Flying Saucer Rock & Roll

by Richard Blandford

  23

  That whole month of July was one of the happiest times of my life, I think, maybe the happiest. But I can’t remember it that way. It’s certainly not one of the little golden ages, like the summer before, or the youth club, or the time in the band when we hadn’t played a gig and we were still rehearsing and Jenny hadn’t started turning it all sour. It can’t be, because every time I think about it, I can’t help but remember what was being planned. At the time I was blissfully happy, and now I’m sick with guilt, because on some level I knew that something was up. If it was a golden age, it was a dishonest one. A fool’s golden age.

  It wasn’t even perfect at the time. Nothing ever is, of course. I remember being quite annoyed that my parents made me look for a part-time job. I found one in a newsagents in Quireley High Street, which I pretty much hated from the start. Still, it brought in a bit of money, though not that much. It was just on Saturdays and a bit on Sundays, because shops weren’t open long on Sundays back then. And though I was pissed off at having to do it so soon after finishing school, I really needed it, seeing as there was no way I was going to carry on doing my paper round now I’d left. Thomas actually carried on doing his, which would have been hilarious if we weren’t all too … well, whatever it was we felt about him to make a joke about it. Jase immediately walked into a bit of work through his dad’s car-repair firm, just odd jobs and stuff, but it was obvious they’d train him up. Ben and Neil didn’t get jobs. Neil because he was too weird, and Ben because he was too lazy. Looking back on it, there was really no hurry, and they probably had the right idea, just enjoy our freedom and the summer for a bit, but I had a girlfriend, and girlfriends swallow money, or at least they seem to when you’re sixteen. Besides, I wanted to be drinking something other than Napalm, because I couldn’t help being sick every time I did.

  The whole Fields thing just got bigger and bigger. There were so many kids round that bonfire, and it wasn’t just on Fridays any more, it was most nights of the week. I remember it being beautiful every night, clear skies and sunsets, then stars in the night sky on the way home. I think I remember one rainstorm, and us all sheltering under the trees, except for the crazy kid who jumped through the fire, and he just ran about in it getting soaked. It was a whole month of blue and green and pollen in the air, long before I started suffering from hay fever. And girls, and friends, and laughing, and music on a portable tape player, that last summer of hard rock and metal. Funny how it didn’t sound as good as it had just a month or so ago.

  So, it wasn’t all so perfect. There were a few things we could really have done with but didn’t have. The promised weed, for example, never showed up. Either the person who said they blew someone couldn’t get any after all, or they got it and smoked it all with their college mates in the afternoon, then turned up that evening at the bonnie totally mashed, but with none to share. They say that anybody who wants to do drugs knows where to get them, but we fucking didn’t.

  Another thing we weren’t getting was sex. Jenny was still holding out on Thomas, and that insane thing he had over us meant that none of us could or would cross that line, even though some of the girls were obviously up for it. Instead, we just stuck our tongues in their mouths and occasionally felt their tits. Tit feeling was OK, because Thomas had let it be known that Jenny had shown him her little lumps, and allowed him to run his hands over them and tweak her nipples in her bedroom one time, but anything below the waist or above the neck was out of bounds. Thanks to Thomas, we were all getting up to a lot less trouble than our parents feared, at least in that respect. Not that we were angels. Some of the college boys vandalised a plastic frog on a spring or something in the kiddies’ play area, which I didn’t think was cool, although Ben did. But I wasn’t going to stop them; how could I? And we were pissed out of our minds on cider and Napalm, of course.

  Obviously, one of us had been getting laid and that was Jase. But July didn’t turn out to be such a good month for him because Kate dumped him all of a sudden, giving one of those weird reasons that girls come up with, something about needing time, or needing space, or needing some particular combination of time and space that Jase couldn’t give her. In reality she just wanted to go out with a crusty from college with disgusting dreadlocks and camouflage trousers who never washed and always smelt like a wet dog. They ended up together for ages. In fact, I don’t remember them breaking up. Maybe they’re still together. Perhaps Kate’s cock hunger could only be satisfied by someone as dirty as she was. Anyway, Jase was pretty depressed about that for a week or two and didn’t come down to the bonnie for a bit, but then he did and he was back to normal.

  And then there was Neil and Louise. It wasn’t as if they were going out, they weren’t, but they always talked together the nights they were both at the bonfire, although neither of them came as often as the rest of us. She lived quite a way out, and Neil, well, Neil was Neil. God knows what he was up to some of the time. I know he stayed in on Mondays because there was a radio programme that played all this weird music that he used to like to tape and then walk around listening to all week on his Walkman.

  I think that’s where he found ‘Flying Saucer Rock ’n’ Roll’. He tried to get the rest of us into it, but we never quite remembered to listen. Besides, I heard one of his tapes and it wasn’t my sort of thing. Other than that, he might not have come out much because he didn’t have any money, but then he didn’t drink so he didn’t really need any. Neil was into abstinence from mind-altering substances, which is odd because all his heroes from the sixties were off their tits on drugs. But in the world of Neil I suppose it all made sense. Anyway, Jenny didn’t like the idea of him and Louise getting on so well one bit. She was always having a go at Louise about what an embarrassment Neil was, and Hannah did too, seeing as she just did what Jenny did and everything, but Louise was having none of it – she liked Neil and always talked to him. Maybe they met up during the day somewhere, I don’t really know. So that was July. Everything felt … ready. Ripe. We enjoyed that ripeness so much, we forgot that unless fruit is plucked and eaten, then it falls off the tree. And rots.

  It was intoxicating, that blend of sunset, grass pollen, fire and friendship. The gig almost sneaked up on us. Not that we weren’t rehearsed, we’d been meeting as normal every Saturday. But it was only in the last week that we really began to talk about it and persuade people to come. And sure, loads of people said they would. Jenny did her usual sniping about Neil’s abilities, but that didn’t stop people from wanting to go. We were happy, that last week in July, in that summer, by the bonnie, on the Fields. And then one day it was the first of August. And our dads were shifting all our gear over to that dingy little social club on the other side of town. And we were there setting up at seven o’clock, doors at eight, ready to go on at half eight. This was it, our big moment, the one we’d been dreaming about for so long we’d forgotten we were even dreaming it. If only it had stayed a dream.

  24

  For the first time that summer, it wasn’t just warm, it was humid. As we took all that gear out of the cars, Neil hitching a ride with Thomas, seeing as he didn’t have a dad to get him up there with the keyboard, big black clouds hung above. And the air was heavy. We could feel it pressing down on our shoulders as we lifted the amps out of the various car boots. Suddenly everything had turned. The summer had passed that invisible moment and was no longer ripe on the tree. Now it was pulling the branch down.

  ‘All right, Neil,’ said Thomas, ‘you grab the other end of your dooferberry.’ What he meant was for him to pick up his end of the long, heavy, outdated keyboard. ‘Tell me when I’m by the door, if you can see that far ahead.’

  Neil had recently started wearing glasses, something that Thomas had been making various snide references to, ironic considering his own four-eyed status. But then consistency was never Thomas’s strong point. As they carried it across the car park towards the concrete bunker of a social club, Thomas walking backwards and Neil obviously strugg
ling with his coordination – but then, no change there – one giant raindrop, and then another, then a third, splattered on the plastic keys and dials and levers.

  ‘Hurry-it-up-a-fucker,’ said Thomas. ‘We’re going to get fucking electrocuted at this rate. Well, you will anyway. I’m not touching this once we’re inside. So go as slow as you like.’ Strangely for Thomas, instead of letting the insult hang in the air to do its work, as was his usual style, he followed it up with a strange high-pitched giggle, almost like an old woman laughing. What it meant I was not sure.

  The rest of us, along with the various dads, quickly carried in any remaining electrical equipment, draping some of it with car-seat covers or dad jumpers or whatever was handy, leaving the drums, our only acoustic instrument, until last. That grim feeling that had bothered us all afternoon grew once we got inside. The social club was a dark, alien space. Nothing like what any of us were used to. Maybe Thomas had been there before, I don’t know. But to me, and at least Ben and Neil, this was something new. It wasn’t just dark, it was stained, a strange, sickly yellow. The carpet looked like it had been new about ten years ago, with its flecks of pastel, but now it had holes in it, and tears that had been nailed down to stop people catching their feet on them. And the furniture looked coated in fag ash, while on the bar were towels soaking up lager, a token effort at cleaning up after lunchtime opening. I’d been to the bowls club with my grandad, and that had a bar, but that was different: even though everyone was drinking, it felt jovial, but proper, respectable. This wasn’t quaint decay, this building was ill. It reeked of defeat.

  We were all on edge. Our dads could feel it too and arranged a time to pick us up, then left, with the usual dad-like whistle and jangling of car keys. ‘I don’t want to find you’ve been drinking,’ my dad warned me, as he disappeared out into the car park. Obviously, none of our families were invited to the gig. Not even Thomas’s dad, who’d got us the gig in the first place. This was for our friends. Was meant to be, anyway. But something about that place, the desperation, the despair, got to us, and we were beginning to wish none of this was happening. There was some old guy from the social doing the sound desk. He looked like an overgrown Teddy boy, with big bushy sideburns. His job was really just getting the volume right for Neil’s vocal and his keyboards, because they were the only things going through their PA. It was just him and some barman there at the time, and the barman kept on popping out back to rustle crisps. Both of them had the red-faced look of men who had spent far too much time in places like this. They were ill like the building.

  ‘Are you Animal Magnets?’ said the Teddy boy.

  ‘Yeah,’ Thomas said, suddenly embarrassed by the name. We did ‘Sound of Sound’ as a soundcheck. At first you couldn’t really hear Neil at all, so the old Teddy boy put both the vocals and the keyboard up loud. He listened for a bit, and frowned, his haystack eyebrows pointing down. Then he slid the fader down with them and made Neil quieter. A lot quieter. Now you couldn’t hear him at all. We finished the song. None of us were quite sure what to say. There was silence as we all just stood there, which Jase broke with some nervous drum banging. The barman exchanged weary glances with the sound guy. Finally, I thought I should say something. ‘Um, could we have the vocals and keyboards a bit louder, if that’s possible?’

  The sound guy squinted me a puzzled look. ‘Are you sure?’ he said.

  ‘Well, yeah,’ I replied.

  ‘OK,’ he said. The ‘your funeral’ was silent.

  He told us to go again, and he pushed Neil’s parts up. Not as much as they should have been, but up. ‘Is that what you want?’ he said.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, sensing that was as much grace as we were going to get.

  I looked around at the others. Ben and Thomas looked back, their eyes a mix of worry and bubbling anger. Jase just stared up at the ceiling while he broke into a violent drum roll, and Neil didn’t even seem to be in the room. What he was thinking I don’t know, I still don’t, but I knew what was going through the minds of the rest of us. This isn’t going to work.

  We knew then that we had been deluding ourselves. We’d been sucked in by the spell we’d cast on each other, compounded by the dreamland that had been the summer, but the utter, irrefutable reality of this dingy, depressed and depressing little social club woke us up with the sickening feeling of having overslept and being made to look foolish. Idiots who had hung on to their dreams far too long because they couldn’t even tell they weren’t real. But the beer—soaked towels were the things that were really real. And the ashtrays. And the dartboard and the snooker table with the beer spills on it. And the sound man and the barman who thought Neil couldn’t sing or play the keyboard properly. And they were right. Which meant we were going to be humiliated. We were going to be humiliated by Neil.

  Next thing we knew, the girls were there. Jenny and Hannah, of course, Louise, a couple of other Louises, and some more of Jenny’s twitty entourage. Neil, seeing Louise, finally remembered what building he was in and bounded over to her, smiling like a Jehovah’s Witness on a doorstep. Jenny rolled her eyes. ‘I suppose you’ll always have one fan, Neil,’ she said. ‘Well, depends. Louise hasn’t heard you sing yet, have you, Louise?’

  ‘No,’ she said softly, looking at Neil. ‘I’m sure he’s very good, though.’

  Jenny placed her hands on Louise’s shoulders. ‘Louise, Lou, Lu-Lu, darling,’ she said, ‘just don’t be surprised if it’s a bit … strange. It’s different, anyway.’ All of this while Neil was standing there, mind you. Maybe a week ago Thomas would have told her to shut up, but now he was silent, just like the rest of us, the social club’s absolute reality clogging up our heads like the concrete blocks it was made out of. Jenny, having finished trying to brainwash Louise, took Thomas’s hand. ‘Shall I get you a drink?’ she asked him, as if he was five. ‘I bet you’d like a Coke.’

  ‘S’pose,’ he grunted.

  I couldn’t bear to look at Jenny any more, so I turned the other way. Already, Neil and Louise had disappeared.

  More people started to arrive. Every one of them soaked from the rain that had bucketed down on the way. James, Will, Jon, other James, loads of the college kids, some of whom were even old enough to buy drinks from the bar, and Damien, and the crazy kid who jumped through the fire, Kate with her new crusty boyfriend, there apparently to prove some point to Jase that they could still be friends, but succeeding only in depressing him further by turning up, and some others, plus the old alcoholics and manual labourers who went there anyway. Because it was a club, Thomas had to keep a list of them, which he had to give to his dad afterwards in case anybody started any trouble. It didn’t sound that legal, but the people who ran the place didn’t care really, they didn’t even ask the college kids for ID. I don’t know why Thomas’s dad went there. He had quite a good job. Mind you, it was in a warehouse. He did mostly paperwork and stuff, but he was still really dealing with moving boxes about.

  ‘Is this going to be good?’

  ‘Are you looking forward to it?’

  ‘Are you nervous?’

  They were all asking me questions, and I was doing my best to answer, supping on my pint of lemonade, but I was miles away. No, not miles away, minutes away, ahead in time to the moment when we had to start playing and everybody was going to laugh. Laugh at Neil because he can’t sing, and us for being stupid enough to go onstage with him. Christ, why did we have to hook up with a monger, no, worse, a spazzer? Spent all this time, all these years, getting popular, keeping my position, making sure I had a girlfriend, and now this. It was all going to come tumbling down now.

  The minutes dragged, the minutes flew. Then, as the sick feeling in my stomach somehow managed to slip up my throat and into my head, and my hands, and my legs, it was time. Time to go on. Ben and I looked at each other, defeated. ‘Better get on with it, I suppose,’ muttered Ben. Jase, who had been sitting behind his drums, tapping along to the jukebox so as to avoid Kate and crusty, nodded sadly.
Thomas, seeing us move towards the stage that was not a stage, just a seating area with a table moved, stopped snogging Jenny up against the bar and came to join us.

  ‘Right, where’s Neil, the little twerp?’ he said.

  Good point. Where was be?

  ‘He must be outside,’ I said ‘I’ll go get him.’

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ said Thomas.

  We went outside. The rain had stopped, and the sky was lighter, although black clouds still sailed above, threatening another downpour. Neil wasn’t there amongst the various wall-sitters, drinking their cans of Napalm and bottles of cider and Newkie Brown they’d got from the garage on the way over and the old guy who’d sell anybody anything before they got on their bikes. We went out into the car park. We couldn’t see him there either.

  ‘Where in fuckery duckery has he gone?’ hissed Thomas.

  Then I saw him. He was there, with Louise. They were holding each other, no, holding on to each other, their faces about a centimetre apart, their noses occasionally rubbing, as the sun went down and the rays broke through the spent rain clouds behind them, by some railings beyond the car park that overlooked an old piece of railway that very little, if anything, ever travelled down now. Old terraced houses, their bricks glowing in the sunset, were on the other side of the track. It was almost as if Neil had arranged it. I just knew he was getting off on the romantic industrial bleakness of it all, the same way he had got off on that suburban thing the night of the fair, because that was Neil.