Dark Terrors 3 (38 page)

Ever.

That’s what happened to me five years ago. Five Years. Just like the old David Bowie song on
Ziggy Stardust.
I had that album on 8-track cartridge. Remember them?

On 8-track cartridge in a special edition Ford Capri 1600 in Dayglo orange with all the chrome sprayed black, a black spoiler, and some kind of trick Venetian blind doodad on the
back window. It was impossible to see what was behind you, but it looked cool.

That was before I met Louise. In fact I can never remember exactly when we did meet. I can’t quite pin it down, though I think about it often.

It must have been ‘73. Spring. And she died in ‘89. So we were together for sixteen years. On and off.

See, we were children of the permissive society. No responsibility. No obligation. No commitment. If you weren’t off screwing the world, you weren’t living.

And Christ knows, Louise and I tried.

We were both working in the music business then. Rock and Roll. Liberation. Sex, drugs, violence, booze, freedom. A heady mix. We had it all, and we fucked it up.

I’d just got a job in the record company that Louise worked for. She was the public relations girl. We called them girls then. I went out to record shops, and tried to convince them to stock our product. I took the managers out for boozy lunches, did window displays, that sort of thing. And when a band was in town, I’d go to gigs and put up displays there as well. And I supplied the drugs. Women too. You could’ve described me as a low-life ponce. But we never thought about it like that then. Not in those days.

That was why I was given the flashy car. We reckoned that a Dayglo orange Ford Capri 1600 was the cutting edge. Then.

I didn’t meet Louise until I’d been in the job for a couple of weeks, but I’d heard all about her. She was famous. Notorious even.

Then on my third Monday morning at our weekly sales and publicity meeting, I did.

She’d broken her ankle six weeks previously, walking down the little street that connects Oxford Street and Soho Square where our offfices were located. She’d been reading
Melody Maker
as she went, not looking where she was going as usual, and tripped over the kerb. Silly cow. A couple of guys who were working on one of the buildings carried her back to the office where they called an ambulance. So my first sight of her
was as she blew into the conference room, red hair permed and flowing, full-on make-up job, with loads of lipstick and eye liner, wearing a halter top made out of patches of ten kinds of material that she’d got from
Mr Freedom,
a long black skirt with buttons up the front, unbuttoned almost to her crotch, one gold, platform soled boot with a six inch heel, and one built-up plaster on the other leg. She looked great and she knew it.

‘Who the hell is
that?’
I said to my boss.

‘That’s Louise Spenser,’ he replied. ‘You wanna watch her.’

And I did. Couldn’t keep my eyes off her, to be honest. And she knew it.

After the meeting we all went to the boozer. The Nellie Dean in Dean Street. I stood next to her at the bar and hummed ‘Jake The Peg’. It’s a Rolf Harris song about a bloke with an extra leg. Funny what you remember.

She gave me a cold stare, and sat with two members of our most popular band of the time.

A few months later she told me that she thought I was one of the most objectionable men she’d ever met.

We were in bed together when she told me that, which just goes to show that first impressions can be misleading.

She was always accident-prone. Whilst we were together she broke her leg once, her arm twice, and I lost count of the number of times she fell over in the street.

Even the way she died was by accident, although it took over three years for it to happen.

But we’ll get to that later.

* * * *

For some reason the pair of us saw quite a lot of each other that spring, and at first I knew she wasn’t very happy about it.

We had to go to the same places, you see. I got promoted to being a record plugger along with all my other jobs, and we’d bump into each other at Radio 1, Thames TV and London Weekend, as well as at concerts and in the office.

I followed her around like a dog. She was three years
younger than me. Only twenty when we met. But believe me, she was a world of experience wiser.

It seemed to me that she loved only two things. Music and alcohol. Not necessarily in that order. Of course with the music, came the guys in the bands, and with the booze came certain other substances. All of them illegal. But what did we care? Like her, ever since I’d first come across them, I’d taken to them like a duck to a duck pond.

I remember her telling me once that she liked anything that came between her and reality, and I said amen to that.

I’d led a pretty sheltered life until I got into the music business. Married at twenty to a sweet girl who didn’t understand me, and who could blame her? I didn’t understand myself. Still don’t. I knew that inside me was something wild. Something I didn’t want to acknowledge because it frightened me. I knew that deep down I wasn’t functioning right. So I asked the first woman who I knew would say yes to marry me. And she did.

I figured that if I took on that sort of responsibility I’d settle down.

How wrong I was. When I got married I was working for an insurance company, in a job that with my qualifications I could do on my head. I did, and hated it.

When I’d been at school I’d worked in a record shop as a Saturday boy, and loved it. One evening on the way home from work I saw an advertisement in the
Evening Standard
for a record shop manager. On impulse I answered the ad, got an interview, lied through my teeth, and got the job.

I was good at it too.

Then one day, a bloke who sold records off the back of a truck for a tiny company that happened to have one of the biggest bands in the world on the label was having a cup of tea in the shop, when his van got towed away by the law.

This individual was always broke and didn’t have the price of the parking ticket and tow-away fee on him, and got a bit panicky about what they would say back at his office.

I lent him the cash out of the till on the promise that if a job came up with the company I’d get first refusal.

He paid back the cash next time he called, thanked me for saving his life, and a few weeks later, gave me a bell and told me that another of the salesmen had left and I had an interview for his job the next morning.

I got it too, and quit the shop that Friday.

I thought I was the business. A white Escort van full of hot product, a desk in a room overlooking Old Compton Street, and rock stars coming and going at all hours. Bliss.

Of course I soon fell into bad habits with the bad company I was keeping. I’d only ever smoked a few joints before, and maybe had the occasional half of bitter. I told you I was innocent, and besides, my wife didn’t drink.

But this place was Cocaine Central. Smack City. Marijuana Junction. Heaven, in other words. The first joint of the day was rolled with the coffee at ten, and the pubs opened at eleven. Of course not a lot of records were sold, but with this particular band pumping out the units worldwide, it hardly seemed to matter.

After a few months, the guys who owned the label and the distribution company got a bit pissed off, and closed it down. All the other salesmen got fired, but I was kept on. General dogsbody for the record company was my game, and I loved that too.

Then I met a woman. Like no other woman I’d met before, or have since. She was pure poison wrapped in satin and lace, with shoes by Zapata, who wafted a trail of patchouli oil behind her that drove men mad.

Me included.

She was in the process of getting divorced from the bass player in an American band who were gradually winding down from being huge. She’d lived in California for a couple of years, then came back to London when her marriage broke down, got a job with the company, a flat off the King’s Road, and started hunting for prey.

She went through the guys in the office like a tornado, until eventually she got to me.

I fell like the proverbial ton of bricks, and she screwed, blued and tattooed me until I could hardly walk.

I knew I was being a mug, but I couldn’t leave her alone, and she knew it.

So did my wife.

In the end, after one of the shortest marriages in either of our families, we separated, and she divorced me.

Adultery.

As soon as the divorce proceedings began, the woman I was crazy about dumped me for a nineteen-year-old boy studying at Oxford.

For the first time in my life I was left for a younger man, and it hurt.

* * * *

I left the firm shortly afterwards, and drifted round the fringes of the music business for a couple of years, until I got the job where I met Louise.

I had a load of girlfriends in the meantime, but no one permanent, and put my other bad habits on the back burner through lack of funds.

Then Louise turned up the heat.

See, I didn’t like the taste of booze much, though I’d had my share. Bitter reminded me of cold coffee, and Scotch made me puke.

Louise had the answer. She introduced me to Strawberry Hock, White Russians, Margaritas, and Harvey Wallbangers, and I was a dead gone kid.

And I found I had quite a capacity for liquor. Hard liquor, and this improbable redhead who kept flashing her knickers at me.

We got it together for the first time in the back of the Capri in an underground car park somewhere off the Euston Road. God knows why we picked that particular location. Romantic it wasn’t. Horny, it most definitely was.

I won’t go into details. Just believe me.

After that we were an item. Christ knows why. She could have had her pick of hundreds of blokes, but she chose me.

Of course we weren’t faithful to each other. That would never have done. But she moved into my flat, and we set up housekeeping together. She was a hell of a cook too. Real domestic when she wanted to be, and she got a cat.

* * * *

We lived together for about eight years before things went seriously up the creek. During that time I asked her to marry me, and she refused, and just before we split up for the first time, she asked me to marry her, and I refused.

Then I met someone else and fucked off. I left Louise the flat where she continued to live with her cat. Percy was his name. A Burmese cross, and destined to live longer than his mistress. Not much, but a bit.

But somehow we couldn’t seem to manage without each other, Louise and me. Can’t live with, can’t live without. Know that one?

I think that in the first year we were apart, we talked more than in the last year we were together. And my new girlfriend wasn’t happy about it.

Too damn bad, I thought. By then I was on the road, tour-managing bands all round the world. Louise got me work in the management office where she was doing PR, after the record company we’d both worked for went belly-up, and naturally that threw us together even more.

So, in the end, I left the woman I’d left Louise for, and moved back in. It was great too, for a while. I was on tour most of the time, screwing the world, getting fucked up with drugs and booze every night, and thoroughly enjoying myself.

Then I met someone else. I needed to right then. I was a mess. Semi-alcoholic. Semi-addicted to uppers and downers, and as a lot of my friends told me, on a one-way roller-coaster ride to Hell.