Stories We Could Tell (13 page)

‘We’re here for a while,’ he said. He stared up at the sky through the ruined rafters. ‘I’ll get you that tape recorder as soon as it’s safe.’

Ray was silent for a second. He could taste the speed on the back of his tongue, feel it lift his mood. Then he said, ‘Okay, thanks,’ as Leon excitedly pushed his face in their faces and said, ‘Is-it-having-any-effect-on-you-because-I-can’t-feel-a-thing-and-I-wonder-if-it’s-really-working?’

Ray and Terry laughed at him, and Terry shoved him, and Ray turned his hat back to front.

‘What?’ said Leon, genuinely baffled.

In the angles of the remaining walls, where the floor was driest, Terry kicked some splintered wood out of the way and lay down on his back. Ray stared at him for a moment and then lay down beside him. Leon lay down on the other side, moved around and got comfortable for a bit, and then he was calm at last.

Then they lay there in silence for a while, listening to the rain,
watching it come straight down, feeling it cool their sweating faces. You couldn’t avoid all of it, not with that missing roof, but after being chased by Teds, it was so refreshing that Terry sighed. And he thought how good it was to be still, to be quiet for once, to be with people you knew so well that there was no real need to talk, and to just feel the sweet kick of the sulphate in your veins, to enjoy that rush of pure euphoria, and to let it all go for a while.

Because, despite all the trials of their youth, summer was here, they were just starting out and when Terry Warboys looked up at the night sky, he couldn’t tell where the stars ended, and where the lights of the city began.

The singing brought Terry out of his dreams.

A woman’s voice, drifting across the wasteland, holding a note that could shatter crystal, and then another, and then another – these heavenly sounds that pierced his soul and seemed to know every corner of his heart.

What was it? Italian? A song of loss and yearning – Terry knew that much. A song about the love of your life turning to dust in your hands. There was something about the unknown song that made his heart flood with sorrow. As if he had already lost her.

‘Puccini,’ Leon said by Terry’s side, startling him. ‘“One Fine Day”. Very nice.’

Terry felt Leon get up on one side of him, and then Ray on the other. But he just lay there, staring up at the stormy dome above his head, the rain on his face, listening to the woman’s voice, paralysed by the unearthly sound, finding the beauty of it almost unbearable.

It was the most glorious music that he had ever heard, and as it was punctuated by the thunder and lightning, it made him despair, made him feel numb with stupidity for giving himself so totally to a girl who would so casually let some old rock star rest his legs on her lap.

Maybe it was crazy to have a girlfriend at all. To be courting,
as his mum would call it. Maybe it was crazy to have someone special in this world, at this time, in this new life, when everyone was trying to be special. Maybe it was mad to have one woman when there were suddenly women all around, when every female in London under the age of twenty-five was flocking to the Western World with dreams of writing about music, or designing clothes, or taking photographs, or playing bass like Grace Fury. But the voice of the unknown singer gnawed at him, wouldn’t let him be, and made him bitterly aware that Misty was the one he wanted, madness or not.

Yet what did he really know about her? He knew that she was nineteen, that she tasted of cigarettes and bubble gum, that her favourite photographer was Man Ray, that men looked at her in the street, and not just because she never wore a bra.

As ‘One Fine Day’ drifted across the black night, Terry knew with complete certainty that you didn’t have to know someone to love them, and he also knew that he had never felt like this before, not with the girls in the Mecca and Locarno dance halls and the butcher’s doorway of his old neighbourhood, or even the girl he had gone out with at the gin factory, Sally, the one he had liked so much, the one his parents had liked so much, the one they thought he might have ended up marrying, if he didn’t have these dreams about another life as a writer waiting for him.

Unlike the girl at the factory, unlike Sally, Misty didn’t want him to meet her parents, or talk about their feelings, or their future, and all that crap. She didn’t want the things that he expected her to want. She wanted other stuff. He didn’t really know what it was, though, and maybe she didn’t either. The girls he had known talked about engagement rings and getting serious. Misty talked about
The Female Eunuch
and the suffocating tyranny of men. It drove him nuts. Maybe he should be like everyone else. Just screw around. Take his pleasures where he could. Not act like some old
married man. Why not? You could sleep with everybody in the world if you wanted to. It wasn’t as if sex had ever killed anyone.

But something in the Puccini drifting across the ruins made Terry realise that he wanted her, he wanted this one, and she was the only one he wanted. He got to his feet and joined his friends at the window.

‘It’s the aria from
Madam Butterfly,’
Leon said. ‘There’s this Japanese chick and she falls in love with this American – I don’t know – naval captain or something. Then he goes home and marries someone else. But she still loves him. And she says that one fine day her love will come again.’

Terry and Ray waited. Leon laid his folded arms on the window frame and rested his chin on his arms. He sighed.

‘Then what happens?’ Terry said.

‘And then he comes back, but it’s too late.’

‘That’s lovely, Leon,’ Ray said, clawing wet hair from his face.

Terry angrily wiped his eyes. ‘How do you
know
all this stuff?’ he said.

‘I just know it,’ Leon said, embarrassed and glad it was dark. He couldn’t say – my father loves opera, I grew up with this stuff on the music system. That was not the kind of thing you admitted to.

Terry didn’t push it. He knew it was a sore point with Leon, this store of knowledge he carried with him. People came to the new music from all sorts of places – factory, dole queue, prison, private school, state school, and the army. Even the London School of Economics. Nobody asked too many questions. Reality was up for grabs, their lives were still waiting to take shape. Terry was glad that there was one of them who knew about Puccini.

The three of them squinted into the darkness. In the distance, walking towards the lights of the West End, they could make out figures in dinner jackets and evening gowns, returning from the opera, umbrellas up, the rain lighter now. It was one of the women
who was singing. They listened until the party hailed a taxi and ‘One Fine Day’ stopped and all you could hear was the rumble of the diesel engine. The yellow
for hire
sign went out and the cab pulled off into the night, a glossy black on a deeper black. They turned away from the window, and that’s when Terry heard the voices beneath their feet.

‘Are you sure that sulphate wasn’t just talcum powder?’ Leon was saying, unwrapping a thick pink slab of Bazooka Joe bubble gum and throwing it in his big gob. ‘Because I can’t feel – ’

Terry clamped a hand over Leon’s mouth. Ray had already heard them, and had sunk into a kind of protective crouch. Leon struggled, muttered a brief protest and then froze. Now he heard them too. Terry could feel the stickiness of the Bazooka Joe on his sweating palm.

‘It’s human nature,’ someone said downstairs, and the voice – thoughtful, high-pitched, almost lisping – came up through the wrecked floorboards. ‘It’s because there’s been no war for thirty year. All that aggression has to come out somehow.’

The three of them eased into the shadows, back into the angle of the two remaining walls, suddenly aware of every creak in the rotten floorboards.
Thirty year
. It reminded Terry of the way his uncles talked, the way his father talked. That old London habit of making everything singular.

‘Don’t know about that, Titch,’ said a deeper voice and Terry felt his stomach curdle. Ray and Leon were both looking at him.
Titch
. Fucking hell! ‘I just hate the fuckers and want to give them all a good hiding…’

‘There’s always been wars,’ Titch was saying. Terry could hear them poking around, throwing aside pieces of abandoned furniture. Hunting their prey. ‘The English and the French. The Germans and everybody. The Mods and the rockers. The skinheads and the Pakis. The Vikings.’

‘Tony Curtis and Kirk Douglas,’ said the deeper voice.

Ray smiled. Terry shook his head. There was a splintering of wood.

‘Fuck are you talking about?’ said Titch.

‘The Vikings,’
said the deeper voice. ‘Good picture. Tony Curtis and Kirk Douglas.’

More smashing wood. There was a fury and violence in the squeaky voice now. ‘Kirk fucking Douglas? Tony fucking Curtis?’ More destruction. ‘You think the Vikings were a bleeding film, do you?’

‘I’m just saying.’ There was something pitiful about the deep voice – a big man humbled. ‘I’m just
saying
, Titch.’

There was a rustling sound at his feet and Terry saw a rat the size of his Auntie Elsie’s cat poking its snout into Leon’s newspaper bag. It made him shiver. Leon poked at the rat with his foot and Terry furiously seized the collar of his leather jacket and shook him.

‘I
don’t like them either,’ Titch was saying, conciliatory now. ‘We’ve been around a lot longer than anyone. They look like they’re not men. Just weird. Strange. Very odd. They nick our clobber – they’ll wear a drape – but they’ll rip it up. What’s that all about? Or they copy bits of our music – it’s rock and roll – but it’s not done right. They say they’re going to wipe Teds out. And we’re not having it. It’s out of order.’ More wood being thrown, smashing to pieces, and the violence in the voice. ‘It’s a diabolical liberty.’

‘They’re taking the piss, all right,’ said the deeper voice. ‘Dog collars and dustbin liners and stupid coloured hair.’ Terry and Ray both looked at Leon. ‘We’re not having it.’

The rat emerged from Leon’s bag chewing a mouthful of
Red Mist
. It scuttled noisily into the darkness.

‘Fuck’s that?’ squeaked Titch.

You could almost hear them listening.

‘Want me to look upstairs?’ said the deeper voice.

‘No, I’ll go,’ said Titch. ‘You round up the others.’

They heard heavy footsteps coming up the stairs. Then Terry felt the grain of amphetamine sulphate lodged somewhere between his nose and his throat start to stir. He fought to control it but it was no good – a giant sneezing cough needed to explode from his mouth and he couldn’t stop it. His mouth opened. His nostrils flared. The terrible snorting sound rose in Terry’s throat – and Ray gripped his nose between his thumb and forefinger and the noise came out in a silent gasp. They stood there with Terry’s hand on Leon’s mouth, Ray’s fist wrapped across Terry’s nose, their hearts pounding, the footsteps getting louder. They pressed back into the shadows, up against the wall, until they could retreat no further.

A giant form appeared at the top of the stairs. Terry felt his breathing stop. A flash of lightning and Titch was suddenly illuminated, the massive face frowning with effort, scanning the room, the quiff standing up on his head like medieval plumage. Then he chuckled. The enormous rat was at his feet, sniffing a brothel creeper the size of a landing craft.

Titch was still chuckling as he went back down the stairs.

‘It was just a cute little mouse,’ they heard him say.

They didn’t speak until they were sure the Teds were gone.

Downstairs now, staring into the blackness from the empty door, Terry listened to the voices drifting away towards the West End. ‘We should get cracking,’ he said.

‘Yeah,’ Leon said, stuffing wet copies of
Red Mist
into his shoulder bag. ‘I’ve got to sell all these before I go and see Leni and the Riefenstahls.’

Terry smiled. ‘You really think you’re going to flog all these fanzines before Leni and the Riefenstahls come on? Who’s going to buy them?’

‘I’ll have one,’ Ray said, and Terry felt a stab of shame. It had never occurred to him to buy a copy of Leon’s magazine. He
watched Ray counting out the coins with hands that were still shaking.

Terry pulled out a handful of coins. ‘Better give me one too,’ he said.

Leon laughed with delight as he gave them their fanzines and pocketed the cash. ‘This is turning out to be a bloody good night!’ he said, hefting his shoulder bag. ‘Okay – I’ll see you back at
The Paper.’

With their copies of
Red Mist
in their hands, Terry and Ray watched his slight figure making off towards the lights of the West End, moving across the flattened surface of Covent Garden like the first man on the moon.

Terry looked at Ray. ‘Want another line?’

‘No, I’m cool.’

Ray could already feel the euphoric buzz wearing off, and being replaced by a tight, jangled feeling. This was why he disliked speed. There was always a price to pay for the heady bliss of the first rush and your blood bubbling with pleasure. There was always a come-down. He wanted something to take the edge off the speed, but not more of the same. He said nothing as Terry dipped his key into the little bag, bobbed his head and came up sniffing like a man with a fever coming on. Terry didn’t need saving any more.

‘We should go,’ Ray said. ‘Get that tape recorder.’

‘Yeah,’ Terry said, although he was afraid to return to the Western World, uncertain what he might find. But the sulphate burned away the doubts, filled him with a kind of cocky elation, and made him feel like he could conquer the world. ‘Misty will be waiting,’ he said.

They walked back towards the club in silence, watching their footing for the potholes and muddy trenches that pockmarked the area. The rain was easing off, but it didn’t make much difference. They couldn’t get any wetter.

‘Before you joined
The Paper,’
Ray said, ‘when you were a reader, did you ever buy it a day early?’

Terry was distracted, trying to remember where Misty had parked the car. So much had happened – Dag Wood, the drugs, the Teds, getting chased, that bloody rat – that it felt like weeks ago. He could see the lights of the club in the distance.