This Could Be Rock 'N' Roll (6 page)

“I won’t be long, kids. I just have to see a mate about a book. You’ll have fun with Jade, I know you will.”

Sam starts to cry.

“Oh, Sam ……”

“Sam is such a cry-baby,” Josh taunts her.

“No, I’m not.”

“Yes, you are.”

“You don’t want Dad to go either.”

“No, but I’m not going to cry about it. He’ll be back soon.”

Sam’s face totally dissolves. “But I’ll miss him.”

Jade goes down on her haunches to give Sam a big hug, but Sam wriggles herself free and comes and grabs my leg again instead. I lift her up.

“I don’t have to go.”

She stops crying instantly and smiles at me.

Jade picks up the phone and hands it to me. “It was a bloody stupid idea anyway,” she comments.

“Yeah, it was really.”

*  *  *

Kevin is one of my ex-house mates, the one who is all of a sudden rolling in it in the fraudulent name of art. I could have coped with it if he had been rolling in it for some normal reason, but he is making big money as an author cynically writing totally crappy books. He calls himself Patricia Season and produces the sort of Mills & Boon stuff where Roedean girls are abducted by Arab sheiks who turn out to be rich and gentlemanly. In fact every single one of his books is like that. He has one plot which he has churned out about ten times by now and he sells millions of the bloody things, quite a large chunk of them to the Middle East - sand to the Arabian desert. I swear that all he does from one book to the next is find & replace. I have tried to prove it but the minute I open one of his books and find that the heroine is called Lucretia or Daphne or Miranda I am instantly moved to hurl it hard at the floor swearing loudly and stamping on it, at which point Jade picks it up, straightens it out, and reads it.

“You can’t seriously want to read that rubbish.”

“Yeah, I do.”

“But they’re all the same.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Don’t you get bored of them?”

“No, I like his books. He’s a really good writer. He knows what we want and he gives it to us.”

“I can’t believe it.”

“He’s your friend, Jake. One of us should read them in case he asks us about them.”

“He won’t. He knows they’re utter crap too. The last thing he will want is an honest opinion.”

“Well, if he asks me I’ll tell him that I honestly like them.” Can’t wait to see Kevin’s face on that one.

“Do you think I should take lessons from him to get my income up a bit?”

“No, that wouldn’t be you. Besides, you’d look pretty daft up there on stage in a skirt and a deep voice. Some people could get away with it, but you couldn’t.”

I’m beginning to realise that everybody thinks I’m a boring old git. I think that increasingly myself. One day I’m going to smash my guitar on stage just to show them what I am capable of, except that I can’t afford a new one. Maybe I’ll spit at somebody in the audience instead. Or I could go the other way and ask for requests. “The Birdie Song. Coming up, Madam.” Some days I want to torch the world and dance around the fire, so I can’t be that boring after all, although my dancing leaves much to be desired.

Needless to say, Kevin’s publicity is that his alter ego, Patricia, went to Roedean herself from which she was abducted by the son of an Arabian sheikh studying at Eton and Oxford before he slung her wriggling and struggling over his shoulder and lugged her onto his private jet, and that her books are therefore based on her real life experiences. Someday someone will do an exposé on him for Dispatches but Kevin boasts that it doesn’t matter because he really does know a Patricia Season who went to Roedean who really was abducted by the son of an Arabian sheikh; it is just that he ghost writes the books for her. You can pay some people to say anything. The really irking thing is that he is still the insufferably modest guy who drinks halves of lager and never speaks above a whisper I used to share a house with. The only way you know there is something to him is that he has a wicked twisted smile that appears for no obvious reason in the middle of a pregnant pause (hate that expression), so he is either an author or a sadist.

Strangely enough, I have another ex-house mate who looks like he is going to be a successful author too - Nick Quantrill. His genre is private eye novels and he is beginning to get a lot of attention for his work which is actually worth reading so he’ll probably have to continue giving them away. Looks like he might finally have hooked up with a publisher though. Nick is quiet too and an accountant, so he looks death in the face day and night. He comes regularly to my gigs, and has done so for years, so he is officially a good lad whereas Kevin is never around nowadays - too busy running his property portfolio.

It’s all a long way away from when we were sharing the house in Parkfield Drive. Kevin was the total slob, Nick was the tidy one, and I was the one out fishing for the birds with my guitar and my leather jacket (“I am an author doesn’t cut it in Hull; I write my own songs and perform them to crowds of fans” does). Near the end I met Cathy and she moved in with me which upset the entire balance of the house. Cathy and Kevin were forever having set-tos because Cathy resented picking up Kevin’s soiled clothing and discarded plates all the time, which shows you that tidiness is no indicator of future wealth. One day Kevin came back to the house with a girlfriend which surprised and delighted us all, except that she was not only the splitting image of my Cathy but she was actually called Kathy too. That made life very confusing. Nick, my-Cathy and I couldn’t work out why Kevin would go out and get himself a woman who was exactly like his tormentor (and mine, even in those days) but he was right - it worked. He and Kathy got married and they are still together. Me and my-Cathy haven’t been quite so lucky.

The trouble is that now I cannot bear to see Kevin’s Kathy, although I don’t admit that to anyone. Kevin and I always meet up alone. He must guess the reason.

I came back to the Parkfield Drive house unexpectedly one afternoon and Nick was behaving really strangely. I was trying to go upstairs for a piss - the only toilet being upstairs - and he kept finding excuses for stopping me. Eventually I said “Out with it, Nick. What’s going on? You are behaving really weirdly.”

“I am?”

“Yeah, you are.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Come on, Nick. There is definitely something. What’s going on upstairs?”

“Upstairs?”

“Yeah, upstairs.”

“Nothing,” he replied rather too quickly.

“I’m going to have a look.”

Nick barred my way. “I wouldn’t do that.”

“Why?”

“I just wouldn’t.”

At that moment I heard my-Cathy call out “Oh Kevin!” sounding suspiciously affectionate, even impassioned. My-Cathy and Kevin’s Kathy have very different voices so you can easily spot the difference if you can get them to open their mouths (not so hard, especially if you have just done something wrong).

“Is that Cathy?” I asked Nick, perplexed.

“I don’t want any trouble.”

“Nick, I am going up to have a look.”

“Don’t, Jake.”

“Well, I’m going to.”

I pushed past Nick and ran stealthily up the stairs. Something was happening in our bedroom. I heard my-Cathy’s voice again followed by Kevin’s voice. I then saw two heads and shapes inside my bed behaving very intimately.

“No,” shouted Nick, grabbing my shoulder.

I brushed him off. “Nick, stay out of this!” I ran over to the bed and pulled back the sheets. Kevin was there in just his underwear and there was what I took to be my-Cathy similarly undressed.

“What the fuck!” I exploded.

Suddenly everyone burst out laughing and my-Cathy emerged from under the bed. Kevin was in our bed with his own Kathy as part of an elaborate set-up. It took me a few moments to get the joke. I turned on Nick. “OK, mate, you get an Oscar.”

“Nick,” said my-Cathy, “you were brilliant.”

I’m still looking out for the opportunity to get him back.

You’ve been picking at the past again

When you should have left it well alone.

Cos only time can heal your heart and then

Maybe you can make it on your own.

On and on and on we go

Where we’re heading no-one knows.

It’s just like Sinatra sings,

I guess it’s just one of those things,

You don’t need to know the who, when, where and how.

It’s just like Sinatra sings,

It’s just one of those crazy things,

And there’s nothing you can do about it now.

You’ve been picking at the past again

It’s as if you need your battle scars.

And now you’ll always wander way back when

Out in sunlight searching for the stars.

On and on and on we go

Where we’re heading no-one knows.

It’s just like Sinatra sings,

I guess it’s just one of those things,

You don’t need to know the who, when, where and how.

It’s just like Sinatra sings,

It’s just one of those crazy things,

And there’s nothing you can do about it now.

It’s just like Sinatra sings,

It’s just one of those stupid things,

And there’s nothing you can do about it now.

Chapter 7

If you were born in Hull, as I was, you could be forgiven for believing that it’s as far away from a Mecca of culture as you can get, that Hull is to art what Darfur is to world peace. That’s what I used to believe. Mind you, if you were born in Glasgow, you might well have been surprised when it was named European City of Culture too.

But something’s happened here in the last twenty years and it isn’t just me. Suddenly poets and writers and musicians and painters are all crawling out of every crevice in the city, and there are still a lot of cracks around this place not filled in properly since the second world war. It’s that old thing about what makes a woman sexy? Answer: looking like she has just had sex and is just about to have it again. So what makes Hull look like a wasteland? Answer: looking like it’s just been bombed by the Germans and is just about to be bombed again by someone else, probably the Council.

And there’s certainly nothing special to notice on the streets. Don’t expect to see dandies with fob watches or interesting street fashion. Everybody wears waterproof jackets or scraggy jumpers with t-shirts tucked underneath and tattoos peaking around the edges. Don’t expect to catch any decent street art either - the dozy buggers can’t even be arsed to daub a wall with anything decorative, the most exciting monument is the massive BBC wide screen in Victoria Square and the most prominent building is the Princes Quay shopping centre which looks like the Titanic whilst it was floundering an hour after it crashed into the iceberg.

We can start off with the music because that is my bit, so there is me, then there’s Edwina Hayes, and James Waudby of Salako and the Horse Guards Parade, and The House Martins and The Beautiful South, and Everything But The Girl, and Henry Priestman of The Christians, and Roland Gift of Fine Young Cannibals, and Mick Ronson and several of The Spiders From Mars, and CrackTown, and Abbie Lammas, and Alex Stork, and Glenn Williams the Hullbilly (as he calls himself) and, moving further towards York, Holly Taymar and David Ward MacLean and Claire J. Smith. Then for playwrights you’ve got John Godber of Hull Truck (turning theatre into a contact sport as everybody says around here) and, heading for Scarborough, Alan Ayckbourn and Graham Rhodes. In poetry you have Philip Larkin, Tony Flynn, Ian Parks, Frank Redpath, Daithidh MacEochaidh (now there’s a solid Hull name for you), Pete Morgan, Peter Ardern, Peter Knaggs and T.F. Griffin, not to mention Andrew Motion who became Poet Laureate so doesn’t count as being much of a poet - I hear he is a good novelist, though. Then as writers you have my mate Nick Quantrill, Daphne Glazer, Steven Hall and Valerie Wood (if you want a break from Kevin’s stuff in the Mills & Boon department). We even have a painter, Peter Bell, who has taken up where Beryl Reid and L.S. Lowry left off - fat ladies and men with flat caps.

OK, so you will get a much bigger roll call in London or even Manchester, but it puts us firmly above Grimsby and Stoke-On-Trent, and maybe even Newcastle, Birmingham and Leeds. It makes me feel like I am part of something which is important because my life is in such a mess I no longer feel I am much in myself.

*  *  *

Harry is back round again, mid-week this time. Now what’s up? Plenty according to him. The weekend in the Lakes was a washout. It rained the whole time, but that’s hardly new. Cathy missed the kids and kept fretting over what we were doing with them - we took them round to my mum and dad, as it happens - the hotel cost them a bomb (not that that mattered) and Harry admitted to Cathy in an unguarded moment that she probably wasn’t good enough for him as far as his family was concerned.