Rotten in Denmark

by Jim Pollard

  I battled with my own cigarettes, removing the battered packet from my trouser pocket. To Cal, I vaguely offered its bent, soggy contents. Then I tried every other pocket on my person looking for a match. Eventually Cal waved a rather pathetic little arm at the skinhead and he came over with a lighter. The smoke bounced around my lungs like a first joint. We were slowly coming down.

  Outside, we walked in meandering monochrome down Wardour Street, slowly, somehow disembodied like two malnourished Martians. There must have been other people passing, but I recall an empty street like an early morning: a black is black and white is white sort of world of stark kerbs, sudden leering pot-holes and the odd patch of cobble.

  A couple of the tube entrances at Leicester Square already had the iron gates across. We were in last-train territory with the itinerant drunks and London’s handful of beggars. We saw the same ones every time. There was an old woman with her grey life in two torn carriers - one from Harrods, the other from Tesco. I always gave her a copper or two because she looked like she’d had a hard time. And the man with a perfectly fitting tweed Savile Row suit that was cut off just below the knee-caps like a pair of jeans. Varicose veins belched from beneath it and struggled down to his battered brown brogues. We called him Bermuda Shorts. Cal always used to give him money because he looked like he’d had an expensive time.

  Tonight we were more generous than usual, emptying our change into their respective receptacles - an empty Max-Pax cup and an upturned flat-cap made by George Malyard, SW11. The yellow tiled floor of the ticket hall stretched away like a dance-floor. There was no ticket collector just piles of pink and yellow tickets spewed randomly about his box. Only the down escalator was still working.

  ‘I’ve got no ticket,’ I said to Cal as we began our descent. In my jeans pocket the return portion of my ticket had simply rotted away - the victim of my sweaty exertions. All that was left of it was a smeggy lump which I flicked from the moving handrail. It stuck to a poster with a picture of a corkscrew and a slogan about avoiding the rush-hour.

  The platform was deserted and we were beginning to wonder if the last train had already gone when it appeared: red with grey doors, one of the newer ones. We were chattering now, recalling highlights; Cal was enjoying his near-death experience, recasting it as evidence of immortality. ‘I knew I wouldn’t suffocate,’ he said. ‘You can’t die within three yards of a Fender Telecaster. It’s a well-known fact.’

  There was nobody in our carriage but there had been. National Front stickers were running down the side of each sliding door - Ain’t No Black In The Union Jack said one. End Immigration, Start Repatriation said another.

  Cal spat at one but he had hardly any phlegm. He started trying to peel it away but the paper was tough, thick and thoroughly stuck-down. ‘Do they use a special fascist glue or what?’ His nails were scratching at the edges.

  ‘You’re wasting your time,’ I said, lighting a cigarette.

  Cal looked up. ‘We’re not in the smoking carriage, Frank,’ he said, scraping again at the red, white and blue labels still more vigorously. ‘We’re in the racism carriage.’

  Suddenly Cal fell back. I thought the sticker had come away in his hands. Then I saw that his hand had come away in the sticker. Cal’s hands and wrists were turning blood red, drops of the stuff falling to the wooden floor and spreading with the grain. At Cal Carter’s feet I saw a razor blade and the top of at least one of his fingers. Blood was bobbing out like a leak. Cal wasn’t saying anything. He was staring at where the tips of his fingers had been.

  I pulled a sweat sodden handkerchief from my pocket and moved towards him. It seemed like slow motion. There was already a thick crimson puddle on the floor. He was standing stock-still, the right hand holding the bleeding left one up by the wrist. I wrapped the handkerchief around his fingers and pulled it as tight as I could. The damp white cotton turned red immediately but then no more and the throbbing flow stopped.

  ‘It fucking hurts, Frankie,’ Cal said, his eyes looking up into my own.

  The tube was slowing for the next station.

  ‘Come on,’ I said, leading him towards the door. ‘You need a hospital.’

  A slim snaking stream of blood was running down one side of the door staining the remaining stickers. I ran my finger over the raised surface of one of them and felt the hidden blade.

  We stumbled back out into the night, crossing Hungerford bridge like fugitives. Charing Cross Hospital I thought at first and then, with the clarity of adrenalin, dismissed it. Charing Cross Hospital was in Hammersmith. I took Cal’s hand, his good one. I was practically pulling him. He seemed dazed. ‘I don’t want to go home,’ he kept saying. ‘Not home.’

  We went to St Thomas’s where I don’t think the nurse believed us. It did sound a tall story the scrambled way we were telling it. She thought we’d been fighting. ‘Why don’t you pick on someone your own size,’ she said to me. There were a couple of drunks singing ‘why are we waiting’ as she led him off.

  ‘Have you had a tetanus, love?’ she asked Cal.

  ‘Yes, he has,’ I shouted, sitting down to wait on an orange plastic bum-shaped seat which was welded to the floor.

  While Cal was gone two blokes who really had been fighting rolled in, blood all over their sports jackets and turtle necks. One of them had a bandage around his head and a jam jar in his hand which he claimed contained his ear. They went to sit down by the temporarily vacant admissions desk.

  ‘You Van Gogh then, sonny?’ one of the drunks called over, conversationally.

  Bandage Head looked up and walked like a cowboy towards him, as if seeing them for the first time. ‘Yeah,’ he said, nodding his head slowly. ‘And you’re fucking Admiral Lord Nelson.’ He punched the drunk in the eye.

  The drunk tried to scramble to his feet.

  ‘Don’t get up, Grandad or I’ll rip your fucking arm off too.’ As Bandage Head plodded back, both he and his pal descended into deep, dark, raucous laughter.

  By one thirty, Cal and I were back on the street. Losing the tips of two fingers was obviously small beer by central London standards because there was no mention of a lift home. There was little traffic and certainly no sign of a bus.

  ‘We could phone your old man,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, he’ll probably send a car.’

  I laughed.

  ‘I’m not joking,’ said Cal. ‘I know he’s done it before. For Wendy.’

  I shrugged. ‘Well, that’s great then.’

  ‘I don’t want that,’ said Cal. As an old Ford Anglia limped passed, Cal stuck his bandaged hand out in a pitiful attempt to hitch-hike. Pulling his jacket up around his shoulders, he looked smaller than ever. In my damp jeans and T-shirts, I was beginning to feel cold. Ahead was a phone-box.

  ‘I’ll phone my Dad’s firm,’ I said.

  The phone-box smelled of piss as usual. I was wondering what the chances were of it working when the dialling tone clicked in. I had the numbers in my head and two pence in my hand. I dialled. The Fat Controller ummed and ahhed about not being a West-End service especially at this God-forsaken hour. When I told her I was Derek Dane’s son, she reluctantly agreed to get me a car.

  ‘You sure you’re Derek’s lad?’ she hissed.

  ‘Course I am. Who’d want to make that up?’

  ‘And we don’t want your friend bleeding over the upholstery either.’

  ‘We’ll wait on the bridge,’ I said.

  We leaned over Westminster bridge, tossing dog-ends into the Thames. As the lights from the hospital played on the ripples, you could just make out the water. It looked like tar. Cleopatra’s needle, the Royal Festival Hall, Parliament and Big Ben, the Post Office Tower, St Paul’s, Tower Bridge and The Tower of London. We ate up the view, Cal pointing places out to me. I still love those views - the London bridges in the small hours.

  ‘They’ve fini
shed The National Theatre,’ said Cal.

  ‘Right,’ I said but I hadn’t a clue what he was on about. I hadn’t heard of the National Theatre then though I’m a patron now. Cal never did get to visit it.

  A couple of black cabs swept imperiously across the bridge. I’d only ever tried to catch a black cab once - it was after another gig when I’d lost whoever I’d been with and it wasn’t an experience I wanted to repeat. ‘Beech Park, pal,’ snorted the driver. ‘Never heard of it.’

  I suppose if I had given it a moment’s thought I could have guessed which Park Cabs driver we were going to get. In fact, in hindsight I’m sure I could hear my father’s Morris Traveller rumbling along all the way from the Elephant and Castle. The vehicle ground to a halt about twenty yards away from us at the start of the bridge and for a moment or two there was a stand-off before Cal realised that the flashing headlights were intended for us. ‘That’s our cab,’ he said, striding towards it.

  ‘That’s my Dad,’ I whispered.

  I can’t say that my father was pleased to see us. He opened the back door without looking and he didn’t ask about Cal’s fingers though he must have noticed the bandage. I went to get in the front as I always did when Mum wasn’t travelling with us but he leaned across and locked the door. ‘Paying passengers in the back,’ he said, still not looking at me.

  As he did a U-turn and set off back past Waterloo station, I gave my father a brief potted account of the evening. He stopped at the lights to let a couple of chuckling railwaymen cross the road and turned round briefly to see Cal’s arm. ‘Let me know if you need the hospital again because I don’t want you waking your family when you get in,’ he said. That was his only comment all the way home.

  When I woke next morning and went down for breakfast my Dad had already gone. He’d decided to do an early shift. On the table he’d left me the bill for an early morning run to Waterloo.

  Cal was late for school but when he did arrive he didn’t seem appalled. ‘He’s treating you like an adult,’ he said, simply. ‘We’ll go halves.’

  ‘Why don’t you tell your Dad?’ I suggested. ‘He’ll pay it.’

  ‘Exactly. That’s why we won’t tell him. Where do you think I’ve been this morning? He’s got a friend who’s a surgeon. Not just any old doctor but a surgeon who specialises in fucking fingers.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘He just put a couple more stitches in. It’ll heal.’ Cal said. ‘Eventually.’

  He showed me his hand. The tips of his first and index finger were topped off with Band Aids. That lunchtime the dual rhythm guitar style that characterised The Go Karts was born. We dropped all the guitar solos because Cal couldn’t play them and churned out the chords together. Cal called it a wall of sound like Phil Spector; Charlie christened it chainsaw rock. Jon said it was a bit loud but even he had to admit we sounded better.

  ‘You know,’ said Cal Carter, his plastered hand looking grossly large compared to the rest of his body. ‘We might have got something here.’ There are stories, aren’t there, of Johnny Rotten miming to ‘School’s Out’ for Malcolm McLaren, of Joe Strummer meeting Mick Jones and forsaking rhythm and blues, of Siouxsie, another Bromley girl, reciting the Lord’s Prayer over the riff from ‘Smoke On The Water’, but, as far we were concerned at least, that lunchtime in Mr Blake’s music room was when punk rock was born.

  22

  The Bromley contingent and their Friday night fashions were getting weirder and wilder. In the corner of the Roebuck a group of perhaps six or seven including Jenny and Linda were dressed in what looked like customised scuba-diving equipment. It was known as bondage gear. They spent more time in the pub these days. They had to. Dressed like that you couldn’t get into any of the clubs round our way. You had to go up west for that.

  In town, especially round the Kings Rd, you saw the odd gang of punk rockers: leather, chains, kilts, flaps of fake leopard skin over their bums, what looked like kit-bag straps holding their knees together, and, of course, we saw them at gigs. It was still a rarity in Beech Park and Jenny’s crowd loved that. For me it devalued it all a bit, I preferred it to be something special, something you only saw on a night out. The idea that these were people like us who lived in dull suburbs with bingo and overweight mothers seemed sad. However, within their pseudo sadomasochistic, fetishistic parameters - whips and dog collars were both popular - there was always something nouveau. Another night, another costume or accoutrement. They bought a lot of their gear at shops with names like Let It Rock, Sex and Seditionaries. Only several years later when I met Malcolm McLaren did I discover that these were actually all the same place regularly revamped and renamed. No wonder we could never find any of them.

  Beneath black panda-like eye make up and matching lipstick, there was Jenny. Sitting on the edge of the group, her bottom perched on the edge of a seat on which three others were already sitting. With the exception of a pink kipper tie and a tiara, her entire outfit was black plastic including her shoes. As my eyes ran down her body, any lust I may have still had for her evaporated.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to play at least once in public before we go our own separate ways?’ bleated Jon. He was talking about A-levels. Or more particularly about what would happen after them. This gambit triggered the usual vagueness and indifference. Nobody wanted to think that far ahead.

  Although he hadn’t even an O-level in the subject, Charlie had this notion about going to Art School. ‘Naturally I mean Art in its broadest sense,’ he would say.

  ‘Yes but do they, Charlie?’ Jon would reply.

  Jon and I had done the UCCA thing and it was now just a question of grades. I had no great enthusiasm for any of the universities I’d visited for open days or interviews. I believed like you do when you’re seventeen and senseless that it was people made places so be they ancient stone or red-brick or plate glass, as Cal had called Sussex, they were all the same to me. Campus or town setting, couldn’t care less. Cal would be going to Oxford, you see; he’d already passed the entrance exam. I needed three As if I was going to get into Oxford. Fat chance.

  We’d discussed playing The Roebuck umpteen times - the landlord had even asked us to - but Cal, perhaps recalling that first performance, always vetoed it. He always said we weren’t ready - that perfectionist in him. Now the opportunity seemed to be ebbing away from us. Cal wasn’t paying much attention. He was drinking and smoking and watching the band. They were a typical pub-rock outfit: a couple of hippies, an ageing bluesman and a sixteen year-old behind the drum-kit. There was a rule that the one with longest hair sang. Cal wasn’t even doing them the compliment of tapping his feet.

  ‘I mean to say,’ Jon continued, ‘we’re far superior to this lot.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Charlie.

  ‘Maybe,’ Cal nodded. ‘You’re right, of course, but what’s the point of doing it unless we’re going to do it properly. And there’s no future if everybody’s going off to University?’

  Jon shrugged. ‘Cal, it’s two wholly different things. We’re talking about life and careers on one and we’re talking about a bit of fun on the other.’

  Cal got up. ‘You might be,’ he said.

  As Cal walked over towards Linda, Jon looked at me, shaking his head. ‘Cal is not going to give up Oxford for our stupid little band, is he? We can’t even play properly.’

  Charlie leaned forward. Now it was his turn to shake his head. ‘No, Jon. You can’t even play properly.’

  I laughed and got up to buy a round. The landlord was watching me as I strode towards the bar and had started pulling the first pint as I arrived. ‘Usual?’ he asked. Introducing live bands had lifted The Roebuck’s fortunes a little but not a lot. The landlord’s voice still sounded like two sheets of glass paper rubbing together. ‘Quiet,’ I observed in a high-pitched tone that I hoped suggested surprise.

  Presumably Cal was fixing up Saturd
ay night with Linda - they’d been going out for best part of a year. She looked less ridiculous than the others, I must admit. Still dressed like she knew a bit about make-up. Wore the odd skirt. Jesus, I sound like I’m a 107. Cal didn’t seem to mind, anyway. They joshed with each other like friends, ‘a match as rare as their rich and golden hair,’ Jon had scoffed. I could hear Cal’s easy laughter as they exchanged some dodgy joke. The difference was that Linda was still herself. Her personality wasn’t lost beneath that gear. Jenny’s, by contrast, was buried.

  We’d had a couple more nights, Jenny and I, but for her it seemed as if once of anything was enough. The Wednesday after Cal’s party we did it with her on top in the middle of the park. This position and the pain of a thistle in my left buttock enabled me to delay ejaculation almost indefinitely. On the Saturday we did it doggy-style in her bedroom while her Mum was down the shops. ‘And you’d better be quicker about it this time,’ she’d said. ‘She’s only gone to the Spar.’

  These encounters exhausted both our repertoires and the relationship. Of course, I felt that turbulence in my tummy when I first heard that she’d slept with all four of the Bromley boys, that sickness that says you’re alive, but I couldn’t care less now. It was up to her and there was no point being angry. After all, I hadn’t done it doggy since. In fact, I hadn’t done much of anything. The pints stood there on the bar like sentries, guarding my three pound notes and a tiny pile of change. I took a big gulp.

  As I was taking Jon and Charlie their beers, I noticed that Cal was no longer chatting with Linda. The band were taking a break and Cal was talking to the singer - a simian individual with hair down to his nipples, a tatty leather biker’s jacket and Jack Daniel’s T-shirt. Cal, pointing out some detail in the design, had noticed the latter.