Echo had an itch. He scratched his arm until the skin was red and raw and his crown of thorns tattoo seemed to weep blood.
We were outside his place, blocking the pavement with old black flight-cases.
‘So Jim – Jimmy – James … ’ow come yer packin yer axe, as they say, in this neck o’ the woods? I wouldn’t have thought rock’n’roll was exactly your button, old bean.’
‘Job,’ I said. ‘I need a job.’
‘I thought they decided on’oo wuz the Sons of Learnin’ an’ ’oo wuz the Children of Toil first day of infants school.’
‘Then we’re doomed,’ I said.
He sniffed, his raw amphetamine-eroded nostrils flaring slightly. ‘Can’t see the attraction for yer.’ He nodded at the clapped-out van and the flight-cases with the fading names of long-defunct groups stencilled in grey on the side.
A major pop group might employ a fleet of fierce articulated trucks loaded with lighting, sound equipment, stage sets, wardrobe, merchandising, even a few instruments – indeed the whole panoply of hardware that goes with the raw vitality of the people’s music. Ours was a small affair. The glamour went no further than Nico.
Quite how Demetrius had managed to persuade her that it was necessary she perform with a group, I couldn’t work out. But none of us would have been going anywhere if it were not for his persistence and her gullibility. Without us she would be able to travel in comfort and earn more money. It didn’t make sense.
‘She’s not so thick as yer think, Jim – Jimmy. Don’t forget, she’s got the songs – what’ve you got?’
Perhaps Nico knew she was better when she sang alone. Maybe she wanted the spotlight to ease up on her for a while. Who could tell? She seemed so knowing and so credulous at the same time that it permanently wrong-footed you. You never knew where she was or where you stood in relation to her. Most of the time she disdained even to speak so there was no point trying to figure it out. We were here, that was all. The job was to load up this Mister Whippy van with Echo’s broken-down junk and pretend to be something.
Demetrius must have got the truck from someone who owed him one. The seats were the kind of thing you get on public transport, the bare minimum in terms of comfort. Plastic and metal. No head-rests. We had to travel two thousand miles there and back in this. Nico hadn’t seen it yet; I just knew she was going to tear into Demetrius when she clapped eyes on it. The mind that child warning was still visible beneath the thin coat of pale blue paint. On the side was written, in lean-to letters to suggest velocity, ‘r & o van hire salford’. The suspension sank with an ominous jolt each time we threw a case in the back.
After five minutes we stopped for another fag.
‘But yer must’ave some ulterior motive for climbin’ aboard The Good Ship Nico? Lemmesee … it’s not the rock’n’roll cos yer know too many chords, an’ it can’t be the drugs cos yer’ve always got yer train fare’ome …’
‘It must be the sex then.’
‘Good grief … yer can’t be serious. Sex? This is a junkie group. Yer do this when yer can’t do anythin’ else.’
‘Then we’re both free to pursue our separate interests,’ I concluded.
Toby struggled up the path putting all his weight behind the massive flight-case that housed his drum kit. Echo and I watched him anxiously.
‘Don’t just fookin’ stare … give us a bit of shoulder.’
We shoved the reluctant crate up Echo’s garden path, the silly little castors getting stuck in every dip and hollow. Finally we reached the back of the truck. We needed a ramp. The thing was impossible to lift. We needed proper men.
Demetrius appeared. ‘The shape of the legs is unimportant – but a finely turned ankle, that’s the thing, n’est-ce pas, gentle-men?’ He was towing an overstuffed leatherette suitcase on runners with a stick attachment – the kind of thing old ladies have. Under his right arm he carried a Bullworker. He dropped the Bullworker onto Toby’s flight-case and parked his suitcase alongside.
‘It’s somehow deeply satisfying to see the working classes lathering up a good sweat. Like shire horses. I exempt you of course from this, James, though for some unaccountable reason you wish to align yourself with the lower orders.’ He sniffed his Vick inhaler. ‘Breasts and buttocks for them, eh?’ He nodded at Toby and Echo. ‘But the ankle, the asterisk, the footnote to the sonnet that is woman …’
‘Get that fookin’ bag of shag-mags an’ dirty drawers away from my gear … Now!’ Echo snapped.
‘You want to know why you people will never be anything?’ said Demetrius, snatching his bag. ‘Can’t take a joke.’
‘Want ter know why yer’ll always’ave dirty underwear?’ said Echo, ‘’Cos yer shit yerself when someone looks yer in the eye.’
The stand-off was broken only when Mercy, Echo’s youngest, came up to us. She was about seven. Beautiful. Skin a soft golden colour. She was carrying a bunch of lily-of-the-valley, which she gave to Toby.
‘Thank you, my little dear.’ Toby bent down and kissed her on the forehead.
There was something other-worldly about the child, but anyone who spent their days playing among gravestones would be that way. She had power. The little girl could even subdue Demetrius, and he was an angry mountain in whose shadows the natives trembled. Or so he liked to think.
After we’d finished Toby, Echo and myself stared at the van, loaded to the gunwhales with crap. Demetrius was indoors being fed by Echo’s wife.
‘The suspension’s gone – before Faticus Omnivorus has even sat in it,’ Echo sneered.
We crawled across town, Demetrius at the wheel. We had to pick up Nico and Raincoat the sound engineer. Echo kept his head down and his hat over his face, so none of his friends would recognise him.
The van chugged into Sunnyview Crescent. Echo grabbed Toby’s lily-of-the-valley and hopped out. ‘I’ll get her.’
‘Creep!’ said Demetrius.
We waited.
‘Purra tape on,’ said Toby.
Demetrius rattled through the pile in the glove-compartment. None of them had names or titles. How was anyone supposed to know? He chose one of his own: A Golden Hour of Conway Twitty.
I began to feel nervous. Strangely, it had never really hit me before that we were illegal. I started to make a mental list of the possibilities: possession of controlled substances; dubious credit cards; unsafe vehicle; illegally parked; loitering. Not forgetting crimes against good taste.
They came out, Good Queen Bess and Raleigh. Echo was staggering in front, carrying the harmonium like a relic of state. Nico had on a pair of aviator shades. It wasn’t sunny and she wasn’t smiling. She reached the gate and stared expressionlessly at the van, then looked back at Echo and shook her head.
Echo staggered, shell-shocked, in no-man’s-land, still cradling the harmonium. He looked at her and he looked at the van, then turned and followed Nico back to the house. The door slammed shut.
Demetrius wasn’t ready for this. It was the first time he’d been out of the country since he was a kid. This was his chance to break the grip of a fear that had been holding him in for years. It wasn’t Nico. It wasn’t us. It certainly wasn’t the music. For him it really was an adventure. An adventure of the heart. Like falling in love, it contained the same terror and exhilaration. No one was going to spoil his romance.
His fist pounded the dashboard. He looked over at the silent, shuttered house. ‘That malignant little earworm, he’s eaten into her soft mind already.’
He jumped out of the van, held on to his trilby, staggered a little at the hard shock of the ground, then straightened himself up for action. Manager/Parent/Suitor – this would test all three.
Echo drove us back to Demetrius’s office. This time we walked up as there was no ‘Dr’ Demetrius to command respect. Tommy the Lift just spat on the floor and swigged at the bottle of Jameson’s he kept under his stool.
The office was strangely full of activity. There was a guy on one phone talking to his record company. In the other room were two small women. One was pretty beneath the attitude armour. The other was pure testosterone. She might have made a good pitprop. They were both using the other phone, fixing up a show where they came in dressed entirely in animal entrails. It was some kind of statement. It was hard to find a good tune anywhere.
Cardboard boxes were stacked high. I looked inside one. It was full of unpromoted promo-singles for Pete Shelley’s “Tiller Boys”.
‘Why does he keep all this stuff?’ I asked.
The pretty one shrugged. The pitprop said, ‘We’re here to make essential calls. What are you here for?’
‘I honestly don’t know … I thought I was doing a tour of Italy with Nico. But I haven’t got further than Didsbury.’
‘Oh, you’ve joined the good Doctor’s sick list have you?’ The pretty one smirked to the other: ‘They all follow the Big Quack around, like ducks in a line.’
‘Quack,’ said pretty.
‘Quack. Quack,’ said pitprop.
Toby and Echo looked at me from the other room, puzzled.
It was clear this was no longer Demetrius’s office. Who were these people? I pulled Echo to one side.
‘Who are they?’ I asked.
‘People with careers,’ he said.
Flying was the only way to be in Italy on time. It had made the most sense all along, but Demetrius was in favour of terra firma.
Raincoat
His eyes blinked, like a lizard. He had a smile like a lizard, totally insincere … maybe he would eat you. He would be smiling at you, summing up your calorific value as you chatted to him, a juicy buzzing fly. He always agreed with you so you never knew what he was really thinking.
Demetrius wanted all his friends involved. Jobs for the boys. All the way down the line. And the line stretched round the block to where someone’s wallet was unaccountably £10 lighter, or someone else needed a runner for a couple of grams. That was where you’d find Raincoat.
But he was so charming. Truly charming. He’d been a ladies’ hairdresser after he left school. He knew what women wanted. He shared their confidences and he got to know their tricks of the trade. He was a professional flirt. He could make a woman feel really good, adored.
In this way he would attach himself to strong professional women who might be feeling insecure about their femininity after a hard day breaking balls in the boardroom. He kept house for a smart young Irishwoman who ran a theatre company. She knew what he was really about but there was a kind of unspoken truce between them so long as he hoovered the house, fixed the dinner, called the plumber and performed prolonged oral sex on her every Friday night. This he was happy to do. It was a small inconvenience for a rent-free existence.
I recognised him before we were introduced. His name had flitted like a ghost through conversations. Nico was continually asking after him, probably because he knew exactly where to find what she was always looking for. Toby had known him for years. Echo, though, was uneasy about him … he’d lent him a microphone a few months back. Raincoat had promised to return it but Echo knew it had been traded in for dope. Echo kept a strict inventory of the junk in his cupboard. ‘Whenever I look at ’im, I don’t jus’ see a second’and Sinatra, I see the microphone on a stand.’
Raincoat was standing by the check-in desk at Ringway Airport. ‘We’ll get high, starry eyed.’ Like Demetrius, he was fond of a trilby but this one fitted, and had a beautiful red feather in the band. He had on a brown Donegal tweed suit with a yellow-checkered waistcoat and had his raincoat slung over one shoulder. He looked like an Irish bookie with Mafia aspirations. He looked good. But he’d left his soul a little too long under the dryer back at Vidal Sassoon’s.
Raincoat, Toby and Echo were off the plane like a shot the minute the rear cabin opened. They mingled with the holidaymakers. Nico brushed past me as if I was a complete stranger, leaving behind her a wake of duty-free scent to baffle the ‘sneefer’ dogs. As I grabbed my hand luggage from the overhead locker a steward from Club Class tapped me. Would I follow him? ‘Snow’ clung to his uniform.
Club Class had been transformed into the Christmas Experience. ‘Snow’ everywhere … small fragments of white styrofoam that had burst free from a pillow Demetrius had chewed and then ripped apart as the aircraft tear-dropped over Milan airport. He cowered in the corner of the cabin like a trapped beast. The last pair of Euro-execs were disembarking: ‘Drogisti,’ said one to the other, brushing the snow off his Armani lapels.
Demetrius was babbling a psycho peptalk: ‘It’s a matter of centring … Locating the Axial Body Meridian … tapping into the Kundalini …’
He breathed in deeply, yogically, on his Vick. Somewhere in the middle of Dr Demetrius was a thin hippy desperately signalling to be let out.
The promoters stepped through the automatic sliding doors. A girl and two guys. The men looked tough, but it was only fashion-tough. Beneath the stubble quivered career anxiety, inside the leather pants was soft pasta flab. Their eyes scanned the arrival lounge. They seemed to look through us, past us, around us, but never directly at us.
Nico stood there, slightly apart, an extra on life’s battlefield, in her black rags. You could read them. After they’d eliminated all the other possibilities, could this be her? The Bag-Lady of Rock’n’Roll.
‘Neeeeee-co!’ The girl strode forward, grinning manically. ‘Here, in Italia, at last.’
‘Are we late?’ Maybe Nico was joking. Behind the shades nobody knew. She wanted to go directly to the hotel. The promoter wanted to take her to a press meeting.
Nico had other plans. Other needs. ‘I need to freshen up.’ She stomped off to the hotel in her motorbike boots, the straps of which she never bothered to buckle. With Nico, you always heard her spurs first.
The promoters quickly consulted each other. The girl ran after Nico.
The guys introduced themselves. ‘Benedetto.’ ‘Pasquale … and that is Titz, as everyone call her.’
Echo MC’d for us.
‘Is there no one more?’ Pasquale asked.
‘He’s following on a bit later,’ said Echo.
I whispered to Raincoat, ‘Don’t you think we should wait?’ He pretended not to hear.
‘We also need ter “freshen up”,’ suggested Echo.
‘Nico … she’s blonde, no?’ asked Pasquale as we sat in Milan’s thrombosis of traffic.
‘Nah,’ said Echo, ‘yer thinkin’ of the Beach Boys.’
‘In the photos, she’s blonde,’ insisted Pasquale.
‘What photos?’ asked Echo.
‘In the Factory weeeth Andee Waaarhol and Velvette Onnergroun’.’
‘Now I’m with yer … yer thinkin’ of Nico from the Velvet Underground. Bit of a mix-up … we’ve brought yer Narco from the London Underground.’
Raincoat tried to friendly things up in a weird Esperanto all his own. ‘Ah, La Bella Italia … Cappuccino … La Dolce Vita …’ He racked his brain.
Benedetto picked up on the latter. ‘Eh, La Dolce Vita … Federico Fellini … Nico participo in quel film.’
‘Nico – yeh,’ continued Raincoat, keeping up the cunnilingua. ‘Nico populario in Italia?’
‘Boh!’ Benedetto shrugged.
‘Pensavo che fosse bionda,’ said Pasquale to his pal, still preoccupied with Nico’s hair colour.
‘Anch’io,’ said Benedetto.
Back at the hotel, the boys ripped open the pick-up plate on Echo’s guitar and carved out the smack.
I fled to my room and laid out my pyjamas.
Demetrius installed himself in the Bridal Suite. Nico was aghast: ‘Does he think someone will ma-a-ary him? The way he was on the plane … like a looonatic.’
I was scared. How many times had I been on stage? I counted, on one hand … two Barmitzvahs and a free-jazz jerk in Leeds. Nico was due to play a club in the north of Milan called Odyssea. Echo explained that the further out of town the venue, the uglier it is. I never went to clubs. Too loud. Too many people. A sea of piss in the gents. Echo and Toby reassured me that this was normal – people who played music rarely went to hear the stuff.
Then there were the songs. I still couldn’t remember how they went and we only had to do seven. Toby said he’d nod to me every time I had to change chords. ‘That’ll impress the music critic of the Milan Bugle,’ said Echo.
The tour bus tumbril picked us up at the hotel. Pasquale was at the wheel. The show was seven hours away but already I felt the game was up.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Echo. ‘You don’t count, they’re only interested in Nico, they want ter touch Death in drag.’
Demetrius sat in the front passenger seat. He loved the big screen. He had to devour everything. He’d showered himself in bonhomie and the hotel’s complimentary aftershave.
‘Jesus, you smell like a hooker’s haaandbag!’ shouted Nico, pinching her nose.
Pasquale jerked the bus to a stop.
‘I say, steady on there, driver!’ shouted Raincoat, unloading the last squirt of a shot into his naked buttock.
Pasquale helped me carry my keyboard into the club:
‘Nico, ees a boy’s name, no?’
‘Yes, I think she’d like to be one … the boots, the bad manners …’
Raincoat, carrying Nico’s shoulder bag, interrupted. ‘Not fergettin’ those teensy weensy temper tantrums … Like a geezer? No chance. No matter’ow’ard she tries, she’ll never be able ter sing like Barry White or piss’er initials in the snow.’ He rummaged in her bag for any stray crumbs of dope or money.
Pasquale introduced Raincoat to the sound and lighting crew. They showed him the mixing desk: twenty-four channels, each with different EQs, a stack of effects – reverb, delays, a hundred different ways of taking a sound and placing it anywhere.
Raincoat shook his head: ‘Nah, can’t work with that lot, mate – pots ’n’ pans, no good ter me. I’ve only ever used Trojan mixers … mucho regretto.’
The Italians were mortified. This equipment was the best in Milan. What was this Trojan stuff? ‘Trojan?’ ‘Trojan?’ They kept passing the word around like a hot pizza.
Demetrius loomed up. ‘Does there seem to be a problem, gentleman?’
‘’Ee say ’ee only work weeth Trojan equeepment,’ complained the Italians in an Anvil Chorus.
‘Trojan?’ queried Demetrius. ‘Do I know them? Are they by any chance related to Stag and Featherlite?’
‘Eh?’ Raincoat blanked him. ‘No … yer know … Tro-jan. Built by Trond Jansson, Swedish … They’re the tip-top of the tree, beautiful Scandinavian teak finish. This stuff’s pots ’n’ pans.’
A sudden rage shadowed Demetrius’s face.
‘My dear Raincoat, although the minutiae of public address systems are a matter of deep indifference to me, I am however aware that they operate on universal principles … Must I therefore construe that you are, in fact, an impostor?’
Raincoat shuffled from one foot to another. ‘It’s only pop,’ he said.
Demetrius’s eyes blackened over. Nero in a Lone Ranger mask.
‘Listen, mate.’ Raincoat’s voice was dry, and insinuating. He smiled, a lizard on a hot rock. ‘Listen, she’s the singer an’ she can’t sing; they’re’ – he pointed at me – ‘the musicians an’ they can’t play; you’re the road manager an’ yer can’t travel; I’m the sound engineer an’ I can’t fix me girlfriend’s’i-fi … What’s the bleedin’ diff’rence?’
5.00 p.m.: Echo was trying to assemble Nico’s harmonium. Raincoat was twiddling randomly with the knobs on the mixing desk. Toby practised relentless paradiddles on a bar stool. Demetrius had gone to the bordello across the road to calm his nerves.
The dressing-room measured about thirteen foot by seven. A minimalist paradise. Wall-to-wall white tiles, buzzing strip-light, smoked glass and chrome coffee-table, black wire-mesh foldout chairs facing a wall-length mirror … cosy.
Nico sat there alone, her eyes closed, head resting back against the wall. A splash of blood laced across the white enamel sink, her signature.
Softly I closed the door and went to buy a postcard. Wish you were here.
8.00 p.m.: ‘Sorry, can’t eat.’ My stomach was a twist of gristle. Demetrius took my plate and scooped the contents on to his own.
‘Waste is a symbol of decadence,’ he said.
‘So is being faaat,’ said Nico. ‘Eat. Eat. Eat. What else do you do with my money?’
‘I go a-whorin’, ma’am, as befits the custom of an English gentleman.’
‘Toooorist!’ said Nico.
10.00 p.m.: There were fifteen, maybe more, in the dressing-room. Pasquale, Titz, some bespectacled dwarf with a dictaphone recording everything Nico said, a couple of Versaces and an Armani with cameras and clinging girlfriends, an acne-ridden psycho babbling nonsense in Nico’s other ear, and three people nobody knew at all, sitting on our chairs.
The dwarf asked each of us in turn our musical pedigree. Nico’s of course was the hippest, then Echo and Toby. Eventually he got to me.
‘An’ wheech grups have you played een?’
‘I … well … er …’
‘Jim plays in a Palm Court Orchestra,’ butted in Echo.
‘Napalm Court Orchestra? Eees Trash Metal?’
‘Pure scrapyard,’ I answered. He seemed gratified.
10.30 p.m.: Demetrius kicked them all out. Then Nico kicked him out. She didn’t like the way he ogled her when she was taking a shot. ‘Like I was naaaked.’
We were running late but she had to have one last hit before we went on stage.
I chain-lit another cigarette.
‘Jim, look, yer makin’ me nervous, an’ I’m not in it,’ said Raincoat. ‘Go on,’ave a dab, yer’ll be all right.’
He opened a small white envelope and then from his waistcoat pocket he produced a miniature penknife. It was the prettiest thing, slightly curved, dagger-shaped. The body was ebony, with three diamonds set along the length. He pressed the middle diamond; a tiny blade flicked out, like a baby with a vicious tongue. He trimmed a corner off the pinkish brown powder and scooped it on to the blade. He held it under my nostril.
I heaved into the sink.
‘Shiiit, Raincoat. Such a waste.’ Nico tutted self-righteously, like a kindergarten ma’am. ‘Don’t you know he’s a health freeek … probably a nymphomaniaaac too.’ Moral superiority builds its pulpit in the strangest places.
10.45 p.m.: Perhaps it was the white tiles and the mirrors.
‘I need a piss,’ said Nico. Though it resembled one, there was no WC in the dressing-room and no other way out except through the audience.
Titz was thumping on the door. ‘Can you pleeese be on stage now?’ The audience were slow-handclapping. Nico hoisted herself on to the sink. We all looked the other way.
Pisssssssssss … You could hear it in the pure tiled acoustics. We started giggling. So did Nico.
Titz banged on the door again. ‘Tell that girl to shutthefuckup,’ said Nico. ‘How can I do it when she’s making me nervous?’
Echo opened the door, blocking Titz’s view. Her head peered round to witness a Rhinemaiden perched on the sink with ancient grey cotton drawers flapping down around her motorbike boots. Another illusion shattered.
Titz led us on stage with a flashlight. Echo first, then Toby, then me. Nico was still hitching up her pants.
Echo plugged into his amplifier, slung on his guitar strap, searched in his pocket for a plectrum, then very carefully and very intently he began to play. Maybe it was good, but no one out front could hear anything. He looked over at me. One word registered across his features. Raincoat.
Nico strode on. The audience immediately surged forward. She stood straight, head back, eyes closed, hand resting on the mike-stand, waiting.
Silence. Nico looked round at us inquiringly. Echo shrugged. Over at the desk I could see Demetrius and the Italians gesticulating at Raincoat. The sea of faces was looking mean. They’d paid good money.
Nico pointed upwards, as if to suggest more volume. As she did so a brain-searing whine shot through the place like a hot needle between the ears.
Toby counted 3–4 with his sticks and we started to play, a whizz-bang cacophony. But the more hideous the uncontrollable squawks and screams of feedback became, the more the audience were getting off on it. My electric organ sounded like a buzz-saw. Toby kept ripping into his snare, Echo was laughing and shaking his head in disbelief. Nico was pacing up and down the stage with her fingers in her ears, kicking at the nearest heads in the audience.
Back at the mixing desk, I could see Raincoat smiling, a huge beam of self-congratulation across his face … After all, it was only Pop.
The seven songs were soon over. Nico had dispensed with our services for the time being.
‘What? You play no more?’ asked Pasquale.
‘Don’t know any more,’ said Echo.
‘Wha’appen now?’
‘The funeral begins.’
Disappointing to be back in the dressing-room after only twenty-five minutes. For Echo, though, a relief. He hated any kind of public display of anything. Toby, being the youngest, still had plenty of adrenalin to work off. He rat-a-tat-tatted his drumsticks on the tiled walls.
‘Gizabreak, and abbreviate the Boys’ Brigade, willyer?’ said Echo, lighting the last of his No. 6. Toby stopped, mooched, and hunted for the beer crate. Plenty of Pepsi and Orangina and a weird Italian Tizer. (Demetrius liked to drink soda-pop. He’d drawn up the contract. Pop it would be. Twenty-four bottles. At every gig.)
‘Maybe there’s some action up front,’ said Toby. ‘Fancy takin’ a look?’
We went sidestage and walked round the back of the audience. (Pop groups are the only practicable alternative for males who are too narcissistic to make the first move.) But instead of a host of Botticelli angels in miniskirts, Demetrius was waiting for us. Imperator. Surveying the scene of battle: ‘There was a time, not so long ago, when people knew of no world other than their own.’ Dr Demetrius was in reflective mood. ‘They were better off for it. Life-connected to the seasons and the stars … Now their heads are full of rubbish, inane fifth-form poetry masquerading as art. They should be listening to Verdi and Puccini …’ He pressed one nostril and Vicked the other. ‘Er, need I mention that you were crap?’
‘What d’yer expect, with a bookie’s runner at the controls?’ said Echo.
‘Why not do something constructive then and fix up a proper sound for Nico’s solo spot?’
Raincoat was still filling the room with weird electric jungle noises. Echo brushed him aside, slid a few knobs up and down, pressed a few settings, the basic stuff. Enough to place her voice somewhere.
We stepped back from the pain threshold. The ringing feedback stopped. The stage was now in total darkness except for a single spot from above. The audience seemed physically to ease up. A different feeling took over. Less mean, more intimate. It was a backstreet Punkerama, but people were willing it into a cathedral. They’d come to be part of some rite. It wasn’t directly to do with the music, or even Nico, they just wanted to be somewhere else. So they were prepared to take her seriously, and she, in turn, was trying her best to take them seriously. A temporary deal had been struck with futility. She was pushing open, with their help, however slightly, the heavy oak doors upon the Mystery.
She sat at the harmonium. The instrument was nothing like a church harmonium – much smaller, about the size of a baby’s coffin. To create a sound, she had to work the small bellows by way of pedals at her feet. With her right hand she played a repeated single phrase and with her left a melody. She’d carefully created her own harmonies, though she had no idea what the notes were in orthodox musical language.
And then of course, there was the voice. Dungeon-deep, where the secret horrors were hidden. It made you listen. No small achievement these days. Sometimes the words were nonsense, her own made-up juxtaposition of rhymes or words that just sounded intriguing coupled together. ‘Nemesis on loaded wheels.’ It made you wonder who was at the flight deck. It certainly wasn’t the voice of a sixties chick in op-art pants, or some emotionally neutral piece of Manhattan window-dressing as had been envisaged by the Factory Funsters.
‘This is the voice of one of those neolithic Venuses with the enormous pelvic girdles, and tiny mammalian heads that they dig up from the peat bogs of northern Denmark,’ opined Demetrius.
Demetrius’s mouth hung open. His glasses were filled with the beatific blue light that emanated from the stage.
Unwed virgins in the land
Tied up on the sand.
Something stirred inside Demetrius’s overcoat.
Are you not on the secret side?
Nico muttered off-mike into the wings. Pasquale appeared with a drink and placed it precariously on a corner of the harmonium. She shook her head and put it securely on the floor by her foot pedals. She started up the harmonium again. Maybe for her it was just that bit more interesting than a pedalo, but we were seeing it for the first time. It was a crazy act. A forty-two-year-old Valkyrie, spaced out in motorbike boots.
She stopped pedalling for a second, reached down for her drink and took a long, throat-saving swig. Instantly she spat out the sickly sweet guck and half-puked an enormous arc that cascaded through the spotlight beam.
It echoed on and on through the sound system from one speaker to another. Laughter in the cathedral.
‘I’m going to fire you aaaall … Assholes!’ She was sitting in Demetrius’s seat in the bus back to the hotel. ‘You’re a bunch of rejects.’ She went round each one of us. ‘Invalids … freeee-loaders … nymphomaniacs … morons … shysters … Don’t bother turning up for the next show … I’ll have you all thrown out!’
‘So … this is the predicament …’
We were gathered around the four-poster bed in Dr Demetrius’s Bridal Suite, minus the bride.
‘She’s out of stuff already, hence the tantrum … although I must say, I find it unlikely that even Nico with her legendary appetite for self-destruction could possibly have cleaned up four grams in two days. I feel she must have had a little chivalrous assistance on the way.’ He sneered at Echo. ‘As for the sackings, I determine who stays and who goes … however, I’m afraid there will have to be a certain stringency regarding your immediate remuneration. I can’t get another lira out of the Eyeties until we’ve done a few more shows. There’s no recourse but to use what little cash we have in order to keep Nico pointing upwards –’
‘’Old on a minute,’ interrupted Echo, ’oo’s payin’ fer this gaff?’ He scanned the Bridal Suite.
Demetrius propped himself up on a pink satin cushion. ‘I have certain personal, private funds at my disposal, but these are exclusively for my own use in an Absolute Emergency. This does not constitute an emergency, but rather a tiresome interruption in our joyous progress towards the golden South … much in the manner of Keats and Shelley, wouldn’t you say, Echo?’
‘What about the beers?’ asked Toby.
‘“With beaded bubbles winking at the brim”,’ continued Demetrius abstractedly. ‘Perhaps something could be arranged with regard to the refreshments, we shall have to see … In the meantime, frugality, my friends, frugality.’ He pulled a tasselled rope and the heavy velvet drapes fell round the four-poster bed.
I had regular sleeping habits, as did Nico, who preferred to sleep all day, fearing disintegration in daylight. I wanted to sleep but couldn’t. Italy was out there – the bars, the bamboozle, the eternal city of flirts, but I felt distanced and disorientated … and tired.
In truth Italy was as far away as it had been back in Echo’s parlour. What we were up to wasn’t work exactly, but it wasn’t a holiday either. As Echo said, it was what you did when you couldn’t do anything else.
I couldn’t seem to connect on any level with Nico. I was used to people who talked. Too much chat seemed to irritate her, too much silence made me nervous. I asked her if she wanted to go and see some frescoes. ‘I can see them in a book.’ A stroll maybe? Too far, too tired – the shows exhausted her.
People would give her things. Once, as we were leaving the hotel, a strange girl, emaciated and stricken, pressed a shell into her hand. Nico immediately passed it on to Echo who made the sign of the cross and threw it away. The girl, in Nico’s eyes a witch, had been waiting up all night since the show, hanging around the entrance, hoping for a glimpse. ‘Anyone who wants to see me that bad has got to be nuts.’
Nico seemed to keep going on a diet of chocolate and white wine. Demetrius would organise great feasts in an attempt at international conjugality. Nico would absent herself.
‘I can’t bear to think of all those lumps of food just rotting inside me.’
She said she hadn’t had a shit in a couple of weeks. Echo said constipation was routine for a junkie. (Though he wasn’t sure if, in his case, it was the smack as he could only go in his own ‘po’.) I imagined Nico, once the gig was done, back at the hotel, curtains drawn, only the ghost flicker of TV, needle emptied, bathroom black, concentrated upon that still stubborn sphincter. Ole Dead Eye in the darkness, coldly staring at the stagnant latrine of romance, the Mediterranean.
Northern Europeans go to Italy to relax, to feel human again in a more exuberant and demonstrative culture, more loving and maternal than their own. North of the Alps it’s the fight to stay warm. Nico had devised her own form of insulation – psychical and physical. (I noticed that even on cold days she’d often worn only a light shirt.) But when the smack ran out she soon got the shivers. It didn’t matter in the least that we were beside the golden Mediterranean. Nothing outside really impinged on her terrifying single-mindedness, her obsessive neurological and emotional need for heroin. Even La Dolce Vita turned sour.
In Rome Nico got deep into withdrawal, her nerves scraping her bones. The money had shrunk, the shows were disappointing, the desperados were doing the drugs in very quickly. The promoters had arranged a lunch meeting with Italian Vogue for a possible photo session. Raincoat and Toby practised sucking in their cheeks. The pretty boys and girls dressed in their relaxed classics did not take immediately to Nico wrapped in an old blanket, eyes streaming, concerned only with her fee. I had an idea. Nico upholstered in Renaissance velvet, the needle scars on her tortured hands and arms, the grey flesh hanging lifelessly from those once unassailably high cheekbones. A powerful spread? There was some rapid consultation during which I heard the word ‘pervertito’, then they shook our hands, wished us a successful tour and left. Within seconds I’d blown everyone’s chance of a good lunch.
I felt especially ostracised after that until near the end of the tour in Genova, when I got my big break to go and get the drugs with Echo. (As I knew three Italian words, Ciao, Vaffanculo and Arrivederci, I had a use.) A smooth transaction with some charming Moroccans, marred only by the later discovery that they’d substituted the heroin with salt.
‘A hundred bucks an’ not even enough salt for a packet o’ staffords,’ lamented Echo.
Nico’s reaction was less circumspect. ‘Assholes.’
Things always ended up there.
A heavy black brogue inserted itself into my room – followed by a dark overcoat, beard, glasses, the soft pale skin of one who toileth not in the fields, hummingbird flash of Vick inhaler.
‘James … I feel I must speak to you.’
I thought, This is it. My old pal Dr Demetrius come to administer the last rites.
‘I wonder if you’re altogether happy …’ I’d heard it at the end of every job I’d ever had. ‘… with things as they are?’
‘What can I do?’ I asked. ‘It’s alien territory. The guys are OK for a few seconds as they intersect normality in between getting out of their heads and sweating it out. The rest of the time it’s lunacy … Nico hates me …’
‘Perhaps you should ignore them – after all, they are little more than circus creatures. Their needs are very basic, their joys are commonplace.’
Things were stirring once more beneath the overcoat. From one of the voluminous pockets he pulled out a Bible. The page was marked with a membership card to ‘Raffles. Gentlemen’s Sauna Club.’ The text was underlined.
… thou knowest the people,
that they are set upon mischief.
For they said unto me
‘Make us gods, which shall
go before us …’
(Exodus 32, v. 22–23)
‘Unfortunately,’ continued Demetrius, ‘Nico comes from a long line of people without a God they can truly believe in and – worse still – without a sense of humour. She fails to see the entertainment value in a lugubrious piano player, a punk drummer and a dope-fiend guitarist. Nor, sadly – and this is particularly painful for me, James – does she reciprocate the depth of my affection for her … more than affection … love.’
So, it was ‘amore’ after all. I was being employed to facilitate a romance.
In Genova we performed with an armed guard around the stage. Young Argentinians of Italian extraction were meeting their deaths in the South Atlantic. There was a strong anti-English feeling, especially among guys of conscription age.
The promoters had really pumped up Nico’s reputation in their pre-concert publicity. The kids were expecting heavy metal Wagner – what they got was Demetrius’s circus. Soldiers reconnoitring the stage; Nico wandering on and off, unsure of her lines, coming in with the right lyrics but to the wrong song. A strange ballet to cabaret angst.
‘Beastly business, old boy,’ said Demetrius in the dressing-room after the show. ‘Do I take it you’ll be yielding to the academic yoke once more next term?’
The study or the circus? The monastery or the madhouse? I looked around. Echo was helping Raincoat retrace his steps down memory lane to the exact moment when his microphone went missing. Nico was locked in her millionth interview about the Velvet Underground – why this, why that, why wasn’t it still 1967? Toby was offering to show the rose tattoo on his backside to a couple of cat girls in leopardskin mittens – if they would, in turn, ‘show somethin’ of yer beautiful city ter me an’ my pal’. He pointed me out. One of them darted a glance at me and giggled into her paws. She was pretty.
Nico stuck her head out of the interview and glared at me. ‘Nymphomaniac!’ she spat, and then carried on reliving Andy Warhol’s dream. For all of us.
‘See you next term,’ I said.