by John King
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I suppose it’s all about reproduction at the end of the day, the constant throb of life and death, seeds that have to be planted, coaxed and cared for in the warm belly of Mother Nature, and I spot Dad in the distance as I come off the main road, a white dot of hair moving through the bamboo canes and rusty mesh of the allotments. Mum comes out of the shed and the old man turns and nods, goes over to her and disappears inside. My brain is nice and level, one of those mellow moods that come after a good week, life motoring along nice and steady, a beautiful woman on the go and money in my pocket. This is how things should be, the days rolling into each other, no aggravation, and it’s when things are at their best that the clouds gather, building up for a storm, so I laugh and tell myself to take care.
I squeeze in next to Al’s van, ALBERTO PLUMBING covering the panels. Albert’s a middle-aged bloke with a wobbling beer gut and hacking cough from the hundred fags he smokes every single day. There’s nothing Latin about him, but he’s a tradesman and did a cheap job for me when I was doing the flat up, reckons the O on the end of his name helps pull in extra business. Says it’s the women who run most homes, make the decisions that really matter, and when they read the name Alberto they think of a good-looking Italian. Seems like it would work the other way round to me, their husbands flicking through the Yellow Pages and spotting the Latin name, rubbing the bloke off their list as they imagine a Baresi-type greaseball. Albert says the woman always has the final say, and when he turns up the blokes are so glad he’s not a smooth talker with his eye on the woman’s panties that he’s given the job. It’s the old double bluff Sounds like a load of bollocks to me, but it keeps him happy, tending the allotment next to Dad’s.
I go in through the gates, Mum coughing as she mucks about with a flask, the same dirty cough as Albert. She’s addicted to the worst drug going, never mind Ecstasy. She’s tried, but can’t give it up. And I never really thought about my mum and dad when I was a kid, they were just there, living their lives, stuck in a rut, making every penny count, raising their kids and happy to sit in front of the telly five or six hours a night. It wasn’t till the old man was laid off and unplugged himself from the telly that I saw things as they were, the choices people make to raise a family, the sacrifices, and the simple truth is that if you look after your own nobody’s ever going to go without. It makes me laugh the number of big-time moralists preaching about helping others, but never bother with those nearest to them, where they could actually do some good. Too much theory and not enough action, just want to be seen in a good light.
Spring is the best time of year, life stirring again, women coming out of hibernation, everything possible. The old man’s down here every day, Mum when she can. This is his paradise, and he comes a couple of times a week during the winter to turn the soil, so the frost can get in and break it up ready for planting. We had his sprouts at Christmas, and he was that proud he’d grown them himself, didn’t have to go buy them. Winter means nothing to Dad, he’s just waiting for the light to come back so he can get outside. He doesn’t bother with the telly much these days. I used to think he was a mug sitting there on the couch, a mental patient in hospital letting the doctors inject him with whatever they fancied, the waves of trivia doing their best to melt his brain. But like he says, if you’re working all day, and doing overtime, then when you get in you’re too knackered to do anything else.
–Alright, son? Dad says, leaning on his fork.
I nod and sit down in one of the deckchairs he nicked off the beach in Selsey last year. Mum’s got a flask of tea on the go and pours me a cup. It’s a tiny patch of countryside here, and when I was a kid I used to go cherry-picking in the summer, a couple of miles down the road. There was a bloke there who went nicking apples at night, a gypsy who travelled all over, but since the new-age travellers came along things have changed, the old sites shut down and the original travellers squeezed out. It’s a good memory and I understand why Dad comes down here. Fair dues to the man. That bloke from Swindon ended up in New York, and I wonder where that apple-picker is right now. I try to remember his name, but it’s gone. I don’t see many fields these days, stuck in town, but that’s okay, my choice. I ask Mum if she remembers when I went cherry-picking, when I was a kid.
–You used to come home with stains over all your clothes, where you’d been climbing trees, she says, smiling.
And I look at her face that’s showing the years, imagine the tar lining her lungs, eyes starting to go misty, and I want to grab her and tell her not to get old, that she should stand up and live for ever. I look at Dad and want to do the same, do the impossible.
–We should grow some cherries, love.
Dad raises his eyes and sits down in the other deckchair.
–It’s hard enough growing the normal stuff. We’d have to put netting to stop the birds eating the lot.
Over by the road a radio is turned up, a love song I couldn’t name. Somebody’s favourite ballad. Dad’s face tightens, but he lets it go, looking at the Major in the far corner of the allotment, clematis curling through the chicken wire he’s set up for some sort of bean or pea. The Major keeps to himself, an easy life since his old dear died and he took over the house, went to work on the trains and then got a decent redundancy with privatisation. He bought the house and is doing alright. He has no family or expensive habits, least I don’t think so. Don’t know a lot about him to be honest. He keeps himself to himself. Thatcher served the Major well.
–We’d be dead before the trees grow and start fruiting, Dad says. Stick to the crops you know, and you won’t go far wrong. Leeks, rhubarb, spinach, beetroot, spuds. Can’t fail there.
–Carrots as well, dear.
–Carrots aren’t easy, Dad says, frowning. The sand we got off that skip last year thinned out the soil and we had a bumper crop. We were lucky. We need more sand. Hope we get some tomatoes this year. That would be nice. It’s the enzymes under the skin. Good for your gut.
–Two or three days a week without chips would be better, Mum says, leaning forward and laughing, coughing, taking the piss out of Dad who sits there like a big Buddha.
I do some digging for the old man, whose back is playing up, big chunky worms sliding through the prongs of the fork, and when I’m done I have another mug of tea, the sun high in the sky heating the sweat covering my skin, stirring things up under the surface, warming the earth. When the traffic on the main road fades, we could be in a garden in the country. It’s nice and peaceful, mostly pensioners and the unemployed during the day, people with time on their hands, refusing to sit at home rotting away, fighting back and choosing another option, doing it for themselves in a forgotten world of rusty wire and splintered wood, the plastic Coke bottles stripped of their advertising and used as cloches, old windows for cold frames and concrete-splattered planks, vines budding from dead wood, lining the tilting sheds and stringed coconut shells, daffodils bursting out all over, saved from the council tip.
The Major’s digging a fork into his compost heap, stabbing the blades into a pile of rotting weeds. A police car pulls up and this copper gets out, calls over to him. I wonder what he’s been doing. The copper goes to the boot of his car and pulls out three bin bags. The Major walks through the gate and up to the car, and after a quick nod carries the bags back to his plot. The car leaves and the Major goes back to work, transferring the manure to his compost heap, pumped-up riot-control horse shit that’ll kick things off big time. He used to be the local nutter, patrolling the streets and nicking people for spitting on the pavement, and thinking back I suppose it was all fluid when we were kids. Lots of gobbing and too much wanking. I can remember the Major standing in court getting the piss ripped out of him, labelled a nonce who hung around schoolkids. I never saw him that way. He was just a bit slow, and because he was out and about all day everybody knew his face. Now he’s rarely seen, except down here on his allotment. I try and talk to him sometimes, but he doesn’t want to know.
The allotments are on the edge of town, a pub down the road pulling in the punters every Friday dinner time with regular strippers, a straightforward boozer’s pub with straightforward girls, none of that Beautiful Belinda live sex. One of the two petrol stations has been boarded up, bullet-proof glass replaced with plywood. Weeds have already started sprouting on the forecourt and it’s mental the way billions of seeds and insects lurk in the cracks, biding their time, ready to take over. There was a plague of slugs last year and most vegetables were wiped out, but it didn’t matter too much, the allotments an excuse to get out in the fresh air, though it can obviously help money-wise. I’ve brought Dad the special-offer seeds he asked me to pick up in Woolies, runner beans and radishes, and every penny counts, the likes of spinach expensive in the supermarket, available most of the year if he grows his own leaf beet.
When the veg sprouts the insects come out of nowhere and start nibbling, slugs firming up under every brick and plank. Dad has got hold of an old sink and dug it into the ground, plugged it with Polyfilla, built a pond from scrap, the allotments a tribute to a DIY culture that grew up during the war and continued through the hard times that followed. This has filtered down. These people were recycling plastic, paper, glass, metal, wood, long before the council thought to stick bins in the Homebase car park. There were a couple of frogs down here last year, but even they couldn’t eat all the slugs, and he’s already got frogspawn in the pond, and is hoping some water boatmen and newts will follow.
–You got any energy left? Dad asks. That patch over there needs digging. If you fancy it.
I stay till six, then stop round Chris’s house on my way home, leaving my shoes by his front door but still dripping mud on the carpet. He’s sitting on the couch marking off his Lottery numbers, the kids arguing over their tea, sitting at the table tucking into cheese pizzas and chips, and Chris isn’t fazed, knows his time will come, that magic moment when the balls come out right and he can retire. I tell him he’s got more chance playing bingo with his mum.
–Fuck off, he says, under his breath.
Carol brings in a plate with a slice of pizza and some beans she’s heated up. I balance it on my knees, get Darren to bring the salt over. He’s a quiet kid, ketchup down the front of his England shirt smudging the three lions, makes it look as if they’ve been chewing up Germans. Carol sits down and grabs the remote off Chris’s lap. She clicks over and turns the volume down, beautiful people giggling, lining up a blind date.
–I’m starving, Chris says. Is there any pizza left?
–Joe’s just finished it. You must have a dodgy thyroid. Like Mum had, when she lost all that weight.
She turns to me and shrugs.
–He never stops eating. Don’t know what’s wrong with him.
When we were kids we said he had a tapeworm, because there weren’t many Chinese takeaways around and they always said that if you ordered spare ribs you’d end up with a massive worm gobbling up your foot, swelling and taking over, except we never bought spare ribs because they were too expensive, the real jewel on Mao’s menu. Now Dave’s usual joke is that Chris has been going up to London on the sly and has caught AIDS off an MP. I tell Carol that it’s in his genes, part of his DNA, built into him from the beginning.
–I suppose so. Just wish he’d put a bit more meat on his bones.
–Not an ounce of fat there, Chris laughs, standing up, looking at the telly. Dear oh dear, that girl’s going to get a fright when they move the screen.
The boy on the programme is done up in some seriously flashy clothes.
–Fucking ponce, Chris says.
Carol slaps his legs.
–Not in front of the kids.
Darren turns round grinning, while I get stuck into the beans and pizza, have a can with Chris when the kids go to bed and Carol has a bath. He’s sitting in these Bugs Bunny slippers he got for his birthday and I ask him who’s the ponce now, think of Sarah in her Mickey Mouse slippers early morning, the sun coming through her kitchen window. He smiles and nods, and I should be getting home, have to sort those records out, a long job that has to be done if I’m going to sell them. I leave Chris’s at half nine, get indoors and pour out a nice cold can of lager, flick through my albums and pull out Massive Attack’s Blue Lines, take it over to the record player.
I sit down and get stuck in, and even though the records are taking time to sort out it was a good buy. Old sleeves have to be replaced and plastic covers added, but more important is the actual vinyl, and I go through checking for scratches, cleaning it up with my magic solution. Records I fancy and don’t already have I keep for myself, and if a picture cover’s in better shape than one of mine, I swap it around, but I have most of the stuff already. The quality of the picture covers varies. Some are alright, others ragged. There’s a big fair coming up in Victoria and I’ll take this lot along, with the stock I’ve already got. First I’ll put them on the Internet. Last year I topped three hundred pounds at Victoria, and reckon I could do better this time. There’s enough teenagers looking for the original music, not to mention the older faces. Vinyl’s more of a specialist medium than CDs, so records pull in the serious people. CDs have to be deciphered and translated, whereas with vinyl the sound goes straight up the needle and out through the speakers. It’s warmer, and DJs choose it every time, right across the board.
Machinery can only go so far, and while CDs might be perfect for classical music, this is all about rough edges and a feeling you can never get from a computer. Nobody’s going to better the Sun Studios sessions with Elvis, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis and the rest of them. The equipment was simple, but meant the feel wasn’t lost in the machine. You could spend a fortune and never get near the feeling of the legendary Jamaican producers. It’s the feeling that counts, and this goes for the new music as well. DJing is an art, and I’m just a spinner, but I’ll stand there and watch Charlie mixing up sounds and that’s a massive skill in itself. Anyone who gets stuck in a time warp and misses all the innovations, the scratching, sampling and mixing is losing out.
The Slaughter & The Dogs single ‘Where Have All The Boot Boys Gone’ is getting a spring clean as I mumble that I’m right here, go on to ‘The Call Up’, a Clash 7-inch, taken off the Sandinista album. I never really appreciated this LP when it was first released, a triple sold for the price of a single album, and I put it on when Blue Lines ends, and it’s obvious the Clash were ahead of their time. I play all six sides, move the needle back to ‘The Equalizer’, do the same for ‘Crooked Beat’ and ‘One More Time’, Mikey Dread right there on the talkover. ‘The Call Up’ reminds me of a train trip I made across Siberia, all the way from Beijing to Moscow, not long before the massacre in Tiananmen Square and the collapse of the Soviet Union, and around the same time the Berlin Wall was demolished as well. Those years away gave me a glimpse of the world, taught me some truths, made me realise that this is a moderate country at heart, showed what racism and communism are like close up. The seventies and eighties were lively times. We grew up with Europe divided and the threat of nuclear war. Vietnam filled the screens and the Second World War and Holocaust were right there in our heads. Kids we knew were getting shot in Ulster, and there was a constant battle between the state and unions, riots around the country and on the terraces, constant battles and opinions. So the music was angry and hasn’t been matched since.
I line the singles up, thinking about when we used to go up to Camden and how it’s changed, become a tourist spot, full of professionals and students, the boozers we used to drink in gutted and turned into trendy bars. I’ve been to the record market there a couple of times, been all over the place, and you get some loonies going around the fairs, blokes who have to own every pressing ever released. They start off with their favourite music, then move on to something else. It takes over their lives. They’ll go everywhere looking for a particular release, building up the suspense, and when they find it, it’s like they’ve had sex with a beautiful woman. You get all sorts.
It’s not just your Clapham Junction trainspotter, overweight and underloved, but a mixture of introverts and extroverts, the sort who want to pocket the records and move on, or the flamboyant ones who stick around talking about pressing plants and obscure groups who were shit but because the print run was so low have made records that top the price charts. I mostly do the big fairs, mail order easier, but I get to see places like Morecambe, Bradford, Leicester, and I’ve been over to the continent a few times. It’s a good life. I’ve been lucky.
As well as the straightforward collectors, there’s the music lovers, people who get into every note and lyric. People want to build up back catalogues, match the new music with older material, find the influences and fit the whole thing together. I get people who dress in motor-bike jackets and suits, a lot of kids who mix records and concentrate on the electronics, but want to know about the Sex Pistols and Special AKA. It takes all sorts, and I suppose I could go into other areas, get into more types of music, but I concentrate on twenty years of punk, 2 Tone, plus the reggae and ska I know. Punk is my speciality, from the seventies to the modern day. I’ll sell the soul stuff as a bundle. Move it on. Don’t want to waste my time trying to work out prices. Nirvana’s Nevermind is in with the albums, and it’s out of time with the rest of the records. Maybe he bought it on a trip home, or it belonged to one of his tenants. Nevermind and Never Mind The Bollocks, plus Never Mind The Ballots. Nirvana kicked off another flood of punk in the US. I’ve got all their records.
When Kurt Cobain blew his brains out the papers chalked it up as a rock ’n’ roll suicide, dismissed the man and concentrated on their idea of drug addiction as some sort of romantic rebellion, dismissing depression as creative misery, while the righteous put it down to self-indulgence. So the face of an ordinary man who loved music and could write a tune and lyrics ends up on a glossy poster, same as poor old Sid Vicious, a teenage kid who was exploited by big business, his self-mutilation touted as more rock ’n’ roll chic. I read in a paper that Sid was gang-raped in a New York prison, after he was charged with killing Nancy Spungeon. It was a casual sentence in a newspaper article. Don’t even know if it’s true. Maybe some people think he deserved it, seeing as he spat into the crowd, sliced up his arms, and had a spiky haircut. Probably they reckon he deserved the heroin he shot into his veins when he died.