by John King
–Fucking hell, Luke laughs, you like your salt, don’t you.
I nod and grin, pleased he’s smiling. I tell him his dad was seriously into music, same as him. We were punks when we were young.
–With Mohican haircuts and safety pins through your nose? Going around begging and sniffing glue in doorways?
It was nothing like that. It was about the music and most people couldn’t afford to dress up, and that beggar act is a con. Punk was about ordinary kids. It was anti-fashion, yet the fashion journalists and university lecturers who have made a mint trying to intellectualise the subject have concentrated on the management end of things, the bands they were ligging with instead of the people, the masses, the social climate at the time when it all kicked off. Punk was anti-fashion.
–I’ve got a punk CD somewhere. Greatest hits.
I enjoy the flavour of the tinned tomatoes, juice soaking a slice of toast. So what’s he’s going to do now? Visiting a grave is fair enough, but what next? Is that all there is, a headstone and a message, then back out on the first train to Paddington?
–I’ll have a walk round and see where Dad grew up. Get a feel of the place. When I was in the home I used to think about having a mum and dad. Used to he awake at night and wonder what it was like, and I used to try and imagine how my mum and dad would be. I drew pictures of them, mostly faces off the telly, or out of books, and when I went back to Mum I found out that she was a beautiful woman, a beautiful girl who was let down when she was a kid. Mum never had a photo of Dad. I don’t know what he looks like. You don’t have a picture, do you?
I shake my head. It’s not the sort of thing you do in everyday life. People take photos when they’re away from the routine. On holiday escaping the daily grind, a quick taste of paradise. Walking down the promenade eating sugary doughnuts and drinking tea, going to the funfair and playing crazy golf, donkey rides on the sand and chips twice a day. No, we never went around taking photos of each other, probably never had a camera till we were in our twenties. Can’t exactly see us standing in a pub on Friday night posing for a snapshot, or at the Electric Ballroom saying cheese. Wish we had in a way, but I’ve never bothered, not even when I was on the train crossing Siberia, at work in Hong Kong, travelling around China. I’d like to give Luke a photo of his dad. I could see if Tony’s got anything. He’s bound to have a picture. He’s living in Langley I think. Haven’t seen him for years. Don’t have a clue where old man Dodds is, except that he moved out two months after Smiles died and was staying with Smiles’s auntie till he sorted things out. I heard he’d gone down to the coast, but Tony never talked about him much after he left. He could be dead for all I know. They’re Luke’s uncle and grandad. Never thought of that. He probably doesn’t know about them, so I start to fill him in, get excited thinking about it, how it’ll pick everyone up.
–I’m not bothered about them, he says, an edge in his voice. I know who they are, but don’t want to make a fuss. This is about my dad.
Doesn’t seem right somehow, but I let it go for now and decide to try again later, wonder what he’s going to do in Brighton.
–Computers is how I make my money, but I want to use them and make music. They’ve opened things up. You can do what you want and don’t need a studio. Do it all yourself. You don’t have to waste time fucking around trying to persuade people to see things your way.
I tell him there’s a bloke I know called Charlie Parish who’s into all that. There’s three of us play records together. I take care of the punk, past and present, while Alfonso deals with the reggae side of things. I tell Luke he takes after his dad, never mind the looks. Luke’s eyes open and he seems embarrassed, but really I think he’s chuffed. He looks like Gary but the longer I look at him, the more differences I see. We have another tea, keep talking till they’re finished.
–I’ll pay mine, he says, when we get up to leave, but I tell him it’s my treat.
He insists, and I respect him for it.
Down at the end of the road we stop and Luke says he’s going to walk around and see what’s what. He’s got the addresses of his mum and dad’s houses. I tell him that if he wants somewhere to sleep tonight he can crash out on my couch. He nods and says he might. Doesn’t know yet. I go into the bookies across the road, write down my address, phone number, draw a map. I hurry back over and give it to him. He nods. Thinking about something else. Says thanks again and walks off in the opposite direction.
It doesn’t take me long to get home. I boot a KFC box across the lay-by, bones tinkling on the ground, sit on the couch and wait, the room quiet except for the rattle of the windows and the hum of traffic on the motorway. Downstairs, pipes yawn and stretch, vibrating up into my kitchen, dying down again. There’s lots of things I should’ve asked Luke and I hope I haven’t missed my chance. Everything’s falling around me, and all I can do is sit on my own and hope I get a second chance.
Luke stays two days and I give him the guided tour, show him the sights, the market with its special blend of pet-shop seed and butcher’s livers, the racks of polyester shirts and plastic toys, the stall selling old rockabilly records. We go through a spruced-up Queensmere lined with jewellers and shoe shops, computer chainstores and high-street fashion, come out by the ten-screen multiplex and Virgin Megastore touting US blockbusters and US gangsta rap, do a circle past Smith’s and end up at the top of the high street with the fun pubs and burger bars on the crossroads. The traffic lights aren’t working and buses block the way. Drills pound and grit flies. People flood past, young and excited, don’t notice the granny in her sari pushing a baby along, the three pocked-faced men with their bent cans of lager. Behind the market there’s a maze of houses, car parks and building work, a hospital that keeps the babies coming, while up on the high street everything’s been scrubbed, like one of those Western towns in the middle of the prairies, where the shopfronts are spotless and look just like a film set.
We sit in a cafe with two mugs of tea, look out of the window for half an hour, drink up and get the car. It doesn’t want to start, and I’ve got the choke right out, accelerator on the floor, listening to the turn of the engine, knowing either the battery is going to run down or I’ll flood it, the little niggles of life, the starter motor finally catching. I show Luke the houses and factories, the warehouses and supermarkets, depots and superstores. I don’t know what to do next. He doesn’t want to go find his grandad and uncle, flares right up when I mention them. I don’t understand, but don’t go on about it. If Smiles’s genes are in his face, then the same DNA boosts his manner. He’s a happy bloke, but now he goes quiet on me. There’s questions he needs to ask, things I want to know. Like why he ended up in care. But where do you start? Don’t have a clue. And I suppose there’s not much to see really, no famous sites or classic architecture, just everyday life, same as most places. Luckily I’m carrying a special-offer trowel to give the old man, tell Luke we have got to go over to the allotments. He’ll get the boy talking. He’s got the experience. Father figure, I suppose.
–What do you do for a job? Luke asks, as we drive over.
I tell him I work for myself, that I love music but prefer the words, the social lyrics that have been sidelined these days. Songs can give you the answers books rarely deliver, dip into your life and make you laugh, draw out things you already know but can’t put into words yourself. I go for content over style. I think about it and I suppose I sell things. Music and myself. Tell him I’m a capitalist, think properly and say I do what I want. I’m my own boss, sell and play records, make enough to live on and keep my time for myself. I don’t mention the tickets and dope.
–Suppose we’re the same in a way, he laughs, easing up now.
Maybe he is, a thinner version, hasn’t filled out yet, like he could snap in half.
–I want to make a living out of music, but prefer sound myself. I wondered why you had all those boxes of records stacked everywhere.
I get ready to argue the toss about sounds
and lyrics, but the music he’s into has a harder edge than all that disco/house bollocks, a tougher home-made sound for a soft commercial era, and it’s another time now, everything melted down and sanitised, following the American pattern. Even though the logic is plain, that the fighting between the mods, rockers, skinheads, Pakistanis, suedeheads, Hell’s Angels, boot boys, greasers, Teds, punks, soulboys, rockabillies, rude boys, casuals and every other shade of herbert going, was just ordinary people fighting among themselves, it’s right there inside me. We roll past the Slough Town football ground and I’m humming along to the Business classic ‘Smash The Discos’. I fucking hate disco. Just can’t help it. Must be something in the blood.
I don’t have a clue how much Luke knows about his dad, except that he topped himself. I wonder if he knows why. The memory makes me jolt, and there must be people in that house right now, having some evil dreams, two suicides in one building, a few feet from each other. Mind you, I don’t really know why Smiles hung himself either. It was one of four possibles. Tipped over finding his mum in the bath, which makes sense, but then why the delay, and when you look back it explained the Sunny Smiles photos, the loneliness he must’ve felt. Could’ve been something in his make-up, a self-destruct gene waiting to take over, which seeing how his old girl went the same way, makes sense as well. Third, the punches he used to take off his dad, but I don’t go for that really. Lots of people get smacked about and don’t string themselves up. Fourth, getting stuck under the water damaged his brain, or triggered something else that was already there. The doctors said he was okay when he left hospital, but he was never the same.
Like everything in life, I suppose it was a mixture of influences. I let things run, wait for Luke to ask or say something. Can’t do better than that. I park up and we go in through the gates. I tell Luke to wait a minute, so I can warn my dad, seeing as he knew Smiles as a boy. I go and explain things, wave Luke over.
–Fucking hell, is all Dad can manage, before he shifts out of neutral, and then he’s sweet as a nut.
We sit in the deckchairs and share Dad’s flask, the smell of the leeks he’s pulled hanging in the air. He gives Luke a tour of the spinach and rhubarb, the broccoli he’s trying to grow, having another try after last year when the slugs steamed in mob-handed. The pictures on the packets show glossy blue buds and thick stems, but without gallons of insecticide it’s hard going. The old man doesn’t get wound up, takes things nice and easy, doesn’t see the point in chemicals. He’s taking Luke in his stride, now he’s used to the likeness, and it’s as if nothing can surprise him these days. It’s experience that does the trick.
–He was a good boy, is all I can hear from the other side of the allotment, when Dad takes Luke on a tour.
There’s an ant hill next to the lavender, a butterfly sitting on the flowers, massive red-and-white wings strapped to its back. And I watch Dad leading Luke around, doing his best not to stare at Smiles’s face. He shows Luke a mouse run along the back of the rhubarb, the pea seeds he put down long gone. He doesn’t drown the ants or try to poison the mice. Suppose he’s content. That’s what it is. The responsibility has been lifted, any ambition to get rich a non-starter, no chance, so he’s done his best and now he’s unplugged from the bullshit and lies, gone his own way. He realises it’s not worth bothering with the media and politicians, who only exist to wind people up. This confidence has swelled in him. He’s not rich in terms of money, but rich because he’s got family, friends, food, drink, a roof, his health, knows his neighbours. Those are the essentials.
–You’re set up here, Luke says, when he’s sitting down again, making the effort, even if he’s bored.
Instead of going down the pub I’ve brought him to meet my old man. They seem to get on well enough.
–It’s not bad, Dad admits, with that twinkle in his eye he gets when he knows someone’s humouring him. Could be worse.
The Major stops and stares over, the top half of his body at an angle to the bottom as he concentrates. I wave him over but he turns away, lifting straw into the compost heap. He loves that heap, and as the weather gets warmer it’ll start cooking. He looks back over and I wonder if he sees Smiles same as I did.
–I tell you what, Dad says. The Major’s on the warpath. I took him some spinach and I’ve never heard him talk so much the whole time I’ve known him. Says he’s not putting up with what happened last year, the way the slugs ate everything. Says it’s war and he’s going to wipe them out, even if he has to come down and sleep in the shed, go out on night patrol. These kids went round breaking stuff last summer, and he kipped out, borrowed a mobile phone so he could dial 999 and get the TSG down. It was Kenny’s boy and some of his mates, and the Major caught them. Called up Ken. You know what Kenny’s like. Those kids won’t be back in a hurry.
–No, it’s the slugs I feel sorry for. He had his table out and was standing there slicing them up, great big juicy slugs with feelers, four or five strokes with a clasp knife. They were oozing. There was a stack of body parts and he stuck them in the compost. Said flesh is as good as plants. If it’s cut up right it’ll boil down and produce something healthy.
The Major must’ve turned nasty torturing something living like that, even if they are slugs.
–They were dead, Dad says. He kills them with pellets first, and was slicing them up so they’d rot faster. Least I think he killed them first. He said he did. I hope so anyway. He must do, don’t you think so?
Luke looks over at the Major, the man’s back to us as he digs into his compost heap.
–He must do.
It isn’t nice, imagining a mad grin on the Major’s face and a cold butcher’s knife, but he’s never been mental like that. If he says the slugs were dead I believe him. I want to tell Luke about the canal, because he doesn’t seem to know, tell him it was the Major who was on the path and probably saved both our lives. I couldn’t get out of the water and he pulled us out. He went to court and did what he thought was right, but got ripped apart by the defence. So far we haven’t gone into things too much. Maybe Luke has important questions to ask, maybe not. I have to decide what to tell him. There’s no point going over things that are best forgotten.
–It doesn’t matter if the slugs are already dead, Dad says. That’s what the Major told me. He said that if slugs have souls then they’re long gone, and he can’t be sentimental with the price of food these days. Started going on about the extra penny they’ve put on a tin of butter beans. Said it was natural justice, survival of the fittest. What does it matter if the slug’s already dead, and he’s right.
I thought something similar when I read Tony’s letter in China, almost felt as bad about Smiles hanging over the stairs for two weeks as I did about him dying. I push it out of my head and Luke will never hear that from me. I change the subject but walk straight into an ambush, Luke grinning as Dad unwinds and starts amusing him at my expense, telling him what me and Smiles were like when we were kids, and it’s as if his memories come from a different life.
–These two were mad about guns and soldiers when they were little, he says. They were always playing war, shooting each other, throwing hand grenades, cutting each other’s throats.
It was all the stuff on the telly. The World At War was on every Sunday, before The Big Match. Dad would be down the pub, mum cooking dinner, Jilly off somewhere, and I’d be sitting there in front of the box watching the Germans pound Stalingrad, or the Luftwaffe bombing London, or the D-Day landings. Then I’d go straight into The Big Match, YOU’RE GONNA GET YOUR FUCKING HEADS KICKED IN and HELLO HELLO, CHELSEA AGGRO filling in where the bombers left off, hoping Dad would have an extra pint and Mum would be late with the food, so I could watch the Third and Fourth Division games. We always sat down and had dinner on Sunday, and Dad would be there in his vest during summer, stuffing the potatoes down. He loved soaking his bread in the gravy after, and we all used to have a go, watching it ooze through, turning white bread into brown. It’s no surprise we were
into war films and soldiers.
–Later on they got interested in music. They loved Alvin Stardust and Showaddywaddy. Then there was Mud and Gary Glitter, before they started listening to David Bowie. They both had stupid haircuts. Spiky on top and long on the sides. They had these cheap brothel creepers when they were twelve. Bootlace ties for a while. Remember the flat cap?
I do now, and nod. Must’ve looked a right state, with the DMs and sleeveless jean jacket, patches of bleach on the denim, the badges and razor-blade necklace that was made of plastic and cost pennies from one of the shops on the high street. There was a craze for flat caps, and I bought one with my shelf-filling money. Didn’t last long. Old working-men’s caps your grandad wore. Both of them are laughing hard.
–They used to wear all these rings on their fingers, hair down to their collars, a couple of right old scruffs. Me and your mum used to have a good laugh, but that was nothing on your sister. She had those tartan trousers up to her knee. Remember?
He goes on like this for ages. I lean back in the chair and close my eyes, let them enjoy themselves, drift away and imagine I’m round Sarah’s house. Wouldn’t mind going and seeing her, but I’ve got to stick with Luke and show him around. Look after the bloke. I think of her boy Jimmy. Maybe I should buy him a toy or something.
–Seriously though, Dad’s voice is calm at last, your dad was a good boy, one of the best. I saw him grow up, and he was always good-natured, would do anything for anyone.
After an hour having my life opened up for Luke, it starts to rain. We get going, leave Dad who wants to wait and see if it stops. He stands in the door of the shed and I wonder what to do next, have an idea. It’s a five-minute drive to Slough Town’s ground, and they’re playing Hayes today. Luke fancies it, and we go in the social club and have a drink, sit in a corner nursing our pints as the rain spreads across the glass, eating our cheese rolls. Three generations sit at the next table, on the piss, and we only have the one pint, things easier now. Dad’s done the business. We go and stand down the side of the pitch, under the roof.