Читать книгу Stories We Could Tell - Tony Parsons - Страница 8

As Misty steered her father’s Ford Capri along the Westway towards the city, Terry laid his right hand lightly on her leg, feeling the warmth of her flesh through the white dress, idly wondering what their children would look like, and loving that little swoon of longing he got every time he looked at her.

Misty was nineteen years old – three years younger than Terry – and although they had grown up within a few miles of each other, he was aware they were from very different places. More like different planets than different parts of the London sprawl. Misty’s family rode horses and Terry’s family bet on them.

He was born in a rented room above a butcher’s shop and she grew up in a house crammed with books, her childhood full of pony clubs and prep schools, her old man some sort of hotshot lawyer – that’s where the money came from. She was a bit vague about it all, but then you had to be embarrassed about it now, privilege was nothing to boast about in the summer of 1977.

But she didn’t need to spell it out. Terry knew they were different. She knew where she was going and he kept expecting to be sent back to where he had escaped from. It wasn’t as bad as it had been at the beginning. It wasn’t as bad as his first day at The Paper. But then nothing could ever be as bad as that.

The memory of his humiliation could still make his face burn. Even now – with a girlfriend like Misty, with a friend like Dag Wood, with his latest story on the cover – the thought of that first day made him cringe.

This is how raw Terry was – he tried to return a review record. One of the older guys gave him a month-old album that nobody else was interested in, pointed him in the direction of the review room and left him to it. And when Terry had finished, when he had come up with his 300 smart-arse words on Be Bop Deluxe, he walked into the office where a few of the older guys sat, and he tried to give back the album. How they laughed! And how his face burned and burned.

He knew that one of the reasons he had been hired was because of the way he looked – that On the Waterfront thing that was back in style. The music wanted to be tough again. And there he was on his first morning, a Be Bop Deluxe record in his hand, his face all red and tears in his ears. He wouldn’t have minded their amusement if they had been nothing to him, but these were writers he had admired for years. And they were laughing at him. They thought he was funny.

This was his dream job and it felt like he had just strolled into it. Desperate for new writers to cover the new music, The Paper had responded to Terry’s carefully typed and Tipp-Exed reflections on Born to Run and a review of the Damned at the 100 Club (Bruce Springsteen and Rat Scabies – a nice combination of old and new school). They invited him into the office, where he met Kevin White, the ex-Mod editor who had practically invented The Paper, and White was quietly impressed that Terry had already seen some of the new bands live, and he liked the way Terry looked in his cheap leather jacket – luckily the interview was immediately after Terry had just pulled a night shift in the gin factory, so he looked fashionably knackered.

They hired him as a trainee journalist to cover this new music that was just starting to happen, this new music that none of the existing writers liked all that much or could even get a handle on. But getting the job turned out to be the easy bit.

Terry had once had a girlfriend who broke it off outside a Wimpy Bar, so he thought he knew about women. He had once smoked a joint that was more Rothman’s King Size than Moroccan Red, so he thought he knew about drugs. And he had left school as soon as he could for a job in the local gin factory – a purely temporary measure until he became a world-famous writer – so he thought he knew about the real world. But Terry soon discovered that he knew nothing.

That terrible first day. He didn’t know what to say – this young man who had always loved books, who had always loved words -it was as if he had lost the power of speech. He couldn’t talk the way the older guys talked – the way they said everything with that never-ending cynical amusement, the ironic mocking edge that placed them above the rest of the world. Already he felt that he could write as well as any of them – apart from Skip Jones himself, obviously – but Terry didn’t know the rules. How was he supposed to know you kept review copies? Until today he’d had to save up for any record he wanted.

It was like everyone else was speaking a language he didn’t understand. He had a lot of catching up to do. Maybe too much. Maybe he would never catch up. And then he saw Misty’s face for the very first time. And then he really knew that he was out of his depth.

One of the older guys parked Terry in the office he was to share with Leon Peck and Ray Keeley, the other young writers. Neither of them were there – Ray was at a Fleetwood Mac press conference somewhere in the West End, and Leon was on the road with Nils Lofgren. So while Terry waited for one of the older guys to find him something to do after finishing Be Bop Deluxe, he played with his typewriter, and looked in the drawers of his empty desk. And then he heard her, explaining something to the picture editor, and climbed on his desk to see the owner of that cool, confident voice.

The office was divided by grey, seven-foot-high partitions that made up the individual offices. It looked like a corporate maze. But if you knelt on your desk you could see over the top of the partitions. Two offices down he saw her – shockingly gorgeous, although he could not work out why. It was something to do with the way she carried herself. But he felt it for the first time – the little swoon of longing.

‘I’ve gone for a look of emptiness and stillness,’ she was telling the picture editor. ‘I think you’ll find it’s redolent of the Gerard Malanga shots of Warhol and the Velvet Underground.’

She had been taking pictures of Boney M.

Together Misty and the picture editor were poring over her contact sheets, these glossy black sheets of paper with tiny photographs – Terry had never seen a contact sheet before – drawing lines in red felt-tip around the shots they liked, then finally choosing one image by placing a cross next to it. Like a kiss, Terry thought, knowing already that it was hopeless. She was way out of his league.

‘I know they’re ridiculous,’ Misty was saying. ‘But it’s like Warhol himself said, Everybody’s plastic, but I love plastic.’

She looked up then and caught Terry’s eye and he attempted a smile that came out as an idiot leer. She frowned impatiently, and it just made her look prettier, and made him ache with hopeless yearning. And just then the two older guys came for him.

They loped into his office with no door, all faded denim and lank hair, untouched by the changes happening on what Terry and everyone else on The Paper thought of as the street.

‘Smoke, man?’ one of them said.

Terry was immediately on his feet, practically snapping to attention, and holding out a packet of Silk Cut. And the older guys looked at each other and smiled.

Five minutes later Terry felt like he was dying.

With the giant spliff still in his hand, Terry shivered and shuddered, the sweat pouring down his face, his back, making his capped T-shirt stick to his skin. He wanted to lie down. He wanted to be sick. He wanted it all to be over.

The older guys had stopped cackling with laughter and were starting to look concerned. Their faces swam in front of Terry’s rolling eyes. One of them prised the joint from Terry’s fist.

‘Are you okay, man?’

‘He’s really wasted, man.’

They were in the shadow of the monstrous grey tower block that was home to The Paper – an entire skyscraper full of magazines about every subject under the sun, from stamp collecting and hunting foxes and cars and football and knitting all the way to music, three titles on every floor – loitering in a scrap of wasteland that doubled as a makeshift car park, overlooking a silvery patch of the Thames and the mournful tug boats.

‘Don’t feel well,’ Terry croaked. ‘Might sit down. Until feel better.’

The older guys went, leaving him to his fate. It was…now what was the word? What was the word that people on The Paper had used all morning when something was even slightly out of the ordinary, like the lady who came round with the sandwiches running out of cheese-and-tomato rolls? Oh yes – Terry remembered the word. It was surreal.

His thoughts felt like they were being formed in quicksand. He could taste his stomach in his mouth. He pressed his clammy face against the tower block, moaning, and felt the entire skyscraper slide away from him. Surreal didn’t quite cover it. Terry had been poisoned.

And then Ray Keeley was standing before him.

Even through the thick fog of industrial-strength ganja, Terry knew it was him. Ray was wearing a Stetson, like Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider, and it made him look like a hallucination, a vision of the Old West glimpsed on the banks of the Thames.

Ray Keeley was only seventeen, but Terry had been reading his stuff for years. Every week Terry looked at Ray’s by-line picture in The Paper – he looked like those early shots of Jackson Browne, the open-faced matinee idol eyes peering out from behind the veil of long, lank, wheat-coloured hair – a teenage hippy heart-throb -and the envy came at Terry in waves, like a toothache.

Ray was the rising star on The Paper in the mid-Seventies, a pretty and precocious fifth-former rhapsodising about Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne and the whole California thing that seemed so very far away now. And Ray liked the Beatles, especially the Beatles, even though they were further away than anything, even though they had broken up a full six years ago, and John was hiding in the Dakota and Paul was touring with his wife and Ringo was banging out the novelty records and George was disappearing up his own Hari Krishna.

You read Ray Keeley and you forgot about the three-day week and the miners’ strike and the streets full of rat-infested rubbish that no one was ever going to collect. All the grey dreariness slipped away when you read Ray Keeley on seeing Dylan at Wembley, reviewing Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark, even trying to give Wings the benefit of the doubt. You read Ray and suddenly it was yesterday once more, summer in the Sixties, the party that everyone under the age of twenty-five had missed. You forgot about Ted Heath and thought about making love to Joni in the dunes on the beach at Monterey.

But Ray wasn’t writing so much lately.

‘You all right?’ he asked Terry, with the expression of one who already knew the answer.

Terry shook his head, speechless, feeling as if his body was paralysed and his mind was broken and his tongue was the size of an oven glove.

Then Ray did something unexpected. He put his arm around him. ‘You’ve got to take it easy with that stuff,’ he said. ‘These guys are used to it. You’re not. Come on, let’s get you back to the office. Before someone shops us.’

‘How’d you know?’ Terry mumbled. ‘How’d you know me from The Paper?’

Ray grinned. ‘Not from Horse and Hounds, are you?’ Terry laughed. ‘Nah!’

Ray half-dragged and half-carried Terry back to the office, and sat him at his desk, and gave him orange juice and black coffee until the shivering and the sweating and the sickness began to subside. Ray took care of Terry when he had been left to melt in the dirt by a couple of the older guys, and it was a simple act of decency that Terry would never forget. He tried to thank him but his tongue was a dead weight.

‘Be cool, man,’ Ray told him. ‘Just take it easy now.’

All that first morning people had been telling Terry to be cool and take it easy. The music had changed, and most of the haircuts, and people were throwing away their flares and buying straight-legged trousers, but the language was still largely the lexicon of the Sixties.

For all the changes, for all the new things, a different language had yet to be invented. All that old-fashioned jive about being mellow and taking it easy and loving one another was still around. Be cool. Take it easy.

All that first morning these worn-out old words had sounded empty to Terry Warboys. But he found himself giving his new friend a stoned, wonky smile.

Because Terry thought that when Ray Keeley said these things, they actually sounded as though they meant something.

Ray let himself into the house, and was immediately assaulted by the smell of home-brewed beer and the sound of the television.

‘Miss Belgian Congo is a nineteen-year-old beautician who says her ambition is to travel, end all wars and meet Sacha Distel.’

‘Back again, are you?’ the old man shouted, not stirring from his chair in front of the TV. ‘Like a bloody hotel…’

It was true. Ray treated his parents’ suburban semi like a hotel, coming and going without warning, never staying long. But the funny thing was he treated hotels like they were home. The last two nights, when he had been in the Holiday Inn in Birmingham and Travel Lodge in Leicester, he could not stop himself from making his hotel bed in the morning. It was as if his home was out there somewhere.

Ray ran upstairs to his room, hardly registering the presence of his younger brother sprawled on his bed, reading a football magazine.

After chucking his bag in a corner Ray knelt before the stereo on his side of the room. The pose made him seem like a religious supplicant, but when he ran his fingers along the spine of his record collection, it was like a lover – familiar, loving, taking his time, and knowing exactly what was there before he had even looked.

The records were alphabetically filed. The As were sparse and unplayed for years – Alice Cooper and Argent and Abba and Atomic Rooster – but B was for The White Album, Abbey Road, Revolver, Rubber Soul, Let It Be, A Hard Day’s Night…B was for Beatles galore.

He pulled out Abbey Road, and the boys marching in single file across that zebra crossing brought back twenty melodies. Ray knew that street in St John’s Wood better than he knew the road where he lived.

The white VW parked on the pavement, the curious passer-by in the distance, and the unbroken blue of a cloudless summer sky. And the four of them, all with a role to play. George in denim -the gravedigger. Paul barefoot – the corpse. Ringo in his long black drape – the undertaker. And John in white – the angel.

Ray replaced Abbey Road. Almost idly, his index finger fell upon the Ds – Blood on the Tracks by Dylan, Morrison Hotel and L.A. Woman by the Doors, The Golden Hour of Donovan, The Best of Bo Diddley and…For Your Pleasure. For Your Pleasure? Ray’s handsome face frowned at the cracked cardboard spine. What were Roxy Music doing among the Ds? Ray glared across at Robbie.

His twelve-year-old brother was reclining on his bed with a copy of Shoot! It was double games on Tuesday afternoons and there was a smudge of mud running right across the bridge of Robbie’s nose, like war paint on the face of a Red Indian.

‘You been touching my records again?’ Ray said.

‘No way, José,’ Robbie said, not looking up from a feature on Charlie George.

Ray furiously filed Roxy Music next to the Rolling Stones, where they belonged. Then he turned back to his kid brother.

‘Don’t touch my records, okay? And if you do touch my records don’t, but if you do – put them back in the right place, okay? You don’t put Roxy Music in with Dylan and the Doors.’

Robbie mimed a yawn. ‘I’ve got my own records,’ he said.

Ray laughed. ‘Yeah, Disney Favourites and Alvin Stardust’s Greatest Hits.’

Robbie looked up, stung. It was the brutal truth. Robbie only owned two records.

‘I’m getting In the City for Christmas.’ His brother had recently seen the Jam on Top of the Pops. It had been love at first sight. ‘Mum’s getting it for me.’

Ray ignored his brother. Bickering with a kid was beneath him. He pulled out Pretzel Logic by Steely Dan, the cover – that old man selling pretzels, that frozen American street – as familiar as the bedroom he shared with his baby brother. It was as if his record collection was the real world, and the place where he lived was the dream.

He loved the way that albums demanded your attention. The way you held them in both hands and they filled your vision and all you could see was their beauty. For a moment he thought of the girl last night, the Bouquet of Barbed Wire press officer.

There was a girl on the cover of Pretzel Logic, in the background, walking away, hair long and trousers flared, a girl that probably looked just like Ali McGraw in Love Story. He wondered about her life, and who she loved, and how he could ever meet her. Ray Keeley ached for a girl of his own. Holding that album was like holding that girl. Or as close as he would ever get.

‘Ray! Robbie! Your tea’s ready,’ his mother called up from the foot of the stairs. Ray sighed with appreciation as he closed the sleeve.

His father was sitting in his favourite armchair like some suburban sultan while his mum carried plates of bread and jam into the front room. Ray’s parents were an unlikely match – his mother a small nervous woman, jumping at shadows, his father as broad as he was tall, a bull of a man in carpet slippers, and these days always on the edge of anger.

Above the new fireplace – the real fire had just been ripped out and replaced with a gas job that had fake coals and unlikely-looking flames – there were photographs in silver frames.

Ray’s parents on their wedding day. Ray and his two brothers John and Robbie on a sightseeing junk in Hong Kong harbour, three little kids – Robbie small, Ray medium and John large – smiling and squinting in the blazing sub-tropical sunshine. Their father grinning proudly in the light khaki of the Hong Kong Police Force, looking like an overgrown boy scout in his shorts and woolly socks, his bony knees colonial white.

Somewhere in the middle Sixties the photographs turned from black and white to colour. And among the colour photos there was John, eighteen years old now, in the darker uniform of the British Army, taken just before he was killed when an IRA bomb went off on a country road in South Armagh. It was the most recent photograph. Nothing had been right since then.

On the television, young women in swimming suits and high heels were staring ahead with fixed smiles as Matt Monro moved among them singing ‘Thank Heaven for Little Girls’.

Ray and his mum sat on the sofa and Robbie sprawled between them on the floor. Everybody drank diluted orange cordial apart from his father, who had a cloudy glass of home-made beer by his feet.

‘Now how can you compare some tart from Bongo Bongo Land with some tart from England?’ he asked. ‘It’s not fair on them, is it? The darkies. Completely different standards of beauty.’

Ray rolled his eyes. The same old stuff, on and on, never ending. They said that travel broadened the mind. They had obviously never met his father.

‘I might marry a black woman,’ Ray said through a mouthful of Mother’s Pride and Robertson’s strawberry jam, the one with the smiling Golliwog cavorting on the jar. ‘Your grandchildren might be half black. Did that ever occur to you, Dad?’

A cloud seemed to pass across his father’s face. ‘What about the kids? The little half-castes? Did you ever think about them? Not belonging to any group. How do you think that feels?’

‘If we all got mixed up together then there wouldn’t be any more racism,’ Ray said. ‘Because then we would all be the same. Got any more blackcurrant, Mum?’

It was one of the things he argued about with his father. Along with the volume and value of his music, the length of his hair and John Lennon. It felt like they argued about everything these days. Ray wished he knew a black woman just so he could marry her and show his father that all men were brothers.

‘Birds of a feather,’ Ray’s father said, pointing his knife at Ray. ‘You don’t see robins flying about with crows, do you?’

‘Are you a crow, Dad? Are you a robin?’

‘She’s nice,’ his mum said. ‘Miss Korea. What one do you like, Robbie?’

‘I don’t like any of them!’ Robbie said, blushing furiously. Ray laughed. He knew that his brother liked all of them. He wasn’t fussy He had heard Robbie fiddling about in his stripy pyjamas when he thought that Ray was sleeping.

‘Enoch’s right,’ his father said. ‘Send them all back.’

‘What if they come from here?’ Ray said, pushing the last of his bread and jam into his mouth. ‘Where you going to send them back to, Dad?’

With his father still ranting about birds of a feather and beasts in the wild, Ray got up and carried his plate out to the kitchen and went upstairs to his bedroom. He knew what he needed, and put on the Who as loud as he dared – 5.15, sad and angry all at once, to match the way he felt.

Why should I care? Why should I care?

As he made sure that he had enough tube fare to get him back to the city, Ray remembered something he had heard at The Paper. Skip Jones had told him that taking heroin was like stepping into a golden bubble – your troubles melted away when you were in there. That was how Ray felt about his music. It made the world go away.

But from downstairs came the rank stench of home-made beer – bitter hops, liquid malt extract and priming syrup, the whole sorry mess fermenting in the huge metal vats for weeks at a time – and it almost made him gag. That was the problem with living at home with his parents.

Ray’s floor would always be his father’s ceiling.

Leon stood at the hermetically sealed windows of The Paper, watching the sun going down and the crowds leaving the tower block, scuttling to Waterloo station and home.

When he was certain that most of them had gone, he went to the washroom and stared into the mirror above the sink. He waited for a few moments, heard a cleaner clatter by, and then slowly removed his hat.

Leon’s hair was thick and wiry, like something you would use for scrubbing pans, but what was most striking about it was that a few hours earlier it had been dyed a virulent orange. Autumn Gold, it had said on the packet.

Leon winced as if he had been slapped. He quickly replaced his hat, gripped the brim with both hands and firmly pulled it down over his ears. It was a disaster. As always.

Leon hated his hair. And Leon’s hair hated him right back.

There was a line from a Rod Stewart song, back when Leon was fifteen years old and Rod was still big mates with John Peel and playing the working-class hero – kicking footballs around on Top of the Pops, pretending he was fresh off the terraces, before he developed that embarrassing taste for straw boaters and blazers and high-maintenance blondes and Art Deco lamps, and everyone had to pretend that they had never liked him in the first place.

It was the first line of the first track on Every Picture Tells A Story – the line that rhymed ‘mirror’ and ‘inferior’. Leon always felt like that song had been written about him.

He knew there were battles to fight now. The middle ground was collapsing, and the Fascists were getting stronger. Not the public-bar bigots, the Alf Garnetts ranting on the sofa, but real Jew-baiting, Paki-bashing Fascists. Out there right now, getting bolder by the day, their numbers swelling, the hate spreading like a virus. Leon had seen their faces at Lewisham, clocked their proud Nazi salutes, and glimpsed what was inside them. There was nothing remotely funny about them, these dreamers of repatriation, these would-be builders of new ovens. Something had to be done.

So why the fuck, Leon asked himself, was he still worried about his hair? You didn’t need a good haircut at the barricades.

He slung his record bag over his shoulder. Inside it was the latest edition of his fanzine, Red Mist. Too valuable to leave lying around the office, Leon believed. Someone might steal it.

The fanzine – a Xeroxed mix of radical politics, new music and cut-up kidnapper’s graphics, hastily stapled together – had landed Leon his job on The Paper eighteen months ago, reminding some of the older guys of their radical youth. But there were sighs and rolling eyes when Leon tried to sell Red Mist in the office, and when he said they should have more politics and less showbiz.

‘We’re a music paper, man,’ they told him every day, as if the music could ever be separated from what was going on in the street, as if music wasn’t a part of the real world but just some playpen that they climbed into for light entertainment.

Leon believed that the new music could be a force for social change. The fire still burned. The audience just needed to be radicalised. And the musicians just needed to be educated. Basically all you needed to change was everything.

Most of the new groups just didn’t get it. They dreamed of the same old stuff – sexual opportunities, uncut white drugs and driving a Rolls-Royce into a swimming pool. They thought that anti-Nazism was just a cool brand name to be dropped in interviews, just another pose to be struck, as empty as Mick Jagger marching to Grosvenor Square to stop the Vietnam War in the Sixties.

But Leon knew this was real. The Labour Government wasn’t going to last for ever. Jim Callaghan wasn’t going to be around for much longer. And then what would happen? Fighting in the streets, Leon reckoned. Struggle. Civil unrest. More riots. Read your history books, he thought. Ask A. J. P. Taylor. See what happens when the centre is too weak to hold. A Lewisham every day of the year.

And when it was all over, from the ashes would rise a better world where racism was defeated and Leon’s hair did exactly what it was told to do.