Rotten in Denmark

by Jim Pollard

  ‘Oi,’ says the news vendor. The grille on the front of his stand contains a poster hastily inserted and hastily printed in black block capitals: MAGGIE’S DREAM FOR BRITAIN.

  ‘We could go to the pictures,’ says Jon so we walk back down Villiers St, past the Duke Of Buckingham, past Gordon’s through the Embankment tube and up onto Hungerford Bridge. Trains rumble in and out of Charing Cross. We are small in their wake. Small and argumentative. Jon wants to go and see Taxi-Driver at the National Film Theatre.

  ‘I just think we want a good laugh,’ says Charlie, glumly.

  ‘We’re angry aren’t we,’ says Jon. He sounds very angry. ‘This will be a cathartic experience. It’ll purge all the shit from inside.’

  ‘What do you think, Frank?’

  ‘Without Calum, Frankie doesn’t think anything, Charles.’

  ‘I’m easy,’ I mumble, thinking that Jon might be right. I light a cigarette.

  ‘Cathartic, eh, Mr College?’

  ‘It’s using drama as an an outlet for emotions, particularly those to do with pain and suffering.’

  ‘I know what it fucking means but this isn’t ancient Greece and you’re not fucking Socrates. This is real life.’ Charlie is trying to light himself a cigarette but the words keep on coming. A pleasure cruiser passes beneath us. ‘Did watching all those gigs purge your desire to get on stage yourself? No, they fed it. You wanted to do it. You have to do it. Not watch it. Not read about it. Do it.’

  Ahead of us are the steps that lead down to the South Bank complex. A man wrapped in a blanket sits at the top of them. I can’t place him but then I haven’t been up town for an age. He’s got a small wooden cigar box open in front of him. Taped to the lid are what look like large coins - presumably to show the tourists what he wants. Inside are a couple of coppers and a few silver pieces. I dredge in my pocket. His overcoat is torn and almost black with dirt and grease. So is his flat cap. As he peers up from beneath it and we take another stride closer I recognise him. Bermuda Shorts. I pull out some change. ‘I didn’t recognise you with your clothes on,’ I say.

  The man smiles just as Charlie lands his first kick. It catches the tramp’s outstretched arm, sending the money flying and completes its journey into his breast bone. I don’t know if it’s a crack I hear or a wheeze. Charlie sweeps the hat from the old man’s head and kicks the cigar box down the steps. More money flying. Three steps from the bottom the box cracks and breaks on the concourse below. The old man pulls the blanket tight around him and tries to make himself into a ball. Charlie kicks him again. Jon picks up his cap and tosses it onto the railway.

  Charlie is yelling like the mad man he has become. ‘You have to do it, Jon. You have to fucking do it.’

  Jon takes the tramp by what remains of his hair so brutally that it seems his head will be torn from his body. I see his shocked face closer than ever before. Weathered lines, the folds and creases hanging heavy, he’s older than I thought. Jon punches him as hard as he can in the middle of the face. The sound is a sickening soggy crunch.

  The tramp slumps forward, face down on the bridge and there is a dropped beat like the night inhaling before blood emerges from beneath his cheek bone and trickles away down a crack in the concrete. Jon and Charlie are half-way down the stairs. I take a week-end’s worth of notes and put them in Bermuda Shorts’s pocket. As I do I can smell his snatched breath and feel his clucking heart. I know he’s not dead. I follow Jon and Charlie. At the foot of the steps they’re completing the demolition of the cigar box and chucking the pieces into the Thames.

  ‘Havanas,’ says Jon. He holds the lid up and it catches the street lamp with a slight shimmer. As he pulls his arm back, cranking up for the throw, I take it from him. Taped to it are not coins but two ribbonless medals. Once silver they are now nearly brown. Beneath the dirty twisted tape they barely shine. I walk back up the steps and place the lid, its hinges bent and twisted from where it was torn from the box, beside the unmoving body. Then I hear an asthmatic wheeze and a cough as a passing train shakes the bridge and disturbs the dust, dirt and grit.

  We didn’t go to a film. We went to the pub, that hole in the wall by Waterloo station, and we sat and we drank and we talked about Cal and how we felt and in our way we cried for him and for ourselves bound by an unspoken shame of what we’d done and the surge of life it sent through us. I awoke the following day with a bad taste in my mouth. Wendy and I returned to France and didn’t come back for years. Don’t think that when I had Jon by the lapels in the NFT that that night wouldn’t have gone through his head. Catharsis? I should co-co.

  But we’ve all survived. Five years later when I went up to Phonodisc to present Tony with Stolen Moments who should I trip over in a Soho doorway but Bermuda Shorts? He smiled like a fat cat when I gave him a couple of fifties and thanked me in a Laurence Olivier voice. He’d got a new suit by then. The odd thing is that he’d done exactly the same thing to it: cut the legs off at the knees. But then perhaps it’s not so odd. Experience plus gimmick equals survival. It’s the free market in begging.

  Real evil is systematic, premeditated and planned - not some individual act in a moment of madness. Cal would have argued that the most evil thing I witnessed that day was not Jon and Charlie losing their heads but the foreboding of the flyer on the newspaper stand. I think about that and what I said in the theatre and then I do a ‘Rotten In Denmark’, produce a series of images. This time from the 1980s not 1977. Paratrooper abseiling down office building to reveal privatised share price, mounted policeman clubbing female protester during miners’ strike, People’s March for Jobs t-shirt stretched across fat chest of man who has never walked anywhere before, heartless witch squealing newspaper headline Gotcha as po-faced civil servant announces sinking of Belgrano, poll tax riot in Trafalgar Square.

  I felt a churning inside as like a pestle to a mortar Jonathan’s fist ground into Bermuda Shorts and that’s what I use for the chorus - a repeating refrain of Jon and Charlie and an old man in the dirt. I shuffle the images around, rewriting over and over, juxtaposing each simply descriptive verse against violent images of clockwork kicking and fists that aren’t for turning. Today in little low-skill England we all grope in the dirt. It’s enough to drive anyone mad, Dad. If you can’t exploit it. But I can - it’s the spirit of the age. I’ve got a new single and I title it ‘Anything Evil’.

  Then I pick up the guitar and begin searching for some chords. I have a buzz about this song - a unique buzz - and as I work on through the night, I feel the occasional echo of that churning inside but it’s so watered down by history that it’s little more than the nausea of an empty stomach.

  I am still at it when Wendy leaves for work the following morning. Apart from half an hour’s kip on the futon in the corner of the studio I’ve worked right through.

  ‘You are mad,’ she says as she sticks her head around the door. The bare bones of a backing track pound from the speakers. It’s got a dance backbeat: 4/4 with a heavy thud on every beat. It’s the first thing I’ve ever done like this and the beat, I must admit, is something else. It’s a simple bass drum mixed with the sound sampled from the cassette of the ‘Live’ sign falling from above the door onto Jon’s head. I’ve compressed it, phased it slightly and added a cocktail of EQ but that basically is what it is. Crash, crash, crash, crash. On Jon’s head. It amuses me. Cal would have loved it. Think how much he would have welcomed the sampler - Jon would only have had to play one note right then. Over the top I’ve put the familiar Carter/Dane jangling guitar. It’s like The Byrds playing on a building site. The words will be spoken - not quite rapped, something less certain. Wendy nods like she likes it.

  ‘Travel agent,’ she says as she turns to leave.

  ‘Wendy.’ I approach her and we kiss with a passion. My fingers run down her spine, over her bottom, supporting her buttocks, hers stroke the back of my neck and knead my shoulders. Our tongues exp
lore with the desperation of thieves.

  ‘I’m only going to the office,’ says Wendy. ‘You should work all night more often if it gets you like this.’ She pats my bottom and with the words, ‘love you,’ is gone.

  Choices, choices. What to do? I keep it simple - a single line of vocals with a double-tracked chorus and some sequenced saxophone. By the time I am upstairs breakfasting with Philip and Rebecca I have made my choice. The song is finished and a rough mix already on DAT tape.

  ‘Dad, are you getting older?’ Philip asks me, looking into what I imagine must be hangdog eyes.

  ‘No, but you two are,’ I say.

  ‘Sadly none of us is aware of the passage of time,’ says Rebecca. She gets up from the breakfast bar and kisses me on the nose just like her mother. ‘You need some sleep, Dad.’

  ‘If you want to go up we’re quite capable of getting off on our own,’ says Philip.

  I put down my orange juice. ‘I know. It’s not that.’

  So I watch my children get off to school. I enjoy seeing them looking for lost books and pens, bickering and arguing. Just as they are finally about to go out of the door I call them both over. ‘Hey, I love you both, you know.’

  ‘What is this, pops, The Brady Bunch?’

  ‘Working all night seems to have addled his brain.’ Rebecca tugs at her brother’s sleeve. ‘Come on.’ I laugh and get up to go back upstairs. Then as she is about to shut the door, my daughter turns and whispers, ‘Love you too, Dad.’

  Finally I go back upstairs and complete the packing Wendy began yesterday.

  32

  You couldn’t swim at Virginia Beach. At Raleigh, the birthplace of Andrew ‘Stonewall’ Jackson, the Confederate general killed by ‘friendly fire’ in the civil war, had been moved. ‘How can a birthplace move?’ Cal demanded. He was interested in the story because he reckoned the friendly fire had been supplied by a slave or two. Soulless Charlotte had music but it was only jazz or country. We seemed to be the only rock act in town. After every number, one hick yelled ‘Ya got som’ing a little more country, boy?’

  Things weren’t going well. Ant was getting increasingly frustrated and increasingly drunk. We’d given up on the man from Phonodisc and kept having to check out of our hotels before Tony ever got round to returning our calls. Audiences were non-existent. We had consoled ourselves that after New York things would pick up - word of mouth. Cal had shaken his head. ‘You’re wrong - we’re going to another country.’

  He was right. South of the Mason Dixon line, word of mouth was unlikely since nobody opened their mouths wide enough to emit any discernible words. Nevertheless, we remained hopeful about Atlanta. Cal told us that in 1974 the city had elected the nation’s first black mayor and he knew for a fact that Martin Luther King’s birthplace hadn’t moved. But Atlanta’s most famous son is not called King but Cola, Coca Cola, and by the time we walked off stage, Cal was cursing: ‘Sherman had the right idea: torch the fucking place. Jesus, I’ll never laugh at Gone With The Wind again.’

  The minibus broke down on the way to Birmingham, Alabama and Cal seemed determined to blame it on divine intervention, retribution even. The American dream was letting him down. While the rest of us hung out in McDonalds, he stood beside the road appealing to heaven like a farmer desperate for rain, his arms waving like the robot in Lost In Space. ‘That does not compute, that does not compute.’ We made it to downtown Birmingham in time for the gig but once again the audience didn’t.

  Ironically we sounded great that night - the best on the tour. Sitting in McDonalds, Nev had come up with the answer to Ant’s problem. ‘You need some cans, man. Put everything through the desk and use some cans.’ This Ant did and, by miking up every instrument and putting them all through the PA desk, he was able to mix the sound pretty accurately using a headphone over his good ear. Cal, I’m sure, never heard the difference. His arm hung over his guitar like a sullen scarecrow, he barely moved all evening. After the show, I tried to cheer him up with a pair of tickets to visit Elvis Presley’s Graceland mansion in Memphis (our next stop) and a Presley Sun original single I’d bought in Bleeker Bob’s Golden Oldie shop in Greenwich Village. I told him our album was still number one back home. He asked me for a bag of fizz.

  I can’t remember going to bed that night (but then I can’t remember going to bed on any night of the American tour). I do remember getting up. I knocked on Cal’s door and there was no answer. We were in a small hotel - it was painted white and looked like an old plantation house - and it was soon apparent that he had disappeared.

  ‘He’ll be back,’ said Jon. He’d found a browning copy of an old English newspaper in the breakfast room so he was happy.

  ‘He won’t,’ I said. The thought of pancakes with maple syrup again was making me feel bloated. I poured myself a massive mug of coffee instead. ‘Actually,’ I said, in a voice I barely recognised as my own. ‘I think I know where he’s gone.’ I sounded like Cal when he insisted on a particular arrangement - absolutely certain. Our next stop was Memphis where we were booked to play some bar on Beale Street, the street where according to the Tennessee tourist authority the blues were born, but it wasn’t there that I thought Cal had gone.

  ‘I’m going to find him,’ I said. ‘If I’m not back when it’s time to go, get on to Memphis without me.’

  ‘Isn’t this a bit melodramatic?’ asked Jon.

  ‘Everything about this fucking country’s melodramatic,’ said Charlie without looking up from his breakfast. ‘I hope you find him, Frank.’

  At the Amtrak Station I checked which trains he could have caught and when I discovered that he wouldn’t have been overendowed with options, my initial suspicions were confirmed. It wasn’t the midnight flyer but the modern equivalent - I knew why some of the names of the places we’d been playing sounded so familiar. I looked at my watch to see when it would arrive and then telephoned the ticket office at the destination. The ticket clerk seemed happy enough to page Cal as I requested and even offered to call me back as the Bell phone began to chew up all my quarters. He seemed glad of something to do, kept calling me ‘sah’ and remarking on my accent.

  The train arrived as he was taking down my message and he kept me on the line giving me a running commentary on the various passengers as they got off. ‘Only one more now, sah. Some geeky looking little chile, sah. Looks like he ain’t got a cent to make groceries.’

  ‘That’s the one,’ I said.

  When Cal came on the line he knew exactly who he was talking to. ‘How the fuck did you find me?’

  ‘Well, we’re playing the birthplace of the blues - you take off to the birthplace of jazz.’

  ‘Bullshit, man.’ He’d been snorting.

  I started to sing. ‘I left my home in Norfolk, Virginia, California on my mind - I straddled that Greyhound and rode him into Raleigh and on across Caroline.’

  A black guy who’d just bought a ticket for Atlanta with a collection of dog-eared dollar bills he’d produced from under his hat joined in doing a doo-wop as I sang. He managed to do this perfectly while smoking a cigarette at the same time and every time he caught my eye, he inclined his greying head towards me and winked.

  ‘We stopped at Charlotte,’ I sang, our voices blending. ‘We bypassed Rock Hill, we never was a minute late. We was 90 miles out of Atlanta by sundown, rolling out of Georgia state.’ The black cat was dancing now. So was I. With our rolling arms and synchronised steps we must have looked like an anaemic, economy-sized version of The Four Tops. I’d only ever sung with Cal before. I was surprised at how much better I sounded with this bloke.

  ‘We had motor trouble that turned into a struggle half-way across Alabam - And that hound broke down and left us all stranded in downtown Birmingham.

  ‘Right away I bought me a through train ticket riding across Mississippi clean - And I was on the Midnight Flyer out of Birmingham smoking into New O
rleans.’ I stopped singing. ‘Or should I say “N’Awlins”’ I said imitating the ticket clerk.

  ‘Who’s a clever boy?’ said Cal.

  ‘Remember, I used to sing “Promised Land”.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know about you Frankie but I’m taking me in a set of cool trad at the Preservation.’

  ‘What about the tour?’

  ‘The tour’s over. It’s been a fucking disaster area.’

  ‘There have been one or two hiccups, it’s true.’

  ‘Hiccups? What do you call the H-bomb, Frankie, a fucking firework?’

  ‘Why did you choose such daft venues?’ I asked. ‘Elvis Presley aside.’

  ‘To prove we could do it.’

  ‘We don’t need to prove anything, Cal. We’ve been meteoric.’

  ‘After I’ve been to the Preservation, I’m getting the next flight back. If you want to do the same I’ll be at the cottage. You talk to the others but don’t bring them. I’ll sort it out with Tony. And Frank,’ he said just before he hung up. ‘You can’t put Presley aside.’ His voice faded away.

  The doo-wop bloke was still standing there. ‘You’ve a voice like an angel,’ he said. ‘Would you see your way clear, my boy, for a loan of fifty dollars.’

  ‘Loan?’

  ‘Well, gift.’

  ‘I thought it was supposed to be “say buddy can you spare me a dime”. What is this, inflation?’

  ‘One needs to be frank when embarking upon a journey, my boy and plan for the unexpected.’

  ‘How much have you of your own?’

  ‘Three bucks, sah.’

  I peeled a pair of fifties away from the roll of notes in my jacket pocket and handed them to him. He stuffed them under his hat with the grace and speed of a conjurer. ‘You sing like an angel too,’ I said.

  As I walked away he began singing a song I didn’t recognise, a chain-gang sort of song. His face may have been pockmarked and lined like old leather but his voice was pure as morning. Me, Cal and any number of white boy wannabes could have practised eight hours a day every day and never been in the same league as that old boy.