  ‘A drum kit?’

  ‘Sure is.’

  ‘Do you play?’

  ‘Sure do.’

  ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘Do you think I’d tell you piss-taking bastards?’

  ‘No, I suppose not.’ I said. I turned back to my own work, inclining my head first one way and then the other, trying to look at it like someone looking at a piece of art.

  ‘What’s that, Frankie? A whale in a duck pond?’

  The only person who was around every day was Terry. He had hardly any exams but seemed to prefer hanging around at school to hanging around at home. He was often waiting as we emerged into the daylight, checking on our progress and laughing at Jonathan’s hay fever and sure enough he was there when the art exam finished.

  ‘Want a fag lads?’

  ‘Thank you, Terence.’

  ‘You look like you’ve been doing the fucking decorating, Charlie.’ Charlie’s hands, shirt and idly knotted tie were covered in black. He could have been my father after creosoting the fence.

  ‘He’s painting his drum kit.’ I explained.

  ‘Well he certainly can’t play the fucker.’

  ‘Fuck off,’ said Charlie, trying to trip Terry up as he skipped a yard or two ahead of us down the path.

  ‘Have you heard him?’ I asked.

  ‘Too fucking right I have. Fucking earthquake or what.’ Terry laughed. ‘Fuck me.’

  ‘Terry?’ Charlie began. ‘Do you know any verbs other than fuck?’

  ‘Bog off,’ said Terry, grabbing Charlie’s carrier bag and dancing off with it. We were walking across the playing fields towards the great arch. The gates were open.

  Charlie went to chase after Terry and then paused and shouted back to me over his shoulder. ‘Come back to mine and see them if you want,’ he said. ‘My drums.’ Then he was off, pursuing Terry across the middle of the cricket square. My eyes followed and then, lighting upon a group of five or six first-years playing football, were distracted. I would have liked to have joined in but of course it was not possible. That was a boy I used to be.

  In the corner of the playing field, a games master was bullying an adolescent high-jumper into Fosbury flopping. ‘Of course you won’t break your back landing in the sandpit, boy. What do you think I am, some kind of a sadist?’ Around us rose the imposing red and grey flemish bond of the school wall; ahead of me: an opening.

  Terry and Charlie were virtually at the great arch, shouting, swearing and I remember at that moment thinking that we could have a band. We had a drummer and we could have a band. Charlie was calling to me to catch up and, with a self-conscious glance over my shoulder, I broke into a gentle trot. I had just one examination left, the sun was still high above the great arch, huge as a saucer, and we had a drummer and could have a b
and.

  I was catching up when suddenly Terry dropped the bag. He cast it to the ground as if it were contaminated, his sinewy body moving with speed and purpose. With the other hand he grabbed the sleeve of Charlie’s blazer and pulled him down on to the grass causing the pair of them to sink to their knees.

  ‘What?’ demanded Charlie.

  Still hanging on with the other arm, Terry presented his palm. It was black, coated in paint rich and viscous as oil. The handle of the carrier bag was covered in the stuff. Charlie was laughing and then I was too, coming to a muddy halt, towering above them as they swayed back and forth on their knees like religious fanatics, children of the earth or something. Terry was trying to finger-paint on Charlie’s face; Charlie was ducking and diving and trying to break away. They were both laughing.

  ‘Well, you wanted it,’ said Charlie, between breaths. He pushed his smaller, slighter friend away once or twice and then he gave in and let Terry paint his face.

  ‘What are you two? Six and a half?’ I said but they weren’t paying any attention to me. With swirls and stars and fierce frown lines they came to resemble the choir from that end of term favourite at Beech Park, The Lord Of The Flies. Terry painted Charlie and Charlie did it back to Terry. They looked like girls playing with make-up.

  But it wasn’t just what they were doing that reminded me of girls. They had an easy companionship that was indifferent to the usual flinches and tensions of masculine physical contact. As they put the finishing touches to their war-paint, I watched the eleven year olds play football.

  Charlie lived up past Cal’s. ‘Will that come off?’ I asked as we were walking down the road and they looked at me as if I was the last of the Mohicans.

  I never saw much of Cal at all during the three or four weeks of the exams, partly because he seemed to be taking virtually every subject. I also sensed that to see him could have been potentially fatal for me. I knew that I needed to revise even if he didn’t. That afternoon round Charlie’s was about the only time I went out and that didn’t last long. Five minutes was sufficient for Charlie to demonstrate that at that stage he knew about as much about playing the drums as he did about painting them.