Lynton shrugged. Vince unscrewed the bottle, poured out a shot and handed it over. Then he poured one for himself and raised up his glass. ‘Cheers!’ he said.
Lynton sensed a challenge in Vince’s eyes. The worm squirmed to rise to it. ‘Cheers!’ he returned. They clinked glasses and then poured the liquor down their throats.
‘Wow,’ Lynton licked his lips. ‘That’s really good.’
It was as well. The tequilla seemed to anaesthetise the worm and filled him up instead with a pleasing glow. ‘Give us another one, Vince.’
After they’d downed another two, Steve grabbed the bottle out of Vince’s hands.
‘Give us it here, you great puff,’ he said, and raised the whole thing to his lips. A second later he was coughing and spluttering. ‘Fucking hell!’ he said. ‘That’s fucking dynamite.’
The bottle had gone before the support band got onstage. Their enthusiasm for its contents seemed to wipe away all the animosity between them, and they found themselves laughing together for the first time in months. It was like Sylvana and all the rest of the baggage faded to the back of the room, out of sight, out of mind. When they heard Three-Legged Dog starting their set, Steve nodded towards the door.
‘Let’s go and check them out,’ he said. ‘They seemed like good lads.’
Out the front, the place was packed. To Lynton’s relief, it all seemed to be students, hippies and a smattering of punks. They stood in front of the stage and cheered on the Dog, who played a harsh, angular type of stripped-down blues, made all the more compelling by the vocals. The tequilla making him light-headed, Lynton found his mind conjuring up all sorts of visions to that keening, hard-lived-in voice. It reminded him of Earl’s Hank Williams tapes and the shapes of the mountains that surrounded this city, a voice directly descended from the Scottish crofters who’d been displaced here, bringing nothing but their songs and stories with them.
‘High and lonesome, dead and gone,’ he caught above the sound of the singer’s guitar. That voice resounded with all of those qualities. Told it like it must have been a hundred years ago.
Vince, however, didn’t seem quite so taken with the music as with what they’d just been drinking.
‘I’m gonna find that Marty,’ he declared. ‘I’m gonna get us another bottle of tequilla.’ And he plunged off through the crowd towards the bar.
Vince didn’t return until the band had finished and Steve and Lynton had gone back into the dressing room to offer their congratulations. Lynton was really drunk now, but it was in a good way, the worm had gone and with it, the sense of disorientation. Now he felt like he could strap on his bass and play note perfect, that he’d left all his fears behind in the bottom of that yellow bottle. He’d been wrong about tonight, it was going to be the best gig of the tour, the one that brought them all back together.
Then Vince came through the door.
‘Did you not find Marty, then?’ Steve clocked his empty hands.
‘I’ve just seen something I shouldn’t have seen,’ said Vince.
‘You what?’ Steve frowned. ‘You been doing drugs or summat?’
‘No,’ Vince screwed up his brow. ‘I wish I had.’
‘Then what’s up with yer?’
At that moment, Marty’s head came round the door. ‘Five minutes, folks, if you’d be so kind,’ he said.
‘Look…’ Vince started, looked at Lynton and then stopped. ‘Look, it’s nothing. My lovely wife was right. That stuff really does fuck with your head. Come on, let’s do it.’
‘Is everything OK?’ asked Kevin, wandering up with his hands taped and his drumsticks at the ready.
Lynton looked at Vince’s face. He wasn’t bullshitting. Something had happened to him out there. But he couldn’t think about that, or that worm would come back. He had to keep it together and play this gig.
‘Yeah, yeah,’ Vince waved him off.
‘All right then.’ Kevin looked at Lynton. ‘Our usual?’
Lynton nodded, felt the sweat break out on the back of his neck. His bass was waiting for him on the left hand of the stage. He just had to walk out there and get it.
His legs felt wobbly as he picked his way across the stage, but the bass felt safe in his hands. He wouldn’t look, he would just do it. Safe. Easy. The first notes, deep and heavy, plucked their way out of his fingers and his body started to sway with them, let them take him. He heard Kevin come in behind him, brushing across the top of his drums.
Yeah, you hillbillies, he thought, you’ve heard your music, now you can hear mine.
Kevin’s drumbeats built up, slow and mesmerising, the two of them locked in their own voodoo. All he had to do was keep looking down, not out at the audience. From his right, Steve’s guitar slashed across their rhythm and he heard a cheer go up from the crowd. Keep looking down, Lynton, keep it together.
Then Vince was right beside him, closer than he should be, his elbow pressed against his shoulder, raising his mic up. ‘I am the king of this wasteland!’ he howled. ‘I am the king of nothing!’ Then he was down on his haunches, leaning forward right into the crowd.
Lynton couldn’t help it. He saw the motion out of the corner of his eye. It was like some strange, slow-motion action replay of their first ever gig, the time when Gary Dunton came steaming through the crowd with his moronic mates in tow. Only this time, what was headed their way looked a whole lot bigger and more horrible than those schoolyard tyrants.
He saw a big, sweaty moon face and piggy little eyes that were black holes of hatred boring into Vince. He saw the red mouth opening and the words that formed on its lips: ‘Nigger lover’.
His stomach did a double flip and he involuntarily stepped backwards, looked sideways, saw Steve with his head tipped back, lost in the moment; saw Sylvana behind him at the side of the stage, staring at Vince as if her heart was breaking; then saw the bottle of beer fly through the air and go smashing right into the singer’s face.
Vince fell backwards, his hands splaying out sideways, his eyes rolling back in his head. Sylvana started screaming.
Everything seemed to happen in slow motion after that. Like two sharks scenting blood, Marty and Earl finned through the crowd towards the pudgy-faced assailant, who was whooping with delight at his direct hit. A couple of Marty’s ex-biker bouncers came up behind him and he soon wasn’t smiling any more as he was hoisted out of there bellowing, the crowd parting to let the procession through.
Steve was down on his knees beside Vince, who had got up onto his elbows and was staring around in disbelief. The bottle that had hit him had been full, so it hadn’t broken against his skin but bounced off onto the stage and smashed, showering the singer in glass and foam. Nik appeared to be holding back a hysterical-looking Sylvana at the side of the stage, while Mouse and Steve hauled Vince to his feet. He swayed there for a moment and the crowd whooped in approval.
Either he looked worse than he felt or the cheers had brought him back with a bang. He raised his hands up in his preacher’s pose, acknowledging his audience’s support, then turned towards Steve and whispered something in his ear. Grinning from ear to ear, the guitarist stepped forwards towards his own mic and said: ‘Thank you, everyone. We’d like to remind you all, these boots kill fascists.’
Another huge cheer and Steve started playing the first chords of ‘Dead Loss’, the song they had written in 1977, about Dunton and his friends.
Lynton shook his head, trying to clear the image of the redneck from his brain, trying to remember how the song went as Kevin picked up the beat behind him. It was hardly likely anyone in the audience knew this song at all, but they were so behind the band now that they virtually erupted.
Steve keeps deliberately going back in time, Lynton realised. He thinks it will make things better.
But it didn’t work for Lynton. As much as he could see everyone else getting off on it, the rest of the gig seemed like a dream. It was almost as if he was standing outside himself, while the musician part of him played
on as if on autocue. But he couldn’t feel anything.
All he could see was that pudgy white face of hatred. And those words: Nigger lover. Nigger lover. He couldn’t feel anything for the music any more – even as Vince threw himself into the welcoming arms of the crowd and was borne aloft like their new messiah, lying on top of outstretched hands, watching his own band as he sang. Even as the crowd begged three encores out of the band, passing up beers they had bought themselves to urge them on.
Even when it was over, and Marty was laying on more beers backstage, apologising for the bottle-chucker, explaining that he tried to run a clean place without any of that scum getting in, but he hadn’t known the guy’s face or he never would have got past the door.
Earl had enjoyed taking the man down and throwing him out. He was delighted that the band had responded the way they did, particularly Steve, who he kept clinking bottles with and declaring: ‘Like I said, it’s good to come from Shit.’
It had all been quite a laugh for Steve and Vince. Even Kevin was knocking back the Dr Pepper with a grin. They had triumphed over adversity and now they were all slapping each other on the back and congratulating each other. They were all right.
All white.
But not Lynton. There was a hollowness inside him that separated him from all the others. They couldn’t begin to understand the way he felt. But there was one thing he still desperately needed to know.
‘What was it you saw?’ he asked Vince, two nights later, as they rolled through another night towards Memphis, Tennessee.
Vince raised his eyebrows. ‘When I went up to the bar,’ he said, ‘that fat guy was standing there staring at me. I asked him what his problem was and he just smiled. There was a little pool of spilt beer just beside him on the bar, and he put his finger in it and drew the letters KKK. Then he wiped it away and smiled at me again. I thought he was just trying to fuck with my head…’
‘But now he’s gone and fucked with mine.’ Lynton put his head in his hands.
‘Vince,’ he said, hearing the words spilling out of his mouth without even meaning to say them. ‘I don’t know how I’m going to get through the rest of this tour.’
Vince put a gentle hand on his shoulder. ‘I know a way,’ he said.
31
Teenage Nightingales to Wax
June 2002
I stood at the bottom of the Trellick Tower, looking for the right buzzer. Funny how Gavin had thought Donna had disappeared off the face of the earth, when she had been just around the corner from him all along. And in West London’s most newly-fashionable address too.
I’d always thought the Trellick was a bit of a monstrosity myself, apparently Ian Fleming had too – naming one of his most famous villains after its architect, Erno Goldfinger. But the Trustafari had been paying up to a third of a million quid for some of the flats up here, ever since the council had let them be tarted-up and flogged off with a nice concierge service installed to boot. Despite the fact that the building was still circled by little hooligans on stolen bicycles trying to sell you: ‘Rocks, hasish, coke’, and a housing estate that rattled and boomed to the sound of about ten different pirate radio stations. Apparently the views were just amazing. Well, I’d soon find out.
As per Ray’s instructions, I’d come alone, at three o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon. The concierge was giving me sideways glances, even though I’d shown him some ID, a bit tetchy about his gated community in the sky. But finally, I found the right bell.
Donna’s voice on the intercom sounded as I had imagined: flat and sardonic. ‘Thirteenth floor, love,’ she rasped. ‘And that ain’t a joke. You have to get out of the lift on the twelfth and walk along the balcony, take the first set of stairs going up on your right.’ I wondered, as I whooshed up the lift, if her face would look as hard as she sounded.
It was a fairly complicated set-up, the Trellick. The lifts only went to every third floor, so you had to walk the rest. I could imagine how scary the long, grim corridors would have been in the days when the GLC owned the building and heroin addicts supposedly laid in wait to mug you in the side rooms Goldfinger had envisioned being used as macramé workshops. They were all locked up now. There was no one about as I made my way to Donna’s door.
There was a rattling of locks and chains as she opened up. It sounded like she could remember those bad old days only too well but I was on edge myself, wondering what kind of fright her appearance would give me. Finally, the door opened a crack and she stood there, leaning against the frame, staring at me with eyes so dark they looked like they were all pupil.
Ray had told me she was half-Spanish; her mother’s folks had been evacuated here like many others during the war, when Tommy needed the Rock of Gibraltar to shield Europe. It had given her that black hair and strong, handsome face. Now there didn’t seem to be much left of either.
Her hair was clipped short, probably only a number three or four all over. It was iron-grey, flecked with white in big patches around the sides and on the top. Her face had that strange, bloated and drained look that many eighties casualties seemed to have been left with, as if all their cheekbones had collapsed into saggy half moons and all the nutrients had been sucked out of their skin. Though to her credit, unlike Boy George and Steve Strange, Donna hadn’t tried to plaster over her crumbling architecture with a cement mixer full of foundation and black eyeliner. In fact, she didn’t seem to be wearing any make-up at all, which, combined with her buzzcut, gave her the look of an aged Greenham Common protester. She certainly didn’t look like the madwoman of legend, but neither did she look much like her former self.
The only thing left of beauty were those huge, black, Spanish eyes. Which were travelling up and down me with a most insouciant glint in them. ‘Hmmm,’ she said, raising one eyebrow and a slight smile. ‘Anyone ever tell you, you look like Dave Vanian?’
I felt myself blushing. ‘No, I, er, can’t say they have,’ I blurted. ‘Do I?’
‘Yes,’ she said, looking pleased, drawing back the door properly. She was shorter than I’d expected; her body a well-rounded figure of eight shrouded in black like a proper ex-goth Spanish Mama. A voluminous long black T-shirt on the top half, ankle-length skirt on the bottom and an incongruous pair of pink fluffy slippers sticking out at the bottom. Yet again, though, there were faint traces of the old Donna in the thick, twisted silver torque around her neck and long, dangling earrings.
‘So you’re Eddie, are you?’ she said, offering a hand that was perfectly manicured, albeit with black nail varnish, and adorned with a heavy silver ring on each finger, silver and turquoise bangles rattling on her wrist. ‘You’d better come in then.’
Her hallway was dark after the brightness of outside, painted purple, with nothing but a coat-stand and a telephone table in it. Donna’s slippers made a gentle slapping noise as she walked ahead of me, her ample rear swinging from left to right. ‘This way, love,’ she said, opening the door ahead of us.
Expecting an altogether more goth interior, I stood on the threshold in shock. Donna’s front room was amazing. A vast panorama of London stretched out in front of me, as far as the eye could see, and all at once I understood the Trustafarian lust for the place. Not just the view, but old Goldfinger’s brutalist glass, steel and blond wood interior, which looked like it had hardly been changed, only added to by Donna’s own shockingly suave pieces. A huge red leather sofa on chrome legs that faced out towards the window, with two smaller ones at each side. A black Japanese lacquer table between them, with one of those long, black and white glass sixties ashtrays that looked like shapes made by the inside of a lava lamp poised at an angle on top. A miniature palm tree in a round black pot by the door that led out onto her balcony. Every surface shining and pristine.
‘Wow!’ I said involuntarily.
‘Yeah,’ said Donna. ‘It ain’t bad, is it? It was a bit of a shock to me the first time too.’
‘Did you buy this place then?’ I couldn’t stop myself from asking.
‘Nah,’ Donna shook her head. ‘Believe it or not, I inherited it. The only decent thing my old man ever done for me was pop off right when they turned this place around.’ She smiled grimly. ‘S’ironic, really. You couldn’t get me near the place for donkey’s. The Tower of Terror they used to call it, and they weren’t joking, it was like Dawn of the Dead round here.’ She nodded to herself. ‘Anyway, Eddie, can I get you a drink? Tea, coffee, orange juice? Or you can have something stronger if you like. I don’t indulge myself any more, but I always keep some in for them what do.’
Well, I was still a bit nervous of her, so I started on coffee, but I couldn’t help thinking that Donna didn’t seem to be mad at all. Granted, she looked like she’d lived a life and a half, but all the apprehensions I’d had about her living in a smelly flat full of cats and crystal balls vanished in the afternoon sun that poured through her window. She did quiz me about how I knew Ray, but we’d already sorted that one out in advance. We’d met at a record company party and I, being an old music paper junkie, had recognised his name and come over all the adoring fan. Flattered, he’d kept in touch ever since.
‘You should be interviewing Ray for this feature and all,’ she said, with surprising loyalty. ‘He was by far the best punk journalist. He was the one who went to all the gigs, the one the bands all wanted to give their demo tapes to. But he’s the only one that hasn’t gone on to make a living from pedalling the same old phony punk war stories over and over again. Shame, ain’t it? I’d far rather look at him on those bloody nostalgia programmes than poncey Paul Morley droning on and on or even worse, that wanker Garry Bushell.’
She was surprisingly funny too. I really found myself warming to her, imagining how Ray must have fallen for her, this mouthy punk Eliza Doolittle. Strangely, as the afternoon progressed and she kept up her steady flow of amusing anecdotes, I even started to realise what the physical attraction was too. Her face got better, the more you looked at it, the more animated and alive it became as she told her stories – which were studded with outrageously libellous insults and blackmail stories on just about everyone from the punk scene you could think of.
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