This Could Be Rock 'N' Roll

by Tim Roux

But there’s too many ghosts here,

  Too many regrets.

  Too many ghosts here,

  Too many voices,

  Too many lives lost,

  In too many choices.

  Drawn through the door,

  On a promise of freedom,

  You sneer: “So you say Jake,

  There’s only you sees them.”

  Chapter 6

  I loathe being an estate agent. Have I said that already? Sorry. I tend to get a bit repetitious. I think it is because I sing the same songs over and over again, so now I tell the same stories over and over again too, and make the same comments over and over again. I get tired of hearing my own voice and I suspect there are several others out there who beat me to that thought too.

  The thing about being an estate agent is that it works best if you just shut up. They did this research among second hand car salesmen which found that the salesmen who said nothing sold far more cars than the salesmen who kept telling the punter what a wonderful car he was sitting in, so my boss at Wiley & Sprogg’s is forever telling me to “Just shut it, Jake. Let the house sell itself.” After all, I am still learning the ropes.

  That’s a tall order in some cases. I cannot imagine what the punters think of some of the houses I show them. Well, I can, then I do, then I feel obliged to echo what I think they are thinking in a catch-up attempt to appear reasonably honest. Some of these guys know who I am and have even bought some of my CDs, so fair’s fair, if I notice that the house is infested with wet and dry rot simultaneously with cockroaches and termites, I really need to tell them. Some appreciate my honesty; some actually complain about it to my boss, which is why he is forever telling me to shut it. Strangely enough, those who appreciate my honesty often end up taking the houses because I have been so honest about them rather than because of any slight merits of the houses themselves, so perhaps by being open and forthright I am actually doing them a lasting disfavour.

  Selling houses troubles me all ways up. Writing music doesn’t but I can’t live off it (have I said that already too?).

  Since Jade announced that she was pregnant, our relationship has become a bit panicky. She keeps checking that I am OK with it and she is now really keen to move to a house which is more family-orientated. I keep reassuring her that I am delighted that she is pregnant (although in reality it scares me shitless) and I am now having to pretend that I am keen to move on when, in fact, I am very happy where we are. I see a lot of houses. Many of them are absolutely horrific, so I wouldn’t want to move to any of those. Others are really posh, and they don’t turn me on either. The rest are more or less like the sort of place we are already in, so why would we move?

  My living dread is that we will end up in Kirkella next door to Cathy’s mum and dad. Can you imagine? And it is a sort of vague possibility because Kirkella is at one end of Willerby New Road where Jade’s mum lives, at Jade mum’s end in fact, and Jade keeps mentioning that she would really like to live near Jackie for when the baby is born so that she can be on hand to provide ready advice and help. I don’t really think that Willerby, Anlaby, Kirkella or Swanland are me somehow. Even the Willerby New Road is not exactly tortured folk singer territory, although I would probably feel tortured enough if I lived there.

  It’s just another battle to fight.

  The one that really scares me is the one that I’ll get when Cathy finds out that Jade is expecting. She’ll explode with more propulsive power than anything lifting off from Cape Canaveral, I can tell you. I have sworn Jade and all her friends to secrecy which is one more piece of evidence in Jade’s mind that I really don’t want this child.

  What do you do when you are in this much torment? You go and see your mates, don’t you, so that they can have a good laugh and a natter.

  My best mates are Jerry, Lesley, Martin and Saskia.

  “For God’s sake, Jake, you are going to have to get a grip on your doo-dah, matey. It’s landing you in all sorts of trouble.” This is from Lesley. I get an instant flashback of the Jitterbug moment when I nearly lost it all.

  “Yeah.” What more can I say?

  “Well, congratulations, Jake,” says Martin standing up and holding out his hand to shake mine. “I sincerely hope that you and Jade will be extremely happy together.”

  Jerry is holding his head in his hands. “Oh my God,” he groans. “Oh my God.” I think he is referring to himself, not as God but as the victim. Jerry recently got married to Mary after being a single man who bedded almost every woman who would have him throughout almost his entire life and, as he is a rather accomplished performer and remains blessed with majestic good looks, they must have run into the thousands if not tens of thousands. He is a man torn between the need for somebody to attend to him during his dotage and his insatiable appetite for liberty - a man racked with guilt and shame, as he should be.

  “Are you pleased?” Saskia asks me.

  “In a way, yeah …..”

  “Which means in most ways no,” Lesley adds in for me.

  “Oh my God,” Jerry continues. “Oh my God.”

  “It’s not every day you hear Jerry in prayer,” Martin wise-cracks. “Does God know who he is?”

  Jerry stops.

  “I’ll take that as a no, then,” Martin concludes.

  “We are all God’s children. It is just that he abandoned some of us at birth. Sorry, Jake, I didn’t mean to mention birth.” Jerry’s songs are about as miserable as they get, but played impeccably. Imagine Leonard Cohen as co-written with Ivor Cutler.

  “Perhaps it is time you had the snip, matey,” Lesley continues. “Draw your tom-cat days to a close.”

  I am not sure where she is getting this from. I haven’t really had any tom-cat days. Yeah, there were certainly a few women before Cathy, as Lesley well knows, but since Cathy appeared on my scene there has only been Jade and that was after Cathy kicked me out. However, a bit like my Hull friends, this lot disapprove of the age difference between Jade and me. They think I am exploiting the innocent, or that I am the innocent being exploited by a gold-digging groupie, whichever way around it is. What gold?

  “When’s it due, then?” Saskia inquires.

  “Six months, give or take.”

  “Has Jade had a scan yet?” Saskia continues.

  “Yeah.”

  “Were you there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It is a girl or a boy?”

  “Dunno. We didn’t ask. Jade wants to be surprised.”

  “How is Cathy reacting?” asks Lesley, always the one to pose the stiletto question.

  “She doesn’t know yet.”

  “Strewth,” exclaims Jerry.

  “God by another name,” comments Martin.

  “I’d rather you didn’t tell her.”

  The table explodes with raucous laughter. “Don’t worry, Jake, we won’t,” Martin assures me.

  Jerry shakes his head dolefully several times like it is a pendulum. “No, we certainly won’t be doing that.”

  “She was the one who kicked you out,” says Saskia.

  Nobody responds to that.

  “Written any new songs recently, Jake?” Jerry asks mischievously.

  “No. I haven’t written a thing in weeks.”

  “Can’t be that bad, then,” Lesley comments. “Jerry would have written a double-album by now.”

  “I’ll get some more drinks in,” says Martin, at which point we go back to discussing industry news, who deserves fame and fortune, and who is getting it.

  * * *

  Harry brings the kids round. “Thanks, mate,” he says. “I owe you one.”

  “They are my kids.”

  Harry leans forward towards me confidentially. “I probably shouldn’t tell you this but Cathy did try asking her mum and dad who refused point blank. Apparently they broke a china dog last time they were there.”

  “Excellent,” I react. “Shame they couldn’t have taken out a whole fucking shelf.” Josh pokes his head a
round the door and beams at me.

  “So, did you put them up to it?” asks Harry, almost admiringly.

  “No, but I can’t stand those bloody things. Still, it was probably an accident.”

  “Apparently not. Cathy’s dad caught Josh carefully laying down the golden retriever on the table before smashing it with a book and Sam jumping up and down in delight screaming ‘Again, again’.”

  “Oh.”

  Josh has disappeared again. He probably thinks that my approval for his anarchic iconoclasm has its limits. Sam enters the room instead and hugs my leg while I vice her around the shoulders.

  “Cathy asked me to check that you aren’t going out tonight. Sorry.”

  “Harry, don’t worry about it. I know better than anyone what you are up against. You can tell Cathy that Jade and I have hired ‘The House Of 1,000 Corpses’ and ‘Kill Bill’ and we are planning on huddling up for a night of family viewing.”

  “Ah, I may not be that specific about the films then. The family viewing sounds good, though.”

  “If I was you, Harry, I would just say that we will both be in and leave it at that. Don’t feed her any bones for her to gnaw at or you will never get to have your night of passion in the Lake District.”

  “The M62 is jam packed so we may not get there tonight anyway. All right, I’ll be off, then. Thanks again to both of you.”

  “No problems.”

  No sooner has Harry left than Jade comes out of the kitchen. “Do you really have to go out tonight?”

  “Yeah, but only for a quick pint or two.”

  “Just to get your own back on Cathy?”

  “Yeah, that’s it.”

  “Well don’t be long then. Tell Kevin that I want you back before nine to help put your kids to bed.”

  Josh and Sam are watching me with disappointment.

  “I won’t be long, kids. I just have to see a mate about a book. You’ll have fun with Jade, I know you will.”

  Sam starts to cry.

  “Oh, Sam ……”

  “Sam is such a cry-baby,” Josh taunts her.

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  “You don’t want Dad to go either.”

  “No, but I’m not going to cry about it. He’ll be back soon.”

  Sam’s face totally dissolves. “But I’ll miss him.”

  Jade goes down on her haunches to give Sam a big hug, but Sam wriggles herself free and comes and grabs my leg again instead. I lift her up.

  “I don’t have to go.”

  She stops crying instantly and smiles at me.

  Jade picks up the phone and hands it to me. “It was a bloody stupid idea anyway,” she comments.

  “Yeah, it was really.”

  * * *

  Kevin is one of my ex-house mates, the one who is all of a sudden rolling in it in the fraudulent name of art. I could have coped with it if he had been rolling in it for some normal reason, but he is making big money as an author cynically writing totally crappy books. He calls himself Patricia Season and produces the sort of Mills & Boon stuff where Roedean girls are abducted by Arab sheiks who turn out to be rich and gentlemanly. In fact every single one of his books is like that. He has one plot which he has churned out about ten times by now and he sells millions of the bloody things, quite a large chunk of them to the Middle East - sand to the Arabian desert. I swear that all he does from one book to the next is find & replace. I have tried to prove it but the minute I open one of his books and find that the heroine is called Lucretia or Daphne or Miranda I am instantly moved to hurl it hard at the floor swearing loudly and stamping on it, at which point Jade picks it up, straightens it out, and reads it.

  “You can’t seriously want to read that rubbish.”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  “But they’re all the same.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “Don’t you get bored of them?”

  “No, I like his books. He’s a really good writer. He knows what we want and he gives it to us.”

  “I can’t believe it.”

  “He’s your friend, Jake. One of us should read them in case he asks us about them.”

  “He won’t. He knows they’re utter crap too. The last thing he will want is an honest opinion.”

  “Well, if he asks me I’ll tell him that I honestly like them.” Can’t wait to see Kevin’s face on that one.

  “Do you think I should take lessons from him to get my income up a bit?”

  “No, that wouldn’t be you. Besides, you’d look pretty daft up there on stage in a skirt and a deep voice. Some people could get away with it, but you couldn’t.”

  I’m beginning to realise that everybody thinks I’m a boring old git. I think that increasingly myself. One day I’m going to smash my guitar on stage just to show them what I am capable of, except that I can’t afford a new one. Maybe I’ll spit at somebody in the audience instead. Or I could go the other way and ask for requests. “The Birdie Song. Coming up, Madam.” Some days I want to torch the world and dance around the fire, so I can’t be that boring after all, although my dancing leaves much to be desired.

  Needless to say, Kevin’s publicity is that his alter ego, Patricia, went to Roedean herself from which she was abducted by the son of an Arabian sheikh studying at Eton and Oxford before he slung her wriggling and struggling over his shoulder and lugged her onto his private jet, and that her books are therefore based on her real life experiences. Someday someone will do an exposé on him for Dispatches but Kevin boasts that it doesn’t matter because he really does know a Patricia Season who went to Roedean who really was abducted by the son of an Arabian sheikh; it is just that he ghost writes the books for her. You can pay some people to say anything. The really irking thing is that he is still the insufferably modest guy who drinks halves of lager and never speaks above a whisper I used to share a house with. The only way you know there is something to him is that he has a wicked twisted smile that appears for no obvious reason in the middle of a pregnant pause (hate that expression), so he is either an author or a sadist.

  Strangely enough, I have another ex-house mate who looks like he is going to be a successful author too - Nick Quantrill. His genre is private eye novels and he is beginning to get a lot of attention for his work which is actually worth reading so he’ll probably have to continue giving them away. Looks like he might finally have hooked up with a publisher though. Nick is quiet too and an accountant, so he looks death in the face day and night. He comes regularly to my gigs, and has done so for years, so he is officially a good lad whereas Kevin is never around nowadays - too busy running his property portfolio.

  It’s all a long way away from when we were sharing the house in Parkfield Drive. Kevin was the total slob, Nick was the tidy one, and I was the one out fishing for the birds with my guitar and my leather jacket (“I am an author doesn’t cut it in Hull; I write my own songs and perform them to crowds of fans” does). Near the end I met Cathy and she moved in with me which upset the entire balance of the house. Cathy and Kevin were forever having set-tos because Cathy resented picking up Kevin’s soiled clothing and discarded plates all the time, which shows you that tidiness is no indicator of future wealth. One day Kevin came back to the house with a girlfriend which surprised and delighted us all, except that she was not only the splitting image of my Cathy but she was actually called Kathy too. That made life very confusing. Nick, my-Cathy and I couldn’t work out why Kevin would go out and get himself a woman who was exactly like his tormentor (and mine, even in those days) but he was right - it worked. He and Kathy got married and they are still together. Me and my-Cathy haven’t been quite so lucky.

  The trouble is that now I cannot bear to see Kevin’s Kathy, although I don’t admit that to anyone. Kevin and I always meet up alone. He must guess the reason.

  I came back to the Parkfield Drive house unexpectedly one afternoon and Nick was behaving really strangely. I was trying to go upstairs for a piss - t
he only toilet being upstairs - and he kept finding excuses for stopping me. Eventually I said “Out with it, Nick. What’s going on? You are behaving really weirdly.”

  “I am?”

  “Yeah, you are.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Come on, Nick. There is definitely something. What’s going on upstairs?”

  “Upstairs?”

  “Yeah, upstairs.”

  “Nothing,” he replied rather too quickly.

  “I’m going to have a look.”

  Nick barred my way. “I wouldn’t do that.”

  “Why?”

  “I just wouldn’t.”

  At that moment I heard my-Cathy call out “Oh Kevin!” sounding suspiciously affectionate, even impassioned. My-Cathy and Kevin’s Kathy have very different voices so you can easily spot the difference if you can get them to open their mouths (not so hard, especially if you have just done something wrong).

  “Is that Cathy?” I asked Nick, perplexed.

  “I don’t want any trouble.”

  “Nick, I am going up to have a look.”

  “Don’t, Jake.”

  “Well, I’m going to.”

  I pushed past Nick and ran stealthily up the stairs. Something was happening in our bedroom. I heard my-Cathy’s voice again followed by Kevin’s voice. I then saw two heads and shapes inside my bed behaving very intimately.

  “No,” shouted Nick, grabbing my shoulder.

  I brushed him off. “Nick, stay out of this!” I ran over to the bed and pulled back the sheets. Kevin was there in just his underwear and there was what I took to be my-Cathy similarly undressed.

  “What the fuck!” I exploded.

  Suddenly everyone burst out laughing and my-Cathy emerged from under the bed. Kevin was in our bed with his own Kathy as part of an elaborate set-up. It took me a few moments to get the joke. I turned on Nick. “OK, mate, you get an Oscar.”

  “Nick,” said my-Cathy, “you were brilliant.”

  I’m still looking out for the opportunity to get him back.

  You’ve been picking at the past again

  When you should have left it well alone.