by John King
We’ve always argued, as far back as I can remember, which is back to when our balls dropped, everything before that snapshots, mental pictures of kicking a football around in the sun and watching telly in the rain. I wouldn’t be surprised if we were rucking in the playground at six years old, but I don’t know. It’s the way we’ve always been with each other and I don’t know why. We get on each other’s nerves, but lots of people get on your nerves in life and you don’t waste time on them. When I was in the pub it got worse. He thought the sun shone out of Thatcher’s arse, was doing well in the shop where he worked. He loved being in charge, as it meant he had less to do and could knock off more clothes than before. I was giving Dave stick, maybe because I was jealous of him doing so well, cash in his pocket and a smile on his face while I was working all hours just to get by, but more likely because he was lapping up the shit he was being fed by the press, while I’d been stitched up by Manors. He was narked I wouldn’t give him free drinks. On top of this there was Smiles and the dictators, something I kept to myself, hoping it would go away. It got to the point where me and Dave couldn’t sit down and have a drink without flaring up. Eventually it spilt over, but that was later.
Luckily I bought a stereo while I was still at Manors, and while it wasn’t top of the range it was good enough, the best I’d ever had. I was buying all the music, listening to it in the morning before going in at ten, then when I got home, making tapes, mixing the punk of the late seventies with the punk of the early eighties. I had a pretty good record collection together and never minded how old a record was, playing the early stuff, which wasn’t that old really, only a few years, just as long as it sounded good. Going to less gigs meant I was listening to the records as if they were new releases, going into the lyrics again, building pictures inside my head, appreciating things I’d missed. Suppose I was running too fast when I was a teenager and had slowed down, was able to appreciate the differences in the music. At first I could only listen to one sound, thought everything else was a sell-out. It was like with 2 Tone, thinking it was weedy because it was new, closing my eyes when really it was brilliant and carrying on the same ideas in a different form.
Some people get their ideas from books, but for us lot the likes of Rotten, Strummer, Pursey and Weller were the best writers, producing the sort of literature that dealt with our lives. They didn’t need to fake anything, do any research, just wrote what was already festering inside them and connected with millions of other people who felt the same way. These people were the contemporary, everyday authors we’ve hardly ever had in England, writing about life through music because they never thought about doing it in book form, firmly outside the literary class and without the classical reference points. And that was what made these people so special, their reference points the same as ours, right there in our own lives, not thousands of miles and years away in ancient Greece.
I stayed at home after I left school. The money I earned meant I couldn’t afford anywhere of my own, and it was easy enough there. Kids who leave home early either hate their mums and dads or go to college, but we all stayed where we were. It was fine with me. Dad sat in front of the telly when he got in from work, more and more angry as the eighties wore on. I’d sit with him sometimes and join in, understanding what he was going on about now, while Mum was always off doing something, telling him to turn the box off if it upset him so much. He couldn’t, was addicted to the news, the endless arguments. I never thought about my mum and dad much, they were just there, fighting for their small victories in life, making the money stretch while I carried on doing my own thing. The only real problem living at home was if I wanted to take a girl home. It was difficult, specially when your mum and dad hardly ever went out at the same time. That’s what I couldn’t handle, being stuck indoors for the rest of my life, only going out to work. What’s the point of watching someone you fancy turn into a relative? It’s better to love and move on, take an exciting memory with you. Love and hate is all part of the same thing I reckon.
I had a few girlfriends over the years, but nothing stuck too long. They got fed up with me, or I got fed up with them. I was never looking to settle down. I always wanted my freedom, it’s just the way you’re built. Maybe I was waiting for Debbie Harry or Beki Bondage to stroll in the pub and pull me over the bar, drag me into a cab and take me away. The only way to do it is love at first sight, none of this long-term friendship bollocks. There has to be passion or you might as well be dead. That’s what always got me about the smelly squatter punks who were really hippies, because you’d read one of their fanzines and they were analysing everything to death, done up like tramps when you knew most of them came from money, boasting about how the roof was leaking and how cold they were, killing any passion for life stone dead. If that’s all punk ends up as, student rebellion for a handful of wankers who think they’re ‘underground’ or ‘alternative’ and wear Mao caps, then I’d rather be a fucking soulboy.
There was a bloke who came in the pub who wasn’t into the music at all, but pointed out to me one night that there was a lot of women on the tapes, up front singing, and he was right. I pictured some of them I’d seen in the flesh—Pauline Murray, Siouxsie Sioux, Poly Styrene, Debbie and Beki, Pauline Black—plus bands like the Slits, Innocents, Bodysnatchers, and I’d never realised it was unusual for the harder music. It was true, there were women involved from the start, but without any big hippy feminist speeches or man-hating, and they weren’t dolly birds in frilly dresses, or with their tits hanging out like on Page 3 of the Sun. It was natural and how we grew up, and you could read the papers and hear about weak women, but we never saw them. All the girls we met were sharp, and when we were kids they were into sex earlier than us, shagging older boys, so all that white-dress virgin stuff was bollocks as well.
Smiles was alright living with his old man for a few years after his coma, but then he started hating him, and once he’d told me about Stalin and Hitler he turned even harder, let the mask slip so I wondered how long he’d been thinking this way. I saw his dad trooping off to work, with every bit of strength he used to have drained away, probably still sorry for how he’d treated his boys and missing his wife. Smiles had his dad’s nuts in a vice and was turning the screw. I felt sorry for him, told Smiles to give it a rest, that I know he got hit but there were reasons. Maybe I shouldn’t have said what Stalin told me when Smiles was in a coma, but I did, wish I hadn’t, because Smiles sneered in my face and told me to mind my own business. There were too many people getting involved in other people’s lives, making notes and keeping files, telling them what to do and how to act, what to think, look at Hitler and Stalin, think of the men, women and children, all that torture and sex.
Smiles was different after Bournemouth. It was out in the open and I didn’t know what to do. He used to come in the pub where I worked, and even though he sat in a corner nursing a drink I didn’t want him there. He made me nervous, watching as I served people, asking me about the music I was choosing. I never kicked him out, and he didn’t cause any problems, but I was on edge. When the light turned dim, he began staying in, his moods linked to the weather, as if he was hibernating. The clouds hung low and there was hardly any sun and Smiles was shut up in his house. I used to go round, but a lot of the time he wouldn’t let me in, and when he did I couldn’t get much sense out of him. I phoned Tony about what Smiles had been saying, but he’d moved away from here by now and only half believed me.
When I told Dave one night he started laughing, and it’s sad to say but it was a good drink-up, getting pissed after closing time, playing pool in an empty pub with a tape going, talking about Hitler and Stalin. We were sitting there and I had ‘Satellite’, the flip side of ‘Holidays In The Sun’ on, and Dave said remember that time when we went in the North Bank with Tony and Billy, when Chelsea took the Arsenal end. We must’ve been pissed because we were really cracking up thinking back to the times when we were teenagers running through the Finsbury Park tunnels la
te at night shitting it in case we got mugged by blacks, carved up same as in the newspapers. Thing was, there was always some big-town snobbery towards anything that didn’t fit in with the inner-city high-rise stereotype, yet there we were along with all these other Chelsea from outer London and the satellite towns piling into the North Bank and clearing the end. Even now I have to laugh at that one. Dave started going on about how Hitler and Stalin were going to put Slough on the map, if the papers ever found out how the council was paying for their keep. We had a laugh. Maybe it’s just the fight we had before I left that’s stuck in my head. Makes me almost look forward to seeing Dave again. We had a laugh at Smiles’s expense and, even though he’s dead, I can’t help grinning in the darkness.
The train takes its time entering Moscow, the outskirts building up slowly, tenements growing in size and stature, majestic halls and concrete blocks, embankment walls rising at an angle to the track. My bag’s packed and I’m standing in the corridor, watching Moscow grow, a shock after the space of the last few days. I look twice and laugh out loud. Someone’s taken a tin of paint and written CHELSEA NORTH STAND in massive letters along the middle of the stone embankment. I can’t believe what’s in front of my eyes. This is the core of the Soviet Union, one of the world’s hardest police states, and the locals are writing the names of English football mobs on their railway walls. It’s mental. Barmy facing the same graffiti that was going around Slough ten years ago. I could be in any European city, but I’m not, I’m in Moscow, the heart of the Eastern Bloc, the power base of one of the world’s superpowers, and the most feared security force in the world, the communist KGB, can’t even stop the promotion of counter-revolutionary capitalist hooligan values.
The train cruises into the station, the crawling end of the trip an anti-climax after the almost constant motion since leaving Beijing. It’s hard to believe the journey’s over, Rika at the other end of the carriage waving to the railway workers lining the platform, a stranger now, back in uniform and acting out her official role. Everything she said is right, but I feel bad inside, and seeing as I’ve only known her a few days this doesn’t make sense. Most blokes would love it, getting their end away and walking off with no after-effects, another sort of room service, but for some reason it’s a choker. Don’t know if I feel sorry for Rika, sorry for myself, or just sorry there’s no choice. She keeps her head turned away and I wonder what she’s thinking. We finish the last few yards of the ride hardly moving at all, the oversized architecture of Yaroslav Station rising above the carriages, dwarfing the train and everyone on board.
My legs feel funny once I’ve climbed down the steps and started walking down the platform, muscles stiff after six days on the train. I’m unsteady on my feet, but that’s nothing compared to my head, feel as if I’ve been on those hippy drugs. My brain’s spinning. As I pass the other door I turn to smile at Rika, but she turns her back. I leave her behind and lose the others, quickly melt into the mass of Russians heading towards the metro, looking around the station as I go, the ceiling arching high above us, built for giants. I can’t work out the metro tickets and go on to the platform, a race against time to reach the main railway office and book a seat for Berlin. There’s two Germans from the train nearby and when the metro pulls in we get on the same carriage. Once it moves a Russian comes over looking for things to buy. He’s paying in dollars and wants jeans, Walkmen, trainers. I only have a Walkman, and it’s a battered old machine that I want to keep. I ask him if he knows any good places to drink in Moscow, seeing as I’ll be staying here tonight, but he’s looking at the other two and moves on, buying a pair of Levis off the man. I concentrate on the map, checking station names, know that people are watching me. There’s a mixture of ages, a wrinkled bulldog three seats away, a chest full of medals and a beret on his head. Nobody talks.
I get off at Belaruski, where the train to Berlin leaves, and the Russian with the Levis comes as well. He makes it ten steps before a man in a leather coat comes up from behind and jams his arm into his back. Two other men step forward and one hits him over the head with a cosh. There’s a thud and he slumps forward. They’re right in front of me and I tell the bloke with the cosh to leave him alone. It’s obvious they’re police, one of the others saying something in Russian and waving his hands. They frogmarch the bloke away. If that’s what they do to someone over a pair of jeans, fuck knows what they do when one of their women sleeps with the enemy. I think of Guilin Station again, the boys with placards around their necks, megaphones and coshes, imagine the West European communists on their all-expenses-paid trips to China and the Soviet Union. There’s nothing any individual can do, and yet that Russian came on the train looking for jeans knowing what could happen, and whoever hooked up a rope and swung down the embankment wall so they could paint some graffiti must’ve got their information from somewhere.
I find the ticket office for my train to Berlin. It’s packed, families squatting on the marble floor, baggage wrapped and stacked in big piles. An official comes over and asks where I’m going. I tell him I have to get out of the country before my transit visa runs out. He’s used to this, deals with the likes of me every time the Trans-Siberian arrives in Moscow. He puts me at the front of a long line of peasants. There’s an argument and the official shouts at people who are angry about me pushing in. Don’t blame them either. The official leaves and I stand at the head of the queue, feeling guilty, glad when he brings the two Germans over. There’s an old woman who keeps going on, and the Germans talk to her. After a while the man tells me that these people are ethnic Germans shipped beyond the Urals when the war started, that they’ve lived in Russia for hundreds of years. Gorbachev is letting them return to Germany. She’s laying curses on us right now, in a German dialect that goes back hundreds of years. He says it’s amazing to hear her speak. She’s praying the crows will come and peck out our eyes. She hopes that the worms will eat our flesh. She wants our souls to burn in hell. I look at her scowling face, and despite years of communist hatred for the Church, it’s interesting to see that religion is still alive and well.
It takes three hours to get a seat allocated, never mind there’s only two people in front of me. Three hours works wonders with the witch. By the end she’s stroking my arm and feeding me apples. My train is tomorrow and I leave the station to look around. The hotels are expensive so I’ll doss here tonight, stick my bag in a locker and get hold of a street map, walk outside and go back to the thirties again. An open lorry pulls up full of blond-haired blue-eyed troopers jumping to the ground and jogging past me into the station. The first thing I notice after the soldiers is that this might be the front of Belaruski, a major station, but there’s hardly any shops or kiosks. The only shop I can see has a window filled with blocks of cheese. I’m hungry and go inside. It’s packed with middle-aged women, except this lot don’t have the happy faces of the gherkin girls in Siberia. Their features are tight and their lips sag, something you see in big Chinese cities. There’s none of the Chinese hustle and bustle in here, just silence and some bread behind the counter. Bread and cheese will do me fine. I wait my turn and point when I get to the till, hold out my roubles. The Nazi serving gives me an ear-bashing in front of everyone. There’s notepaper and pencils, and she’s telling me to write something down. Maybe the food’s rationed. Fuck knows. I point again and get another bollocking. Then I leave.
I walk towards Red Square, following the map. The streets are wide, with big pavements. It’s cold out and the buildings lining the avenue are official-looking, but probably nice and warm. It’s always hard to know how much is your conditioning when you go some where new, if you fit a place in with the image, but there’s an edge to Moscow. Even if I got off the train and didn’t know where I was, I’d feel the atmosphere. I keep walking and cross a road, the shriek of a whistle turning my head towards a policeman shouting and waving me back to the pavement. He keeps on till I’m back on the kerb. It’s a fair old walk to Red Square, and I’m on the lookout
for a shop where I can buy some food, but there’s nothing. Anything will do. A bowl of borsch or a bar of chocolate. It doesn’t matter. I’m not fussy.
I reach Red Square and see the Kremlin, picture Stalin on the balcony watching the Red Army march past, celebrating victory over Hitler. There’s a thick column of people waiting to go in and see Lenin, who’s lying in state. There’s thousands of them, waiting patiently. St Basil’s is right here as well, more impressive in real life. I lean on the barriers and let the experience soak in. It’s a funny feeling and makes me realise how much the Second World War and the Cold War politics that followed it have influenced my life. I’ve seen Mao, and it’s a shame to miss out on Lenin, but the people aren’t moving. I don’t have enough time. After a while I walk over and go into St Basil’s Cathederal, where the rooms are small and covered in drawings, proper little caves. It’s a different country in here, old and Orthodox. I don’t know much about this Russia.
When I leave it’s colder, and I head for a block of buildings nearby that turns out to be a grand shopping arcade. There’s lots of glass that keeps the weather out and lets the light in, the stone expensive and clean. The shops are packed with tinned fruit and preserves, whole rooms dedicated to fancy boxes of chocolate done up in bows, fine clothes and ethnic stalls for the tourists. Thing is, I don’t see any tourists. It’s warm though, and I walk around, taking my time. I’ve hardly spent anything yet, could’ve got away with changing ten dollars, a bundle of roubles burning away in my pocket. I can’t change them back, seeing as they’re black market, but there’s nothing I want to buy here, apart from food. I get some chocolate and cakes, and keep walking. It’s busy and I can’t work the place out, suppose it’s mostly party officials who come in here, same as the Friendship Stores in China. These are luxury goods in here, and have to be beyond the ordinary Russian.