Rotten in Denmark

by Jim Pollard

  And that was how I came to meet Jody Clarke. Actually Phonodisc did pay for one thing on Stolen Moments - a week in the studio to put on Jody’s backing vocals and to do the final mix-down - but Tony wrote that off and we didn’t have to recoup it.

  This morning my Desert Island Life has me in LA with Jody, has me writing movie scores but that could never happen. Never could have happened. I never did have an affair with Jody and it wasn’t out of loyalty to Wendy not if I’m honest about it. It was because of Tony. Jody can sing like an angel and we could have got those BVs done inside half a day had we wanted to but we worked late that night, knew we would. Empty building, Jody and I, a locked door, a soundproofed recording studio and in the control room a bottle of Champagne - Tony’s present. When she touched me it was as beautiful as her voice, the same vulnerability and control, but every time I looked at her in that way, with a summer buzz of lust, I thought of Tony and how he had treated her while I’d stood gawping and my desire expired like a punctured tyre.

  Recording those vocals we had take after stunning take. Naked on a pine floor where even her sweet nothings had a perfect cadence we tried again - take after take - but there was nothing worth a note. Even now when I think of her as I do on mornings like these, my Saturday night of an erection is followed as surely as Sunday by Tony’s leer and a limp feeling inside and out. Sometimes I think of someone else instead but not this morning.

  25

  I pull into the underground car-park where Jon parked when we came up to see Tony. It was easy as in truth I knew it would be. Driving is just one of the arty-farty fears I have created to mask the real ones. The streets are full of maniacs with wheels but I keep telling myself that I am at least as crazy as they are and it makes me feel less vulnerable. I reverse our car into a parking space and turn off the engine.

  I watch as the petrol gauge slides down from full to empty. Here I do differ from Jon. I use a different service station. Jon says he feels awkward calling at Terry’s garage these days. I don’t. For me it’s about the only attraction of getting behind the wheel. Terry is manager there now after all. He jokes with me about my driving. He knows I’m not keen.

  ‘Even when we were teenagers, Frankie,’ he says.

  ‘I know, I was scared of the bumper cars,’ I say as he leans over to check my oil, a service I doubt he offers his other customers and that makes me feel good.

  ‘I saw Charlie on telly last night,’ he continues, standing and wiping the dipstick. ‘Local news, you know. Opening that new club of his.’

  ‘Strike Four,’ I say.

  ‘Yeah. And that bird he was with. Stunner and a half in’t she?’

  ‘Claudia.’

  ‘You know her too? Christ. Well stocked in the knocker department or what? I’ll just top you up, Frank.’

  I give him my credit card. It’s self-service but I’m not getting out. ‘You should give him a call, Terry. He’d be pleased to hear from you. I’ll give you the number.’

  Terry smiles and says he will but we both know he won’t. He calls across to the overalled youth by the car wash and instructs him to give my car a quick polish. He’s as polite but firm with him as he’s polite and deferential with me - a good manager, I suppose. He knows where he fits in now does Terry.

  I left early to avoid the rush hour - Philip told me it starts around two these days - so I’ve got time to kill before I meet Wendy and my mother. Some people are still eating their lunch; I doubt my womenfolk will have left Fenwick’s yet.

  I’m going to play Product Placement to kill time. This involves going into all the record and CD shops and making sure that my albums are prominent - moving them to the front of the display stand, that sort of thing. I am planning my route around the West End as I walk out of the car park and don’t notice Jonathan’s gleaming kit car standing just four bays from my Rover.

  Over Covent Garden a frostier air descends and I turn up the collar on my overcoat. Given the right hat and a double amputation below the knee, I could be Humphrey Bogart. There are still plenty of tourists, of course, whatever the weather. I stop myself before, like some wizened society dame, I lament how nowadays the season never seems to end. A snatch of German, a sprinkling of French, a volley of heat-seeking American laughter. On the corner a mime artist with a painted face struggles to get out of a box.

  I wonder what my grandfather would make of the place where he once used to count vegetables. I like to think he would have had a smile on his face, enjoyed a crepe and a coffee and bought a Tibetan anus flute with his pension. Once, when I asked him if he liked his job, he told me it was ‘cramped, cold and smelly’. It’s still cramped and cold but now the air is stuffed with patchouli and jasmine and lavender. His nose at least may have sensed some progress.

  The beads and the trinkets that were once the bounty of the rucksacked traveller are now set on display for all who can shake a credit card, the spoils of the democratic free market. My mother is examining a copper egg-shaped ornament for holding joss-sticks. If those thick brightly coloured anoraks are anything to go by, the people she is talking to are Scandinavian tourists. She sees me and speaks without surprise.

  ‘Is this some sort of pepper pot, Frankie?’

  ‘No, it’s er...’

  ‘Must be a joss-stick holder then.’ She returns to her new friends. They utter their thanks and begin to pass the item around the group like an artefact.

  ‘Mum, what are you doing here? Where’s Wendy?’

  ‘We’ve split up. I’m going to a shop called Pineapple to buy some new dance shoes.’

  ‘Right.’ I am perplexed. ‘Mum, I think Pineapple’s more leotards and Lycra body stockings.’

  ‘Well, perhaps I’ll try one of those too.’

  ‘Where did you say Wendy was?’

  ‘She’s gone to the café at Liberty’s.’

  ‘And you’ve been wandering around on your own?’

  A laugh. ‘You sound like my mother,’ says my mother then she touches my arm with an actressy sort of gesture. ‘I’m not your father you know.’ And then she is away again. One padded boot followed by another.

  ‘Where are you going now?’

  ‘Pineapple. I’ll see you as arranged. Have fun.’

  Her red coat disappears into the crowd, scarf swirling like a gymnast’s ribbon. I look after her for a second and then turn back. The Scandinavians are buying the joss-stick holder.

  Liberty is the West End store I remember best from my childhood. Its Tudor facade looked like something out of a picture book and at Christmas time Charles Dickens himself could have shopped there. I never went in there then but we stood outside a couple of times, my mother taking in tiny breaths, my father champing at the bit. The first time I actually went inside was with Cal when we went up on a Red Bus Rover. We popped in on our way to Hamleys to buy Subbuteo accessories. Must have been about twelve.

  I know where Wendy will be. She has a favourite table in Liberty’s café - the one in the corner. Wendy says she likes Liberty’s café because, by comparison with the rest of the shop, it appears to lack confidence in itself and she’s attracted to this quality. Among the opulence of designer labels and carved wood panelling, there it sits with its silly green cushions, tin-topped tables and tea bags, the most English thing about the place. I turn through the books department and am about to call but my words become ensnared in my throat almost before my eyes can register her form. There is someone sitting opposite - smartly dressed in a sunshine yellow blazer. She is adjusting his lapel. I catch the laughter - a laughter as if every other table is frozen in icy silence and their two voices are blended as one, ricocheting around the room, bouncing with the buzzer and bell brightness of a pin-ball from the ceiling and walls and silent statues. When it reaches my ears it batters my skull like a scream.

  I pause, think and realise that I am skilled at this next part. I buy a hat and a sca
rf and remove my coat in case Wendy should recognise it and then I return. I opt for a chair a couple of tables away shoving the coat beneath the seat as I sit. I’m not close enough to hear what they are saying but I’m near enough to read the writing on the wall. What I witness is like the left and the right hand conspiring. A secret more special for being shared. A deception more complete by its symmetry. Or do I flatter myself? After all, there are other husbands and there are other clients. Careful Frankie, there is a danger that you might start believing your own publicity.

  After a coffee and a shared chocolate nut sundae, he rises and with a kiss is gone. As she sits back and savours the flavour of her smile for a second before taking up her newspaper, it is like a scene from a film. A blink and you may never have noticed that satisfaction playing on the lips but the camera catches it all and it is preserved. Wendy is gone behind her Guardian when I get up, decline the second coffee I have ordered, and do what I have always done so well: follow. As I leave the cafe I am pulling my coat on with a purpose.

  Sharp clothes, soft furnishings, prints of distinction, fine crystal, oriental mysteries and occidental accessories, I follow through the crowds: the browsers, the buyers, the bored and the wistful. Their shuffling shoes and unpredictable diversions do not distract me as I pursue a pair of fresh heels. Out on the pavement Jonathan stops. I lose myself in the window display, crawl inside that hollow pumpkin and light a juniper candle. His reflection stretches and yawns, looks bored, and for the first time I feel something nearer anger than despair. He glances again at his watch - the one we gave him when we got married, the one we gave him when he was our best man - and steps out for what must be an important rendezvous. Someone else’s wife?

  I could go back and confront Wendy but then confrontation never was my thing. I am tossing the emotional options like loose change when Tony Beale emerges from Argyll St opposite. I duck back inside my hole. Collar up, hat brim down, back inside the head of a vegetable. He crosses the road, trying to hail a taxi. As usual it is hard to tell how sober he is. The cabbies of London spurn him for while he may look rich to you or me, he does not at this often windy and rainswept time of year look rich enough. That is the refreshing honesty our homespun London cabbies bring to their work. With his shambling posture, wayward hair and one-winter-too-many trench coat, they do not see Tony for what he really is.

  He is heading under Liberty’s arch in the same direction as Jon and my mind is made up. I leave my Halloween window and its white wide-eyed ghosts. He makes a turn and then another. Not so many people here and I need to keep my distance. Ahead I think I can see that yellow sun of a jacket.

  They meet on a corner, Tony and Jonathan, and slip into a nearby pub. A gust of wind coaxes another layer of leaves to the ground. The pub’s simple sign swings in the breeze - like a film again - and I take a deep breath and step on in. I’ve given them long enough to order a drink. I intend, if they see me as I enter, to pretend that I was just passing and saw them going in.

  The pub is quiet. It is too late for lunch and too early for an after work drink - the briefest of respites in the London drinking day. On the stool, a pal of the landlord reading The Mirror, talking about Arsenal. In the centre table a couple of tourists who have wandered from the beaten track, his stubby finger pogoing on the map, her apologising in German. At the table by the window an older couple in respectful silence. Along the side of the bar, four booths. In the second sits an older punter with a trilby and a paper and a betting slip and there it is. Hanging over the arm of the fourth booth, the one at the far end, is Jonathan’s yellow jacket. Ducking into the third booth, I pretend I’m a tourist too. I don’t want to go to the bar because I’ll be seen. After a moment or two the landlord comes across and I order a bière in a fractured French accent.

  Behind me, I hear them still slapping and laughing their greetings. When Tony compliments Jon on his new jacket there’s a warmth in his voice - the stress of the office is gone and he almost sounds like the younger man we once knew. Then Jonathan is doing what I pay him for.

  ‘It’s not that he hasn’t written anything Tony, you know that. It’s quite simply a matter of quality control. Retaining the standard. There’s not yet an album of quality material.’

  ‘Retaining the standard - flouting the contract more like. Well, tell him from me he’s a lazy little fucker. ‘

  ‘I do, Tony, I do.’

  ‘Anyway, point is the dithering must have done something because the British Film Institute want to do a retro on him - Frankie Dane: the movie.’ Tony snorts. He’s getting into his stride.

  ‘Sounds interesting.’

  ‘You know, archive footage from gigs, old interviews and videos, usual crock of crap. Ninety minutes worth of cinematic excitement and then our Frankie speaks to the audience afterwards and answers questions.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘It’ll be at the National Film Theatre - part of the music in cinema season or some such thing.’

  ‘Nice one, Tony.’

  ‘Don’t thank me. It was Ian - you know, Ian Martyn Baker who suggested it apparemendo. Anyway, point is we could do with some product. Okay so no album but he must have a fucking single.’

  ‘I’m sure that’ll be no problem, Tony.’

  So I am snookered. I desperately want to join in but I can hardly claim to be just passing now. They can’t be seen from the road or indeed from any spot inside the pub itself through which one could be ‘just passing’.

  I have been standing on the edge for so long that it is now too late to jump in. I finish my beer, get up and leave. On the way back to meet my family I play Product Placement in the record shops and on the walks in between I play Desert Island Life. Perhaps you should be allowed two suitcases.

  Outside Charing Cross station, I help my wife and mother with their shopping. Wendy has a new jacket. My mum in one of her many bags has a new pair of dance shoes. They both moan a bit about the long walk to the car but they are satisfied with their day’s work. This time I do notice Jon’s vehicle but my wife’s eyes don’t flicker. Down in this gasoline alley she’s modelling the new jacket for us. I tell her to let her hair down, it will really suit the casual cut of the jacket I tell her and she does it and I fancy her.

  26

  Beech Park, Autumn 1977

  I placed my packed lunch in my briefcase. As my Dad always took the newspaper, it was the only thing of any interest or value in there. Just a couple of biros and pencils, a slide-rule I never used, my personal copy of the department’s procedural manual and my daily bread: a round of cheese and tomato and one of peanut butter. My mother was dabbing on my tie with a damp cloth and wittering on about being more careful with my corn flakes when the doorbell’s tiny fart interrupted.

  ‘Now, who’s that at this time in the morning?’

  Cal was wearing the same all-American threads as he had been the night before in The Roebuck, was smoking the same soft-pack Marlboro. I blinked and it wasn’t caused by the sunlight.

  He yelled ‘Morning, Mrs Dane,’ and then, to me, ‘I’ve come to give you a lift to work.’ Parked outside was the red Ford Escort that he had had before he went away.

  ‘Still driving the Chevy, then?’ I observed.

  ‘Hey, it’s been garaged these twelve months and had a full service yesterday.’

  ‘That should be satisfactory.’ Solemnly I straightened my tie and the creases in my suit. ‘So you going to tell me some more Elvis stories then?’

  ‘The time for stories is over,’ Cal replied. In the street he executed a breakneck three point turn, peering over the dashboard with an intent that wasn’t for the road.

  ‘You’re going the wrong way,’ I said.

  ‘And you’re looking a bit queasy,’ he said. ‘Russian flu, I’d say. My prescription: a day down on the coast.’

  The Carters’ second (or was it third) home was on the south coast in one
of those villages near Brighton. We drove it in little more than an hour. It was a cottage - ‘an artisan’s dwelling,’ Wendy later told me - with a mossy slate grey roof and white pebbledash walls buffeted and made bald by the sea breeze. The gate was attached by a single hinge and the garden had a gay abandon which I far preferred to my parents’ antiseptic affair.

  ‘They’ve let it go a bit,’ Cal said as he stumbled through the wooden doored pantry searching for the mains switch. There was that musty smell of history in the air. I dumped my briefcase on the table which was metal-legged and formica-topped like the one we had once had in our kitchen at home. ‘There’s years left in it,’ my father had said when my mother suggested chucking it out. ‘That’s what you said six years ago, Derek,’ she had replied.

  ‘I wish I’d brought some civvies,’ I said, fingering my pin-stripes distastefully.

  ‘We can go shopping,’ said Cal. ‘There.’ The lights came on like after a power-cut. He tested the electric cooker and then he put the kettle on. I’d visited the cottage a few times as a child - the odd weekend and for a week one summer holiday - but this was my first adult visit. We both had to search the pantry to find the tea-bags. They were in the flour container.

  ‘For freshness, I suppose,’ Cal scoffed. He had been away for the best part of a year and over tea he began to explain.

  ‘You know when my father first told me I was going to go to Oxford University, Frankie?’ He sounded like that old woman in the hairy purple cardigan who used to come and tell us stories of a Friday afternoon in primary school. I shook my head.

  ‘When I was six years old. When I was this fucking big.’ He held his hand about six inches from the floor. ‘So since failing the A-levels wasn’t an option as I’d already passed the entrance exam, it was a case of leaving the country or bust.’

  ‘Yeah, well thanks for all the postcards,’ I said. I had them plastered across my wall. Long distance information like it says in the song. I didn’t understand what he was talking about - my Mum would have been made up proud if I’d gone to Oxford.