That night, when we return from the pub, Robin sits on a chair and sets his twelve-string acoustic guitar on his knee. He plays a chord, then hunches over the instrument, adjusting first one gleaming machine head, then another. The rest of us settle round the kitchen table. Lynne uncorks a bottle.
Robin starts with ‘Amsterdam’, a Jacques Brel classic that has been part of his repertoire for years. For the first few lines, his voice drops low. He is intimate, informative – setting the scene.
In the port of Amsterdam
Where the sailors all meet
There’s a sailor who eats
Only fish heads and tails –
But it isn’t long before the lyrics allow him – no, compel him – to cut loose. His eyes squeeze shut; his lips seem to tighten. He sings with a mixture of ferocity and yearning.
And he yells to the cook
With his mouth open wide
Hey, bring me more fish
Throw them down by my side –
From that point on, we’re listening to a drunken lament, a ballad drenched in semen, piss and vomit, a hymn dragged reeking from the gutter. The song ends with five savagely strummed chords, the last of which is silenced the moment it is played as the flat of Robin’s hand slams down over the strings. Our applause is long and wild. The room appears to cave outwards; the windows rattle in their frames. Luckily, the Atwoods have understanding neighbours.
The next song, ‘Home’, is one that Robin wrote. His voice lifts an octave as he launches, with a howl, into the first verse:
No, I won’t be your son
My mother died, my father died –
When I first heard the song, I thought of Robert Mitchum’s tattooed fingers in The Night of the Hunter, LOVE and HATE so proximate, so yoked together, that it’s difficult to know where one ends and the other one begins, and as I listen to Robin singing it again I feel he has caught something of the uneasy, unruly time that we are living through. He seems to push himself to the limit in ‘Home’, except during the chorus, perhaps, where his voice softens, but even the softness has an edge to it, a thinly veiled viciousness, like a razor-blade wrapped in a piece of Andrex. For a while, he sounds disingenuous and plaintive, almost resigned, but his fury soon returns, the guitar appearing to accelerate towards that familiar, wailed denial: No, I won’t be your son …
He’s exactly the right amount of drunk tonight, not so drunk that he fluffs his chords or stumbles over words, but drunk enough to hit a note and wring every ounce of rage and anguish out of it. When he sings like this, I sometimes forget to breathe. I can’t believe he’s in a kitchen in Wales, with an audience of five. He should be up on stage, in the Marquee or the Roxy.
A year or two ago, Robin had a band called the Sticky Cherubs, and they played live on a beach near Seaford. It was low tide, and the waves were breaking far out, uneven lines of white unravelling, one after another. That distant, grainy roar. I have a photograph of Robin from that night. His washed-out drainpipe jeans, customized with zips, are ripped at the knee, and his white shirt hangs untucked and unbuttoned, revealing a black T-shirt that says RAPE ME. What looks like a dog’s leash or a toilet-chain is wound around his neck. Both his hands clutch loosely at the microphone stand, and one foot is lifted off the ground, as though he might be about to stamp on something. His mouth is open. His eyes are dark, flat, disconnected. He’s in the tight grip of the song. Behind him, part of a drum-kit, and the blurred but gritty horizontal layers of sand, sea and sky.
Robin.
‘Home’ is almost over. The words tell of someone staggering back to his lodgings after a night of heavy drinking. The tone is quiet, elegiac:
I will go where the old black men go
And shout in the dark
And fall into hedges
On my way home –
Robin performs some more of his own songs – ‘One Hundred and Fifty Miles’, and ‘Dreaming’ – and then Jacques Brel’s ‘My Death’. We whoop, clap and whistle between numbers. We don’t want it to end. His voice is beginning to sound rough, though. He gulps from his glass of wine, which Lynne promptly refills.
‘All right,’ he says. ‘Last one.’
Tom Jones’s ‘Delilah’ is a song about betrayal, and Robin puts so much into it that it’s a wonder he doesn’t do himself an injury. As he sings of the revenge the man wreaks on his unfaithful wife, and the knife that silences her mocking laughter, my heart pushes high up into my chest, and I glance over at the Atwoods. Like me, they’re captivated. They love Robin – the sheer size of him, the raw passion, the waywardness – and all of a sudden I think I understand why he was so eager for me to come to Wales. The cars are no more than a pretext. This is a place where he doesn’t have to follow in my footsteps. This is a place he carved out for himself. He wanted to show me his new family. People who are devoted to him, thrilled by him. Proud of him.
‘More,’ the Atwoods shout.
Robin looks at me. Shrugs happily.
We leave on Monday morning in the more reliable of the two Rovers. Robin will pick up the other one in a few weeks’ time. This seems to confirm the theory I came up with while he was singing, but I no longer care; the weekend was an adventure, just as he had promised it would be. We cruise along at fifty, the windows open wide. Smells jostle, intermingle. Buttercups and petrol. Leather. Queen Anne’s lace.
As we cross the Severn bridge, I tell Robin what Lynne said while we were walking to the pub on Saturday.
He grins. ‘That sounds just like her.’
I ask him what he thinks she meant.
He doesn’t answer straight away. After perhaps a minute, he says that she’d probably heard too much about me. She did the same thing with him sometimes. She threw down the gauntlet. Threw it down really hard. It was a kind of test.
‘She likes to tilt at windmills,’ he says.
I suspect he knew that she would try and make me squirm a little. Maybe that had even been part of the agenda – a desire to see her put me in my place.
Once we are in Gloucestershire, he lets me have a turn behind the wheel. At first I am struck by the sheer tank-like weight of the old car. The steering is light, though, as if to compensate. When I press down on the accelerator, it takes a moment for the engine to assert itself, but then the whole structure gathers speed with unyielding determination. I feel unstoppable.
‘What do you think?’ he asks.
‘It’s heavy,’ I say, ‘but it’s smooth as well. I like the way it surges.’
He looks pleased.
After ten minutes, I offer to swap places again. I can tell that he can’t wait to be back in the driving-seat.
Somewhere east of Cheltenham, Robin changes into overdrive, and the gear lever comes off in his hand. Still thundering along the road, he holds up the gear lever and waves it about inside the car.
‘They don’t make them like they used to,’ he says with a wild laugh. And then, ‘No, wait. I got that the wrong way round.’
Tumbleweed
The weekend after we return from Wales, a friend called Toby drives down from London. Toby works for Texaco, as a geologist. Presumably, he helps the company in their quest for oil, though I can’t believe he has found much of it; he always treats his job as such a joke. Good-looking, with blue-grey eyes and teeth so perfect that they could be American, Toby has a different girlfriend every time I see him.
When I first met Toby, he had two favourite places. One was the Chippenham, a pub in Maida Vale. We would be sitting on the dark brown carpet in my flat, then our eyes would meet and one of us would shout, Go! The Chippenham exerted such a pull on us that we would run there, even though it was half a mile away. Once we had burst, panting, through the double doors, Toby would shake a Rothman’s out of its packet and flip it through the air. It was meant to land, filter first, between his lips, but the trick almost never worked. Still, Toby seemed to think it was worthwhile for the rare occasion on which it did. We would drink vodka or bottles of Pils
, and if the table was free, we would play pool. Mostly, though, we talked to people. There was a burglar who would sit at the bar with an A–Z, planning his next job. There was a retired gravedigger. There were mischievous Irish nurses and stoned Jamaican bricklayers. I remember a dog that could jump as high as my shoulder. When the pub closed, we would often go back to someone’s flat, cheap booze lined up along the skirting-board, and a room set aside for dancing. Punk had burned out. Ska was all the rage – bands like Selecter and the Specials.
Toby’s other favourite nightspot was Toppers, and he was always trying to persuade me to go there with him. Come on, he would say. The girls are really interesting. In the end, I gave in. I followed him down Poland Street until we came to a sign with a top hat and a cane on it. Toby pressed a bell. The black door buzzed. We sat at the bar on the ground floor and drank tequila slammers. I suppose I should have guessed that the girls would all be topless. Most of them were about our age. The men were twenty or thirty years older – business types from out of town. If a girl tried to talk us into going downstairs, Toby would smile knowingly and shake his head. He wasn’t falling for that one. The only time he’d ever been down there, he’d found himself drinking champagne. He wasn’t sure how it had happened. It had cost him an arm and a leg.
It’s no great surprise when Toby announces, half an hour after arriving in Eastbourne, that his first priority is to sample the nightlife. He wants some action, he says.
‘Well,’ Robin says, ‘I suppose there’s Bilbo Baggins …’
Toby looks wary.
‘That’s what it’s called,’ Robin explains. ‘Everyone in there’s about sixteen.’
‘Sounds good,’ Toby says.
I reach for the local paper. ‘Or there’s Shimmers,’ I say. ‘A Select Discotheque for Select People.’
‘I’m select.’ Toby tosses a Rothman’s in the rough direction of his mouth. It bounces off his chin and drops to the floor.
‘What about the organist?’ Robin says.
Toby studies him through exhaled smoke, both eyebrows raised.
‘The pier’s resident organist, Mr Music,’ I say, reading from the paper, ‘is back for his twelfth season …’
Robin and I have already been to the bar at the end of the pier. We sat in the corner with our pints of lager while Mr Music played instrumental versions of famous top-ten hits, and OAPs shuffled round the dance floor, hands waggling in the air above their heads. Time for another drink, isn’t it? Mr Music would say between numbers. Me, I’m sticking to the hard stuff. Lemonade. He laughed at all his own jokes. His suit was the colour of porridge.
‘He does a lovely “Puppet on a String”,’ Robin says. ‘Really lovely.’
‘No,’ Toby says. ‘I don’t think so.’
We drive up to the top of the Downs in Toby’s car, stopping at the pub on Beachy Head for a beer and a game of pool. On my way to the toilets, I pass two black plastic bin bags that have been dumped in the passage, and they remind me of what happened earlier in the week. We had agreed that Dad’s clothes should be donated to the charity shop in Old Town, and I had volunteered for the task. One afternoon, when the house was quiet, I opened the airing cupboard. There, on the wooden slats, were his shirts, his socks, his string vests and his underpants, everything folded, everything warm. I lifted out the nearest pile and placed it in a bin bag. I had to work fast, afraid of what I might think if I allowed myself to think, afraid of what I might feel. At times, I seemed to sense Dad watching me with a look of bemusement. What are you doing with my clothes? Once the airing cupboard was empty, I loaded the bags into the boot of the Renault and slammed the lid. That was the hard part over – or so I thought.
When I pulled up outside the charity shop, there were no lights on. Then I realized what day it was. Wednesday. Early closing. Hands on the steering wheel, I stared through the windscreen. I couldn’t bring myself to take Dad’s clothes back home with me. I couldn’t bear to go through this again. The charity shop was double-fronted, I noticed, with a kind of porch between the two display windows. If I stacked the bags in that small, sheltered place, they would be protected from the elements, and the people who ran the shop would find them in the morning.
Throwing glances left and right, as though engaged in some criminal activity, I carried the bags over the road and heaped them against the shop’s front door. When I was finished, I hurried back to the car. The bags looked more visible than I had imagined they would. What if the dustmen thought they were rubbish? Drops of rain appeared on the windscreen – delicately, magically, as though conjured by the glass itself. His shirts with their worn collars and frayed cuffs, his socks darned with wool that was never the right colour. The fact that his clothes had been mended, cared for, made to last – and now they were out there in the dark, the cold … I lean on the sink in the Gents. My face floats on the green surface of the mirror, mournful, soggy-looking, and I remember how the rain grew heavier, and how I went on sitting in the car. These endless goodbyes, and every one of them mismanaged.
Later, as Toby drives us back to the town centre, he flips another cigarette towards his mouth. For once, he catches it between his teeth.
‘That’s the first time in how long?’ I say, an edge in my voice.
Toby stamps on the brakes. ‘Do you want to walk?’
‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘It’s not you.’
We have drinks in Bilbo Baggins and more drinks in Diplocks on Terminus Road, and then, when all the pubs have closed, we climb a narrow flight of stairs to Ziggy’s. We sit at a see-through table shaped like a surfboard. The DJ puts on Billy Joel’s ‘Uptown Girl’, a song I’ve always hated. The dance floor is packed but lifeless. I feel a kind of rage or turmoil gathering inside me. I down two vodkas. Light a cigarette. Toby’s chatting up a blonde. Words glisten on the front of her pink T-shirt. Action, I mutter to myself. The watery drinks, the dreary dancing. Now they’re playing ‘A Flock of Seagulls’. Christ. The surfboard bristles with bottles and ashtrays. A glass glows in the ultraviolet; it looks so white and two-dimensional that it could have been drawn with a piece of chalk. All right, that’s it. I’ve had enough. Leaning forwards, I reach out and sweep the whole lot on to the floor. There’s a huge crash and then a splintering and a girl at the bar bends double, as if someone just punched her in the stomach. Another girl has brought her hands up to her cheeks. No music suddenly, just a silence that is choppy, swirly. A bit like being under the sea. Near the shore, though. Waves tumbling over my head.
‘I always wanted to do that,’ I say, but not to anybody in particular.
Two bouncers seize me. One white, one black.
‘You’re very symmetrical,’ I say.
Hands gripping me under the arms, they haul me through the club, then down the stairs. There are three of us. It’s a tight squeeze.
‘Not easy, is it,’ I say, ‘throwing someone out?’
I’m chatty now. My mood’s improved no end.
They fling me across the pavement, then stand over me, brawny forearms dangling. I feel like I’m in a western. They should have six-guns and star-shaped metal badges that say SHERIFF. I glance at the road behind me. Where’s the tumbleweed?
‘Don’t ever,’ the white one says, ‘don’t – fucking – ever come back here again, all right?’
Robin appears in the doorway, face tinted blue by the neon above the entrance. ‘Don’t worry, he won’t,’ he says. ‘Because this place stinks – of shit.’
The black bouncer swings round, levelling a stubby finger. ‘And you. Don’t you never come back neither.’
I lie back in the gutter, laughter bubbling inside me. Oh no. Banned from Ziggy’s. The night seems to stagger. It’s made of big dark blocks that don’t quite fit together.
Robin helps me to my feet.
‘You see it sometimes, don’t you,’ I say, ‘in films, but you can’t imagine doing it.’
‘It was loud. People screamed.’
‘Was it?’ I rub my elbow. �
�It felt good. Really good.’
Robin looks off up the street, towards the seafront, and then looks back at me. ‘I’m usually the one who does things like that.’
‘I know. Makes a change, doesn’t it?’
Toby crosses the pavement. ‘You could have said something. You know, like, I’m tired. Or, Can we go now?’
‘Shut up, Toby,’ Robin says.
On the way home, Robin and I sit in the back of Toby’s car. I lean my head against the headrest. Each passing street lamp makes a photocopy of my face. I watch as Robin reaches into the gap between the side of Toby’s head and the half-open window and lets the slipstream snatch his cigarette.
‘You were like a brother back there,’ I tell him. ‘That’s what brothers do.’
‘I am your brother.’
I smile.
This is probably the first time Robin has ever taken care of me. In the past it was always the other way round. He even said it to me once: You had to be our mother, didn’t you, after she died? For years I have found responsibility exhausting – the very word exhausts me – but now, suddenly, I feel younger than Robin, and light, infinitely light, so much so that I nearly float out of the window and off into the gaudy, lurching fairground of the night.
Little Black Joe
Uncle Joe died in September 1988, barely two years after my one and only meeting with him. I was living in Los Angeles at the time, but Frank sent me Xeroxes of the pen-and-ink pictures Beth had drawn after the funeral. They showed Joe in a coffin, surrounded by a horde of bearded men in baggy trousers and sandals.
On my return to England, I learned that Joe’s funeral had taken place in a cemetery in Walsall, and that he had been carried to his grave by members of the mosque where he had worshipped. No women attended, except for Miriam and Beth. Islamic law demanded that they remove their shoes; they had to stand on the wet grass in their stockinged feet. Frank was asked if he would like to say a few words. He declined. Though Joe was his brother, Frank felt marginal, excluded – a bystander rather than a true participant. According to Beth, Joe was lying on his side in the open air. His coffin, she said, was made out of fruit crates. He looked pale, unusually so, but she was able to recognize him by the slight indentation in the tip of his nose. Though the sky was overcast that day, a shaft of sunlight angled down on to Joe’s face, and this was thought to be a good sign.
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