It’s almost gone one before Alec can get out of his overalls, shimmy into his suit, and be off at a run: out the loading bay entrance round the side of the Gazette and up Marshall Street to the Hare & Hounds. As ever, after the metallic close-up clatter of the machines, the air on the street seems soft and expansive. The traffic noise comes and goes in gentle waves, as if all the gearshifts and revving buses have melted together into soft surges. The sky is very high, the breeze when he rounds the corner by the milk bar seems to be telling him how big the world is. How much bigger than the Gazette’s little composition room. Quick glance at himself in the window to set himself to rights, pat the hair, straighten the tie; then into the saloon bar, not the public. They’re already there, with a fag lit each but empty hands otherwise, laid on the table as if to emphasise their lack of a drink. True, it’s for him to buy today, tradition says so, but still: what a pair of skinflints.
‘Mr Hobson!’ says Alec, bearing down, hand out.
‘Ah,’ says Hobson, ‘here we are, then. Clive, this is Alec Torrance I was telling you about. Alec, this here is Clive Burnham from the Times chapel.’
Hobson has been very good to Alec since his dad died and he and his mum lost the house. He helped out with the apprenticeship; when that was done, he spoke up for him at the Gazette; now here he is again, doing his best to sort him out a route to the Fleet Street shifts that pay better than anything on a local paper. Replacement dad stuff, in short, and all in the name of something-or-other that passed between Hobson and his actual dad, way back before the war, as mysterious from the outside as all work friendships are, based as they are on the alchemy of rubbing along with someone day after day. But whatever it was, it was enough to have Hobson keeping an eye out for Ray Torrance’s boy these last eight years. He’s a creaky, rusty, angular old thing, with a mess of white hair and a suit of undertaker black, lightly snowed with dandruff on the shoulders. First name Hrothgar, astonishingly enough. H-r-o-t-h-g-a-r, Alec’s mind’s fingers spell out on his mind’s keys, just as they now automatically letterise every unusual proper name he comes across. Mrs Ermintrude Miggs (61). The defendant, Dafydd Clewson. Employed at the firm of Silverstein and Rule, Manor Road, Hockley-in-the-Hole. Every one its own different little cascade of brass. He looks like a Hrothgar too, does Hobson. Like one of those minor people in Dickens you see leaning out of the smudgy shadows in the old illustrations. Half smudge himself. But Burnham’s the one Alec needs to please. He’s a different proposition altogether. Smooth, with a bit of weight on him, packed into one of those silvery Italian-style suits, and a face as tanned as someone fresh back from the seaside.
‘What’ll you have, gents?’ he says.
‘Just a small whisky for me, I thank you,’ creaks Hobson.
‘Pint and a chaser,’ says Burnham, not bothering with the pleases and thank yous. ‘Scotch egg if they’ve got one.’ He looks a bit bored; glances round the bar like he’s seen better; stifles a yawn.
‘Sandwich, Mr Hobson?’ says Alec. ‘I’m getting one for myself.’
‘No, no, that’s fine,’ says Hobson. ‘I’m not on this afternoon, I’ll get something at home, after.’
Alec fetches the round on a tray. Pint of mild for him, and that had better be all, he thinks; there’s the afternoon to concentrate through. Not to mention now.
‘Well, sit down, sit down,’ says Hobson. ‘Now, I’m putting you two together because Alec is a good lad, very accurate, and he won’t let you down neither. His family’s old LTS – in the print back to time imm-em-orial.’
‘Yeah, you said,’ says Burnham.
‘You prob’ly remember, his dad Ray used to do little articles in the Journal? Chess problems, cycling notes? Funny stuff.’
‘Sorry, no, doesn’t ring a bell. I’m not LTS myself – I’m national.’ The London and provincial compositors had merged the year before, and in theory it was all one union now, but the distinction had been in place since Queen Victoria was young, and it hadn’t worn away yet, specially at the London end.
‘So how’d you come up, then, Mr Burnham?’ asks Alec politely.
‘Birmingham Post. Anyway, doesn’t matter. What matters is, son – and I’m sure you’re doing a nice job down here, don’t get me wrong – what matters is, you’re on a weekly here, and the pace you’re used to will be nice and slow. Stuff up, and there’s time to fix it, right?’
‘I don’t “stuff up”,’ says Alec. Hobson gives him a look.
‘You don’t know that,’ says Burnham. ‘You can’t know that till you’ve been there. Till it’s half an hour after press time, and you’ve got nasty little NATSOPAs breathing down your neck waiting at the presses, and the management muttering about overtime and losing some of the run: and then the stone sub says, ooh dear, page two doesn’t add up at all, thanks to this piece from our own correspondent in Fuck-Off-tania, which is full of exciting details about the Fuck-Off-tanian situation which no one has ever heard of, and you certainly haven’t, and which is one hundred and five words too long. Shorten it, will you? Take out one hundred and five words exactly, without turning the Fuck-Off-tanian report into gobbledegook. And for this task, you do not have time immemorial. You have no time at all. Or a minute and a half. Whichever is shorter. How would you do at that, d’you think?’
Burnham’s teeth when he grins are small and regular, like little squares of Formica.
‘I think I could do that,’ Alec says. ‘I think I might like that. Actually.’
‘Is that right?’
‘Well, we aren’t all asleep, you know, “down here”. There isn’t, like, a belt of sleeping sickness you run into soon as you come across Waterloo Bridge.’
‘Is that right. Is he always this mouthy?’ Burnham asks Hobson.
‘Alec is not shy about having an opinion,’ says Hobson. ‘But he is pretty calm, on the whole, if you don’t wind him up deliberate.’
Burnham laughs. ‘How else am I going to find out what he’s like under pressure? Look, you know how many people are after shifts on the Street. They’re gold dust. They’re the jackpot. And you know how much it matters that we get to give ’em out, not management. I don’t need a hothead.’
‘I’m not a hothead,’ says Alec.
‘No? Took me, what, thirty seconds to get a rise out of you.’
‘I think,’ says Hobson, ‘I think – that you should get Clive here another drink.’
Alec shuttles to the bar and back, reminding himself of how much he needs the shifts, and when he gets back Hobson has somehow made Burnham laugh, and is laughing himself, in a series of rubbery gurgles that sound like a hot-water bottle being folded and unfolded.
‘What’s up?’ he says.
‘Nothing,’ says Burnham, and offers Alec a filter-tip from his shiny packet. Which is probably a good sign. He has a shiny lighter too. Hobson, though, turns one down, and says he’s off to the gents. They watch him go, limping away with his scarecrow gait.
‘He’s a bit of a character, isn’t he?’ says Burnham. ‘Does he always dress like that – you know, like he’s just embalmed someone?’
‘Pretty much,’ says Alec. He clamps his mouth shut again.
Burnham sighs.
‘We’ve started off on the wrong foot, haven’t we? Look, I’m not taking the piss here. The old git speaks very highly of you, and it’s nice, yeah, that you’re loyal to him, too; does you credit. But this is a big step up, and I’m trying to work out whether you’re up to it. As it happens, it might be quite useful to have someone in the composing room who’s got a bit of a gob on them. Someone who’ll push back, speak up, help draw the lines that have to be drawn. We’ve got management trying to take liberties one side, and the buggers in the machine room with their elbows out on the other, all the bloody time. But it needs a cool head, not a hot one – not someone whose mouth runs away with ’em. I dunno if you read up on that Royal Commission stuff ? Said we were overmanned and riding for a fall, basically. Hasn’t happened yet; there’s more people in the print than ever. But it bears watching; it’s ticklish. So you tell me what it is about you that’s nice and calm and steady, means I could rest easy?’
He doesn’t know what he could offer.
‘That … I need the shifts? I mean, really need them?’
‘Nah,’ said Burnham. ‘That won’t do it. Look at you: you’re young. Put the extra four quid in your pocket and you’ll, what, piss it away on nights out. Wine, women and song. Collecting god-awful jazz with no tune. Something like that.’
Alec looks at Burnham, and he sees someone asking him to translate into banter everything in his life that’s hardest. But perhaps it has to be done.
‘No,’ he says. ‘I mean, I’m married?’
‘Well, you would know best,’ Burnham says. ‘Are you or aren’t you?’
‘Fuck off, all right: I’m married. Gotta little boy, and another baby on the way, and I could really use the extra, ’cause we’re living with my Sandra’s mum, and my mum’s in the flat with us too.’
‘Oh, right,’ says Burnham warily, looking slightly startled by this deviation from men’s talk. ‘I see. And it’s all getting a bit tense?’
‘You could say.’
This is where he should insert a joke of his own. He should say something on the lines of: by now, the international crisis in Fuck-Off-tania has nothing on us. That would please Burnham. That would be handing him his own joke back with a cherry or a ribbon on top, and everyone likes that. Mothers-in-law, newly-weds, trying to snatch a chance to have sex when three people aren’t listening – it’s all the stuff of comedy, isn’t it? But comedy doesn’t cover the bone-deep, unwavering dislike Sandra’s mother has for him and everything to do with him. Banter isn’t the right style for the way his own mother is shrinking, is reducing, the longer they stay in the flat, as if she isn’t sure she’s even entitled to the two-foot space she sits in at the end of the couch. Sandra’s mum wouldn’t have anything from the old place in her precious living space: not the furniture, not the shelves his dad had made, not the books. It all had to go, or nearly all. There’s one cardboard box of the books, down in the damp under the stairs into the area. When he looked in it, there was black mould growing on the covers. Socialism and Fungus by Walter Fungus. Walter Citrine, really. C-i-t-r-i-n-e.
‘Okey-doke,’ says Burnham. ‘I believe I have got the picture.’ He pauses; stares at his fag-end; raises his eyebrows, still at the cigarette, in an expression of pained delicacy. ‘And you wanna get out from under? Get a place of your own, right?’
Come on, thinks Alec.
‘Yeah. That’s right. There’s a house up the hill’s coming free next month, and the collector says we could have it. We need three bedrooms, you see, really, if we’re not going to … well: if we’re gonna be comfortable.’
Burnham brightens.
‘You don’t wanna do that,’ he says, energy back in his voice.
‘What?’ says Alec.
‘You don’t wanna do that. Renting’s a mug’s game,’ Burnham explains, back on safe saloon-bar ground. ‘You wanna think a bit bigger than that, and buy something. And – no offence – not round here, if you take my advice. All this Victorian shit? Leaks, tiny rooms, terrible repair, the coloureds coming in. You wanna get out of London, somewhere new, somewhere clean. Us, for example, we got a semi in Welwyn. Brand new, no cobwebs in the corners, bit of garden, green space for the kids, gravel drive to park the motor. And I get to work on the train quicker than you could get there from here, I should think. And it’s ours.’
‘That sounds great,’ says Alec stiffly. ‘Really nice. But, you know, I’m born and bred in the Smoke. I think I’ll prob’ly stick to the old place all the same.’
‘Don’t know what you’re missing,’ says Burnham.
‘Chance to support Luton Town and own a hedge, by the sound of it,’ he says, unable to help himself.
‘Cheeky little bugger,’ Burnham says, without heat. ‘Cheeky. Little. Bugger. Wasn’t wrong about that, was I? Mouth in gear, brain not engaged. Suit yourself, then.’
Fuck, fuck, fuck, thinks Alec.
‘Mr Burnham to you.’
‘Mr Burnham. Sorry. Look, I swear, I am not normally hard to get along with. The baby’s colicky, you see, and we’re not getting a lot of sleep. I’m sure you remember that, right?’
‘Yeah, yeah. You know what I do when one of ours is poorly? Leave the wife to sort it, and go and sleep in the spare room. Pity you haven’t got one, isn’t it?’
‘Touché,’ says Alec.
‘“Too-shay”?’ mocks Burnham. The Formica teeth are back. ‘“Too-shay”?’
‘My dad liked The Three Musketeers.’
‘Did he. Yeah, I bet he did. Ooh, you’d fit right in at the Times – the stuff we have to set sometimes.’
Burnham grimaces at him, considering.
‘Ah, fuck it,’ he says. ‘All right, we’ll give it a go. Step by step, mind you. We’ll try you for a shift or two, and if it goes all right, all well and good; and if you point your mouth where it doesn’t belong, you’ll be back here in the arse-end of South London before you can say too-shay. All right?’
‘Yes, Mr Burnham,’ says Alec. ‘Thank you.’
‘And you can forget about the foreign news and all of that. You’ll not be let near the pages that change at the last minute; not for years. The way it works is, you start off on the Court Circular, the law reports, the classifieds, the letters. “The bride was resplendent in a whoopsie of cerise taffeta” style of thing. But even there, you got to keep your cool, you really do. Bastards to the left, bastards to the right; it’s not a peaceful spot, is what I’m saying. And you need to be able to handle that.’
‘I can handle that.’
‘You better not make me regret this, d’Artagnan.’
‘No, Mr Burnham. All for one and one for all, Mr Burnham.’
‘First shift next Thursday, then,’ says Burnham. He raises his voice. ‘You can come on back now, Mr Hobson.’
Hobson sidles arthritically round the bar from the corner where he’s been tactfully hiding.
‘All set, are we?’ he says.
‘We are,’ says Burnham. ‘And now I shall be getting back to civilisation. Thanks for the drinks; thanks for the pointer to your mouthy little so-and-so here.’
He drains his glass, picks up a pork-pie hat from the bench, and is gone.
‘Very good, Alec,’ says Hobson. ‘That’s excellent. A bit … bumpier than I had anticipated, but excellent all the same. A very good result. I’m pleased for you.’
‘Well, I owe it to you, Mr Hobson,’ says Alec. ‘I know that. You’ve been fantastic, all down the line, and I’ll not forget it. And now I better get moving, too. I’m back on in ten minutes. Shall I leave it with you, to tell the Gazette you’ll be bringing on someone else?’
‘Yes, yes,’ says Hobson. ‘But Alec? Sit down a second, would you. There’s something I just wanted to say.’
‘What?’ says Alec, thinking that there might be, who knows, a message from his dad for this moment, or something.
Well,’ says Hobson, ‘well.’ He steeples his long white fingers just in front of his face, tucks his thumbs under his lantern jaw, and uses the innermost two fingers to tap his nose. ‘What I wanted to say, is.’
‘Yes?’ says Alec.
‘What I wanted to say is, look: you’ve got a future ahead of you in the print, and that’s grand. That will see you and Sandra right. And I done my best to help. But you’re a bright boy. And I just wanted to say, so I had at least come out and said it, at least once – is this what you really want?’
‘What I want?’ repeats Alec, baffled, his mind already half heading back down Marshall Street.
‘I should have said this long ago, I know. And it would be … dicey to make a change now, I see that. But you are still young. And what I find myself thinking is, the machines aren’t.’
‘Sorry, you’ve lost me,’ says Alec, glancing at his watch and thinking: can he be pissed? Not on one whisky, surely.
‘The Linotype. It hasn’t changed, my whole life. It’s old. It’s ancient. And you’re going to sit down in front of it, and then you might spend your whole life sitting there, like I have.’
‘Not a bad life,’ says Alec, as gently as he can.
‘Not at all! No! But heavens, lad, you’ve got a very good mind, you’ve got your father’s mind, near as I can see, and you could do anything you put your mind to, pretty much; you could do something new.’
Alec struggles with exasperation. Six years an apprentice, four on the Gazette, a decade getting deeper and deeper committed, and now’s the moment the silly old sod chooses? All Alec hears, in Hobson’s ‘could’, is an appeal to an imaginary world in which none of the last ten years have happened; in which there is no Sandra, no little Gary, no decisions already taken, no paths already followed, no necessity tightening and narrowing. No need to buy groceries. What’s that, that other life Hobson is invoking? A figment, a theory, a phantom, for which you’d have to throw away everything real. Silly old sod. But he won’t, he won’t, snap at him today – not when he’s so much reason to be grateful.
‘I’m fine,’ he says. ‘You know I love it.’
And he does. When he’s back at the Gazette he switches on, and while the red bulb glows and the lead in the machine heats back to the melting point, he sorts through the copy: magistrate’s court reports, then small ads. ‘All right, Len,’ he says to the other compositor, already rattling away. ‘Didja get it, then?’ Len asks. ‘Yep.’ ‘Nice one,’ says Len peaceably. Alec waits, knowing that he’s just on the cusp of concentration, of the state he’s going to be in all afternoon long, where the minutes are crammed and stretched but the hours slip by, and for once, because of what Hobson said, he notices himself sitting there and waiting. He looks at the machine deliberately, and the bulk of it before him is as big as a grand piano stood on end, only not made of sleek and glossy wood but all of greased and intricate metal, exhaling fumes. And it delights him, with its thousand visible parts interlocked, and its multitude of pulses attending on his fingers, and its seat in front which amounts to, yes, an industrial throne. He is enthroned. (Green bulb.) He’s king of the machine. His vision narrows down to the copy clip, and the keyboard with its ninety keys in grimy black and blue and white. Each key he presses releases a brass letter-mould from the registers above, where they wait in columns long as piano wires. Click, rattle, and the brass matrix chinks into place on a steel rail in front of him at eye level. But there’s a short but definite physical delay before the matrix arrives, so by the time it arrives he’s long pressed the next key and started the next one on its rattling descent. When he gets a good speed up – left hand spidering away over the lower-case, right hand punching out the capitals, both scampering into the centre to hit punctuation and figures – the machine delivers him the moulds in appreciable arrears, still jingling down in reliable right order, but two or three characters or so behind his racing fingers. Which means he can’t check where he’s got to by looking at the brass row building up, if he’s got any pace at all; he has to hold it in his mind, he has to mark his place in the copy by moving his attention along it like a pointer, o-n-e l-e-t-t-e-r a-t a t-i-m-e. At the end of the line, which is the width of a column, he cocks an ear for the end of the jingling metal snowfall, and soon as it stops presses the line-end trigger that sets the rest of the machine into treadling, reciprocating motion. A bar shunts the row of matrices away left in tight order. The first elevator lifts them to be injected with liquid lead (hiss), pulls them out (clunk). The second elevator lifts them way up to the summit of the machine and threads them to a continuous screw running its width that carries each just as far and no further than its register of origin, where it drops back to the top of the column ready for reuse (jangle). But he’s not paying attention to that, having long since typed the next line, then the one after that: not paying attention, that is, except to the complex invariable symphony of noises the machine makes when going at full tilt, the click-rattle-chink-chunk-scree-hiss-whirr-treadle-jangle it lays down constantly, in rhythms far more overlaid and syncopated than can be set down in linear order. A womb of mechanical noise, to be monitored with some spare fraction of a busy mind, because a variation or blockage in it could be a sign that Mama Linotype is about to squirt molten metal at your legs. That apart, his mind moves on with his fingers as they dance on ETAOIN SHRDLU, the first and commonest letters on the keyboard; and at his left, hot enough to smell, pristine, new-minted, brighter than the brightest silver, there build up in stacked lines of metal all the words that a moment before were only blurry typescript or pen and ink – until Alec, king and alchemist, transformed them.
I’m too old for this, thinks Val, as she clings wearily to Alan’s waist, and the scooter buzzes along like a huge wasp, and the air stinks of petrol, and her head aches, and more and more and even more cherry orchards and cows and other rural stuff go by as they file along the A-whatever-it-is with all the rest of the bank holiday traffic.
‘All right?’ shouts Alan, grinning over his shoulder.
‘Yeah, great,’ she says. She should have insisted on the train. She should have not worn the pink batwinged mohair sweater, which is picking up flying crud from the road, and which Alan slopped tea on the sleeve of when they stopped for a breather at a snack van in a lay-by two hours ago. She should have not said yes in the first place to going to Margate. He’s a nice enough lad and they’ve been smiling at each other in the Co-op for weeks but he’s only nineteen; and when she turned up this morning, as arranged, at the garage by the railway arches, it turned out he was, if anything, the oldest one in the little crowd of boys-with-scooters and girls-with-beehives who’re going to Margate. She feels middle-aged compared to the sixteen-year-old dollybirds, and don’t they let her know it. They’re in the middle of a whole excited tribal thing, and she’s not dressed right, and they treat her like someone’s interloping auntie.
Alan says something, but a lorry overtakes and the words get lost in the grind and the roar.
‘What?’ she shrieks.
‘I said, we’re nearly there! Only another coupla miles! But there’s this great caff! Where we always stop off for a bite! Fancy it?’
‘All right.’
‘What?’
‘Yes! Great! Whatever you like!’
And in fact they and their particular flock of scooters are already pulling off the road into a car park which is, oh of course, absolutely choked with scooters. The caff is a red-brick building the size of a pub, with picture windows and a married couple behind the counter on whose faces can be read the reserved wariness of those who aren’t sure about young people these days. But they are still selling them egg and chips and beans on toast and orangeade and transparent cups of milky Nescafé as fast as they can get the till to open and close. They are still making a living from the half-crowns and ten-bob notes of the slightly threatening young. She could catch their eye; she won’t. Instead she goes to the ladies while Alan’s lot fold excitedly into the company of a mob of other kids who look just like them. There are girls jammed in the loo stalls in twos and threes, twittering and laughing, and she has to push to get in front of the mirror to repair her mouth, next to a sneery little madam who’s got so much eyeshadow on she looks like a raccoon.
But when she threads her way back out, and locates Alan over by the jukebox, she finds that another lad has come and joined the group. He’s sitting on the plastic chair with his knees wide apart, like he doesn’t care how much space he claims in the world, even though the caff is burstingly full and it’s making everyone else shuffle up. His only responses to what’s being said to him are little tilts of his head, and uh-huhs and mmms from bruised-looking lips. He’s gazing straight ahead into space with his big dark eyes, as if he’s bored senseless; and he’s beautifully dressed. No, beautifully, in a peacock-blue suit with narrow lapels and drainpipes that must have cost him weeks of wages, ’cause it has to have been made to measure. He’s got high cheekbones and feathery black hair and a nasty look, and he’s the best thing she’s seen in basically forever. Neville-the-louse, before he scarpered, did not look this good. Compared to this one, it is suddenly clear that Nev’s wide-boy act, which at the time was all too successful at getting him into her knickers, was only a very approximate and second-rate thing. And poor old Alan, for sure, looks as appetising next to him as a piece of tinned ham, well meaning, sweaty, sitting there all pinkly in his Aertex shirt.
‘Oh; there you are,’ says Alan. ‘Got you a bacon sarnie. This is Mike – turns out he’s from Bexford too.’
Mmm, says Mike, looking at her.
‘Funny that we’ve never run across him, really, innit,’ says Alan.
Mmm, says Mike, still looking.
‘Yeah,’ says Val, looking back. ‘I’d remember.’
Mmm, says Mike.
One of the beehive girls snickers.
‘Well; right,’ says Alan, glancing from face to face. ‘We should be on our way, shouldn’t we, pet? If you don’t mind eating as you go.’
‘I’m not hungry,’ says Val.
‘She don’t look like anyone’s pet,’ says Mike unexpectedly. ‘Not to me, mate.’ His voice is full-on nasal South London, as if it’s being broadcast in sawtooth vibrations from a point between his black eyebrows. When he finishes he presses his lips together and curls them.
‘Er, anyway …’ says Alan.
‘No. But. Are you, then?’ says Mike. ‘Are you his pet? Are you, like, a budgie? Or one of them little dogs?’
‘No,’ says Val.
Mmm, says Mike.
‘I’ve got a headache,’ says Val. ‘Really splitting. In fact.’
‘Yeah?’ says Mike.
‘Yes,’ says Val; and if she could, she’d like to pull the dirty coil of the ache out of the side of her head, and step up to him, and shove it into his forehead with the heel of her hand, just where the words seem to buzz, so that the sick hollow feeling is something they share. So that both their heads are adjacent chambers of queasy vacancy.
‘Shame,’ says Mike, raising his eyebrows. He gets up suddenly, in a movement as bonelessly graceful as if he were on strings like a marionette, and he holds his hand out towards her face. Just for a moment it’s like he’s read her mind, and he’s reaching out with finger and thumb to actually take the headache, too impatient for her to bring it to him. But he isn’t. He’s holding out a pill to her, blue and triangular.
‘Try that, then,’ he says. ‘That’ll sort you. Maybe.’
‘Oi!’ says Alan, uncertainly.
But she takes the pill and swallows it straight away, dry, without even stopping to think, tasting the chalky coating as she squeezes it down her throat; and Mike, not looking round, raises his empty hand to shoulder height and shakes his finger at Alan behind him, once. Nu-uh.
‘See ya,’ he says, and stalks out.
Back on the scooter, Alan’s stiff damp back in front of her again, Val attempts a quick conscience check. She doesn’t know Alan, not really. She’s not his girlfriend. She’s not – she just— But they’re going downhill, the white boarding-house stucco of Margate is rising around them, there’s a grainy glitter ahead that is the sea, and also the pill (whatever it is) is coming on, express-train fast on her empty stomach. The headache is going, oh yes; the headache is a cloud she left behind her some time, some long time ago; the thing she was trying to worry about likewise slid out of view ages back. This is not a day for worrying. The sun is out. The colours on all the parked cars shine as if freshly glazed and enamelled. Wherever she turns her head, something astonishing and fresh and remarkable snags her attention, and sends her off on a circuit of gloriously rapid thought, from which she returns with a start much later, surely much much later, when the next glint from a dry-cleaner’s sign or the crisp crisp aspidistra in a window reels her attention back in. With a spring, with a bound, with an elastic snap and thwunk and hurl as if the whole bright world were a pin-table in a pub, and her thoughts were doinging and flying and here-there-here-there-here-there hammering to and fro between rubberoid bumpers. Or—
Alan parks the scooter on a piece of waste ground already crammed with others. She has never noticed before how the branching mirrors on the scooters give back a flitter of light, a mosaic of little reflected samples of everything around, a smashed ocean ingeniously cached in round-cornered dishes on stalks.
‘It’s all pinball, innit?’ she says.
‘You what?’ says Alan.
‘You look like ham,’ she says, ‘nice ham and of course I met you in the Co-op but you weren’t on the meat counter you were in hardware, what a shame, but to tell you the truth even if you had been I wouldn’t fancy you, no offence but there it is.’
‘What’s up with you, girl?’ says Alan, blushing.
‘She’s had a dexy, hasn’t she?’ says one of the beehive girls.
‘I’m having fun, is all,’ says Val, ‘first time today to be honest, you know what Alan, Alan, Alan my old mate, you know what, you should lighten up, you should take things with a bit of what’s the word, what is the word, it’s on the tip of my tongue, don’tcha hate it when that happens, it’s like a hole in your brain innit, ha ha, mind like a Swiss cheese, me. Or a colander.’
‘Fuck,’ says Alan, concisely.
‘You should sit her down somewhere, shouldn’t you? Get her some tea or something. You can tell she’s not used to it.’
‘We’ve just got here,’ says Alan. ‘I don’t want to be a flaming nursemaid. I wanna get down the front. Can’t you girls keep an eye on her? Go on.’
‘You’ve got a nerve, haven’t you? You brought her – you sort her.’
‘Go on, please. Just for a few minutes. Go on.’
The chief beehive girl looks at Alan in disgust, and spits out her gum onto the back of a finger whose nail is lacquered postbox red. Then she sticks it demonstratively onto the seat of the scooter.
‘Steady on,’ says Alan. ‘Watch out for me upholstery.’
‘Upholstery!’ cries Beehive Girl, and she and her mates scream with laughter.
‘Hey,’ says Val, who has been waiting an inconceivable age for this very boring conversation to finish. ‘Hey. Hey hey hey hey hey. You know what? Fuck you.’
‘Oh, charming, I’m sure.’
‘Val—’ begins Alan.
But Val, smiling broadly, steps backwards into the crowd surging along the pavement, and that’s all she has to do. The bank holiday flow takes her, and Alan’s worried face, and the girl’s scornful one, recede on the instant, dwindle to pink crumbs, to nothing. Out of sight, out of mind: immediately her eyes are full again with other stuff, and the crowd bumps her along sustainingly, as if an ocean has taken her by both elbows and lifted her off the shingle, with a pluck and a pull and a sway.
There’s the real ocean, actually. All the side streets are pouring people down onto the curving road that runs along the front, and where she turns – where she is turned, carried along by the mass – you can see the pier sticking out into the hot blue water and beyond it, the whole curve of Margate Beach, hundreds of yards of it, and all of it thronged with the spicules of human bodies. On the roadway they sway to and fro, loose-woven and relatively fast, holding up the traffic. Out in the sea the crowd frays into individual clumps of bathers, little kids in rubber rings, grannies holding up their dresses as they paddle their bunions. But in between, the people are packed tight and only sluggishly convulsing: tight as the bristles on a brush. Three zones of density, three different kinds of movement. She sees them all with a kind of contented impatience. Anything she looks at, she feels she’s been looking at for a long time, too long. She jerks her gaze onwards and as soon as it snags again it’s been snagged forever. But she doesn’t want to do anything but take in this day in more and more of these dragging instants.
She sees: the gloss on the papier-mâché cheek of Judy as Mr Punch swings his stick into it in the booth by the pier-end while the watching children roar wail clutch their heads in consternation. She sees: women five years ten years twenty years no years older than her, swabbing babies wiping noses towelling hair passing sandwiches. She sees: sleeping dads angry dads patient dads reading-the-Racing-Post dads. She sees: encampments of families arranged in deckchairs unto the third and fourth generation, temporarily connecting again on Margate sands everything they permanently connect at home. She sees: a pat of bright-yellow vanilla ice cream sticking up from the tarmac between its wafers at the angle of the sinking Titanic, having dropped from the sticky starfish hand of a child. She sees: the swaying blue-serge bulk of policemen buttoned hotly into their uniform jackets, patrolling along the roadway one heavy leg at a time. She sees: the paler blue nylon shirts of the police reserves, standing round the vans that brought them, waiting for trouble, each topped with a blue-and-silver Noddy helmet where sunlight winks and burns. She sees: the bristles on the high-shaved pigskin necks of the men forty and older who’ve come to the seaside in their ties and who’re loitering around the police vans like supporters’ clubs, stubs of fags between forefinger and thumb, waiting for there to be some scandalous disorder, so they can cheer on order’s restoration.
And in between all this, greatly outnumbered in the granular mass of needle-people, particle-people, people packed close like cress growing on a windowsill, little rivulets of young men are moving, clumsily, uncertainly, looking for each other and also waiting. For what? Attention. Without attention they grin sheepishly, bump shoulders, wipe their sunglasses, pass chips to each other, and drop them on the beach and pick them up and try to blow the crunching sand grains off them. With it, though – when the families turn to look, or the older men in ties do, or the police start towards them – they seem to know what to do. Activated by disapproval, they perform fighting in little clumps and clusters. They push at each other in wavering rucks. They knock each other down and roll over and over, disturbing the deckchairs and trying to free their arms enough to aim clumsy punches. Here and there, one acquires a bloody nose. Mums tut and stand up; the men in ties shake their heads tightly; the hot policemen wade in and pull the boys away by their collars, with their arms flapping and their shoes dragging runnels through the sand. It’s not exciting to watch. It’s like the slow heaving as a pan of porridge comes to the boil. A porridge-boil of an event.
But then, in one of the struggling groups, her eye picks out a different kind of movement: someone in peacock blue who is in the ruck but doesn’t seem to be weighed down by it, who is moving quickly, precisely, elegantly. What looks like a metal comb glitters at the end of his deft blue arm, and where it goes it cuts and cleaves a path, and the strugglers divide. Looking down over the railings at the edge of the esplanade, Val sees Mike: and pausing momentarily with the chin of a groggy bloke with a quiff tenderly poised on the outstretched upturned fingers of the combless hand, he sees her seeing. He grins. Something twists and tightens under her ribs, something else throbs and loosens in her groin. Time pulls itself together with a start, and instead of passing as a series of frames held in dragging delay, suddenly consents to flow. Flowingly, Mike spins and leans and kicks the groggy boy underneath his chin with a pointed winkle-picker. Something crunches, probably; there’s blood, probably; but it’s a little way away and the kick flings the bloke off into the melee and he vanishes as if he’d never been, leaving all her attention filled by the neat sweet movement of the kick, and Mike turning back to her like a dancer, his hands theatrically spread, as if to say, d’you like my trick?
She doesn’t know. She isn’t thinking about it. She likes him. And it must show on her fascinated face, because he steps out of the fight, and lightly, swiftly up towards her, slipping the comb into his breast pocket and dusting dab-dab, dab-dab at his peacock lapels, ignoring as if it no longer had anything to do with him the cries rising behind him, and grinning at her still.
‘All right?’ he says.
‘Yes, thanks,’ she says. ‘Headache’s gone.’
‘See you got rid of yer bloke, too.’
‘He’s not my bloke,’ says Val.
‘Does he know that?’
‘Yeah,’ says Val. ‘He definitely does.’
‘Then,’ says Mike, ‘then …’ Big build-up.
‘What?’ says Val.
‘Then, milady …’
‘What?’ says Val, laughing.
‘D’you fancy some chips?’
‘Might do,’ says Val.
‘Ah, hard to get, eh?’ he says.
‘No,’ she says, looking at his gazelle eyes. ‘Really not.’
Mike, who has been sauntering next to her, bending at waist and wrist and neck in a mannered way that somehow still looks dangerous, stops.
‘What’s your name?’ he says. She tells him. ‘I like that,’ he says. ‘Proper old-fashioned. None of that Yank shit.’
He reaches out his long hand with its neatly trimmed nails to her face. Very lightly, he taps the middle of her forehead, and then the end of her nose, and then the divide of her lips.
‘What’s that in aid of, then?’ says Val, and saying the words opens her mouth, lets his nail and his cuticle and his warm dry skin come a tiny way in, resting there on the pillow of her lower lip. Police vans go by; seagulls ice cream carts gabbering families a grunting bus.
‘I’m laying a finger on you,’ says Mike.
She licks the square end of the finger with the very tip of her tongue. Mike blinks.
‘Come on, then,’ he says. And he takes hold of her. But he doesn’t put an arm round her waist or kiss her or hold her hand or anything. He grips her elbow, absolutely definitely, and he guides her, absolutely definitely, off the busy esplanade and up the first side street and off it into a quieter street of little shops, and off that into an alleyway between pebble-dash walls which has got nothing in it but some bins.
‘What?’ she says, breathless, half-laughing. ‘What’re we—’
But he just puts his hands on her shoulders, absolutely definitely, and pushes her down onto her knees in front of him, on the ground by the bins.
‘Yeah?’ he says.
She doesn’t know what she’s supposed to be agreeing to. This is weirdly unlike the known behaviour of interested men. All the others have wanted to touch, to turn handsy, to get in close and slide damp anxious mitts inside her clothes. Neville-the-louse was all hot breath in her ear. But Mike, for whom she has a yes that for the first time might have matched a man for handsy greed, leans back, away from her and out of reach, with his blue shoulders back against the pebble-dash, and his beautiful face averted, and his legs braced, as if he only wants to come near her with the one part of him, the one point of attachment where the pleasures of bank holiday Monday have dilated him and driven him out to meet her. He brings his hips forward and puts a hand on the back of her head and – oh. He wants to push something into her head.
It doesn’t take very long. It’s salty, like blood, but with a flat taste, like iron.
Mike produces a matching handkerchief to give her, and zips himself up.
‘Thanks, love,’ he says. ‘Now, what about those chips?’
Maybe he should have gone for the Café Royal? Vern quails as the taxi door opens, and it suddenly seems a long way across the pavement to the steps of Tognozzi’s, and a total toss-up whether McLeish will even get the point of the kind of understated, cripplingly expensive, visited-by-the-Queen poshness that this place represents. Footballers know about the Café Royal. They get taken there with their wives by the management when they win the Cup. There’s gold leaf, and bottles of bubbly going fwoosh, and a picture for the paper. It’s their idea of quality, isn’t it – of the high life? Yeah, he should have taken him there; or to do a bit of that kind of nightclubbing where posh meets gangland. Except that subbing McLeish to play baccarat in Soho would mean, potentially, anything happening, at God-knows-what kind of expense that Vern couldn’t afford. This is all carefully costed, carefully budgeted and scraped together: his one shot at creating the impression of careless, glad-handing wealth. It’s much too late to rethink now. Just don’t cock it up, he tells himself. Bulky in powder blue with dazzling white cuffs, attended by an aggressive cloud of aftershave, he bustles to the restaurant doorway, McLeish in tow.
‘Reservation for one o’clock. Name of Taylor,’ he tells the maître d’ lurking just within. And he doesn’t try to posh up the voice, to hide the South London in it. Nah, the opposite. Vern can do officer-class if he wants. It was one of the unexpected perks of national service, that, getting to listen from the kitchens as an assortment of Ruperts and Hugos in the officers’ mess modelled the vowel sounds of the Home Counties over and over again: but here and now, elocution is definitely not called for. What’s needed is the upward bounce of common-as-muck talent, utterly unapologetic, shoving into the sanctum with its elbows out. Look at him! He could be … a barrow-boy photographer shaking up fashion! A lairy young advertising genius! A record company A&R man with his finger on the beat pulse! A junior film producer dashing into the West End from Pinewood! An exec on the rise in commercial telly! He is none of those things: but, as Vern reminds himself under his breath, they don’t know that.
‘Certainly, Mr Taylor,’ says the flunkey, having located the name in a bookings book like the kind of photograph album you’d have if your surname was pronounced Chumley or Fanshaw. ‘Mario will take you down. Enjoy your lunch, gentlemen.’
‘Spiffing,’ says Vern flatly, and takes a step or two after the more junior flunkey who is leading the way to the spiral stairs. But, he realises, he has somehow shed McLeish, and when he looks back, from the opulent dimness of the stairwell to the portal fringed with the silhouettes of petals dangling from window boxes, where the daylight of St James’s glares, he sees his guest hesitating just outside. McLeish is glancing up at the facade with his shoulders hunched, doing that unnecessary fiddling with his jacket buttons that always means nerves. Maybe this isn’t the wrong choice after all, if he can read this place well enough to be afraid of it. And now Vern can give him the pleasure of stopping being afraid of it.
‘Come on, Joe!’ he calls over his shoulder. ‘They won’t eatcher!’ And McLeish follows, with a slight duck of the head as he pierces the marmoreal force field of the maître d’ but a promising, faint, half-guilty smile on his face.
The downstairs of Tognozzi’s is a long subterranean vault, with traces of the art deco jazz den it used to be pre-war, when aristos and blackshirts and aristos who were blackshirts did the charleston down here on glass-smooth parquet. But Mayfair good taste has flowed over it since, like a bland and floral tide. It’s all white linen now, with little bunches of freesias on the little round tables. Vern feels big as the waiter fits them into little gilt chairs not far from the foot of the stairs: but then Vern feels big everywhere. It’s just a fact of life. He waited and waited for growing up to turn him into one of those gracile kids with the spindly legs, but no matter how tall he got, and he’s six-two now, he expanded in proportion. At any height, he was always going to be a big, square block of meat, with sharp little eyes in a face as wide as a shield. He goes to the old gym on the Bexford High Road now, not so much for the sparring, which just makes him sweat and pant, as for the hours on the bag and the speedball. He couldn’t chase someone up the street but if they’d consent to get in reach he could flatten ’em. And his size has this going for it: it confers a bit of presence, of authority almost, and thus compensates for his age somehow. People don’t see he’s twenty-three. They see he’s considerable.
The waiter brings them red menus that also look like heirlooms of the Chumley-Fanshaws. McLeish gives off new signs of alarm as he grips his. The menu’s in French, of course. But, again, God bless the Army Catering Corps; God bless watching sergeant-chefs laboriously typing out the mess dinner menu in the Limassol heat. M-i-l-l-e-f-e-u-i-l-l-e-s with sweaty fingers.
‘’S amazing the fuss they make in these places, innit?’ says Vern, deliberately. ‘I mean, that top one’s liver, and then it’s a steak, and then halibut, and then a lobster.’
‘Yeah,’ says McLeish, and his wrists relax, and his quick black eyes stop darting anxiously about. ‘Yeah …’
‘I dunno why they can’t just say so.’
‘Right, right,’ says McLeish. ‘You know, I’ve never ate a lobster.’
Fuck, thinks Vern, acutely conscious of the finite contents of the wallet in his left trouser pocket.
‘Go on, then,’ he says. ‘Now’s your chance. They’ll do a lovely job of it here, with all your special French sauces for it, and the special cutlery to get in through the shell and that.’ Held breath.
‘Nah,’ says McLeish. ‘D’you know what, I’ll just have the steak.’
‘Good plan. Me too,’ says Vern. He calls the waiter. ‘Two entrecôtes, please, medium rare, and we’ll have a bottle of the sixty-two Côtes du Rhône. If that suits you, Joe?’
‘Fine, yeah,’ says McLeish; and now that the crisis is past, and the waiter is safely receding, and it’s clear that he’s not going to be caught out failing to understand something, he leans back on the tight little golden throne and spreads his big thighs, and cracks his neck-bones, and lifts his long jaw, and looks about himself, prepared to be entertained. A good-looking lad: black brush of hair, and blue-white London Scots pallor in his skin. ‘It’s quite something down here, isn’t it?’
‘It surely is,’ says Vern. ‘More dukes and duchesses than you can shake a stick at in here. Nob central. And they get famous people and all coming in.’
‘Yeah?’ says McLeish. ‘Like who?’
‘Well, there’s you,’ says Vern, grinning.
‘Shut up!’ says McLeish, and of course he’s right; he’s not famous in any way that would compute or even register in a place like this. He’s a second-string striker in a fourth-division club, and the Millwall only signed him ten months ago. For a little less than a year he’s experienced a strictly local and limited celebrity down in Bexford, New Cross, Bermondsey, where dockers will buy him pints at the price of telling him in exhaustive detail every single foot the team have put wrong this season, and their daughters will give him the eye on Saturday night. But he likes it, this piss-taking by Vern with a dash of flattery thrown in. And he’s got used enough, you can see, to the little bit of extra female attention that here too he’s glancing around, probably automatically, to see if he’s causing any flutters. Nothing doing: the younger ones of the ladies lunching in Tognozzi’s today are sleek Mayfair types in their thirties, with their court shoes and their collarless jackets and their thoroughbred knees pressed together slantwise as they laugh. All McLeish’s optimistic gaze gets back is an occasional display of nostril. Well, that’s not quite true. A couple of nancy-boys on the other side of the staircase who look as if they’ve just woken up are enjoying him, but best not to point that out.
‘All right, the Queen, then.’
‘For real?’
‘Yep. Real and royal.’
‘Blimey,’ says McLeish.
‘And you. Her Majesty – and you.’
‘Shut up!’ says McLeish. He is nineteen years old. ‘My mum’ll have a fit when I tell her that.’
‘Good,’ says Vern benignly, the bestower of mum-worthy boasts, the founder of the feast.
And, right on time, the waiter is back with a bottle which he splashes into the wine glass on Vern’s side for testing – sagacious nod – and then there’s the ceremonial pouring, the filling of the water glasses, a ritual of crystal vibrations and gurgles in the face of which McLeish falls silent again.
‘Cheers,’ says Vern firmly. They knock glasses together.
Then, while McLeish is cautiously sampling his mouthful, Vern leans forward, drops his voice and says:
‘She might’ve sat in that very chair. You could be right on top of the royal arse-print.’
McLeish chokes and ducks his head.
‘Steady on,’ says Vern. ‘Don’t cough up the vino. It’s a quid a bottle.’
‘You can’t bloody say that,’ hisses McLeish. ‘Not … here.’ He is definitely blushing, and he is darting looks out to left and right as if the Posh Police will imminently step out of the shadows and grab him.
‘I bloody can,’ says Vern. (Though he is himself observing strict volume control, and keeping an eye out for trouble.) ‘And what’s more, I bloody should.’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘I mean,’ says Vern, leaning back so that his powder-blue lapels and his gleaming bri-nylon shirt, collar size 19, and his turquoise silk tie, together fill McLeish’s vision like a cliff face of confidence, ‘that all this stuff down here – these people – this place – it’s all very nice, but it’s basically over. It’s the past, innit. And I’m not bothered about the past. I’m for the future. Look around’jer. Who’s the future, down here, eh? I’ll tell you, it’s not bloody them. It’s us. Who’s the future? We are.’
The look he gives McLeish is fierce and full-on. It’s the one the speedball in the gym has been on the receiving end of. The boy squirms, but he also swells. He’s excited.
Enter the steaks. They come with button mushrooms, round and rubbery, which McLeish abandons when the first one he tries to capture bounces off onto the tablecloth, trailing juices. But the meat yields tenderly to the knife, and emboldened by Vern’s speech he ignores the mushroom, chews, swigs the red wine, and actually makes the next move himself.
‘So, you’re gonna be opening restaurants, then, Vern?’
‘Absolutely,’ says Vern. ‘Something a bit more modern than this, I can tell you. Light and air and none of the oh-I-say-how-quaint, if you know what I mean?’
McLeish nods, grins.
‘But that’s Phase Two. I’ve got to build up to that. Conquer the world in stages, that’s the plan. First comes bricks and mortar. Houses – you can’t go wrong with houses, ’cause everyone needs them, right?’
He takes out his wallet and passes McLeish a large cream-coloured business card. GROSVENOR INVESTMENTS, it says, the most solid-sounding name he could think of, with the address of an office over a chip shop on East Bexford Hill.
‘You’re gonna build houses?’ says McLeish.
‘Well, not yet. Buy ’em and rent ’em out, that’s the plan.’
‘You mean you’ll be a landlord?’ McLeish sounds disappointed. More than that – disapproving. ‘My dad says landlords are all bloodsuckers. Like that Rachman? I saw in the paper where he was setting these great big dogs on little kiddies?’
‘No no no no,’ says Vern swiftly. ‘All that’s over. The new law they just done, that’s finished all that stuff off; cleaned it right up.’ Also, incidentally, the Rent Act has put paid to the kind of fly-by-night building societies from which it would have been much easier for someone like Vern, starting up without any capital, to get his hands on mortgages. But he doesn’t say that. He says: ‘That’s my opportunity, you see. All the crooks and the bloodsuckers, they’re out of the landlord game, because you can’t make money out of it any more.’
‘But … don’t you wanna make money out of it?’
‘Yes, I do,’ Vern says. ‘Yes, I will. Because I’ve got an angle. Think of Bexford High Street, think of the New Cross Road. Think of the middle of Deptford and Lewisham. How many houses there have got a flat upstairs and a shop downstairs? I’ll tell you: thousands of them. Literally thousands. You can buy them dirt cheap. And who gets the rent from the shop, as well as the rent from the flat? The landlord. Doesn’t matter if the old dear upstairs is only paying pennies, bless her. Because the Rent Act doesn’t cover the downstairs, it doesn’t make the rules for shops. So the money coming in from the shop, right, that’s your little gold mine; and it pays for buying the whole property, and then the next one, and the next one, and the next one, till before you know it you own the whole bloody street.’
‘I dunno,’ says McLeish uneasily. Vern can practically see the thought he’s having. He’s picturing Bexford’s array of sad butcher’s shops, seedy corner groceries, shonky second-hand furniture dealers and mildewed newsagents, and finding it a stretch to believe there’s any kind of gold mine to be found in any of them. ‘I thought it would be something a bit more, you know, new. Something, like you said, more – er …’
‘It is,’ Vern insists. ‘What this is is the start. On an ordinary street, in an ordinary shop what no one else has seen the potential of. But then, yeah, then comes the exciting stuff. Then comes the shopping centres, and the office blocks, and the – the bloody skating rinks, and the casinos. And the skyscrapers!’
‘In Bexford,’ says McLeish. ‘You wanna build skyscrapers, in Bexford?’
‘Why the bloody hell not?’ says Vern: and then they’re both laughing, but it’s good laughter, it’s audacious laughter, and the ghost of a glorious skyline south of the river lingers in the air.
The waiter appears without being asked, and pours the rest of the wine into their glasses. He takes his time, with some fancywork where he twists the bottle to catch drips, and flourishes his white cloth about the place. McLeish cools, sits more anxiously again. ‘Would you two gentlemen like another bottle?’ says the waiter. No, bugger off. ‘No thanks,’ says Vern, waving him away with a big pink hand.
‘So you see’ – plunging on before the mood can be lost – ‘it starts small, it starts practical, but it is the future we’re talking about. My future; maybe yours too. Because, a lad in your position, you’ve gotta be asking yourself what comes next, right?’
‘That’s what my dad keeps saying.’
‘Sounds like a wise man,’ says Vern lightly, smoothly, preparing to bounce on with this family testimonial incorporated into the pitch. But McLeish has put down his knife and fork, hunched his shoulders up, and twisted his face into a grimace Vern doesn’t realise immediately is supposed to be an imitation of someone.
‘Och, think aboot yir future, Joe!’ says McLeish in sudden parodic Glaswegian – baritone, geriatric, phlegmy, smoker’s-cough Glaswegian, with rumbling pops under it like a Geiger counter gone rogue. ‘The footie’s no’ a bad wee racket while yir young, but whit aboot whan yir knees gi’ way, eh? Whit aboot whan yir twenty-five and yir bosses think yir an auld man, eh? Whir’ll the money come from then, eh, tae keep ye in yir shiny wee suit and tie?’
The mimicry is sharper than Vern would have guessed the boy was capable of, and he also can’t quite read the level of resentment in it.
‘Bit of a ray of sunshine, then, is he?’ he says, playing it safe with all-purpose irony.
‘Oh, he’s not wrong,’ says McLeish, sighing. ‘He’s just so bloody pleased about it.’
‘What does he think you should do, then, after?’
‘Go on the trains, like him. Settle down. “It’s guid work – unless ye think yir tae guid for’t.”’
‘And you don’t fancy it.’ Safe ground now, for who at nineteen at the beginning of their adventure, their sudden flight, would welcome the thought of crashing back to earth.
‘Not much, no.’
‘Well, you could certainly do better.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah! Course you could. D’you mind me asking how much they’ve got you on at the moment?’ Vern of course knows the answer to this question, to the penny. Finding it out was one of the most important parts of setting today up.
McLeish looks wary, as anticipated.
‘Why d’you wanna know?’ he says.
‘Just as a for-instance. But don’t worry, I don’t wanna pry. Lemme guess, all right? I’m thinking … about … thirty quid a week?’
Flattery. The players’ strike three years back, also a vital precondition for this conversation, has removed the wage cap that applied for decades, but Millwall isn’t rich, and McLeish isn’t much of a star yet, and they’ve got his youth as an excuse, so he’s on twenty-six pounds ten shillings right now.
‘Thereabouts, yeah,’ says McLeish.
‘Not bad,’ says Vern. ‘Good for you. But you know what? In essence, in the final analysis, when it comes right down to it: chickenfeed, son.’
‘You what?’ says McLeish, not sure whether to laugh or be offended.
‘I mean obviously, compared to British Rail, that’s excellent. Compared to what you could be getting, with the world’ – he circles the spectacle of wealth that surrounds them with a finger – ‘just ripe to be given a squeeze, if you know how; compared to that, you’re on poverty pay, mate. You haven’t got two bob to rub together, really.’
‘I’ve got enough that you want some!’ says McLeish.
‘Pardon?’ says Vern, allowing a wrinkle of confusion to appear midway across the slab of his forehead.
‘I’ve got enough that you’re after me to put some money in your – you know.’ McLeish is tapping the business card on the tablecloth.
‘What – you think I want you to invest?’
‘Yeah?’
‘Oh Lord,’ says Vern, trying to look both apologetic and amused (but not too insultingly amused). ‘No! Oh dear, oh dear. Total cross purposes there, mate. No no no; I’ve got my backing all lined up. That’s all in hand, and to be honest it’s coming outta pockets a lot deeper’n yours. No offence.’
‘You don’t want any money from me?’
‘No. Obviously I haven’t been very clear; sorry ’bout that.’
‘Then – what …?’ asks McLeish.
Vern tuts his tongue, and looks modestly down. ‘Well,’ he says, rubbing at a non-existent spot on the tablecloth with a forefinger, ‘I was going to lead up to this, you know, subtly. But fat chance of that, eh. All I’m after—’
At this point he looks up, to give McLeish as planned a double eyeful of sincerity. But instead his gaze snags on a sight behind the boy’s head. There, stepping off the spiral stairs with a couple of brilliantined continental smoothies in attendance, is a face he last saw minuscule and fifty feet below him on the Covent Garden stage, pouring out song that soared to the six-shilling seats in the gods, and took him by the heart, and twisted. She looks older without the tragic-heroine outfit, and her face is unfamiliar in its mild off-duty sociability. But it’s her. Just there, a few feet away. That woman, there, is the key to a compartment of feeling inside him that he keeps secure even from himself. When he gives himself the opera, he doesn’t let the left hand know what the right hand is doing. He goes behind his own back. He slopes off on the quiet to the West End with his own mind averted from the certain knowledge that later he’ll be wiping his eyes with his hanky, he’ll be sitting up under the golden roof at Covent Garden leaking silently down both cheeks. His eyes prickle now.
He should be launching into this lunchtime’s patiently developed coup de grâce. All the goads of greed and humiliation and flattery have been deployed. It’s time to close. And, somewhere far off, he is still talking. McLeish is nodding. But it’s as if Vern has split. A Vern kept locked privately away, a Vern who trembles at beauty, a Vern who does not know what he wants or how to get it, a Vern tenderly incapable, has with truly terrible timing emerged to divide the attention of the Vern who needs at this minute to be driving events to their destined destination with as hard a hand as he possibly can. Out of the chrysalis of the usual him has crept this damp-winged other Vern, who only wants to stare. Who wants to hang his mouth open and gawp. Who doesn’t want to speak the lines insisted on by the plausible fat man in the blue suit. Who almost resents him, in fact, with his grubby little scheme. And meanwhile the Vern who has worked so hard is feeling hollow indeed. His strength is failing, his energy is dipping, his delivery of the last part of the pitch going from fiery to watery. Where’s the conviction? Where’s the belief he should be infecting McLeish with? Gone AWOL. Distractedly lingering over the sight of the diva being served consommé on the other side of the room.
‘So, right, it’s just your name I wanna borrow,’ he is saying. ‘People know you, and I wanna use that to raise the profile of the firm; give it a bit of glamour, while I get it going. If I can do that, I’ll put you on the books and give you a cut. Which could be worth a lot, later. When I’m doing the skyscrapers.’ Ghost of a joke at the end there, but that’s got to be the limpest attempt at a closing ever recorded. Surely no one would go for it. Fat chance, Vern. Fat chance. His wavering gaze slips off McLeish’s face, and past it: past it so obviously that McLeish can’t help but notice.
‘Fuck,’ breathes Vern, more in despair than in awe.
McLeish turns his head to see what the big attraction is. But all he can see is a skinny, foreign-looking woman in her forties with black hair. When he looks back, he finds that Vern has put his hand over his face and is looking at the world through the gaps between the bars of his fat pink fingers.
‘What?’ he says, somehow compelled to drop his voice to a churchgoing whisper.
‘You know I said you get famous people here,’ says Vern very quietly. ‘Well, that’s one of them. That’s Maria Callas.’
‘Sorry, I dunno who that is,’ says McLeish.
‘She’s a singer. She’s – how can I put this?’ Her vocal cords are like Bobby Charlton’s feet, he ought to say, or something like that, something pat and funny that will make sense of her to McLeish. But he doesn’t want to. He doesn’t want to connect these two worlds up; he doesn’t want to build any kind of jokey bridge between what he feels when Callas sings ‘Vissi d’arte’ and what he’s doing here today. They don’t match. He doesn’t want them to match. ‘She’s … amazing,’ he says lamely.
‘You’re a fan, ain’tcha?’ says McLeish. The boy is smiling at him. Not scornfully – kindly. Encouragingly. It occurs to Vern that McLeish has probably seen the odd person go tongue-tied and shy when meeting him. ‘You know what, you should go and say hello. G’wan. Now’s your chance. She won’t mind.’
‘No.’
Coaxingly: ‘Go on!’
‘No.’
McLeish holds his hands up in mock-surrender, looking indulgent and puzzled. ‘Fair enough, fair enough. No one’s gonna make yer.’
He looks at his chunky steel watch.
‘I should get going, really, Vern. So – just my name? No money?’
‘None.’
‘And you won’t be doing any of that Rack-man stuff ? Nothing dodgy?’
‘No.’
‘All right, then. Don’t see what I’ve got to lose.’
‘Great,’ says Vern. ‘That’s … great. I’ve got some papers for you to sign, then.’
‘Okey-doke,’ says McLeish. ‘Gotta pen?’
Vern has a pen. Vern passes McLeish the pen, and McLeish obediently signs there, there, there and there, without stopping, just as Vern would have been busting a gut to induce him to do if he were not in this enfeebled state. Consequently, without McLeish noticing that what he signed on page three was a mortgage guarantee.
‘There!’ says McLeish. ‘Fingers crossed, maybe you’ll keep me off British Rail. Cheers, Vern.’
Vern pays the bill and McLeish leads the way back up the stairs, past the flunkeys, through the mystic portal of wealth, out again blinking into London daylight. Vern does not look back at Miss Callas. Vern uses his last pound note to send McLeish off in a taxi. Wave, wave.
Then he totters away towards the bus stop. He feels very tired. He only has the sixpence left he needs to go home to Bexford on the number 29, and it takes an age, but somewhere along the way, around Waterloo, it begins to sink in that it worked. This morning he wasn’t a property developer. Now he is. He stops trembling. At the Elephant and Castle, a gaggle of schoolboys boil up onto the top deck towards his seat at the front but he gives them the look the speedball gets and they retreat. About halfway up the Walworth Road, he starts to whistle bits from Tosca under his breath, badly.
The mist has lifted from the tussocky outer field. Now, instead of the bare trees rising from whorls of slow white, Ben sees from the tall ward window that each stands in a ragged oval of leaf-fall, summer’s discarded yellow petticoat. A few last leaves, small as halfpennies or candle flames, cling on to twigs, tugged at by the wind. The Largactil affects a lot of things but not Ben’s sight. He can see these fluttering holdouts as clearly across a hundred yards as he’d be able to pick out the separate grains in a palmful of seashore sand. (They say it’s all one colour but it’s not, it’s got orange in it, and chocolate brown, and stray flecks of bottle green.) He’d like to stay by the window till the wind plucks one down at least – loses the halfpenny, snuffs the candle flame, sends the yellow speck twinkling end over end to land, indistinguishable, in the shadow of colour the bare tree casts.
He has resisted Sid-the-postman’s constant invitations to play ping-pong.
‘No, th-th-th-thanks,’ he says every time, letting go of his left hand with his right hand, and holding it up to show the tremor. ‘T-too sh-sh-shaky.’
Also too s-s-s-slow. They had tried a match once, and with Sidney bouncing about on one side of the table and him on the other extending his shaking bat to return the serve at roughly the pace of a glacier, a Parkinsonian glacier, it could not be called a success.
‘Oh, right!’ says Sid, equally surprised each time. ‘Right right right. Gotta ciggy, mate?’
‘Mm,’ says Ben. He does. He lowers two fingers into his shirt pocket and traps a bent Gold Leaf between them. ‘There y-you … are.’
‘Thanks!’ says Sid. ‘You’re a pal.’ He puts it between his lips, mouths it, thinks better of it; sticks it behind his ear, thinks better of it; puts it between his lips, thinks better of it; puts it down on the tabletop next to where Ben is sitting by the window. Goes off to try to tempt Mr Neave into ping-pong instead.
Ben tilts himself to get the Gold Leaf centred in his vision and dispatches a patient hand in its direction, a wobbling probe elongating and growing less convincingly his own as it gets further away. Yet by a process of adjustments and corrections, he closes in on it, he pins it down, he retrieves it. He brings it all the way back to his pocket and drops it in, ready for the next time Sid asks.
Is this time-consuming? He couldn’t say. It does not seem to leave him with less time for gazing at the trees, any more than Mr Neave’s interruptions do, when he comes over to Ben and, tapping on his knee for attention, lays out his documents on the table. Always the explanations, with Mr Neave. The slightly patronising smile, the reminder that he is an educated man, a trained solicitor, who can consequently be expected to perceive more, to understand more, than a simple bus conductor such as Ben. (‘No offence taken, I trust? None intended, my dear fellow.’) It is true that Ben does not follow the web of implications Mr Neave draws from arranging the last letter he had from his wife next to the reply he had from the hospital’s chairman when he appealed to him under Section 26 of the Mental Health Act 1959. Or that he quite sees why Mr Neave then deals out in a circle surrounding them an ever-varying mixture of library fine notices, old menus from the noticeboard and certificates from the Gardening Club. It is also true that he does not try very hard. All Mr Neave needs is a nod and a frown from time to time. Otherwise you can go on gazing at the trees.
Largactil congeals time. It makes everything seem to move very slowly, from one point of view, and yet to make great expanses of time slide by with undetectable sameness, until one day you look out of the ward window, and suddenly it isn’t summer. Ben doesn’t know how long he has been here. Many days, that’s for sure; and he doesn’t think he has ever seen the leaves fall before. But thinking about this is difficult, because thinking about anything is difficult on Largactil. It swathes your thoughts, it muffles them, it swaddles them up, as if they were all wrapped in dustsheets like furniture in an empty room: still there, underneath, but with their hard edges and definite outlines all hidden, and difficult to get at, without a great deal of determined fumbling.
And why would you want to do that? Because muffled away under one of those heavy, shapeless wrappings is The Trouble. It has not gone. All the time Ben is awake it can still be heard as a remote muttering, mercifully indistinct. If it were allowed out, Ben is sure, it would swell right back into the horrible, unstoppable circuit of thoughts that had taken over his mind before he came to hospital. Vile link after vile link in a vile chain, going round and round, round and round, never stopping. With nowhere to go to get away from it, because how can you ever get away from your own head; and impossible to turn away from, because how can you turn your back on something frightening? It isn’t safe to turn your back on the dark thing, the thing that walks beside you on the road. Only you are the road, and you are the dark thing too. It’s confusing. Best not to think about it. Even to glance at it like this makes the muttering louder. Naming calls: so don’t name it, don’t look, don’t think. And Largactil makes this possible.
Ben doesn’t like everything here. He doesn’t like the nights in the dormitory, with Mr Neave’s mews of distress in the bed to his left, and Derek from the next dormitory bursting in, in search of something Mr Neave has borrowed, and upending Mr Neave’s collection of borrowings all over the hard floor with a clatter.
‘Give me back my Vosene, you bastard!’
‘It’s not – no, no – hands off – oh, how can you? I need it. I need it. Oh, Primrose, they won’t leave me alone.’
In the bed on his right Mr Corcoran breathes angrily. Mr Corcoran is never not angry, waking or sleeping, and Mr Neave does not borrow anything from him. Mr Corcoran transferred here from Broadmoor, and Nurse Fredericks has read something about him in the Daily Mirror. They keep him dosed up day and night. Dull reddish-blue tides of fury crawl under the bristles of his face.
It’s worth it, though, all this is easily worth it, to keep The Trouble wrapped away. Largactil is a kind of bliss that Ben is steadily grateful for. He totters to the OT Room and (very slowly) makes raffia baskets and wobbly pots. He eats pork luncheon meat and baked beans followed by blancmange. He goes outside when the weather is sunny. He tries not to worry about the back wards, glimpsed on his way to the vestibule for outings, where lost souls in too-short pyjamas drift in madness decades deep – and Largactil helps him with that, too. He sits by the window and watches the trees.
Look: each stands in a ragged oval of leaf-fall, summer’s discarded yellow petticoat.
But there are some things you can’t avoid.
‘C’mon, Ben, ward round,’ says Nurse Fredericks, a large kind tired man who gives out jumpers his wife has knitted, and who has only ever been observed to give anyone a slap under extreme provocation.
‘Mm?’
Mostly ward rounds involve the doctors conferring with the nurses about who’s been prescribed what, and how they’ve been behaving. Only occasionally are the patients directly involved.
‘They want you in Room 3.’
‘Mm?’
‘I don’t know why. Up you get, young man. Chop-chop.’
When Ben reaches Room 3, just beyond OT, he discovers with a slow coiling of unease that it is full of people. A horseshoe of chairs has been set out, with an empty one at the head of the horseshoe, next to the briskly smiling Dr Armstrong: Ben’s doctor, in theory, though he has scarcely ever spoken to her. All the other chairs have medical students in them, an unmistakable array of white-coated boys (and a few girls) with notebooks and biros. They must be about the same age as Ben but they gaze at him as if he were a member of a different species. The only reassuring face in the room belongs to Nurse Fredericks, who follows Ben in and, finding that he himself hasn’t been given a chair, leans against the closed door, his shoulders outlined against the wire squares in the door glass like a graph of an Alp.
‘Now,’ says Dr Armstrong brightly, as Ben shuffles across the lino, ‘this is Mr Holcombe. Mr Holcombe is a voluntary patient. Age twenty-two, employment since leaving school as a kitchen porter and then bus conductor. He presented six – no, seven – months ago at his GP’s in a state of extreme agitation, asking, quote, “to be put to sleep”. Questioning elicited no apparent prior history of depression, but complaints of persecution by intrusive thoughts, possibly amounting to auditory hallucination. Diagnosis?’ she asks the room.
He is being used as a teaching aid.
‘Schizophrenia,’ says a confident boy with sideburns.
‘Correct,’ says Dr Armstrong. ‘But with the usual reservations – yes? – about the breadth of the schizophrenic syndrome and its failure to offer fine classification of specific conditions.’
They all write in their notebooks.
‘Admitted eighth of June 1964. Initial dose of 400mg chlorpromazine. Trade name?’
‘Largactil,’ says a girl with a brown plait.
‘Or Thorazine, yes. Increased to 500mg when agitation persisted, then successful maintenance at 300mg per day thereafter. Behaviour?’
This last question is directed to Nurse Fredericks.
‘Ben is no trouble at all,’ he says. ‘As good as gold.’
‘I’m glad to hear it,’ says the doctor. ‘And how do you find yourself, Mr Holcombe.’
‘F-f-f-fine,’ Ben manages to say.
‘Excellent,’ says Dr A. ‘But gentlemen, ladies, what do you observe? You’ve seen Mr Holcombe walk, you’ve heard him speak, you can see how he’s sitting. Thoughts?’
They all stare at him. The girl with the plait taps her biro against her teeth. A small, slight Indian student, neat and brown and feathery-eyebrowed, like a sparrow you could pop into your pocket, clears his throat and says: ‘Tic in his right hand. Quite pronounced.’
‘Indeed,’ says Armstrong, and as if her approval had granted everyone permission, they all start to offer suggestions.
‘Gait ataxia?’
‘Parkinsonism?’
‘He keeps sticking his tongue out?’
‘Frequent blinking?’
‘T-t-t-’
That last one is Ben, trying to say tardive dyskinesia, which is what he saw written on his notes when they were left facing him at the nurses’ station. He doesn’t know what it means and he knows he’s not supposed to join in, but the urge to surprise them all is too strong. In fact, though, since he can’t get the word out, all they hear is another symptom.
‘Speech difficulties!’ says Plait Girl triumphantly.
‘Mm-hm,’ agrees Dr Armstrong. ‘All symptoms which, if we didn’t already know Mr Holcombe’s medical history, might lead us to suspect – what?’
‘Cerebral palsy,’ suggests the Indian student.
‘Yes, or Huntington’s chorea. We’d be testing for both of those if Mr Holcombe presented himself like this for an initial consultation. And yet – and this is what I want you all really to notice – there is nothing organically wrong with Mr Holcombe at all. Every single one of these symptoms is a secondary effect of neuroleptic medication. Mr Holcombe is a healthy young man. It is chlorpromazine that has done this to him. Yes, Mr Patel?’
The Indian student has raised his hand.
‘He has been unlucky, I think. These symptoms would usually take longer to come on, and affect older patients more?’
‘Indeed. Only about thirty per cent of patients have these reactions, and Mr Holcombe is one of the unfortunates within that percentage who exhibit them particularly strongly.’ She holds up a finger. ‘Remember, please, that this is ordinary. Rare outcomes are not outcomes that never happen. They are outcomes that happen all the time to a few people. And as clinicians, we must expect to encounter these people, and to be prepared to care for them.’
Scribble, scribble, in all the notebooks.
‘So, how shall we care for Mr Holcombe? The tics, the impeded movement, the interrupted speech: I said there was nothing wrong with him (apart, of course, from the schizophrenia itself) but it would have been more accurate to say that there was nothing wrong with him yet. Because …?’
‘Because the symptoms can become permanent.’
‘Thank you, Mr Patel. So what should we do for Mr Holcombe? Recommendations?’
‘We could switch him to a different medication?’
‘Such as, Miss Edwards?’
Plait Girl looks down; she doesn’t know.
‘Well,’ says Dr Armstrong, ‘we could try him on Fluphenazine or Acepromazine, true, but they are from the same family of drugs, and they all produce the same side effects, and we know that Mr Holcombe has an elevated susceptibility. Anyone else?’
Patel coughs questioningly, but no one else wants to speak.
‘We must taper off his dose, quickly?’ he says.
‘N—!’ says Ben. ‘N—!’
The noise he has made is more a groan than a word. The doctor frowns at him, but gives him a pat on the arm and goes on talking.
‘I think so, yes,’ she says. ‘Not too quick a decrease, but a prompt one, in the first place to a much lower maintenance dose, with perhaps some conventional sedatives if the psychotic crisis shows any signs of returning. But you’ve had a nice quiet few months, haven’t you, Mr Holcombe?’ she says kindly, raising her voice as if speaking to a deaf person. ‘Time to get you home again. You don’t belong here.’
It is possible to be afraid on Largactil, Ben finds. Angry, too. If the emotion is strong enough, it sweeps through the room with the muffled furniture, bumping it and rattling it like a wind, throwing it to and fro while your heart bangs. He throws off Dr Armstrong’s hand – she wouldn’t smile at him if she knew what The Trouble murmured to him – and pushes to his feet.
‘No!’ he bellows thickly, his tongue getting in the way like something half-swallowed. ‘Naow!’
The students avert their eyes. Armstrong sighs. This is not how she wanted her little demonstration to end.
‘Fredericks?’ she says. The nurse moves forward, irresistible, and takes Ben by the back of the neck with one wide hand.
‘No need for that, son,’ he says. ‘Calm down, now, calm down.’
‘Maybe give him his next dose now, and start the taper tomorrow,’ she commands. Fredericks nods, and has him out of the door in seconds.
‘Honestly!’ says the nurse. ‘This ain’t like you at all.’
Ben is used to getting his Largactil as foul-tasting syrup in a little beaker. But now it arrives as an injection in his arm, and from the place in his vein where the needle goes in, calm does spread with astonishing immediacy, a blanking numbness that freezes all the rattling contents of his head in place as if they’d never move again, and wipes away too – for now, at least – all the terrors of the future, all that will need to be endured again in solitude.
‘You have a sit in your chair,’ says Nurse Fredericks, ‘and I’ll get you a nice cup of tea.’
Look: each tree stands in a ragged oval of leaf-fall, summer’s discarded yellow petticoat.
In the wings at the Pelican Club. Well; the wings. The ‘artists’ entrance’ to the Pelican, so-called, is up a Soho alley that smells of men’s piss and indeterminate rotting things, in between an Italian grocer’s selling spaghetti in long blue paper packets and one of those doorways with many bells where shamefaced men come and go without meeting anyone’s eye. You go up the alley, and a door lets you downstairs into a warren of little backstage spaces, many with black bundles of cable snaking about on the floors. Jo changed into her Tearaways outfit in a narrow slot halfway between a dressing room and a corridor, with mirrors in horseshoes of light bulbs on one side but people coming and going behind, and not much privacy. And the wings are another compromise, an L-shaped left-over tucked next to the stage, where people do wait to go on, but where there are also dead amplifiers stacked, and cardboard boxes of flyers for gigs past and gigs yet to come. Part of the roof of the L is made of the green glass bricks that run right across above the stage itself, letting in a watery aquarium light from the pavement outside the front of the Pelican, when it’s daytime. Go on early at the Pelican, in the summer, and the glare coming at you from the spots competes with a rainy glitter draped over your hair and shoulders like jewellery.
It’s fully dark now, though, and from where Jo is tucked in the angle of the L she sees the stage as it looks when you’re performing on it at night. The light strikes down and in from the track running around the little proscenium, and it kindles the air where you are into a radiant wall. Apart from the dancing legs of the front row, in drainpipes and tight skirts, and the occasional dangling hand holding a smouldering fag, you can’t see the audience, packed in five feet in front of you: you can only hear them, a hooting whooping sighing swaying presence just outside your tent of light.
In the tent of light is Willy Reeves of Chicago, stamping on a wooden block to make his own percussion and pounding through a twelve-bar on a steel-string guitar, in a way that somehow contrives to sound both heavy and light at the same time. Heavy, as in inevitable; as in blues-logic proving its way through the changes and coming home as certainly as the tumblers of a safe locking into place. Light, as in playful; as in fingers that dance their way in and out of inevitability as if they had all the time in the world, and arrival at the iron-hard conclusion might be an airy impulse. I cain’t hardly, sings Mr Reeves. Tell my baby. Backstage, he is a small walnut-coloured lech, reeking of whisky and making a stumbling nuisance of himself. Out here, where the democracy of the tight space abruptly shakes itself out into aristocrats and commoners, headliners and mere backing musicians – he’s an aristocrat, for sure. The part of the invisible audience who know what they’re getting are reverently mute, in a hush of attention, although the hush is edged by some impatient mutter from the rest. This year, proper Chicago blues isn’t quite the commodity it was in London. You can get it from pretty-boy white guitar bands now, or a version of it, rather than from old black men. You can get it hipper, better-dressed, more fanciable, more danceably diluted into a solution of rock ’n roll. A lot of the crowd want to get on to that part of the programme.
Jo, though, is with the mute and reverent contingent. She’s listening with her ear cocked, hungry for the secrets of how Reeves does what he does. She done tol’ me. Ev’ry mornin’. She should probably be back in the haze of hairspray, perfecting raccoon eyes with the other Tearaways. She’s the new girl, after all, brought in to fill a space left by pregnancy, and she should be chatting with Viv and Lizzie, cementing things. But this is too good a chance to miss. Reeves’s chords sound out in her mind, gunmetal grey and blackish-brown like Bournville chocolate, for she still hears in colours, though she knows now that people mostly don’t. Her fingers move in the air at waist height.
Someone jostles her. Concentration broken, she glances behind and finds that, guess what, the pretty-boy white guitar band who’re due to go on next but one have pushed round the corner of the L too, to get their look at Willy Reeves. They’re a slightly motley lot, with a look (suede jackets, jazzman polo-necks, denim jeans with big buckles) that says, to her at least, that they don’t know what to aim for, now that the Beatles have claimed smooth ’n cheeky and the Rolling Stones have taken over rude ’n rough. They’re called the Bluebirds, if she remembers rightly. A little pathetic in itself: a name so busy creeping up on the Yardbirds that it hasn’t noticed it’s gone accidentally all Walt Disney, twitter-twit round and round Snow White’s head. Mind you, thinks Jo, the Beatles have got one of the worst band names of all time, and nobody even notices any more. She hardly even notices herself.
Took ma chances. Played ma cards out. Needless to say, none of the irritated scrutiny she’s giving the Bluebirds is coming back her way. She looks good tonight, she knows she does: the Tearaways have an Honor-Blackman-in-The-Avengers thing going, and are all wearing tight black sweaters, tight black trousers and boots with spike heels. Three in a row at the mike, swaying in time, they look kinkily fabulous. But right now, she’s girl-furniture as far as these whispering, oblivious boys are concerned. They’re locked in the serious business of male-to-male musical adoration. Without even noticing it, the one with the sideburns has backed her against the amp stack. The one with the thin froggy lips has blocked her view of Reeves. The skinny one with the nose has trodden on her foot, then tried to kick it away under the impression it’s cabling. She’s been absent-mindedly pushed behind a wall of bloke.
‘Amazing,’ breathes Sideburns. ‘Fuckin’ phenomenal.’
‘Hear the way he sort of slaps it, on the six chord?’
‘Just like on the LP.’
‘We’ve got to learn that.’
‘Yeah, you’ve got to learn that.’
‘Well, I will,’ says Sideburns. ‘I will. ’S just, he picks it so fast, yeah? Look at that. I can’t even— I just can’t.’
‘No such word as “can’t”.’
‘No such word as …?’
‘Ladies present,’ says Froglips, gaze unwaveringly fixed on Reeves.
‘You swine.’
‘You filthy swine,’ they chorus, in a strangulated, murmured version of Bluebottle’s voice from The Goon Show.
Oh, shut up, thinks Jo.
Clearly there has been worshipful listening to Reeves’s long-players in whatever bachelor pit these idiots inhabit. Blue-and-white Chess Records label going round and round on the turntable, stylus dipped crackling into the groove for three or four bars then lifted out again; fingers on the fretboard trying to puzzle out something sounding the same, nearly the same, not quite the same, memory of the original slipping, lost it. And repeat. Banging on the party wall from infuriated neighbours.
‘Hey, he’s doing “Northbound” …’
‘Yeah …’
‘I love this song.’
‘Yeah, but you can’t play it.’
‘I can. I so nearly can. Except—’
‘Here it comes—’
‘—yeah—’
‘That. What was that? On the five chord? That sad … thing. I’m looking at his actual hands, and I still can’t work it out. ’S nearly a B seventh; ’s not a B seventh. What is it?’
She shouldn’t, she knows. In her experience nothing good at all comes from making the faintest criticism of men’s expertise in what men think of as men’s stuff. Probably if she had spent the usual amount of time in men’s company the urge would have been completely squeezed out of her by now, but the years of nursing Mum in relays with Auntie Kay, while Val went out gallivanting with bloody Neville and his predecessors, made for a lot of evenings on her own. Home from the job in the shoe shop; take over; make the tea and coax it into her; sit by her; measure the medicine, and the medicine, and the medicine. Then alone, either at the upright in the front room, playing from the weird mixture of Dad’s pre-war sheet music, or upstairs, slipping the treasures from the record library on Harper Street free of their sleeves, and lowering her own stylus into the valleys of the black vinyl, and making her own experiments in reproducing the sound. ‘You’re like an old maid,’ says Val. (Thanks, Val.) And it’s true that by Val’s standards she’s about six years late at venturing into the men’s world. (And whose fault is that, Val? Who took all the fun and left me with all the duty?) But time alone does tend to get you trusting your own judgement, there being no one else’s around to trust. Is this an advantage? Probably not. All the magazines say not, all the wives she’s ever talked to say not, bloody Val when she’s offering expansive advice says not. You don’t ever let men know that you know better. Even if you do. Especially if you do.
But her foot hurts. And Mum is dead. And she’s been waiting too long already.
‘It’s an open A and a finger sliding up the D-string to a seventh,’ she says.
An almost undetectable pause, and then they resume as if she hadn’t spoken.
‘Just mystifying,’ says Sideburns. ‘It’s a mystery of the blues, that’s what it is.’
‘A blues Bermuda Triangle.’
‘The lost city of the blues.’
‘A blues enig-ma,’ says Frogface, doing an old-fashioned newsreel announcer’s voice.
‘You could always ask him, when he comes off,’ says Skinny.
‘Nah.’
They pause again. North-bound, North Side. Reds ’n whites.
‘Don’t know what that means either,’ says Frogface.
‘Maybe,’ says Sideburns, ‘maybe …’ He has the air of one labouring to bring forth a discovery.
‘What?’
‘Maybe it’s not a B-chord at all. Maybe it’s, like … a combination of some kind?’
Jo rolls her eyes in the dark. But to her surprise, Frogface starts to snicker.
‘Genius, mate! Just came to you, did it?’
And he shuffles sideways enough to be able to turn and look at Jo.
‘How d’you know that, then?’ he says. Unlike the others, whose voices are pure grammar-school London, from one of those middle-class zones in Hendon or Ealing or Sydenham where the middle-class-ness overpowers the difference between the city’s compass directions, his voice has something warm in it that comes from elsewhere: from west, and further west than Ealing by a long way. A burr. Bristol, maybe. He’s a head taller than her. His face is insolent-clever but he’s not sneering now; he’s leaning in, interested.
‘Worked it out,’ she says, shrugging.
‘You play?’
‘A bit.’
‘You like this?’
Shrug.
‘Why? Wouldn’t have thought it was a chick’s kind of thing.’
He means, of course, that the blues is men’s music. Songs of male misery and male disappointment and male boozing, sung by men with aggressive unprettiness, all sinew and bone, so that the sound itself seems to mimic strength being defeated, independent of the words. That’s not the whole story, of course, just the story that boys tend to see. But it’s true that, compared to the bone-hard jangle Willy Reeves is laying down now, the music she’s going to make when she goes on stage with Viv and Lizzie, any minute now, will sound deliberately light and sweet and girly, apparently woven out of candyfloss, with all its muscles concealed. So yes, why? If she likes the one, why is she making the other? The question has answers she certainly won’t give here; maybe answers she couldn’t give anywhere. Part of it is, she doesn’t see why she should choose. Willy Reeves singing ‘Northbound’ is glorious, and the Crystals singing ‘Da Doo Ron Ron’ is differently glorious, and to tell the truth neither of them are exactly her cup of tea, neither of them sound like the music she would make on her own account. Will make, some day. And underneath there’s another reason, made of silence. It’s a reason to do with their house being quieter than any other house in the street, always. Only two kids; no man; and later a sickroom hush getting deeper and deeper. She wanted to fill it, and she did, listening hard to everything she could get, picking determinedly along. Working it out, and working it out, knowing that she would still be missing most of the music until she could make it with people. Till Mum died, and she saw the advert for the Tearaways audition, and she dared.
Shrug.
He hasn’t lost interest, though. He goes on looking down at her, and puts a hand experimentally on her bum. She twitches it away.
‘Get off, I’m listening.’
‘You really are, aren’cha?’ he says, smiling.
Not for long, though. Willy Reeves’s set is over, and they’re calling for her. The Bluebirds are pushed aside by the stampede required to get the Tearaways on stage. It isn’t just the three of them, on vocals. They also need, to get the Spector-ish sound they’re after, live, the guitars and the rhythm section and the brass, all played as a favour by blokes they know from the studio circuit, backing musicians like themselves who’ve turned out to help see if the Tearaways can move on up from backing to headlining. No one is going to get rich tonight. The Pelican’s payment for the gig is getting split nine ways. In strict cash terms, they’d all do much better just turning up, prompt and professional and self-effacing, for another session laying down the harmonies for Miss Springfield. But you’ve got to try, haven’t you? You’ve got to find out if you have it in you to be the one the crowd’s eyes focus on.
Now they’re in the tent of light. There’s the song they want to be a single, but they thought they’d better lead up to it, and get people going a bit first, if they can. So they open with ‘Mockingbird’: home ground for them, at least home ground in their old role as the chicks in a row at the back somewhere. Brian on bass starts up, deep with some echo on; they get the kinkily fabulous hip-sway going; the feet that are all they can see of the audience follow into tentative motion. Viv, slightly uncertain taking the lead, launches into call-and-response, and Jo and Lizzie sing it back to her.
‘Mock! Yeah!’
‘Ing! Yeah!’
‘Bird! Yeah!’
‘Yeah! Yeah!’
Then a spurt of drums, and Terry and Nigel lift the cornets to their lips and loose a shining blare with crisp corners. And the feet in the front row begin to dance in earnest, and their own hips settle into the groove, and all together they sing:
Mockingbird, everybody! Have you heard,
Have you heard?
The trumpets are golden. The trumpets are golden, and as she head-tilts right, left, right, she discovers out of the corner of her eye that though the wings have emptied of all the other Bluebirds, Frogface is still standing there, and she would swear that he is listening. To her.