Stories We Could Tell (37 page)

Twelve inches by twelve inches, you had to hold them in both hands, and they were all you could see in front of you. Holding a record was like holding a baby, or a lover, or a work of art. Robbie waded through the collection with a kind of stunned wonder, like an archaeologist fingering impossible riches in a pharaoh’s tomb.
Sticky Fingers
by the Rolling Stones, with the Warhol cover, the picture of the jeans with a real zip.
Led Zeppelin III
, with no words on the cover, no words needed, just the picture of the old farmer with a bale of twigs on his back, and then when you opened up the gatefold sleeve, you saw the picture was on the wall of a demolished house, and in the background were tower blocks going up and the old world being torn down.

Revolver
and
Rubber Soul
and
Imagine
– John’s head, lost in the clouds – and records that Ray had almost forgotten about –
First Steps
by the Faces, back when Rod was still being played by John Peel, and
Highway 61 Revisited by
Dylan and
Blue by
Joni Mitchell-Ray had laid in bed with that record on his pillow, and dreamed of kissing those cheekbones – and
Harvest by
Neil Young. And greatest hits by Hendrix and the Kinks and the Lovin’ Spoonful – when he was trying to catch up, cramming in everything he had missed the first time around, when his head was still spinning with how much great music there was in the world. Ray envied his little brother, with that feeling still ahead of him.

And then Robbie was pulling out the records that embarrassed Ray now –
Band on the Run by
Wings,
Days of Future Passed by
the Moody Blues and
Chicago Transit Authority by
Chicago. But nobody’s record collection could be cool all the time. And you never knew what you were going to grow out of, you never guessed that
The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter by
the Incredible String Band would one day wear right off while
Tupelo Honey
by Van Morrison would sound great for ever.

He crouched by Robbie’s side, picked up a copy of the
Easy Rider
soundtrack, remembering when his mum had bought it for
him. Then he looked at Robbie, kneeling by his side with a copy of
Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
in his hands, and he realised that his brother was crying. ‘Don’t go,’ Robbie said.

‘Ah,’ Ray said, a consoling hand on the boy’s shoulder. ‘I have to go, Rob.’

‘But I’ll be all alone if you go.’

Ray hugged his brother tight, both of them on their knees, the records all around them. ‘You’ll never be alone,’ he said. ‘Not now.’ They pulled apart. Robbie wiped his nose on the sleeve of his brinylon school shirt. ‘And you’ll come and join me. In London. When you’re big enough. Okay?’

His brother nodded, trying to be brave, and Ray left the bedroom where he had been a boy, and walked down the hall past his big brother’s closed room. Already the house seemed too small to live a whole life in.

His mother was waiting dry-eyed at the foot of the stairs. She handed him a small crumpled pack of something wrapped in kitchen foil.

‘Fish paste,’ she said, by way of explanation.

‘Thanks, Mum.’

He could sense his father’s presence in the living room, shuffling about, that hard man always out of place surrounded by the knick-knacks his mother stuffed into every nook and cranny, the white Spanish bull and the
Greetings from Frinton
ashtray and a green-and-white model of Hong Kong’s Star Ferry. Ray thought about leaving without saying goodbye, but something made him push open the door, and there was the old man in the curiously stiff uniform of the Metropolitan Police.

His father stuck out an enormous hand and Ray took it in the only way he knew how, like he might take a girl’s hand in the back row of the Odeon, and he saw his father flinch with a quiet contempt before he pulled his hand away. Ray realised that their attempts at
civilised formality would somehow always be worse than their arguments.

Then there came the noise from upstairs. This dirty, chugging riff on slide guitar, and then a singer who sounded as if he had been gargling with gravel. The old man’s face clouded with fury and disgust.

‘What the bloody hell is that racket?’

‘That’s the Faces, Dad,’ Ray laughed. He stared thoughtfully at the ceiling for a second. ‘Sounds like “That’s All You Need”. I’ll see you around.’

The car was waiting for him on the street, and some children from the neighbourhood were gathered around it, boys and girls alike in flared denims, the hems of their jeans uniformly frayed by the adventure playground and filthy with muck from their bikes, all of them keeping a respectful distance from the yellow Lotus Elan, as if it had come down from some other planet.

‘Turn it
down!’
Ray heard his father shout as she opened the passenger door for him, but Ronnie and Rod and the lads just seemed to get even louder.

These were the last days of hitching.

Lorry drivers and sales reps who had never heard of Jack Kerouac or
On the Road
would offer a lift to a young man with no money and his thumb in the air just for the company, or just to perform a good deed in a wicked world.

So it was that Leon was picked up on the North Circular by an oil tanker heading all the way to Aberdeen, and the driver told him that the English were stealing Scottish oil, just as the thieving English bastards always stole what they wanted, they would nick the coins off a dead man’s eyes if you let them, and after driving all the way across the great sprawling expanse of north London, he dropped Leon off halfway up the Finchley Road, telling him to mind out for the traffic, and the thieving English bastards.

Leon walked up the hill to Hampstead, through the leafy streets with their huge houses where he had grown up, through the Village and across the Heath, the grass burned yellow by two burning summers in a row, and all of London spread out below him.

The squat would be gone by now. When the bailiffs had cleared the building, they would do what they always did. Rip out the plumbing and smash the toilets. There were other squats, thousands of them, but summer was almost gone and Leon knew that soon the squatters would be freezing their non-conforming arses off, wearing their greatcoats and Afghans inside their sleeping bags, too cold to think. Leon no longer had the heart for it.

So he went to the place where a young man goes when there is nowhere left to go. Across the Heath, over the fence that surrounded the grounds of Kenwood, past the great white house, and then the Suburb, and the clean, quiet streets of home.

He had thrown away his front-door key so he had to knock. His mother answered the door still in her dressing gown. His father was sitting at the big wooden breakfast table, surrounded by broadsheet newspapers, orange juice, coffee, bagels. Cream cheese and smoked salmon. Bach on the hi-fi – ‘Sheep May Safely Graze’. Leon could smell real coffee and toasted bread, and it almost made him swoon.

‘What happened to you?’ his mother said, taking it all in – the fading bruise from last weekend, the cut on his forehead from Junior, the black eye from the porter with HP sauce on his head.

‘He was at Lewisham,’ his father said proudly. ‘Bloody thugs!’

‘Let me put something on it,’ said his mother.

Over Leon’s protests, his mother brought a pack of frozen Birds Eye peas and made him hold it against his wounds. His parents watched with a kind of affectionate amusement as Leon shovelled down bagels and lox with his spare hand. They didn’t remember him having such an appetite.

‘I haven’t been reading your column,’ Leon said, wiping crumbs
from his mouth with the back of his hand. He gulped down some black coffee. He couldn’t remember the last time he had drunk coffee that hadn’t been the kind where you just add boiling water. ‘What’s your take on this Thatcher woman?’

‘Never happen,’ his father said emphatically. ‘In this country? With Benny Hill and Page 3 lovelies and mother-in-law jokes? The British will never vote for a woman.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said his mother. ‘I think it would be rather nice to have a woman Prime Minister.’

‘She’ll be burning her bra next,’ his father laughed.

Leon’s parents were still laughing when he undressed and crawled into bed in his old room, out of his mind with exhaustion, the room dancing around him.

It felt both cosy and ridiculous to be between these boyhood walls again, the embarrassing pictures of outgrown passions on the wall –
Jaws
and Jimmy Page and Jimmy Greaves – and a mad library where copies of
Jonathan Livingstone Seagull
and
Das Kapital
shared space with Anthony Buckeridge’s tales of two larky lads called Jennings and Darbishire at Linbury Court Preparatory School—
Jennings Goes to School, Jennings and Darbishire, Thanks to Jennings
and maybe thirty more – whatever happened to Jennings? Leon had loved Jennings, he had wanted to
be
Jennings –
’That shepherd’s pie we’ve just had was supersonic muck so it’s wizard, but this school jam’s ghastly so it’s ozard…being a new chap’s pretty ozard for a bit, but you’ll get used to it when you’ve been here as long as I have.’
Silly really, but it didn’t matter right at this moment, because – oh, Ruby – the sheets were soft and clean and his parents had taken him back without making him feel bad, without asking any questions, as if he had never been away, as if he had never thrown away his front-door key, and Leon knew it would be like that for as long as they lived, they would never turn him away, and also he could not feel too bad about sleeping under a
Jaws
duvet because he was so very tired, swamped

swamped…swamped…swamped
by tiredness, his eyes closing now – and he knew that sleep would come the moment he laid his head on the pillow. And it did.

So Leon drifted away, a man in a boy’s bedroom, the St Christopher around his neck feeling cool against his skin, and many miles to go when he awoke.

Terry liked belonging. He saw that now.

Belonging to his paper, belonging to her. It was good. He was glad that he hadn’t been sacked. He was happy that they hadn’t broken up. Knowing he was getting married next month, knowing he was going to be a father next year – these things did not frighten him. They made him feel as though he belonged to this woman, and to this unborn child, and to this world.

But sometimes
The Paper
felt like just another job, where someone older than you was always telling you what to do, not so very different from the gin factory, except there was less freedom to run wild. And sometimes Misty really got on his nerves.

The two of them sat facing each other on the Inter-City 125 train, waiting for it to leave, and Misty was reading aloud from a paperback called
The Flames of Love
that she had just bought at W. H. Smiths. And Terry understood that the opposite of love is not hate. The opposite of love is irritation.

‘Listen to this bit,’ she said.
‘She came through the French windows and suddenly felt his strong, manly, dirty fingers in her taffeta. Miles the gardener was on his knees before her, imploring with his heavy-lidded eyes.’
Misty guffawed.
‘She gasped as he kissed the hem of her gown. “Valerie,” he said, “do you understand how big this thing is?”’

A gaggle of businessmen staggered down the carriage, smelling
of smoky bacon crisps and shorts bolted down at the railway bar. They eyed Misty hungrily. Terry glared at them. She didn’t notice. She was enjoying her Doris Hardman too much.

‘“No
one – least of all that cad Sir Timothy – is man enough to do more than kiss your gilded slippers.”’
She was laughing so hard now that she struggled to get the words out. Misty shook her head, wide-eyed with disbelief. ‘Isn’t this just
fabulous?
Don’t you
love it?
I’m going to read
everything
by her, she’s so
mad.’

Terry smiled politely. It
was
funny – he could see that – but was it quite as funny as Misty was making out? Was she planning to read the whole book out loud? Was it going to be like this all the way to Sheffield? Was it going to be like this for the next fifty years?

He could hardly stand to admit it, but it was suddenly all a little bit different. With Misty, and with
The Paper
too. He began leafing through the latest issue. It was a good issue. The kind of issue that would have had his heart beating faster when he was out there in reader-land, travelling up to the city to buy
The Paper
a day early with all the other true believers.

Young Elvis on the cover in all his greasy pomp. Pages of tributes and memories and reflections from some of the older guys. Ray’s interview with Lennon. And the new guy tearing Dag Wood to bits for spending most of his gig at the Rainbow squatting behind the amps, his leather trousers down by his ankles, clutching his stomach and groaning.

And – who would have thought it? – the diary mention of a band called Electric Baguette who wore Italian suits and played synthetic dance music and said they were bored with politics, they just wanted to make pop music and money. Brainiac had finally formed his band, and everybody seemed to think they were going to be the next hot thing. Funny how time slipped away – it was no longer the Sex Pistols that filled the sky for the new groups, but Chic. How quickly the new music – the new anything – became old hat. There was a rumour that Brainiac had even had his teeth
fixed. But Terry closed
The Paper
, feeling curiously unmoved by all of it.

Partly it was the ham-fisted, infantile quality of much of the writing – one of the older guys had compared Elvis to Jay Gatsby, ‘the hero of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s brilliant novel,
The Great Gatsby.’
As if everyone needed to be told who Jay Gatsby was, and as if everyone needed to be told that the book was one of the greatest novels ever written. As if, Terry thought, we’re all just a bunch of dumb kids, waiting to be educated by our betters. There was nothing by Skip Jones in
The Paper
. For Terry, there was always something missing when Skip’s by-line wasn’t in there. He was happy that Skip was on the mend. But
The Paper
seemed almost ordinary without him.