by John King
Doesn’t matter what age they are, women always want to fill you in on their past. It’s a different way of thinking. I try not to look back too much. What’s done is done. You’ve got to go forward. It’s more exciting, seeing what’s round the corner. But I can understand not wanting to get cornered, stuck with someone for the rest of your life, nailed into the system, your whole life controlled by bankers as you graft to pay off the mortgage and credit cards. It’s a decision you have to make. Don’t commit and you don’t hurt anyone else. On your own, there’s nobody to blame for your mistakes. That’s the way I see things. That’s my choice.
–I just hope Jimmy will be alright. You worry about them getting into trouble. Lots of boys go off the rails when they haven’t got their dad around. Don’t know what it is.
You need a role model. Doesn’t help when the politicians cut the benefits for single parents. Makes the kid’s life even harder.
–Jimmy’s in school now, so at least I can get out and work. You go mad stuck indoors, worrying about money all the time.
There’s this sound in the background, and it’s getting louder and faster. At first I think it’s someone’s music in another flat, echoing along the pipes, but it doesn’t sound right. I try and place the beat. Then I wonder if Sarah’s CD player has been left on, or maybe it’s the tuner stuck on a garage track, but again it doesn’t sound right. It takes a while, but finally I work out that the noise is coming from next door. Sarah’s face has gone red. It’s not music at all, more like her neighbours on the job. She lifts her glass and empties it in one go.
–Sorry about the noise, she laughs. Don’t know what they get up to in there. There’s screams and all sorts sometimes. Anything could be happening on the other side of that wall and you’d never know. Did you ever see that film about a man with X-ray vision? He could see through walls and everything. He knew what was going on in his block of flats, but at night he couldn’t stop seeing things, because he was looking through his lids. He was looking right out into space. Seeing further and further. In the end he was seeing heaven and hell. Imagine that. It’s better not to know sometimes. It’s a good film. You should see it.
The sound winds down and stops, and I tell her I wouldn’t mind getting the film out on video.
–You won’t find it in Blockbuster. It was on the telly years ago. It always stuck in my head, X-ray vision driving you round the bend.
It would upset Dave, mean his clothes weren’t worth having, and she goes on about this for a while, then she says she knows someone I know. I shrug my shoulders and ask her who. Says I got off with this girl at a party years back, tells me the year and everything. Can hardly remember what happened yesterday let alone years ago. I’ve always been like that. It’s a mug’s game, living in the past.
–Don’t you even remember what this girl looked like? And she seems narked for some reason. She had short blonde hair.
Something stirs, brain clicking as she keeps talking, and I don’t hear her for a while, finally tuning back in.
–She’s a lovely girl, you’d like her if you saw her again.
It slowly dawns that Sarah’s talking about herself, and the more she goes on the more I’m sure. Just can’t remember. We couldn’t have had it off. It’s not like I’m some stud who doesn’t remember his sex. I know it’s her.
–We had a kiss and a cuddle, she says. We were pissed. You don’t remember, do you?
Don’t have a clue. I lean over for another drink. Sarah pours it nice and slow, doesn’t seem fazed with me acting like a cunt. If I can’t remember a face like hers I’m in serious trouble. It’ll come to me in the end. Hope so anyway. It’s an insult for her, and I feel like a wanker.
–Never mind, she says, going and sitting in a chair opposite. I remember. You were fresh out of prison.
She puts on a pretend pout and I lean back, watch this cat stroll into the room. He stops dead when he sees me. His eyes catch the light so it looks as if there’s nothing inside his head, and I think of Dave earlier, in the pub, his brain rotting from the charlie, big holes in yellow chunks of cheese, tongue lashing. The cat stands still for a few seconds, then struts across the room. He reaches out these long legs and digs some wicked-looking claws into a chair leg, drags back, pulling threads out. He walks over to Sarah and jumps straight on to her lap, purring as her fingers run over his fur, his nose buried between her legs. This is his patch, and he’s showing me who’s king.
I get up and go for a piss, and I’m trying not to splash water when Sarah flashes back into my head. I don’t see her face, just a bedroom at a party and another girl walking in to puke up over a pile of coats. When I go back in the front room I ask about her mate, pretend I was having her on, that I knew all the time. She opens up now, laughs as she lifts Claws down to the ground, comes over and sits next to me. The cat looks pissed off about this and goes to a chair, a thin piece of superstore furniture, digs his nails into a soft arm, reaching for wood under the fabric. Sarah lobs a cushion at him and he trots off.
Nobody wants to be forgotten. It’s the worst insult. I’ve carried her in my head for years, and it’s not nice thinking that all the faces I’ve seen in my life are filed away, waiting to rear up. It makes me feel good that I came up with the memory and reach for her hand. We start kissing. I look over her shoulder and see the cat lifts its tail in the corner. She stands up and I spin her round so she won’t notice him having a piss, don’t want to spoil things.
Sarah dips into the bathroom for some rubbers and we go into her bedroom. She tucks them in the waist of her jeans and tells me to come on. I hate these things like nothing else. Never used one till I was well into my twenties, after I’d come back from Hong Kong and everyone was going on about this sexual disease that could kill you. Things were more relaxed in the old days. We fall on the bed, undressing, the silent patter of paws on the carpet next to us, the sound of my shirt ripping in the background.
Sarah sleeps curled up, but I’m wide awake, look at the clock and see it’s nearly four. I’m not complaining, feel happy enough. You get better as you get older, and I haven’t reached my prime yet, doing okay with money in my pocket and some sort of freedom. The Labour Party used to slag off the self-employed and tax them to the hilt, driving anyone who wanted to stand outside the system out of business. I used to believe in Labour politics, but there’s no Labour Party these days, just a bunch of yuppies mincing around Islington and Notting Hill, the sort of areas that used to have flavour when we were teenagers but have been gutted and gentrified by the sort of scum that leeches off other people’s culture.
I’m doing alright, sitting pretty, make a living buying and selling second-hand records and the occasional tickets, DJing, plus selling a bit of home-grown ganja to people I know. Doing the record fairs and mail order sees me alright, while Satellite Sounds, which I run with this bloke Alfonso and a young lad called Charlie Parish, can bring in three or four hundred in a good month. The tickets and blow are handy topups. I don’t have a big rent or mortgage to pay, so if I can pull in a grand a month, that’s two-fifty a week for bills, food and socialising, most of it tax-free. Can’t see how anyone needs to spend more than that in a week. The biggest expense is accommodation, and I bought a derelict flat seven years ago, did it up off my own back, paid it off double quick.
Satellite Sounds is a laugh, and I shift a lot of records that way, hand-to-hand and through the flyers that key people into the mail-order business. Distribution is a problem, but if you can crack it yourself, you’ve taken control and hold on to profits that would otherwise be milked by middlemen. It’s all about keeping some control of your life, deciding how you spend your time, and we generally play the sort of places where the people live, areas trendy DJs don’t bother with, the likes of Slough, Hayes, West Drayton, Bracknell, Woking, Camberley, Feltham, Reading, and so on. Sometimes we take a ride on the M25, north to Rickmansworth and Watford, south to Croydon and Epsom. Parish knows a local football firm who’ll run the
door when the place is dodgy but paying enough for us to afford them, but mostly they’re easygoing nights, not too professional if I’m honest. We’re making money from our favourite music. We’re pulling in a cross-section of people as well, dipping into a bubbling pot of men and women, boys and girls who want to listen to something a bit better than the normal greatest hits of the local pub disco, but don’t want to spend a fortune going into the West End just so they can stand next to the trendies, students and tourists, listening to weedy dance music that’s just disco under another name.
The cat jumps on the bottom of the bed. I click my fingers and he comes over. He’s careful, but once I tickle his head he lies down and purrs. I used to hate cats, before Hong Kong. It was after I’d done my back in lugging crates around the bar where I worked that I got a different view on them. The doctor told me to see an osteopath, and instead of a slim beauty queen rubbing oil into my muscles, cracking the joints in the neck and spine, head buried in a firm bosom, I got this bloke who was a dead ringer for a boxer, and not a very good one either, with a bashed-up face and puffy eyes. It wasn’t cheap, but he knew what he was doing and got me standing straight, told me to sort out my spine. He asked if I’d been in an accident, jolted myself, and the only thing I could think of was a couple of kickings when I was younger, otherwise nothing. That and smashing up my first car. He told me to try t’ai chi, as this would help my back. I took his advice, and learnt the short form, took it on another stage and got interested in the martial arts. I got hold of some books and sat in my room at Sammy’s with the fan spinning and a bottle of iodine-treated water on the floor, reading up on the different options before choosing karate. Sammy put me in touch with this bloke in Chungking Mansions, and he started teaching me the basics.
John Ho was a mad character, an opium addict with a taste for cold Heineken, and I had lessons with him twice a week in a hall three floors below Sammy’s. He let me go in and practise when it was empty as well. Didn’t ask for a penny, just that I gave the floor a sweep after. The ceiling needed a paint and the walls were peeling, but Ho had got down on his hands and knees and polished the floorboards till they shined. Don’t know if he owned the room or had a lease, but he loved those slats of wood. He taught me that karate is a passive art, a lot different to the Bruce Lee films. It’s about turning the other person’s anger to your own ends, conserving strength and letting an opponent wear himself out, picking your moment. The way Ho explained it, this made a lot of sense. It got me thinking, and I stopped drinking so much for a while, did some training and went over to the Philippines for a couple of weeks, later on along the North-East Asian coast on small-time smuggling runs that let me see Seoul, Taipei and Tokyo.
Ho told me to watch the next cat I saw. They sleep most of the day, but can hear a whisper and are awake right away, sharp and alert. He told me that the secret was getting out of the Good–Bad, Left–Right way of thinking, that if you really want to think for yourself you can’t hide behind any group, have to break away from the set rules. He was right when he said people take themselves too seriously. All of this tied in with punk, which had a lot to say but was forever taking the piss out of itself, moving on and breaking its own rules, always one step ahead, mutating and carrying on regardless. It was the same piss-taking humour as the Carry On films we watched and the saucy postcards we sent from the seaside. When the Pistols did that gig in Finsbury Park a few years ago, people said they were going against their ideals by playing together again, but for the Pistols it was perfect. They wanted a pay day, and if people were prepared to fork out twenty-five quid to see them taking the piss, then whose fault was that?
Ho couldn’t have weighed more than nine stone, and he was at least sixty, but he was a hard bastard. How he smoked his pipe and drank three bottles of Heineken as a warm-up, then chased me across the boards I’ll never know. He was half-Chinese, half-British, his dad a civil servant who’d got a Chinese girl in the club and done a runner. Ho didn’t give a toss, or at least he said he didn’t. Deep down he must’ve cared, but was standing firm, and he’d taken his mother’s Chinese name. He didn’t believe in sympathy, for himself or anyone else. His wife was a chubby woman, but pretty, thirty years younger. Ho was a bit of a boy away from the karate and philosophy, and not just with his opium and Heineken. He had a couple of rooms with his wife down the corridor from the hall, and sometimes he used to invite me in to listen to his Bob Marley tapes, recordings he got in one of Chungking’s markets. Ho said he liked Marley because his dad was British as well. I did the karate for a while but wasn’t disciplined enough, started drinking again and stopped practising, went to China where I heard about Smiles and headed back to England.
I knew the basics when I got back, but it wasn’t till over a year later, after I got done for assault outside the Grapes and ended up doing six months, that I thought about karate again. It was self-defence, or at least helping someone who was getting the shit kicked out of him, but coppers don’t listen. Prison was shit, the set-up bad enough, but the real killer was the loss of freedom. It was a nightmare for me. Most of the blokes inside were fine, each with a story to tell and a life they were missing, but it was the boredom that did my head in, knowing I couldn’t move around, another sort of claustrophobia. Going to the corner shop and buying a paper was suddenly important. There was no space inside. It’s something in me. I thought I was going to crack up, sentenced by the sort of scum I always hated. Prison was another lesson, and an old boy passed me some blow, which calmed things down. I started reading up on karate again, ordering books from the library, thought things through and made a proper plan for when I was released. I was never a hard man, wasn’t interested in getting a reputation for myself, kept my nose clean, used the gym and kept away from the harder drugs on offer. I turned things round. There was no way I was going to beat the system banged up, so I played the game and went with the flow, but it didn’t mean giving in, just another approach. I remembered what Ho taught me, and things came together, I found this determination I’d never had before.
When I was released, the first part of my plan was to sort out a place to live. I was never a thief, but there was a job nicking off a big firm, a major pharmaceutical company who’d been done for cruelty to animals. This made them fair game as far as I was concerned, and I came away with eleven grand. It was simple robbery, no violence, and it was a one-off. Enough to put a deposit on a flat nobody wanted and start doing it up. I got into the karate as well, went into it properly, applying John Ho’s standards to the more brutal classes on offer. I moved through the gradings and got my black belt. I was an unskilled man, and after thinking about what I could do for a living for months, the answer popped up one week before I left prison. It was so obvious I couldn’t believe I didn’t think of it years ago. The thing I knew most about was music, mainly punk, so all I had to do was put this knowledge to use. And that’s what I did.
My brain’s still racing as I leave Sarah’s flat and stroll into a brilliant Saturday morning, her phone number in my pocket and a big smile on my face. Life is sweet, it really is, don’t care what anyone says, the only downer the sick tug of a stout-charlie-vodka cocktail swilling around my gut, worse than a Chapatti Express special, their off-the-menu pharl with twice the strength of a vindaloo, the sort of food that turns the lining of your gut into the inside of a heavily oiled balti dish. I need something to soak up the drink and wet the tonsils, my left nostril numb and a trickle of blood down my shirt. Sarah’s gone and pushed me out before her mum brings Jimmy home, and it’s a good job too, because I don’t fancy standing in the hall with three generations giving me the once over, the old girl checking to see my flies are done up. Can see her lifting cushions and pillows, finding a used rubber under the bed. I’m better off out of it.
I cross the road and go in a paper shop, buy a bar of fruit-and-nut and a carton of milk off an old geezer listening to a cricket match on his radio, drink the milk leaning on the railings outside, watch the world go
by, except the traffic lights are blinking stop-go-stop-go at an empty road, yellow cones on their side next to a hole in the tarmac. The roof of a factory I worked in as a kid peeks over the buildings, and the community centre is on the other side of the bridge, and I laugh thinking how pissed I was with Dave one time, when he conned me into going to an all-nighter, a horrible fucking jazz-funk disco, and I asked for my money back but was soon getting slapped up in the air by three massive bouncers in dicky bows. Ended up with six stitches in my head, but at least I didn’t have to listen to their shitty music all night. It’s half-eight and the rush hasn’t started yet, and soon Chris will be rolling past with his family, heading for the superstores and their seven-days-a-week bargain shopping. And I’m in the clear, on the move, breathing cool refreshing air as the chocolate and milk ease the pain in my gut. I’ll call Sarah next week. See if she’ll come out, go for a drink or something. I head home, thinking about her as I walk. She’s alright.
I have a wash when I get in, put on some clean clothes and skin up, the coke still lingering from last night, grains itching away, wedged in between the soft sponge of my brain and the hard skull bone. Drugs mess my head up first thing, so during the week I keep off the drink simmering on tap, never mind the charlie Dave’s shoving up his hooter like there’s a shortage looming. I try and save the serious socialising for Friday and Saturday nights, a slow session with the old man and brother-in-law Sunday dinner time. Dave calls me the Lone Ranger, and maybe he’s right, but I work for myself and have to stick to a routine otherwise nothing gets done. Micky Todd’s shifting some powerful gear alright, and it shows how the flow of goods has picked up, trade routes dipping into the new towns, one-man labs and small businesses flourishing in the back streets of an England the cameras never record. I make some coffee and sit down on the couch, light up.
Everything’s available these days, all you need is the money to take part, and if you’re skint the financial institutions are ready with a long line of credit that’ll stretch to your dying day, gagging to sign you up. People are sucked in and spend their whole life working to pay off the interest. The coffee is smooth and slips down a treat, the grass strong, home-grown and free. It pisses all over that oily Moroccan muck. I pull the nearest box of albums over and take Asian Dub Foundation’s Rafi’s Revenge over to the record player, turn on the amp and gently spin the Rega turntable, flick the switch. I place the LP on the mat, ease the arm across so it’s a quarter of an inch over the record, lower the needle on to the vinyl and wait for the speakers to boom. It’s the small things that make life worthwhile. It took me years to get this system and I love every click and whiff of the separates, the delay and small pop of electricity connecting. I turn the volume down, stretch out on the couch and enjoy life, this feeling of well-being that’s hard to explain taking over. I’ve been lucky in life, living in the South where there’s always been work, my crunch years coming during punk which shaped my thinking, the family and friends I’ve had. I’m a lucky man and not afraid to admit the fact. One of the best tracks on the album is ‘Culture Move’. Sums things up to a T.