by Jim Pollard
Back in the hotel, Jon and Charlie were philosophical. I agreed that we’d all meet - all four of The Go-Karts - at our flat in a fortnight’s time. My departure was more substantially delayed by the need to convince the crew that Tony would pay them for the full tour. I’ve never been the most persuasive of people but in the face of a real crisis I managed it with a succession of assurances that I had no reason to believe and of promises that I had no idea if I could keep. ‘We’ll take you all on the World Tour, promise. We’ll give you an annual retainer.’ The whole business took longer than it needed because of Ant’s habit of uttering ‘pardon’ whenever Mac, Nev or I drew breath. When I left Jon and Charlie had agreed on going to California for a holiday but were arguing the toss between Venice Beach and San Francisco.
We hadn’t played ‘The Promised Land’ since our early gigs but Cal had used its story of a boy’s journey across the United States as the basis for planning our tour. On one level I suppose, it was as good a basis as any but given that we were totally unknown in America, surely doomed to failure. Perhaps it was our deviation from the song’s route (Tony having vetoed some of Cal’s suggestions as ‘absolutely fucking ridiculous’) that had brought the heavenly wrath of the King of rock’n’roll down upon us or perhaps we were simply trying to sabotage our own careers.
33
Sussex Coast, 1979
Cal began with four lines of speed for medicinal purposes. He was snorting off the kitchen table.
On the kitchen floor where they’d been dumped on arrival were the only belongings we’d thought it important enough to bring: our guitars and our bags of tricks. We both had jet lag - mind-numbing, body aching, throat-wrenching, eyeball-busting jet lag. America was half a day behind us. Walking down onto the beach we started on another bottle of Jack Daniels. It was nearly lunchtime. The Go-Karts were at a crossroads.
We hadn’t said much. The odd burst of laughter, too loud and too long. The tide was out and so were the fishermen after worms. We walked all the way down to the shore and tossed a few stones into the sea, trying to make them skim but each in its turn was swallowed by little waves. In the wet sand we wrote The Go Karts in great three foot high letters.
While we were working I could see a figure walking slowly towards us - at first a speck on the seascape, then a suited man, then a suited old man with no shoes on paddling in the sea.
‘Morning,’ he boomed from fifteen yards or so. Cal and I both stood up from our work as if we had heard the voice of God himself. We exchanged glances and Cal pretended to pinch himself. Were we looking at a ghost? Walking towards us was the headmaster of Beech Park Grammar - a few years older and apparently a good deal more eccentric but instantly recognisable. We waited for him to recognise us but it never happened. He looked at us briefly before turning his proudly held head out to sea. His suit wasn’t as tatty as Bermuda Shorts’ but it was on its way.
‘Bracing morning, isn’t it,’ he observed. ‘For a constitutional. The rush of the wind, the call of the gull. Sand soft between your toes.’
‘Good morning, Mr Hart,’ said Cal.
He reacted as if everybody knew his name - smiling benignly at the pair of us and moving to proceed. Cal stepped into his path. ‘Cal Carter, Mr Hart.’
‘Calum Carter,’ he savoured it slowly - adopting the longer form of Cal’s name but without giving any indication of recognition. Then it was as if he clicked into a different gear. His voice, hitherto airy and light, assumed a deeper more rigid tone. ‘Beech Park. You’re a long way from Beech Park, boy.’
‘I’ve come a long way since Beech Park, sir.’
‘Have you now? Well, that’s very pleasing to hear.’
‘And this is Frankie Dane, Mr Hart.’
We weren’t that long out of school. It was absurd that he shouldn’t know me but he didn’t. I was looking straight into his thin brown eyes and there was nothing there - not even a shimmer of familiarity denied. Nothing at all.
‘Good day, boy. You must forgive me. I cannot recall.’
I wondered if this new tone was largely one of embarrassment. He appeared to have become an old man over night.
‘Well, good morning to you both.’ He went to tug at a hat that wasn’t there and walked briskly away. As he did so his footprints shivered and died in the wet sand behind him.
‘He didn’t recognise us,’ I said.
‘Neither for who we were or for what we’ve become,’ said Cal in a spooky voice like a parody of a horror film.
We were sitting on the breakwater when Cal started to speak. He returned to a subject we’d discussed before - his conversation with his father after he went to America. ‘Give me a chance of a career with the band.’ Cal had said. His father had scoffed and Cal had left the country. ‘By the time I came back, he had mellowed a little. Of course, initially he assumed that I would be off to Oxford but when I made it quite clear that I still wasn’t going, he gave me a day to stew and then came back. The old schemer already had a contingency plan. “You want to be a musician, Cal? Then let’s do it properly. Let’s take a business-like approach.” So we talked. He took me into his fucking study and pulled out a chair.’
Every time Cal talked about him, his father became bigger and what Cal told me this time was shattering. Most people think our story is the story of four school-friends and so it is, but these friends are not Cal Carter, Frankie Dane, Jonathan Waters and Charlie Ball, they are Alexander Carter, Anthony Waters, Gerald Beale and Ronald Baker. We’re not talking ’bout our generation but our masters’ voices. Cal’s father had arranged it all. He called in a favour from an old school chum who worked at Phonodisc - Ronald Baker. This meant our deal was sewn up before we played our first gig. It also explained our very tame contract - it was the sort of indulgent contract you’d give to a friend when you weren’t really expecting anything. Tony had always claimed it was his belief in our talent that had enabled him to persuade Phonodisc to offer us such friendly terms. In fact he’d been lumbered with us. He couldn’t say no when Ronald, who had given him the job as Gerald’s son in the first place, told him to take The Go-Karts on. Not that he wanted to say no. Not with the PR and publicity budget he was being offered. That the decision to take us came from higher up the corporation took the pressure off Tony a bit and enabled him to display all that apparent brinkmanship when signing us which earned us all so much publicity.
Meanwhile Alex gave Ronald’s son Ian a job on the New Rock Journal, the UK’s leading rock weekly which happened to be published by Mr Carter’s publishing house and instructed him to cover every activity of The Go-Karts in full and glowing detail. This wasn’t difficult for Ian to do because Mr C let it be known to the editor through the appropriate channels that The Go-Karts were to be given the ‘next big things’ treatment. All this ensured that Ian Martyn-Baker’s name became very prominent too - prominent enough to attract the attentions of the NRJ’s teenage punk rock correspondent Miranda Paxton. Ian and Miranda were married shortly before ‘Rotten In Denmark’ hit number one - a happy by-product of the whole business and, given Ian’s egocentric personality and over-extended girth, perhaps the biggest miracle of them all.
If by any chance we still didn’t make it, despite all this ‘investment’, Anthony Waters construction company had been prepared to underwrite Phonodisc’s losses. They were putting up offices in London ten a penny back then but they sold for a little more than that. If we’d bombed there would have been a block or two with Phonodisc’s name on the deeds.
It was a win-win package. All the fathers were able to help all of the sons. Cal and Jon became pop stars, Ian became a top rock journo noted for his nose for talent and Tony went from being a new boy to the A&R man handling Phonodisc’s hottest property.
When Cal finished I knocked back the rest of the Jack Daniels.
‘So we haven’t achieved anything ourselves?’
‘Well, we got the gig
at the Roebuck.’
I thought about that for a moment. It was some consolation, I suppose, that that had been the best night of them all. ‘And you’ve known about all this business since the start?’
‘Yep. Do you remember the last time we came down here? I knew then what they wanted to do.’
I sat up. ‘What they wanted?’
‘Yeah but I didn’t want it - not then - and I didn’t think the rest of you would.’
I threw a big stone. It landed with a spark and sent a flock of seagulls scattering. ‘Jonathan?’
‘It was the only way to persuade him to leave University.’
‘Why didn’t we just get another bass player?’
Cal looked at me. He picked up the whiskey bottle and inverted it. Not a dribble. ‘I don’t know.’
‘So America was your attempt to do it on your own?’
‘Exactly. And what a fucking catastrophe. Now do you understand why I’m so miserable?’ He looked left and then right like a kid crossing the road and then he boomed: ‘He’s doing it again, the bastard.’
I got down taking with me the empty bottle. The sun was coming out and the breakwater cast a shadow across the beach. ‘I’ll get another bottle,’ I said.
‘Nice one,’ said Cal. ‘I think I’ll have a kip down there.’ The other side of the breakwater was out of the wind and in the sun. There was a strip of dry sand which the tide had never reached. He jumped down from the breakwater to join me.
‘My stash is in the kitchen, Frank. You know where. Can you get it for me?’
‘Taking more drugs won’t help,’ I said. That was the sort of thing his father ought to have been saying. ‘We haven’t actually lost anything, yet.’
‘Except our self-respect.’ He rolled his jacket into a pillow. ‘OK. Except my self-respect.’
When I came back Cal was curled up on the beach, snoring, sand in his hair. I had another two bottles of whisky, eighty cigarettes, the tobacco pouch containing Cal’s speed and a large jar of generic paracetamol. My head was pounding now and while I wanted sleep more than anything in the world I knew it wouldn’t come. I took two tablets and knocked them back with a swig of bourbon.
As Cal slept I looked out to sea. I followed the familiar gait of the headmaster as he walked back - his morning constitutional having transmuted into an afternoon stroll. Strangely sad and prematurely wizened. It was all too much to take in.
The swoop and squawk of seagulls on their way inland. The distant chattering chuckles of the fishermen as they repaired back to the pub. A bird - a tern? - pecking at the sand. A couple walking. Behind me the trundle of a wheelchair being pushed along the promenade. The sun slipped behind some clouds again and a grey shadow fell over the whole beach like a cloak over a cage. The temperature dropped a notch. Cal stirred, sat up. ‘I could eat a fucking horse,’ he said.
I remembered that I hadn’t had any food since that curling, yellowing ham sandwich on the plane. ‘Good idea.’ I patted my stomach and it emitted a hollow holler. We laughed.
‘Hold my coat up,’ instructed Cal.
I held his coat as a wind-shield as he snorted more lines of speed. He got to his feet gingerly like a man who has been kicked by an elephant. ‘This stuff is burning my brains, Frank. I’ve never had anything like it. Must be stale.’ He coughed, clearing his throat. ‘Got anything for a headache?’
I told him I had paracetamol but that he shouldn’t mix it all. He took four tablets and washed them down with whiskey.
‘Did you bring that back from America?’
‘Don’t be daft. It’s the rest of the stuff I had down here last time,’ he laughed. ‘It’s actually the other half of my first ever stash.’
We walked back along the front into the village. My head felt heavy with lack of sleep and too much drink. With the sun appearing then disappearing behind the cloud, the beach was brightly lit one moment and in the shade the next. I was losing track of the time. Cal was walking next to me - a yard away that seemed like a mile. We carried a bottle of Jack each from which we sipped intermittently.
‘Did you go to the Preservation Hall?’
‘No, a prostitute,’ he replied breezily.
‘Really?’ I said, lazily. (Nothing could surprise me now.)
‘Her name was Cherry. She was the one my father introduced to me.’
(Yes it could.) ‘Your father?’
‘Frank, my father’s fortune, success and power has given me everything. Except a challenge.’ He paused for a moment, looked away. ‘Except this time I couldn’t get it up anyway, not for all the baby-oil in all the brothels in all the world. Cherry was good about it. She said I wasn’t always like that. Quite the opposite as she recalled.’ He laughed with a boom. ‘She had a better memory than the fucking headmaster. Or she was a better actor.’ His voice and that old man’s laugh were whisked away on the breeze and he was fading into someone else. ‘But she’s nice, Frank. Too nice for that.’ He turned and looked at me and wiped his hands on his jeans as if he was ready to go somewhere. For a moment he reminded me of my mother in her prim readiness. ‘I was 15 when he first took me to her,’ he said. ‘On a family fucking holiday would you believe? Yet another present, another step on the inevitable road. They had an argument about that one though - Alex and Faye.’ He turned his nose up with each name.
‘I’m not surprised.’
‘You think about something of substance? No, she thought he should wait until I was 16. He said that I probably would have got it for free by then and that we didn’t want any mistakes. She didn’t say anything but I bet she was thinking about my height - not this little one, she was thinking. And he was thinking they’ll shag anything with a bank balance these tarts today. My virginity was just like another insurance policy, a question of when to cash it in.’
The first time I had seen vulnerability in Cal’s eyes, heard it in his voice, I had lifted him up into the window seat outside Beech Park station. This second time, much longer was the moment and nothing so simple the solution. He was sliding away and I was silent.
In the village, hidden among the charity shops and beside the window displaying knitting patterns, we found the one cafe. However even this, behind its greasy spoon curtains, had some pretensions of an afternoon to being a tea house. As we collapsed in the wooden chairs, we were offered cream tea for two.
‘Are we too late for a fry up?’ asked Cal.
‘I’ll just ask,’ said the waitress. She was barely out of school, thin and anaemic-looking in a starched white coat that made her resemble a lab technician rather than a waitress. I could see Cal eyeing her up, calculating whether he wanted to shag her enough to completely fuck up her life. ‘Can we have two large teas?’ he asked as she disappeared through the frosted glass door into the kitchen. The café was decorated in that 1930’s art deco sort of green like the old Deptford cinema. There were a few lacy flourishes belying its aspirations but the menus - they were hand corrected and falling from their torn PVC holders – gave it all away. That and the tomato sauce in a plastic tomato on every table.
An older woman stuck her head out of the kitchen - her hair-up, her apron greasy and egg stained. The owner’s wife, I think. ‘Full English love?’
‘Thanks,’ said Cal.
‘And what about you love?’
‘Just an omelette thanks.’
She disappeared and the waitress appeared with our teas, a dull brown residue swilling in the saucers.
‘You’re in that band, in’tcha?’ she said to Cal. She sounded like she’d taken a deep breath to do it. ‘The Go-Karts. My brother’s got your records.’
Cal laughed as if this was the best joke he’d ever heard. ‘No, sweetheart, you must be mistaken.’
‘Yes, you are and so’s he.’
I shrugged. ‘Curses, foiled again. Look, we’re just staying one night,’ Cal sai
d conspiratorially then the star sat back expansively and smiled. ‘Bring your brother’s record round and we’ll both autograph it.’ He gave her the address which she wrote on her little notepad, young hand and yesterday’s nail varnish shaking with excitement.
I looked at him distastefully. Nearly as distastefully as I looked at his fry-up: bacon, sausage, eggs, mushroom and fried slice all floating like flotsam on a puddle of grease. ‘Are you trying to kill yourself,’ I asked.
He shook his head. ‘The material’s good. Our songs. I still believe that. I mean you can’t make people buy records, can you? It’s where do we go from here. Where do I go from here?’ He regarded me curiously for a moment, a fatty sliver of bacon clinging to the end of his poised fork. ‘How do I get out of this?’ He didn’t look that convinced of anything. I wanted to free him. ‘Did you really think it was just luck?’ he asked.
‘No, Cal, worse than that: I thought it was just talent.’
He didn’t say anything for a moment, ruminating thoughtfully over his breakfast. ‘Talent, sure we may have made it on talent. But how long would it have taken? My old man only invests in sure things. Anyway if we wanted to make it on talent, we definitely would have needed a new bassist.’ He laughed. He seemed to be perking up as he warmed to the idea that all we had really done was to save time. I knew how fast his brain could move - accepting an idea and moving on while I was still trying to work out the first thing. I’d get there eventually but this time I wasn’t sure that I wanted to. Then I figured he’d been living this lie for months. I wondered if he had rehearsed this in his head before.
We ate on in silence and by the time we emerged into the afternoon Cal was well on the way down again. We returned to the cottage so that he could take some more speed. Line after line of it. Gorging. I sat in the armchair gently sipping whiskey from my bottle and when I woke up it was still in my hands. The evening had drawn in tight as a noose and the room was shrouded in darkness. My neck ached from the way I’d been sleeping with it hanging over the top of the armchair. My mouth was open, my tongue like broken glass. In fact, I think it was the pain of swallowing which woke me. I had no idea of the time.