For the first time that summer, it wasn’t just warm, it was humid. As we took all that gear out of the cars, Neil hitching a ride with Thomas, seeing as he didn’t have a dad to get him up there with the keyboard, big black clouds hung above. And the air was heavy. We could feel it pressing down on our shoulders as we lifted the amps out of the various car boots. Suddenly everything had turned. The summer had passed that invisible moment and was no longer ripe on the tree. Now it was pulling the branch down.
‘All right, Neil,’ said Thomas, ‘you grab the other end of your dooferberry.’ What he meant was for him to pick up his end of the long, heavy, outdated keyboard. ‘Tell me when I’m by the door, if you can see that far ahead.’
Neil had recently started wearing glasses, something that Thomas had been making various snide references to, ironic considering his own four-eyed status. But then consistency was never Thomas’s strong point. As they carried it across the car park towards the concrete bunker of a social club, Thomas walking backwards and Neil obviously struggling with his coordination – but then, no change there – one giant raindrop, and then another, then a third, splattered on the plastic keys and dials and levers.
‘Hurry-it-up-a-fucker,’ said Thomas. ‘We’re going to get fucking electrocuted at this rate. Well, you will anyway. I’m not touching this once we’re inside. So go as slow as you like.’ Strangely for Thomas, instead of letting the insult hang in the air to do its work, as was his usual style, he followed it up with a strange high-pitched giggle, almost like an old woman laughing. What it meant I was not sure.
The rest of us, along with the various dads, quickly carried in any remaining electrical equipment, draping some of it with car-seat covers or dad jumpers or whatever was handy, leaving the drums, our only acoustic instrument, until last. That grim feeling that had bothered us all afternoon grew once we got inside. The social club was a dark, alien space. Nothing like what any of us were used to. Maybe Thomas had been there before, I don’t know. But to me, and at least Ben and Neil, this was something new. It wasn’t just dark, it was stained, a strange, sickly yellow. The carpet looked like it had been new about ten years ago, with its flecks of pastel, but now it had holes in it, and tears that had been nailed down to stop people catching their feet on them. And the furniture looked coated in fag ash, while on the bar were towels soaking up lager, a token effort at cleaning up after lunchtime opening. I’d been to the bowls club with my grandad, and that had a bar, but that was different: even though everyone was drinking, it felt jovial, but proper, respectable. This wasn’t quaint decay, this building was ill. It reeked of defeat.
We were all on edge. Our dads could feel it too and arranged a time to pick us up, then left, with the usual dad-like whistle and jangling of car keys. ‘I don’t want to find you’ve been drinking,’ my dad warned me, as he disappeared out into the car park. Obviously, none of our families were invited to the gig. Not even Thomas’s dad, who’d got us the gig in the first place. This was for our friends. Was meant to be, anyway. But something about that place, the desperation, the despair, got to us, and we were beginning to wish none of this was happening. There was some old guy from the social doing the sound desk. He looked like an overgrown Teddy boy, with big bushy sideburns. His job was really just getting the volume right for Neil’s vocal and his keyboards, because they were the only things going through their PA. It was just him and some barman there at the time, and the barman kept on popping out back to rustle crisps. Both of them had the red-faced look of men who had spent far too much time in places like this. They were ill like the building.
‘Are you Animal Magnets?’ said the Teddy boy.
‘Yeah,’ Thomas said, suddenly embarrassed by the name. We did ‘Sound of Sound’ as a soundcheck. At first you couldn’t really hear Neil at all, so the old Teddy boy put both the vocals and the keyboard up loud. He listened for a bit, and frowned, his haystack eyebrows pointing down. Then he slid the fader down with them and made Neil quieter. A lot quieter. Now you couldn’t hear him at all. We finished the song. None of us were quite sure what to say. There was silence as we all just stood there, which Jase broke with some nervous drum banging. The barman exchanged weary glances with the sound guy. Finally, I thought I should say something. ‘Um, could we have the vocals and keyboards a bit louder, if that’s possible?’
The sound guy squinted me a puzzled look. ‘Are you sure?’ he said.
‘Well, yeah,’ I replied.
‘OK,’ he said. The ‘your funeral’ was silent.
He told us to go again, and he pushed Neil’s parts up. Not as much as they should have been, but up. ‘Is that what you want?’ he said.
‘Yeah,’ I said, sensing that was as much grace as we were going to get.
I looked around at the others. Ben and Thomas looked back, their eyes a mix of worry and bubbling anger. Jase just stared up at the ceiling while he broke into a violent drum roll, and Neil didn’t even seem to be in the room. What he was thinking I don’t know, I still don’t, but I knew what was going through the minds of the rest of us. This isn’t going to work.
We knew then that we had been deluding ourselves. We’d been sucked in by the spell we’d cast on each other, compounded by the dreamland that had been the summer, but the utter, irrefutable reality of this dingy, depressed and depressing little social club woke us up with the sickening feeling of having overslept and being made to look foolish. Idiots who had hung on to their dreams far too long because they couldn’t even tell they weren’t real. But the beer—soaked towels were the things that were really real. And the ashtrays. And the dartboard and the snooker table with the beer spills on it. And the sound man and the barman who thought Neil couldn’t sing or play the keyboard properly. And they were right. Which meant we were going to be humiliated. We were going to be humiliated by Neil.
Next thing we knew, the girls were there. Jenny and Hannah, of course, Louise, a couple of other Louises, and some more of Jenny’s twitty entourage. Neil, seeing Louise, finally remembered what building he was in and bounded over to her, smiling like a Jehovah’s Witness on a doorstep. Jenny rolled her eyes. ‘I suppose you’ll always have one fan, Neil,’ she said. ‘Well, depends. Louise hasn’t heard you sing yet, have you, Louise?’
‘No,’ she said softly, looking at Neil. ‘I’m sure he’s very good, though.’
Jenny placed her hands on Louise’s shoulders. ‘Louise, Lou, Lu-Lu, darling,’ she said, ‘just don’t be surprised if it’s a bit … strange. It’s different, anyway.’ All of this while Neil was standing there, mind you. Maybe a week ago Thomas would have told her to shut up, but now he was silent, just like the rest of us, the social club’s absolute reality clogging up our heads like the concrete blocks it was made out of. Jenny, having finished trying to brainwash Louise, took Thomas’s hand. ‘Shall I get you a drink?’ she asked him, as if he was five. ‘I bet you’d like a Coke.’
‘S’pose,’ he grunted.
I couldn’t bear to look at Jenny any more, so I turned the other way. Already, Neil and Louise had disappeared.
More people started to arrive. Every one of them soaked from the rain that had bucketed down on the way. James, Will, Jon, other James, loads of the college kids, some of whom were even old enough to buy drinks from the bar, and Damien, and the crazy kid who jumped through the fire, Kate with her new crusty boyfriend, there apparently to prove some point to Jase that they could still be friends, but succeeding only in depressing him further by turning up, and some others, plus the old alcoholics and manual labourers who went there anyway. Because it was a club, Thomas had to keep a list of them, which he had to give to his dad afterwards in case anybody started any trouble. It didn’t sound that legal, but the people who ran the place didn’t care really, they didn’t even ask the college kids for ID. I don’t know why Thomas’s dad went there. He had quite a good job. Mind you, it was in a warehouse. He did mostly paperwork and stuff, but he was still really dealing with moving boxes about.
‘Is this going to be good?’
‘Are you looking forward to it?’
‘Are you nervous?’
They were all asking me questions, and I was doing my best to answer, supping on my pint of lemonade, but I was miles away. No, not miles away, minutes away, ahead in time to the moment when we had to start playing and everybody was going to laugh. Laugh at Neil because he can’t sing, and us for being stupid enough to go onstage with him. Christ, why did we have to hook up with a monger, no, worse, a spazzer? Spent all this time, all these years, getting popular, keeping my position, making sure I had a girlfriend, and now this. It was all going to come tumbling down now.
The minutes dragged, the minutes flew. Then, as the sick feeling in my stomach somehow managed to slip up my throat and into my head, and my hands, and my legs, it was time. Time to go on. Ben and I looked at each other, defeated. ‘Better get on with it, I suppose,’ muttered Ben. Jase, who had been sitting behind his drums, tapping along to the jukebox so as to avoid Kate and crusty, nodded sadly. Thomas, seeing us move towards the stage that was not a stage, just a seating area with a table moved, stopped snogging Jenny up against the bar and came to join us.
‘Right, where’s Neil, the little twerp?’ he said.
Good point. Where was be?
‘He must be outside,’ I said ‘I’ll go get him.’
‘I’ll come with you,’ said Thomas.
We went outside. The rain had stopped, and the sky was lighter, although black clouds still sailed above, threatening another downpour. Neil wasn’t there amongst the various wall-sitters, drinking their cans of Napalm and bottles of cider and Newkie Brown they’d got from the garage on the way over and the old guy who’d sell anybody anything before they got on their bikes. We went out into the car park. We couldn’t see him there either.
‘Where in fuckery duckery has he gone?’ hissed Thomas.
Then I saw him. He was there, with Louise. They were holding each other, no, holding on to each other, their faces about a centimetre apart, their noses occasionally rubbing, as the sun went down and the rays broke through the spent rain clouds behind them, by some railings beyond the car park that overlooked an old piece of railway that very little, if anything, ever travelled down now. Old terraced houses, their bricks glowing in the sunset, were on the other side of the track. It was almost as if Neil had arranged it. I just knew he was getting off on the romantic industrial bleakness of it all, the same way he had got off on that suburban thing the night of the fair, because that was Neil.
Thomas’s eyes burned like the sunset behind his jam jars. ‘Right, let’s get him,’ he said.
We walked towards them. ‘Oi! Wank-wrangler!’ shouted Thomas. ‘You doing this or what?’
‘Yeah, sorry,’ said Neil, walking towards us. ‘Just lost track of time.’
‘I bet you did, you dirty little fucker. Stick your finger in her hole, did you?’ Although a few paces behind, Louise could probably hear.
‘Ah, no, no I didn’t,’ said Neil.
‘Good,’ said Thomas, a little too quickly, and a little too much like he cared. ‘Right, let’s get this fucking thing over with.’
‘I think we should play “Flying Saucer Rock ’n’ Roll”,’ said Neil.
‘No. It’s shit.’
Louise caught up with Neil and squeezed his hand. ‘Good luck,’ said.
We walked back into the social club. I’d leave a couple of hours later, tamed, damaged, changed.