Stories We Could Tell (11 page)

Pierced, painted faces stared out of the gloom. Faces shone in the darkness for a moment and then were gone. There was Brainiac, grinning like a mad man, taking alternate swigs from the cans of Red Stripe he held in each hand. And there was the nearly famous Grace Fury, the girl of the moment. Grace Fury – red hair, black tights, some sort of PVC corset and a tartan mini-kilt that would have just about covered her pants, if she had been wearing any. Terry felt Misty’s hot breath on his neck and tried not to stare at where the skirt ended and the legs began. Maybe Grace could hang out with them too.

A crush of bodies pressed against him. Some kid who looked barely into his teens had shredded his school blazer and put it back together with safety pins. Because the grown-up world was
too slow and stupid to sell it to them, and because they had no money, most of their stuff was customised or home-made. Like Terry, many of them were wearing a dead man’s jacket.

Maybe Grace Fury’s gear was from the far end of the King’s Road, but all around him were mail-order catalogue T-shirts subverted with rips, pins and slogans borrowed from records by the Clash – WHITE RIOT, UNDER HEAVY MANNERS, 1977 – and rendered with toy printing-press stencil sets or wonky Biro.

As they moved slowly through the crowd, Terry could feel Misty behind him, her arms around his waist, and Ray trying to stick close by his side. According to Terry’s calculations, Ray was only the third person with long hair ever to enter the Western World. The other two had been Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, who had turned up on separate nights to check out this new scene. Because nobody knew if this music was going to dominate everything for the next ten years or fade away to nothing, nobody knew if this time next year these bands would all be signed and rich and famous, or signing on the dole, or dead. That was what was so wonderful, Terry believed. Nobody had a clue what was going to happen next.

They went down to the basement, feeling the semi-derelict wooden staircase creaking dangerously beneath them, having to step over a young man in a Lewis Leather and a pink tutu who was comatose at the bottom, and then there it was – the basement of the Western World. Terry had to smile.

In front of the bouncing mob, Billy Blitzen was on a low stage the size of a snooker table – Billy dapper and beautiful in his soiled three-piece suit, his pomped-up black hair flying, letting his Fender swing at his side while he stabbed an imaginary syringe in his arm.
‘Whooh!’
Billy sang, and the crowd went stark raving mental.
‘Shoot up
,
everybody!’

Then Billy grabbed the guitar’s neck and tried to do a Chuck Berry duck walk in the confined space. Terry’s eyes shone with joy.

Billy’s group, the P45s, were a pick-up band of jobbing local
musicians, who had chopped their hair off and dyed it metallic silver. This time last year Terry guessed they had looked like pub rockers – all shiny-arsed suits and Dr Feelgood swagger and a snout permanently on the go. Unless Billy got a deal, this time next year they would again have different trousers and haircuts. But Terry knew that Billy was happy with them because they all knew their five chords and where to buy drugs in Chalk Farm, and they didn’t matter anyway, for Billy Blitzen was essentially a solo act now, well on his way to perfecting his stage persona as the Dean Martin of the new music.
‘Whooh! Shoot up, everybody!’

Needles had yet to really surface in London, but to a New Yorker like Billy they were old hat, a way of life, something to brag about, sing about, and a way of pulling rank over all the little London speed freaks and spliff smokers. The Americans already knew how hard drugs could be, and they flaunted that knowledge like a college degree. Terry sang along at the top of his voice to ‘Shoot Up, Everybody’ and he couldn’t hear a word. Needles still had a dark glamour for him. He hadn’t seen any yet.

‘There’s
Dag!
Misty said, starting to jump up and down. And Terry gawped at her, momentarily stunned. Jumping up and down? He thought she only did that for him.

Yet then Terry was looking at Dag Wood and grinning shyly. It was really happening, the moment Terry had yearned for all the way through Berlin. Dag Wood – hero, rock star, friend – was in the basement of the Western World, looking like an exiled king or something. There he was at the back of the basement, as far away from the stage as he could get, in the only place where the crowd thinned out and you could sit down at a rickety table. Dag’s face looking like it had been hacked out of granite, his lank white hair pushed back, his huge bug eyes surveying the heaving basement as if it was his own underground fiefdom. His silk shirt was half off, and his muscles rippled.
Holding court
, that’s what he’s doing,
Terry thought. Dag was surrounded by people – his musicians, his slick chubby manager, a dark-haired German woman called Christa, who was maybe his girlfriend or maybe his drug dealer or maybe both, plus some of the bolder regulars who had worked up the nerve to approach their tables. Everybody else, the ones who were not watching Billy Blitzen, was trying to be cool and not quite managing it. Kids who never changed the bored-witless expression on their face when they spilled a beer over a Buzzcock or peed next to a Sex Pistol or stood on the toe of a Strangler, stared with swoony wonder at Dag Wood – the Godfather, the thorn in the side of the Woodstock generation, the man who had started it all. And Dag Wood saw Terry Warboys and laughed.

‘You did it, didn’t you?’ Dag said, coming over to him, the voice surprisingly deep and booming. He slapped Terry’s shoulder so hard it hurt. ‘You got me the cover. You are a
good writer
, man.’

Terry’s face ached with the grinning.

Oh, he knew how it worked. He knew that he had the ability to make rock stars his temporary friend if he got them the cover of
The Paper
. But Dag was different. He wasn’t some snot-nosed opportunist who had been a prog rocker with a mullet six months ago. Dag was the real deal – he was crawling across broken glass in Texas biker bars when the Beatles were sitting at the Maharishi’s feet, spitting blood and telling the world to shut its fucking mouth long before it was fashionable. And they had really connected in Berlin, Terry believed. What he had with Dag was like the thing he had with Billy Blitzen. They respected each other’s talent.

‘Hello, stretch,’ Dag said to Misty, who was hovering at Terry’s shoulder. ‘How are you tonight?’

And Terry thought –
stretch?
What does
that
mean? Is it – what? Because she’s tall or something? Terry thought – I don’t get it.

‘Love the dress,’ murmured Dag, narrowing his eyes.

Misty was laughing brightly and Terry was telling Dag her name, and then he was trying to introduce Ray, but his friend hung back,
half-turning away with a fixed grin on his face, his hands stuffed deep into his Levi’s, letting his fair hair fall into his face, hiding behind it, and Terry felt a twinge of annoyance and disappointment. Ray had a way of just shrinking into the background when he felt uncomfortable. And it was too late anyway, because by then Dag had taken Misty’s hand and was guiding her past the sticky tables occupied by his musicians who – Terry couldn’t help noticing – casually sized up Misty as they sucked from cans and rolled joints and scanned the club to see who they might take back to their hotel tonight.

As if, Terry thought bleakly, she was just another girl.

Dag’s manager – a greasy New York type with cropped white hair who Terry now realised he had always disliked – vacated the seat next to Dag so that Misty could sit down. ‘Welcome to London, Dag,’ Terry said, having to almost shout it. ‘You want a drink or something?’ He paused, trying to be a good host. This was all so new. ‘They got Red Stripe and Special Brew.’

‘Man,’ Dag said, drawing it out, not taking his unblinking eyes from Misty’s smiling face. ‘I’m going to have exactly what you’re having.’

Dag’s manager laughed at that, and Terry flushed in the darkness, and he did not like that laugh at all. But he was paralysed, standing there like an idiot, uncertain what he should think, let alone do. He was off the map and in uncharted waters. Then Dag did this thing that made Terry’s blood freeze. Dag lifted his legs as if in slow motion, and eased them across Misty, so that his black leather-clad calves were resting on the top of her thighs. The pair of them looked like a weary man of the world about to give a lesson in life to a bright head girl. And Terry thought – now what the fuck does
that
mean? Is that like a
sex
thing? What’s going on here? He looked at Ray, but Ray looked away.

Billy Blitzen and the P45s had left the stage and dub reggae was playing. Prince Jammy, maybe. You only heard two kinds of
music at the Western World – the live stuff slashed out by the bands on stage, which was the fastest music in the world, and the dub reggae records played by the DJ, which was surely the slowest. It put you in a trance. Misty was still talking to Dag. Terry didn’t know what to do. He glanced up at the DJ box and the DJ seemed to stare back at him, impassive and unreadable behind giant Superfly shades and a huge matted tangle of dreadlocks. Misty always claimed that there was an affinity between the white kids in the Western World and young Jamaicans, and that’s why there was always dub reggae on the sound system. But Terry knew that it was because when the club had first opened none of the new music had yet been recorded. The DJ played dub reggae because they were the only records he had. Misty didn’t know what she was talking about.

Then Billy Blitzen was by his side, the sweat streaming down his dark Italian face. That A&R guy from Warners is coming down later,’ Billy said. ‘Warwick Hunt. For our second set. It’s our big break.’

Terry placed a hand on Billy’s shoulder. He felt for him. They all loved Billy Blitzen at the Western World, they were still in awe of him because of the Lost Boys, but somehow he was being left behind. While the musicians who had worshipped him from way back recorded their first or second albums in New York or Nassau, Billy was still playing basements for pin money.

‘Man, I need you tonight,’ Billy said. ‘A review. Even just a mention…’

‘I’m there,’ Terry said, nodding emphatically. ‘I’ll do a review. No problem. You want to say hello to Dag?’

Billy stared at Dag and shook his head, grimacing with distaste. ‘I already met that asshole,’ he said. Then he was gone. The dub reggae thundered on. The bass line rang in Terry’s head like an echo from the underworld. Misty was talking to Dag. He was listening patiently. Someone touched Terry’s arm.

‘You all right?’ Ray said. Terry nodded blankly.

Look at her face, he thought. She looks – what is it? Happy. Fucking happy. He had felt closer to her than to anyone on the planet. Now he felt like he didn’t know her at all. And he didn’t know what to do.

Wild maniac drumming came from the stage. Terry tore his eyes away from his girlfriend and Dag Wood. Brainiac had occupied the empty drum kit and was attacking it with fury, his red, white and blue arms flying. At first nobody stopped him. There were no more fans. That was the idea. The old barriers between the act and the audience had been obliterated. No more heroes and everyone a hero. But when Brainiac began kicking the snare and throwing the cymbals around, the drummer of the P45s came back on stage and grabbed him by the throat. It was all right obliterating the barriers between the performers and the audience, but you didn’t want some toothless idiot destroying your Sonor drum kit, did you?

Terry gave Ray a push. ‘Let’s get some drinks.’

Grace Fury was standing at the foot of the stairs, smoking a cigarette and basking in the glow of her recent TV appearance, frowning over her guitar on
Top of the Pops
, plucking out the bass line to ‘Baby, You Kill Me’. She had that glow about her, that glow they always got when success finally happened. She smiled at Terry and he liked it.

‘Terry Warboys,’ she said in that gently mocking way she had, touching the lapel of his Oxfam jacket. ‘Still rocking and rolling?’

He laughed and didn’t know what to say. He wondered if she was trying to catch Dag Wood’s eye, even though everyone knew that her band’s lead singer was her boyfriend. Grace ran her long fingers down Terry’s Oxfam lapel as if she was stroking an erect penis, and he caught his breath. Everybody wanted her now. But not me, Terry thought. I already have a girlfriend.

‘Got a little something for me, Terry?’ Grace said. ‘Catch you later,’ he said, easing past her. He knew she wasn’t talking about sex. She was talking about amphetamine sulphate. ‘Not if I catch you first,’ she laughed.

Terry wanted to get back to Misty as quickly as possible. But at the top of the stairs, someone stepped in front of him, barring his way. Terry pulled up and Ray clattered into him. It was Junior. The other two Dagenham Dogs, the fridge and the fat boy, were behind him, the cans of Red Stripe in their fists looking like offensive weapons. Terry’s heart sank when he saw that Junior had a rolled-up copy of
The Paper
in his hand. He knew they were easily offended.

Terry was aware that a gap in the crowd was opening up around them. He felt the dryness in his mouth. The old playground terror when faced with someone who can take you to bits.

‘You work with that Leon Peck, don’t you?’ Junior said.

Terry didn’t have to ask what Leon had done. He already knew.

He watched Junior lick his index finger and slowly open
The Paper
at the albums page. There was lots of space around them now, and everybody was watching, excited by the promise of violence. Some community, Terry thought. He knew what was coming. Leon had slagged off the first Sewer Rats album in flamboyantly bitchy true
Paper
fashion. He had criticised the band for their music, their politics and their choice of trousers. Even upside down, Terry could read the headline of Leon’s review,
REBELS WITHOUT A COCK
.

‘He doesn’t write the headlines,’ Ray said over Terry’s shoulder. The refrigerator scowled, came in closer and Terry felt his testicles shrivel. But he took half a step to his right, placing himself between Ray and the fridge.