Stories We Could Tell (34 page)

Then he shook the sauce bottle as hard as he possibly could and – as the top was merely resting rather than screwed on – a projectile of thick brown sauce shot into the air like something hurled into space out of Cape Canaveral. It came down on the table directly behind Leon and from the shocked intake of breath all around the café, he knew the landing place wasn’t good news.

Leon turned to see a meat porter with violence in his eyes and HP sauce on his shaven head. He was as broad as he was wide and the muscles in his arms were thick and knotted from a quarter-century of heavy lifting.

Leon could see the muscles in his arms quite clearly because, as the man rose from his seat, making no attempt to wipe away the HP sauce that was dripping into his eyes, he was rolling up the sleeves of his blood-splattered white coat.

And that was when Leon Peck stopped worrying quite so much about the workers.

Terry’s father was an old man now.

Terry watched him coming down the street from the window of their front room, coming home from the night shift, and he looked like he was dragging the weight of the years behind him.

Worn out by work, worn out with worry about his son, worn out by the unforgiving toll of the years. An old man at forty or fifty or whatever he was.

Terry’s mum smiled at her son as they heard the key in the lock. She indicated that they should all be very quiet, all three of them. And then the old man was standing in the doorway, still in his white coat and his French Foreign Legion hat, blinking at his wife and his son and his son’s girlfriend, young Misty.

‘Guess what?’ Terry’s mum said, as if she had been saving this up for a long time. ‘Guess what, Granddad?’

Yes, his father looked ancient these days. But when he heard the news and it had started to sink in, that kind, exhausted face lit up with a smile, and it was a smile that Terry knew would last the old man for years.

The editor’s office was crowded but the only sound was the metallic limp of a spool on Terry’s tape recorder and the singsong voice of John Lennon.

‘I’ve been through a lot of trips – macrobiotics, Maharishi, the Bible…all them gurus tell you is – Remember this moment now. You Are Here.’

The editor swooned. It was the kind of moment that Kevin White lived for. Everybody would go crazy when they heard this stuff. The Fleet Street boys would be banging at the door.

‘The break-up of the band…the death of Brian, the selling-out of Paul…Ringo makes the best solo records…’

Kevin White thumbed through Ray’s handwritten notes, shaking his head, a slow smile spreading across his face. Lennon kept talking. He was the great talker. And he seemed to have this need to get it all out, to get it all down, to confess to everything. He was the great confessor, talking about the whole mad trip as if for the first time, as if for the last time.

‘We were pretty greasy…outside of Liverpool, when we went down south in our leather outfits, the dance-hall promoters didn’t really like us…they thought we looked like a gang of thugs. So it got to be like Epstein said, “Look, if you wear a suit…” And everybody wanted a good suit, you know, Ray? A nice, sharp, black suit, man…We liked the leather and the jeans, but we wanted a good suit to wear off-stage. “Yeah, man, I’ll have a suit.” Brian was our salesman, our front. You’ll notice that another quirk of life is – I may have read this somewhere-that self-made men usually have someone with education to front for them, to deal with all the other people with education…You want another tea? You sure?’

‘You know what you’ve got here, don’t you, Ray?’ White said. A world exclusive.’

Ray nodded, smiling weakly. He was suddenly spent. He felt like he could sleep for a thousand years. He wished he were curled up under clean white sheets with her – with Mrs Brown, although he no longer thought of her as Mrs Brown. Now she was
Liz –
her parents had been to see Elizabeth Taylor in
National Velvet on
their first date – because now she was no longer just some other man’s wife, because that was her name. Liz. It was a good name for her.

And then there was Yoko.

‘I’m
not somebody who wants to burn the Mona Lisa. That’s the great difference between some revolutionaries and me. They think you have to burn the Establishment. I’m not. I’m saying make the Mona Lisa into something like a shirt. Change the value

of it.’

‘Turn the Mona Lisa into a shirt,’ White chuckled. ‘I love it.’

Was it a good interview? Ray couldn’t tell. Turning the Mona Lisa into a shirt – that was just mindless babble, wasn’t it? That was plain nutty. But it had happened. That was the important thing. And in the end it had all been so easy. And everyone had been so nice. And with hindsight it seemed perfectly natural to walk up to the biggest rock star in the world, introduce yourself, and then sit down and have a talk. That world of shared feelings – John Lennon believed in it too.

Ray Keeley had approached John Lennon with love in his eyes – a supplicant, a fan, a true believer. How could his hero refuse him? And Lennon was kind. He was more kind than he had to be.

‘It can’t be the cover,’ said one of the older guys, unable to keep the resentment out of his voice.

Kevin White had been treating Ray like the prodigal son ever since he turned up with his Lennon interview, but the older guys seemed curiously put out, as though Ray had got something over them.

The editor nodded. ‘Any other week it would be the cover,’ White said, almost apologetically. ‘This week – well, there’s only one cover.’

‘I was thinking Elvis in ‘56,’ said one of the older guys, tapping a pencil on his pad. ‘One of the classic Alfred Wertheimer shots. The Memphis Flash in all his pomp. Headline – REMEMBER HIM
THIS
WAY. Italicise the “This”’.

White nodded thoughtfully.

‘Yesterday Elvis was a fat embarrassment who went on twenty years too long,’ he said. ‘Never the same after he joined the army, blah blah blah. Today he’s a rock-and-roll martyr, a cultural god, immortal. And taken from us far too soon.’

‘That’s cruel,’ Ray said.

‘That’s showbiz,’ sneered one of the older guys. The tape played on.

‘Our
gimmick is that we’re a living Romeo and Juliet. And you know, the great thing about us influencing in this way, is that everybody’s a couple. We’re all living in pairs. And if all the couples in the world identify with us and our ideas go through them, what percentage of the population is that?’

‘Er…’

Ray flinched at the sound of his own awkward voice.

‘You know what you’ve got here, don’t you?’ White said to him, laying a loving hand on the tape recorder. “A job for life.
A job for life
. You’re the writer who interviewed John Lennon in the middle of the Summer of Hate.” White smiled proudly at Ray, as if he had never stopped believing in him. ‘You’re going to be getting free records when you’re forty. Think about it.’

Ray could sense every eye in the room on him, and he could feel their envy. It was what they all wanted – it was what he had wanted at the start of the night. The promise that the circus would never leave town without him. Perhaps it was just nervous exhaustion, but he didn’t feel as happy as he’d thought he would.

Free records at forty…Why did the idea depress him?

This was the only job that he had ever wanted, because it had never felt like a job. And yet the prospect of growing middle-aged within these walls filled him with dread. Maybe it was that he needed to sleep now, needed it urgently. Or perhaps it was because his generation, and the one that came before, had made such a big fucking deal about being young that the thought of growing old was unthinkable. Even if you still got free records when you were forty.

‘Life’s too shorty’
said John Lennon, and then there was a click as the cassette ran out. ‘Life’s too short,’ and then he was gone.

Then White’s secretary was bursting into the room, and she was doing something that you were never meant to do in the office of
The Paper
, where beyond everything else, you were expected to be cool.

She was crying.

‘It’s Skip,’ she said.

There were green shoots pushing through the crushed rubble of Covent Garden, like the promise of a better season, or possibly an early warning of chaos ahead, all the old wildness breaking through.

No, thought Terry Warboys. Call it a better season. That’s what you have to believe.

He was standing outside the Western World. It looked so different in the daylight. Little more than a hole in the wall, the extinguished neon sign bleak and filthy. It looked as though it had been closed for years, not a few hours.

Suddenly Terry was aware that there was a crumpled figure curled up in the doorway. His red, white and blue jacket was in tatters now. He blinked at Terry as if he had just emerged from some enchanted sleep.

‘Is that it?’ Brainiac said.

‘Yeah,’ Terry nodded. ‘I think that’s it, Brian.’

Terry was nostalgic for this place already. He thought about the nights he had gone through those doors and down into a cellar full of sound, the speed pumping in his veins, the faces of old friends and beautiful strangers coming out of the darkness.

Misty had gone on ahead to
The Paper
to deliver some shots of Dag Wood to the picture desk, and that was fine because Terry needed time to think. Before everything was different.

Misty said that the baby would change nothing. Terry suspected that the baby would change everything. But what would never change, he thought as he stood outside the Western World, was the way he felt about his girl. He would never stop wanting her, and the baby would make the bond between them even stronger. Everything else would have to take second place.

He knew he wouldn’t be coming to the Western World quite as often as he had in the past. It wasn’t just the audience that was changing, as word of the new music and the good times to be had spread out to the council estates and the suburbs and the faraway towns. The groups were changing too.

Bands were like sharks – they kept moving or died. You couldn’t play a place like the Western World for ever. He looked at the fly posters for coming attractions and he realised he didn’t know any of these bands, and he wasn’t particularly interested in knowing them.

The bands he had started out with were on their way. Last year there had been a real camaraderie – the days of amphetamines and new friendships and a whole world opening up. Everybody escaping from their own private gin factory. Now it was all capped teeth, cocaine and bodyguards. The bands he had known and loved were either getting left behind or they were becoming famous, and struggling to remain famous, and they were changing. And Terry was changing too.

He took out the bag of amphetamine sulphate that the police search had failed to find in the ticket pocket of his dead man’s
jacket. Then he tossed it as far as he could on to the wasteland that faced the Western World.

Brainiac looked up, sniffing the air, and then abruptly lost interest.

It seemed to Terry that the thing they had come here for had been better a year ago. During that blazing summer when it was all just getting started. They couldn’t wait for that time to be gone, and for their real lives to begin.

But he saw now that was
it
– that was the special time, when you could walk into a club and hear the Clash playing ‘London’s Burning’ or the Jam playing ‘Away from the Numbers’ or Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers doing ‘Chinese Rocks’, and you knew that you were in exactly the right place, the centre of the universe, and you could go out every night of the week and see a great band, a great band who didn’t even have a recording contract, and you could take home a girl whose name you wouldn’t remember in the morning, and there wasn’t just one girl who you couldn’t live without. That brief period when he had been Norman Mailer’s free man in Paris.

He had not appreciated how good it all was at the time. Or maybe it was always like that, and you only noticed happiness when it was past. They all had more now – the bands had recording contracts, the writers had careers, and he had the girl he had always wanted from the moment he first saw her.

And yet somehow it felt like nobody was quite as happy as they were a year ago. There was a fragment of poetry running around his head, a snatch of someone – Larkin? – from an English Lit class of five or six years ago when he had been watching the clouds drifting over the playing fields and only half listening. And now he saw that the poem was about him.

Terry watched Brainiac slowly get to his feet and stumble across the wasteland of Covent Garden, a forlorn figure wearing what appeared to be a ragged old flag. The builders had started work for the day. They were cementing over their beloved bombsite. All this was going to change. Everything.

The sun had come up on a different world and Terry couldn’t run around like a dumb kid any more. He loved their baby already. Yet it brought him down to think that he would never again go out watching bands with his head full of chemicals and ready for anything. It brought him down hard.

But he stopped outside a bakery on Neal Street, bought a bag full of bagels and started walking south, his fingers and teeth tearing greedily into the hot white bread, the smell the best smell in the world, his stomach rumbling with protest but somehow remembering what food tasted like, and by the time he reached the river and the bag of fresh bagels was gone, Terry was aware that he was smiling.

Terry burst into the review room full of news for Skip – about fatherhood, about how your life could change in a night, about revenge being a dish best served with laxatives.

But instead of Skip he found Misty drinking vending-machine tea with a tall, middle-aged lady. She looked kind and pretty and Terry felt that he had seen her somewhere before.

‘This is Skip’s mother,’ Misty said, taking a quick, concerned glance at the woman. ‘Skip – Skip’s not very well.’